Showing posts with label Rhetoric. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rhetoric. Show all posts

Thursday 8 May 2014

CFML: Advice for Adobe re Railo

G'day:
I was a bit surprised to read this this morning:

The sole reason for adding this functionality was to make it easy for the frameworks to define the datasources from within the framework without going through the administrator. If one has to go through the administrator to get the encrypted password, that defeats the whole purpose. You can very well keep it defined there. So why define it in the application at all? 
As far as the railo approach is concerned, I don't know the details of their implementation. As Hima said, after putting the encrypted string, your code would not be portable because encryption will be installation specific. In case they are claiming the encrypted string is portable, it would mean that they are encrypting it with a static key same across all installation which is not at all a secure practice.

I dunno if Rupesh was meaning "in general" or just "in the context of this topic".

However, to be clear, the very first thing Adobe engineers - especially senior ones who seem to make decisions - should be familiar with is how Railo does stuff, and what features it has. In the context of this specific issue, as soon as I compared ColdFusion's functionality unfavourably with Railo's equivalent functionality, Rupesh should have spun-up his Railo instance and had a look. That's if he didn't already know about it.

As Adobe was playing catch-up with this feature, all the devs involved in it should have already gone over the feature in Railo and used that as a basis to make the CF implementation at least as good, if not better.

I'd be fine if Rupesh had said "yeah, we looked at that and didn't think it had merit because [reason here]", but it sounds like he didn't even know about it.

It would not surprise me if Rupesh doesn't even have Railo installed.

Adobe have to be all over what Railo is doing. They should be members on their mailing list (not just lurking, but actively discussing stuff), they should be checking out all the new features (and bugs!) as soon as they come in, and in general know exactly what the opposition is doing. Not least of all because they could learn a thing or two from Railo's implementation of things.

Obviously it cuts both ways, but I already know the Railo bods are fairly familiar with how ColdFusion operates.

When I read stuff like this, the silo of naïveté that the Adobe team resides in that I have a mental image of gets slightly higher, and the walls slightly thicker.

--
Adam

Wednesday 7 May 2014

For the record: Cameron vs <cfclient>

G'day:
This is just cos I need some typing space.

Isaac Sunkes posted on another article:
If you try to google anything CF11 or CFCLIENT or similar looking for some useful information to help you learn new features, search results are sometimes just Mr G'day's post complaining about them.
How is that useful?
Isaac... let's google. I've googled for "cfclient". This is with an incognito window, as Chrome remembers what I tend to look at, and obviously I have been busying myself with <cfclient> recently.

Saturday 12 April 2014

ColdFusion 11 is not ready for release in one month's time. Simple.

G'day:
This is a short adjunct, designed to encourage the Adobe ColdFusion Team to respond to their community. It'd be helpful if you could retweet it.

In my opinion, CF11 is not ready to release for one very good reason:

67 ColdFusion  bugs not even looked at yet? Yer having a fucking laugh, Rakshith.

I wrote a speculative article the other day: "ColdFusion 11 release date confirmed to be no later than...", which intuits that we're about four weeks shy of ColdFusion 11 coming out. I think this is borne out by an increase of bug closures with "can't be arsed... maybe in two years time" (I think it actually said "Closed/EnchancementRequired" or "Closed/NotEnoughTime").

However as far as I can tell, Adobe haven't even bothered to look at a whole bunch of the issues their paying customers have raised with them.

I really don't understand how Adobe can be so dismissive of their clients. I seriously can't see how this is even "minimum professional" behaviour, let alone appropriate behaviour when they're in one of their very rare development cycles.

In contrast, Railo has the "luxury" of being able to do continuous development, so continuous issue triage/resolution, and they very rarely leave an issue untriaged (and even unfixed!).

Adobe choose to only do development on ColdFusion once in a blue moon, so they really have to at least triage all the currently outstanding issues. And, if they were to have any sense of professional integrity, fix the bugs, implement the features, or explain why they don't.

Adobe have done a bunch of good stuff for ColdFusion 11, but they are way more than a month away from delivering a professional product. Part of being professional is listening to one's clients.

I would like Rakshith to respond to this article. And what's up with their bug-fixing...

--
Adam

Thursday 27 March 2014

Sharing a conversation about clean code

G'day:
I'm being a bit lazy today. And interesting conversation cropped up on the comm log of one of the side projects I'm working on, and I thought you might be interested to read it, and perhaps add your thoughts.

We were discussing how to handle the requirement for a new API function we're adding to our localisation suite, which works similar to dayOfWeekAsString(), except the immediate requirement it to provide a localised "short version" of the day, eg: "Mon", "Tue", etc. The initial suggestion had come in as dayOfWeekShortAsString(). And the conversation started. I am "Mr Green", incidentally. I have made a few edits to clean up spelling and grammar, but I have not removed anything, or changed the context of what was said. I have added some clarification (for the purposes of this article) part-way down.

Topic:
dayOfWeekAsString() / dayOfWeekShortAsString()

Thursday 20 March 2014

An insight into the mind of a CFML developer

G'day:
I was going to respond to this on the blog I found it (the Adobe ColdFusion one), but I'll do it here instead so I'm not polluting their blog with my anguish / irritation. Be warned: this is a fairly mean-spirited article, and singles out an individual.

Tuesday 18 February 2014

Slow news day & Adobe charging twice for CFML features

G'day:
You'll be pleased to know that Brendon McCullum got his 300 runs, becoming New Zealand's highest scorer for an innings, finally falling on 302. New Zealand declared on 680, which is their highest innings score in test cricket. We now have 56 overs to bowl India out to win the match. Which is seeming possibly on the cards as they are already 28/2: "McCullum, Neesham bat India out".

Increasingly the news media is relying on Twitter banality for its news content, and - whilst not a news organ - I don't see why I should be any different. So today's article is brought to you via a comment on Twitter.


James raises a very good point, and one I've been meaning to comment on for a coupla months now. Adobe are currently working through their bug backlog, and a lot of bugs are being fixed, with the comment of "this will be available in the next major release of ColdFusion" (ie: ColdFusion 11). That has a veneer of good news about it, but let's stop to think about this.

ColdFusion 9 and ColdFusion 10 are the current versions of ColdFusion. They are both still within their standard support phase (ColdFusion 9 until 31/12/2014, and 10 until 16/5/2017. Ref: "Adobe products and Enterprise Technical Support periods covered under the new Lifecycle Policy").

Wednesday 12 February 2014

Things I am not...

G'day:
Just quickly. Whilst I might have various old ColdFusion installers lying around, I am not a download service for complete strangers who didn't think to keep hold of their own software.

When it was one person once in a blue moon who needed help with this sort of thing, it was no problem. But I've had two complete strangers in the last 48hrs ask me for various CF installer files, so am making a policy decision that the answer is automatically "no" if you're thinking of asking me for a ColdFusion installer file. NB: to the two bods who asked for help... I'm not having a go at you: it was a reasonable question to ask.

I can only suggest you post a question on the Adobe ColdFusion forums, or contact Adobe, or ask on Twitter or something.

Cheers.

--
Adam

Tuesday 4 February 2014

Cheers lads

G'day:
I'm making a blog article out of this because I can't fit it into 140 chars, and I don't want it to solely be buried on a comment on their own blog.

If you didn't know, or had managed to ignore it, the lads @ CFHour, Scott and Dave, took exception to something I wrote a coupla weeks back, "CFML: where Railo is better than ColdFusion", and had "a bit" of a rant in their recent podcast "Show #207 - Ryno, Rocks, Railo Rants, and Scott (Box)". I thought their tone was perhaps a bit more intense than it needed to be, and some other people have said the same.

TBH, I don't mind. I'm a big boy, and I simply don't take offence at stuff. They're entitled to their opinion, even if I don't happen to agree with it. For the record: no, I don't agree with pretty much everything they said, however I do see where they were coming from. That said, there was never any anguish or angst between us: I was talking to Dave about tickets in the bug tracker shortly afterwards, and was in touch with Scott yesterday too. I consider them my mates, so they can say what they like at me.

Wednesday 29 January 2014

CFML: To that 20% of you out there: what the f*** are you thinking?

G'day:
I am utterly gobsmacked. Look at this:



These figures are from the intermediary results of the "State of the CF Union survey 2014" survey that's on currently. it's a trimmed version of the full results, which one can see if one completes the survey.

A few people in the community - including myself - have expressed derision at this:



Monday 13 January 2014

Using "undocumented" methods

G'day:
Today, my mate Duncan is my muse. That comment should make him feel pleasingly uncomfortable.

Dunc was revisiting some code, and he saw something along the lines of this (disclosure: it was my code):

numbers = queryNew("id,number", "integer,varchar", [[1,"tahi"],[2,"rua"],[3,"toru"],[4,"wha"]]);

while (numbers.next()){
    writeOutput("#numbers.id[numbers.currentRow]# #numbers.number[numbers.currentRow]# <br>");
}

Thursday 2 January 2014

ColdFusion: contempt of court

G'day:
Be forewarned. If you're the sort of person who reacts poorly to me being a meany, then can I just refer to this this right now: "Why weI fight" (and this blog's communication policy), and perhaps you oughtn't bother reading this. I do call into question someone in our community's professional capabilities here. And some of you might not like that. [shrug].

I am reproducing this here, as some of it has already been redacted by Adobe. I understand why they have done this: fair enough.

Here's an exchange in the comments (OK, not the best place for me to have posted some of this, I know) against bug 3648781: "Closures cannot be declared outside of cfscript".


Rupesh Kumar (RK):

11:02:55 PM GMT+00:00 Jan 1, 2014

It is not about half implementation at all. Outside cfscript, functions are declared using cffunction tag. Now how do you define the closures in tag syntax? The only way to do that would be using an ugly mix of script and tag which would look like

<cfset c = function(){
    var a = something;
    var b = foo();
    return a * b;
}>

To me, this syntax looks confusing. Given that more and more new code is being written in cfscript, I feel we should not mix script and tags in this way. Deferring it for the time being and we will revisit this later.

Adam Cameron (AC):

3:01:16 AM GMT+00:00 Jan 2, 2014

It's just an expression like any other sort of expression, Rupesh.

You can't say "oh, this sort of expression is OK in a CFSET statement, but this other sort of expression? No, can't do one of those". That's ridiculous.

By way of comparison, this already works fine in Railo. But then again they're not quite so judgemental/patronising as to what will / won't look "too complicated" for CFML developers.

I think if it looks complicated *to you*, you probably should not be making decisions as to what does and does not go into the language.

--
Adam

Saturday 7 December 2013

CFML: Response for Russ

G'day:
I feel like writing more in response to Russ than Twitter messaging will sensibly allow, so am doing a quick blog article instead.

The context is as follows:



Note that the RT's of Matt's messages aren't quite in the correct order, but as his Twitter account is "private" (that was easily circumvented ;-), I cannot include them inline in a custom timeline. But the gist of the exchange is preserved.

Right, so I feel the decline of CFML as a language is mostly down to Adobe's stewardship of it. There are a few factors here:

Wednesday 4 December 2013

Random thought...

G'day:
Right, I've been at the pub for the third night running (so much for a low-expense Dec), so this is not exactly the most well-formed idea I have ever had.

Wednesday 20 November 2013

Ways to call functions in CFML

G'day:
We've got Brad Wood and David Epler to thank for this article (sorry that Twitter presents information back to front, so start at the bottom and read up. Like one never generally would):




Monday 4 November 2013

My readers doing my work for me

G'day:
Sometimes the comments on this blog are better that the articles themselves. I've elevated one of Sean's comments to a full "guest" article a while back: "An Architect's View: Sean's feedback on my recent article about ColdFusion interfaces", and over the weekend my mate Simon put his oar in on one of my recent Unit Testing / TDD articles to feedback some useful info to one of my other regular commenters, Bruce. What Simon says is very true, and something I think all devs should bear in mind. It's got nothing to do with testing or TDD, but is all about how we ought to be approaching our work, as professionals. Simon's comment:

Sunday 3 November 2013

Unit Testing / TDD - why you should bother

G'day:
OK, I actually showed some code in the last entry in this series, but now we're back to me spouting rhetoric (read: waffling on). This stems from Andrew Scott making a very good observation about a benefit of unit testing (not so much TDD) in a comment in my last article:
Adam, can I add another under estimated use for TDD. Apart from the bit you touched on about refactoring. But there comes a point when one will need to migrate to a newer version of ColdFusion or Railo, and this would help identify migration problems as well.

And Andrew is dead right.

Saturday 26 October 2013

Unit Testing / TDD - why you shouldn't bother

G'day:
Here's the second in my intended series covering unit testing and TDD and anything else that springs to mind. Earlier in the week I started the series intended to get straight into code, but my intended "intro paragraph" ended up being an entire article, which was then retitled "Unit Testing - initial rhetoric".

So I'm not looking at code today, instead I'm gonna look at why you oughtn't bother doing unit tests.

Huh? Yeah, that's an odd thing to suggest in a series about unit tests, innit? Well let me be abundantly clear now that I'm below the fold, and you're reading the article and not just reading the intro: there are no bloody reasons why you shouldn't unit test. And you're a muppet if you think there are. I should add that I'm not having a go at people who thusfar haven't been doing unit testing etc for whatever reason, but those people generally know they should have been doing it, but haven't for [some reason which they probably concede is invalid]. I'm only having a go at people who try to justify their position as being a valid one.

Wednesday 23 October 2013

Unit Testing / TDD - initial rhetoric

G'day:
I was talking to a mate/colleague the other day @ CFCamp, and the topic of unit tests came around, and that they... well... didn't do any. They were aware this was not good, but had a sorta mental block of how to get going with TDD and the whole idea of test-first code-second. I had to admit I only started doing unit testing in my current role, and I have our lead architect, Simon Baynes to thank for this. For the preceding decade or so of my development career my approach to testing was the standard cowboy approach of if something didn't seem to break it was probably OK. A lot of people take this approach. It's a shit approach. Don't do it.

In my own defence (it's a lame defence, I hasten to add), I can explain away my lack of unit testing practice for the first few years of my career as I was one of these typical CFML developers who wasn't aware of the wider industry around me, so having not thought to investigate stuff like good coding practices and to check how other people did stuff. Also when new to dev I was in a very jack-the-lad cowboy-ish environment in which doing a decent job of anything was shunned in favour of doing the quickest job possible. Not ideal.

However ignorance is not a defence, and certainly for a few years after my start I was well aware of unit testing as a concept, but never really looked into it. I was like "yeah, I know I should look at this stuff, but it'll just end up meaning I have to write a whole lot of boring test code, and who wants to do that?" This is a very immature, lacking-in-self-disciple attitude, which I now regret.

Monday 21 October 2013

Best description of Stack Overflow "community" ever...

G'day
Someone just left this comment against an older blog article on a similar topic:
Stack Overflow is basically the Stanford Prison Experiment playing out on the internet.
Classic.

--
Adam