CFML: that survey... sit. rep.

G'day:
A coupla people have asked me what's happening with my feedback from that survey you all did for me (Survey: CFML usage and migration strategies).

I have to simply apologise for the delay. I started to look at it, but could not work out how best to present the data. Then I buggered off to NZ to sit in the sun watching cricket and drinking beer with me mates; and "CFML survey data analysis" was not high on my list of priorities. I did start looking at the data some more though.

So not much progress yet, but I'm now back in London and trying to refocus on IT stuff, so I'll try to start feeding back soon. -ish.

Again: apologies for the delay.

Righto.

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Adam

Survey results: most useful response first

G'day:
I've got the results in from that survey, and started looking through them last night. I haven't really organised anything yet, so nothing useful to report, but this response stood out. The survey had 16 questions, but they left them all blank except question 15:

15. What else do you think might be useful to share?
    

    You are toxic.

That's it. That's what they decided to write. That's what they figured was worth investing their time in.

Now I'll not contest whether or not I'm toxic, but I'm not sure that in a community survey aimed at understand how best to help people migrate their skills from CFML is really the best place for it. They coulda just emailed me (my email address is in the "Communications policy" link to the right there). But what I will conclude is if they read the survey questions, and decided that was a sensible, relevant and effective answer to make, they should perhaps be worrying less about how toxic I might or might not be, and more concerned about their own state of mind.

But still: at least I got a new quote for my banner line.

Yours toxically,

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Adam

Survey: CFML usage and migration strategies

G'day:
This comes off the back of a few unrelated discussions I've had recently about people having moved on from CFML, and there being a reasonable desire to encourage and facilitate other people to do so too. There's a feeling that a lot of CFML devs might move away from CFML if they were helped to, but lack the confidence to make the leap themselves, or know where to start.

One suggestion floated was to start a project similar to ColdFusion UI the Right Way, but basically covering any part of CFML. Someone's suggested they might help giving examples of how to do stuff in Go; and I'd definitely help out giving examples in PHP (which might encourage people to stick with CFML, I dunno! ;-)

The motivation for this is that I think persisting with CFML is - for a lot of people in a lot of situations - career "assisted dying". I think for most CFML devs it's deleterious to stick with it. I'd like to help show these devs that other languages aren't scary, and indeed a bunch of them are similar in ease of use as CFML claims it is.

I've created a survey on freeonlinesurveys.com. I used to use Survey Monkey for this, but they now limit their free surveys to ten questions, and this one has 15. I've not tried freeonlinesurveys.com (either as a provider or a consumer), so I hope this works out. The UI for creating the surveys sure was easy to use though.

Anyway, the survey is here: "CFML usage and migration strategies". Go fill  it in if you can be arsed. To let you know what yer getting into, the survey is 15 free-flow questions, as follows. I've included my own answer for each question:

1. Provide a brief comment about youself (don't worry about your CFML usage or dev work just yet: this is just about you). Don't worry if you'd rather not give too much detail, that's cool.

   This is my own answer: Adam Cameron. I'm London-based and (breaking my own rule slightly here) have been a dev for 16 years and in the IT industry for... blimey... 23 years.

2. How did you come to be a developer, and are you primarily a developer or is it an adjunct to another role (like a sysop or designer or something like that)?

   I did programming at polytech, and loved it. I then took the first job that presented itself to me, which was as a sysop & desktop support bod on a NetWare network. I started using CFML there just before I went abroad for a few years. On return I got offered a job as a CFML dev with no professional programming experience at all.

3. Summarise your CFML usage timeline (just timeline for this one). Include things like what year you started, when you moved on, if you have. (or what's the time timetable for moving on if it's just planned). Mention versions in this one.

   I started in 2001, and stuck with it until 2014. I shifted to PHP because the company I work for did. During that time I used all versions of CF from 4.5->9 professionally, but also have good knowledge of 10-12 as well, as I've been involved heavily in the CFML community and testing of ColdFusion's CFML implementation. I've never used any other CFML platform other than ColdFusion, other than experimentally & community participation.

4. During that time was it your primary or sole dev language, do you think? Or was it always an adjunct to some other language? How did it fit within the mise en scene of your daily usage? For the purposes of this answer, let's consider "a wee bit of client-side JS and a bunch of HTML & CSS" as a given. Only mention those if they represent a significant part of your work.

   Yup. I did purely CFML from 2001-2014.

5. Did you work on just in-house code bases for your employer, or did you also work on third party code bases - like open source projects - too.

   Just in house, and for client applications when I worked in a studio.

6. If you're still primarily a CFML developer... why? That's not a loaded question, and I'm not suggesting that you're wrong for being where you are. It's just good framing information. Don't answer this if you've moved on from CFML: the next question is for you.

   I've moved on.

7. If you've moved on from CFML: why? Did you just change jobs? Did other languages you were using just seem more appealing? Over time did you find yourself using CFML less and less? Did you actively change because of career-longevity considerations? What language(s) did you move to? Stuff like that.

   I was offered a job doing CFML, with no professional programming expertise at all, and it was a good way of getting away from doing network / hardware / desktop suppport work, which I didn't enjoy. That was my only reason for even starting with CFML: it was easy to pick up. I stuck with it cos I am lazy, and couldn't be arsed changing, and it paid the bills. By the time I decided I'd had enough I was tithed to my employer, so had to stick with them. We started a move to C# but that didn't take as we got bought out by a PHP shop. So now I do PHP. It was a good opportunity to shift languages, even if PHP would not have been my choice.
   
   My chief concern with changing languages is having to take a pay cut from "senior" dev to being a newbie in another language. I cannot sustain a pay cut.

8. Do (/did) you use primarily or solely ColdFusion; or Lucee or Railo; or some variation of BlueDragon? In what proportions? If you migrated from one to another: why?

   ColdFusion. I never used any of the others professionally, but have messed around with all of them a fair bit.

9. Do (/did) you participate in any CFML-based open source projects? To what degree (like you are the owner or primary committer of the project; or just a single commit; or raised some bugs but never actually coded anything; or wrote some docs, or whatever)?

   I raise bugs when I find them, and have helped a bit with cfdocs.org and luceedocs too. But never submitted a pull req.

10. And what about in other languages?

    I've raised a bug in PHP 7 which got fixed. I have not directly contributed to any side projects though.

11. What is or was - for you - the best feature of CFML which has you going "yeah, that's pretty cool actually". List more than one if you like. Importantly: had you compared similar functionality to how it's done in other languages, or was it just based on liking the CFML feature?

    That it's loosely and dynamically typed,which cuts down on pointless boilerplate code like one sees in Java. I didn't really compare to other languages too much.

12. Are there any CFML features that would have fallen into that category for you when you were doing CFML, but ended up not being as cool as you thought when you looked at other languages?

    <cfquery> isn't really any easier to use than how it's done in any other language. That's a myth.

13. What is it about CFML (or the underlying ColdFusion / Lucee / etc platform) you like the least? Explain why, if poss. Again, list as many or as few as you like. If this/these contributed to you moving on (if you have, I mean), mention that too.

    The vendor attitude. Adobe is slack at their job with ColdFusion, because they have too "enterprise" an approach to something that should be dynamic and agile. The community is very small and shrinking. Community expertise seems to migrate away, rather than steward the community (most of the community stalwarts still around aren't even CFML devs any more!)

14. If there was a project similar to "ColdFusion UI the Right Way", but aimed at any part of CFML (like how to make a DB query in PHP instead of CFML for example), would you be keen to help on it? Would it be of interest to you to be a "user" of it?

    Well yeah. It was partly my idea.

15. What else do you think might be useful to share?

    nothing really

So you could be writing a lot of stuff there: that's excellent if you do. Or you could write as little as you like: also cool, just slightly less so.

One of my Twitter contacts said that if I furnished the questions, they'd blog their thoughts. That's another thing you could do instead of doing the survey if you like: just let me know about it, as I don't follow any technical blogs these days (CFML or otherwise). Or you could reply in a comment here (although for me the survey would be easier to deal with, to be honest). Just whatever.

If you could also circulate word about this to your CFML contacts, that'd be cool too. I dunno how much notice the CFML community takes of me any more. Cheers.

That URL again: https://freeonlinesurveys.com/s/AuQ2WWKy#/0.

Or just RT it:

"Survey: #CFML usage and migration strategies" (https://t.co/3u9vr0PD1J)

— Adam Cameron (@DAC_dev) January 7, 2017

Righto.

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Adam

TeraTech's State of the CF Union Survey 2016

G'day:
We're trying to drum up more submissions to TeraTech's State of the CF Union Survey 2016. That's a link to their blog article about it, and the survey itself is here.

As well as making sure you fill it in yourself, please do the rounds of your colleagues and contacts who don't usually participate in the community, and... well... get them to pitch in.

Cheers.

--
Adam

Survey results: singular or plural for datetime component setters?

G'day:
Yesterday I asked you whether for methods for setting the discrete components of a datetime whether you prefer singular - eg: setMinute() - or plural - setMinutes(). The reason for this is that Adobe are adding those methods in ColdFusion 2016, and there seems to be some flip-flopping on whether each one should be singular or plural. Details here:  3374275: Add granularity to createDateTime().

I've had 50 responses now, and the trend is fairly clear, so I'll tabulate the results:

Component	Singular	Plural
Year	96%	4%
Month	96%	4%
Day	96%	4%
Hour	80%	20%
Minute	76%	24%
Second	72%	28%
Millisecond	72%	28%

So that's reasonably clear: most people prefer singular. That said, a decent percentage of people prefer singular for the date components and but plural for the time components.

Two people went plural for everything; 35 went singular for everything. One person went singular for everything except for the minute component (slightly odd choice, that one, I reckon).

There were a few comments too:

I would go for singular even though some sound better as plurals. Though in the end as long as it's consistently one or the other and not a horrible mix I would be OK with it.

This is my opinion too. It's not an exercise in grammatical accuracy or even to do with how human language would do it. They're methods of an object.

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Arse Arse Arse

Yes. Yes you are. At least you spelt it right though.

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you're setting an hour, not a range of hours

This came out a bit, and not something that occurred to me previously, but they're correct.

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As far as getting or setting, I think the plural form is more conceptually consistent. Though both can be equally argued for. Second refers to the value place, but Seconds refers to values in that place. I believe both Java and Javascript use setSeconds(), which is probably more comparable to ColdFusion, but other languages use setSecond() and set('second'), and SQL uses dateAdd('seconds'...), so there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of consistency across languages. In the end, I hate date manipulation anyway, so whatever method they choose will work for me. Unless they go with something like changeTime('addSecond(s)'). :-)

I'd like it if you could tease out why plural is more conceptually consistent. I don't get that.

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plural makes no sense to me here? You are setting the "hour of the day" not the "hours of the day"

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I avoid plurals on my methods and DB field names. I have exactly 2 exceptions to this rule: Comments Details IMHO, these two by their nature are not singular. I also thing of these as being free-form text.

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Consistency above all else. As indicated by my responses above, my preference is singular. This is in part because some just don't work (for me, mentally) as plurals. Consider: setYears()? Ew. Combine that logical preference for _some_ of them to be singular, with the desire for _all_ of them to be consistent, and you arrive at: All of them should be singular.

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Either way, just please be consistent!

Good pragmatism.

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use singular or plural to match JS implementation

Why JS? I don't think the JS implementation here is very sensible, and I was left wondering why they made the decision that they did.

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I prefer all singular. Especially since year(), month(), day(), hour(), minute(), second() exist in the language. I think it'd be odd to keep those as-is and introduce .setHours(), .setMinutes(), setSeconds(). I'd rather introduce millisecond()/.setMillisecond(), even if I don't typically say "the millisecond", and retain consistency. On a different note, I am happy to see Adobe presented their proposal so that we can offer feedback. Very nice there. Thanks Adam for doing this survey!, -Aaron

Cheers dude.

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Just follow what JavaScript has already done!

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You are setting a single value of a property not several values although that value could be more than 1.

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I would match the javascript date object setters: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Date they use setDate() instead of setDay() for the date part of the month.

Again... I think JS ballsed this up, so not a good precedent to follow. There is also not intrinsic connection between CFML and JS to warrant following their precedent in the first place.

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If you go look at the current date/time functions on cfdocs.org, you see MOST of the function names are singular (daysinMonth, daysinyear only plural), so it seems to me that Singular should be used to keep in sync with the rest of the date/time functions.

Good call. I did not check that. So internal consistency would be to be singular. The existing procedural "getters" are all singular, for example: year()... through to second().

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You are setting a single value, therefore, it should be singular. setMillisecond() = set the millisecond value to

Correct.

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Initially, I favored the plural for the Minutes, Seconds, and Milliseconds. But after thinking about it more, I think that the singular makes the most sense, and will help to keep the purpose clear. Otherwise, I could see someone saying those functions should take ranges.

Thanks for giving it some thought, and sufficiently so for you to actually change your position on the matter. Nice one.

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Unsure as to why anyone would want some plural and some not. Let's pick a sensible rule and stick with it throughout. Signular all the way, as the method is referring to the property, not multiple things.

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Date/Time is a singular entity If you were setting a range/duration, then this should plural

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Adam loves the wallabies

Specifically their services to the All Blacks 2015 World Cup campaign. Cheers for that, Andy.

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So there's a suggested case for following JavaScript's Date methods, which would be:

• setFullYear() (setYear() is deprecated)
• setMonth()
• setDate()
• setHours()
• setMinutes()
• setSeconds()
• setMilliseconds()  

What a mess. There's four different approaches in the first four methods. Screw that. This is also ignoring the fact that those ones don't match the existing getter functions CFML already has. I think this is a pretty invalid position to take, to be honest.

The people advocating for this probably just meant in the context of plurals for hours, minutes, seconds, but I wanted to demonstrate that I think not a lot of thought went into how JavaScript did this, so I don't think there's a good reason to follow them.

Other people reckon using plurals for some but not others based on how one would use them in English: it's quite likely to refer to the year of the date, but the minutes of the hour. But the hour of the day. English is not a very sensible language, and not everyone speaks English so I think following English's weirdo rules (even though these words are in English) is about as helpful as following JavaScript.

So at the beginning of this I was fairly certain sticking with singular would be the better approach, and the more I think about it now and look at what other people say, I am even more adamant. I am going to advocate on 3374275 that they stick with singular. Which, indeed, is what they've already done and they were going to change it to plural for hours, minutes and seconds, so this saves them some work.

Cheers everyone.

And thanks, Andy, for reminding me how the All Blacks smashed the Wallabies in the Rugby World Cup final.

Righto.

--
Adam

Survey: singular or plural for datetime component setters?

G'day:
ColdFusion is adding date/time component setters methods to CFML, eg: myDate.setYear() etc. The ticket covering this is here: 3374275: Add granularity to createDateTime().

The methods could be implemented with a singular term for the date component, or plural. EG: setHour() or setHours(). There's currently some disagreement over the approach to take here.

I thought I'd put it to the CFML community, so have concocted a brief survey to ask the question: Date component setter methods for CFML. It basically asks what your preference is for each method, and there's a box for other observations.

Please go fill it out if you can be arsed.

Cheers.

--
Adam

Survey results: bug tracking software expectations

G'day:
This survey was so devoid of interest even I forgot about it! It took a bloody age for me to gather enough responses to bother writing up, but it seems to have maxed-out at 94 replies, so I'll run with that. Cheers to everyone who replied. And if you read this blog and did not fill it out: you suck. ;-)

As ever, I will preface this "analysis" with observing it's statistically meaningless because the sample size is too small, and is only really measuring the position of people a) reading this blog; b) likely to reply to a survey I create. That's pretty niche. However I got the answer I was after (yes, as I often do, I asked specific questions to demonstrate a specific point).

The questions were as follows:

• What bug tracking software do you use?
• When reading comments that have been added to an issue, in which order would you expect them to be listed?
• When voting for an issue would you prefer (out of the listed options)
• How important to you is it to be able to (perform a list of common bug-tracking tasks)
• If you are a user of the Adobe ColdFusion bug tracker, what are your thoughts on it?

As I said in the original article (Survey: bug tracking software UX expectations), "The last question kinda gives away my motivation for asking these questions: I'm hoping to lean on Adobe to get some stuff in their bug tracker to be changed."

I had lobbied Adobe to switch the way they list comments in their bug tracker (from last first so one needs to read them upside down), to first first ("Comments displayed in reverse order"). Like reading and writing usually work. Adobe have come back with:

Currently the logic behind showing the notes in reverse (latest at top) is that:

- If user wants to go through the comment history they can go all the way to bottom, keep reading notes one by one (could be hard if any note is really huge) upwards. Once gone through all, they reach the point where they can add their comments in the note box.

- If user wants to read latest comment and respond to it, it's right in the top next to the box where new note can be added.

If we change the order then it would only make sense to move "add new note" box also to the bottom which may be confusing as the landing view will not show this box and user may think there's no way to add new comment.

I still believe the way it is shown (if we don't change design of page) is right.

Let me know if you still feel it should be other way around.

This is actually very good feedback from Kapil, and he is definitely one of the good 'uns at Adobe (like Anit). I don't agree with what he's saying, but it's a well-reasoned and well-articulated case. If it was one of the ColdFusion Team members, I'd expect this ticket to be closed "NotABug/ByDesign" without further comment. So cheers for the feedback Kapil.

This got me thinking... is my expectation actually as ubiquitous as I think it is? I am used to using Jira, and it lists the comments in reading order, not upside down order, and this is where I level my expectations. Not exactly scientific research there. Hence the survey (also not scientific research, but at least it's not just basing my position on my own person proclivities).

So what did other people think?

Q1: What bug tracking software do you use?

The sole "hard-coded" option I offered was "Jira". I was aware of a few others, but didn't know if people took them seriously: Bugzilla, FogzBugz (or whateverTF it is), Trac (chortle: I feel sorry for you if you are stuck with that). It did not occur to me to list GitHub, which would have been another sensible option. Still: I had an "other" option for you to DIY.

The responses were interesting. Not least of all because I had not even heard of a lot of the options. Some people put more than one option, and I've included them all (with how many votes each got, in parentheses).

• Jira (48)
• GitHub (7)
• None (5)
• assembla (3)
• Bugzilla (3)
• Redmine (3)
• FogBugz (3)
• In-house solution (3)
• YouTrack (3)
• Bitbucket (2)
• Mantis (2)
• Rally (2)
• Trello (2)
• Asana
• BugBase (what, the Adobe one? I cannot find anything else called this)
• BugLogHQ
• CA Service Desk Manager
• gforge.com
• GitLab
• HP ALM
• Issue ticket (I dunno what this is)
• LANDESK (why so shouty?)
• Lighthouse
• Microsoft OneNote
• OnTime
• Remedy
• Spiceworks
• TestTrack
• unfuddle

Jira was head and shoulders the winner. My way of asking the question might have skewed this, but I will note that some people who used different systems as well as Jira answered "other", and listed the lot.

One observation. Five of you said "None"? What sort of way of conducting your work is that? Blimey. Perhaps you don't actually code in a professional environment.

Q2: When reading comments that have been added to an issue, in which order would you expect them to be listed?

Oldest first: 57
Newest first: 32 (you're all weirdos ;-)
Other: 5

The "other" options were:

I'm fine either way. If Bugbase becomes oldest-first, it's cool by me. I also now query my local copy of the Bugbase.

Oh I do so love people who sit on the fence. You have no preference for which order you like to read things? None? I'm surprised by that.

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I actually prefer interfaces that thread comments, from oldest to newest.

Good call! I didn't think about threading as an option. Do some issue trackers out there permit this? But - bottom line - this is a vote for reading top-to-bottom.

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I like the idea of being able to see the most recent comment first, but if reading through a substantial list of comments, oldest first (chronological order) makes more sense to me.

So - if I'm getting you right - you don't care if there's not much to read, but once it because an exercise in reading, then it becomes an issue to deal with, and you prefer top to bottom. That's a good pragmatic way of looking at it.

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Newest first. Best if done in a threaded fashion. Also sortable by date

Good idea regarding being able to toggle the ordering.

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Configurable at RunTime

This does not really answer the question. The answer would be based on when you see a list of comments in (some order), then which order would you use the toggling to order them in.

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So the bulk of people - UX tweaks aside - prefer reading in chronological order. Not reverse chronological order. And I like the idea about being able to thread and re-sort the list too, so as to accommodate better discussion, and each person's ordering preference is preserved. Tell me though, people who suggested threadability... how would you expect the re-sort toggle to work within a thread which has more than one comment at the same level? Would that re-sort too? That seem weird to me.

Survey: getting responses is like pulling teeth

G'day:
(Well: mostly for just this survey).  A few days back I posted about "Survey: bug tracking software UX expectations" (direct link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/LJDXRNB).

It's still languishing on on 47 responses, which is a bit pox.

So if you haven't answer me five questions, wanna do so? Cheers.

Righto.

--
Adam

Survey results: Jared's CFML text editor usage survey

G'day:

I've got Jared doing the donkey for for me today. Here's his article on the results of the CFML IDE survey he ran last week:

First of all, may I say thank you to Adam Cameron for hosting this post. I've been a ColdFusion developer for too long a time now, and it's only because of people like Adam Cameron and others, that I feel there is a community behind this language.

I have to thank everyone who participated in the survey, 132 of you in about 2 days. That's pretty good going in my opinion. Sadly, those 32 extra responses won't be counted as I have not paid for more than 100 responses. Thank you for your input though.

I wanted to get a sense of what the community were using for their main development purposes. Myself? I started off on Dreamweaver, moved to Eclipse with CfEclipse and about 2 years ago switched to Sublime with community made CF Support. My theory was that many have gone down this path, they started with a heavy IDE and either found their environments were never properly setup to use it, or that they were far too beastly for what they were doing. 

As much as I like IDE's, the environment really has to be setup for it to be useful, mine never were, our servers didn't support step debugging, so switching to a lightweight Advanced Text Editor that has allowed the extensibility to be used much in the same way as an IDE made complete sense.

I should say that an Advanced Text Editor is normally a very light weight program that will contain different types of language support for highlighting and closing of brackets and such, but with a plugin extensibility that allows for things like linters. They don't normally allow for debugging unless the community have gone completely out of their way to add it.

With my theory, I wanted to find out if the community was still using IDE's. Adobe and the CF team have invested a lot into ColdFusion Builder. Personally I think we've moved on past these heavyweight tools… Adobe have been investing in their open source community project Brackets. This already has a lot of support for many languages, but none for ColdFusion. I've argued in the Slack channels that I would prefer Adobe to focus development on, or at least put some first class support into, projects like Brackets over ColdFusion Builder. Many have argued against me, claiming there is still a want and need for ColdFusion Builder.

This survey was far from perfect, as some (Adam…) of you pointed out. Yes it was slightly Yoda-ish, maybe I should have used checkboxes instead of Radio Buttons… But I think it gives a first attempt to find out what the community is using day to day. So let's take a look at the results from the first question.

For the first question, I asked: For general purpose development, including ColdFusion, I use as my IDE?

With this, I was trying to get a sense of what people are using for general purpose development. As the world has moved on, platform specific developers have found themselves become more general purpose developers, not to say Jack of all, Master of none… but that most ColdFusion developers will now be Web Developers, expected to write at least JavaScript and HTML if not some other random language as people find themselves in DevOps roles. Keep in mind that 32 results are missing from these responses.

From these responses, we can see that overwhelmingly, Advanced Text Editors are being used for general purpose development (with a ColdFusion edge). Sublime Text appears to be the community favourite, which I can understand as it has a well supported and developed ecosystem of plugins. 21 of you are using IDE's (Dreamweaver, ColdFusion Builder, Eclipse and Eclipse with CFEclipse) which isn't surprising, ColdFusion is still a Enterprise Language, with Enterprise Pricing, so the features offered by these make sense. 

There was one IDE that I had forgotten about: IntelliJ iDEA, you made it well known by telling me in the "Other" choice. With the responses from there, IDE's are still behind their more lightweight counterparts.

Another survey (not by me this time) about text editor usage when CFML coding

G'day:
More radio buttons for you to click! This time my mate Jared Evans wants to know what manner of app you tend to use for doing your coding (with a CFML bent to it). The survey is here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/8X3TMLP. It's nice and short (three questions, from memory), so shouldn't take you long. Get in there.

I'm not sure how Jared will circulate the results, but will let you know when I find out.

Oh, and don't forget to do my one on error tracking system UX, as detailed yesterday: "Survey: bug tracking software UX expectations" (survey link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/LJDXRNB).

Righto.

--
Adam

Survey: bug tracking software UX expectations

G'day:
I haven't done a survey for a while. This one is a quicky about bug tracking software: "Bug tracking software expectations". It's only got a few questions:

• What bug tracking software do you use?
• When reading comments that have been added to an issue, in which order would you expect them to be listed?
• When voting for an issue would you prefer (out of the listed options)
• How important to you is it to be able to (perform a list of common bug-tracking tasks)
• If you are a user of the Adobe ColdFusion bug tracker, what are your thoughts on it?

The last question kinda gives away my motivation for asking these questions: I'm hoping to lean on Adobe to get some stuff in their bug tracker to be changed.

Help me build a case, if you like. That URL again (in case you've lost it amongst the preceding dozen lines of text ;-) is https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/LJDXRNB.

Righto.

--
Adam

Survey results: A quick OO terminology survey

G'day:
I didn't quite get 100 responses, but 95 is close enough (and not bad for over a weekend, during which this blog's readership is pretty dire).

To recap, the first two questions related to this code:

x = new Y()

First I asked whether you were more likely to describe x as:

• a class
• a component
• an instance
• an object
• or something else

Second I asked the same question of Y.

The third question was to guess what a CFML function createComponent() might be for.

CFML: A quick OO terminology survey

G'day:
If you have 5min (and it probably won't even take that long), do you fancy filling out a quick survey: "CFML nomenclature"?

The survey asks three questions, based on this code snippet:

x = new Y()

Basically I want to know how you'd refer to x, and how you'd refer to Y. Don't answer here, answer on the survey. As I note on the survey: they're not trick questions, and I'm not looking for people to demonstrate how clever they might think they can be. I'm just after your honest answers.

As per usual, I'll report back once I get enough responses to warrant it.

Oh, and if you could help me circulate word about this, that'd be well cool. Cheers:

"#CFML: A quick OO terminology survey" (http://t.co/C5U8W7EMmK). (pls consider circulating this to help me get more responses. Cheers!)
— Adam Cameron (@DAC_dev) April 11, 2015

Cheers.

--
Adam

A bit of fun: #Code2014

G'day:
The Hybrid Group are doing a bit of a fun Twitter survey of language usage in 2014. See here:

Tweet what programming languages you used this year with hashtag #code2014 then check out the latest stats at http://t.co/Qrpobx6xwE
— The Hybrid Group (@hybrid_group) December 29, 2014

So go on, give it a bash.

And for the technical-accuracy-challenged of you out there (looking at you, Brad ;-), remember the language you probably use (if you're reading this), is CFML, not ColdFusion. ColdFusion is the app server (or, hopefully, Railo is the app server ;-); CFML is the language.

Anyway - ColdFusion, CFML, Cold Fusion or DBML - go have a Tweet. Support your language!

--
Adam

(CFML) Survey results: how you write your function signatures

G'day:
Firstly, hey thanks to everyone who filled the survey in! I got over 100 responses within the space of a coupla days. That's the fastest I've had responses to a survey. Cheers!

Anyway, what did you have to say?

(CFML) A quick survey about how you write your function signatures

G'day:
The subject kinda says it all. I'm just curious as to how people tend to code their function signatures, so I'm running a short survey.

Update:

The survey is closed: Survey Monkey will only allow me to gather 100 responses, which I've now got.

Survey results and my own findings: timestamp vs DateTime (PHP)

G'day:
Apologies for the delay in getting back to this survey ("PHP: a survey about date data handling") - although I'm sure few people would have been waiting with bated breath - I've just had a very busy week with one thing and another. Now it's Saturday and I have a moment or two to breathe before finding a pub to watch the rugby (England v Aussie and/or Wales v South Africa, which are on simultaneously).

Anyway... here are the results:

PHP: don't forget the timestamp / DateTime survey, if you have a moment for a one-question survey

G'day:
I released this ("PHP: a survey about date data handling") on Friday, which is a bit of as rubbish day for me to ask for ppl's input as they've generally got better things to think about. Whereas on Monday people might be looking for something to do other than work.

I've got 55 responses, which ain't bad given how anonymous both myself and this blog is in the PHP world, but I wouldn't mind a few more. So if you've got an opinion on PHP timestamps vs DateTime objects, I'd be keen to hear it. Or if you can fwd it on to other people who are in the PHP world, that'd be cool too.

I'll post the analysis tomorrow. Spoiler: there's not much in it.

Cheers.

--
Adam

PHP: a survey about date data handling

G'day:
I'm just going to regurgitate the intro paragraph to the survey (https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/XV9ZP8W) here:

I'm in the process of teaching myself PHP, having come from a CFML background. One topic that came up in conversation yesterday was how to store dates in memory (ie: in a variable). In CFML we'd use a date object. It seems in PHP there are a number of common options: using an integer in the guise of a "Unix timestamp" or using a DateTime object being two options. I'm just wondering what people tend to do here.

CFML survey results: scoping of variables-scope variables

G'day:
So I'll close off the survey "Survey: to scope or not to scope" now. I got a good level of response: 79 responses. Here's the aggregation of said responses. Including some charts just for you, Phil Duba.