onApplicationEnd() usage survey results

G'day:
I've had a reasonable number of results on my survey asking whether or not you use onApplicationEnd(), and if so: how so. It's telling a predictable story: the answer is "no, not really".

I've had 42 responses, and 38 of them are "no".


Four were "yes", with the following comments:

Current application uses onApplicationEnd to write to a log file that the application has shut down.

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for some projects I work on we have to do audit records almost everything. So that's one of the things that's triggered on Applicationend. Other stuff I've used it for was for general cleanup of data.

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I've used this to clear a shopping cart for a reservation app. I'm not convinced it was the best solution. I also used it for a large streaming app with thousands of users to save the last channel they were listening to when their app timed out. So at their next login it remembered. It does delete the structures & I had a lot of issues with blowing up memory with session variables.

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Record page views for cart tracking / checkout progress.

I think the logging situations make sense, although perhaps it would be more robust to put it in onApplicationStart(), because an application will always start, but it might not end: for example if the box itself crashes, or the JVM gets tangled-up (sorry about the technical jargon there). So there's a chance of missing some metrics doing it at the end. I understand, though, in an auditing situation "what makes best sense" is not necessarily one of the requirements. And also there's merit to be had in a "belt 'n' braces" approach.

I'm not sure about the shopping cart ones. Aren't shopping carts generally session-centric, not app centric? Also an application can time out without a session timing out. If the application times out and restarts, it will re-acquire any sessions that were still around when it timed out. Obviously it'd be unusual in the normal sequence of events for the application to time out before its sessions, but it's possible if say one calls applicationStop().

Still: I will not base any sort of judgement from a quick comment in a survey, obviously I know stuff-all about the environments / codebases in question.

There were a coupla good comments on the survey article too:

Abram Adams said:

I've never used onApplicationEnd (and indicated so in the survey), but that got me thinking of what I could use it for. Perhaps as a mechanism to keep an application alive and fresh? One of our larger projects uses a custom framework that does some data/object caching, etc... The first request (if app has expired) can take around 5-10 seconds to complete while subsequent requests take <1-2 seconds. Perhaps I could hook into the onAppEnd and re-init the framework so that it doesn't become stagnant, but is always ready...

I've prototyped the idea in my dev environment and it does seems to work nicely, though there may be hidden gotchas that I'm not aware of. Any thoughts to that approach?

And Jose Galdamez said:

I've rarely had a need for OnApplicationEnd. The server should be handling garbage collection of application-scoped variables, so one shouldn't have to write that sort of logic. When I see OnApplicationEnd in lessons I usually see examples where applications log information such as the date/time when it ended. Personally, I can't think of anything useful to log when the application ends. If you really want to keep track of the application lifecycle you could always log that within OnApplicationStart and leave it at that. I'm curious to see what people say in your survey!

Both good observations.

I think with the application timeout thing - I've had similar thoughts in the past - the easiest way to mitigate it is to have a really long application timeout. This removes the issue. Bear in mind that by the time onApplicationEnd() runs, the application has already timed out, so I think if one is after continuity, then making sure it never times out, rather than re-init-ing it if it does time out is a better approach.

Also if an application must be up, then there should be some sort of "are you up?" check going on to alert [someone] if the answer is "no". And the act of asking the question will reset the time out timer anyhow.

Unfortunately there were no responses with some really excellent thing we can all take away thinking "hey, that's cool". But I think we all probably suspected that would be the case anyhow.

Thanks for filling out the survey, to all those that did.

Righto.

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Adam

CFML: Quick survey: do you actually use onApplicationEnd()?

G'day:
I'm in rapid fire mode today.

When talking about all this onApplicationEnd() stuff recently, Bruce asked a good question: what does one use it for? I mean in real life? Well: I don't.

Do you? If you do, and fancy sharing, pls fill out this survey. It's one question: just a bit of typing.

Update:
The survey is closed. The results are here.

NB: as Sean has just pointed out... my wording was slightly vague before, but I'm also keen on you answering even if you don't use onApplicationEnd(). There's a "no" option in there too. It'll be good to see the split of do/don't use it.

I'll report back with what people say when when the frequency of submissions flattens out.

Cheers.

--
Adam

How did you come to be using Railo? (survey results)

G'day:
I've got 80-odd results for the survey I started the other day. This was one of the best and fastest responses I've had on the various surveys I've run on this blog. I wonder if this is because it was just a very short survey (one question), it was something people felt like responding to, or just that more people read this blog these days? Dunno. Anyway: no-one cares about that.

So: the results. Firstly I'll repeat something I touch on with each of these surveys I do, and that Mark Drew alluded to in a comment against the original article relating to the survey. With the mechanisms available to me, these surveys are not reflective of a very broad population base and this can have a hand in pre-determining the results.

How did you come to be using Railo?

G'day
I've concocted a quick survey, which simply asks how you came to be a Railo developer, IE: whether they have come from a history of using ColdFusion or BlueDragon, or straight to Railo having not used any other CFML engine.

The survey is here now closed. The results have been posted.

Survey results: turning a string into an array of characters

G'day:
One of my readers pointed out to me if that if I tarry too long before reporting back on my recent survey about turning a string into an array of characters, then people would lose what little interest they have in the topic. And I admit it's not the world's most interesting topic anyhow. Anyway, I've got 35 responses, so I'll summarise the results.

Quick survey / quiz: turning a string into an array of characters

G'day:
This is a bit of a random article. In conversation a coupla weeks back, a colleague questioned my approach to converting a string into an array of characters. Not questioned in a bad way, but my approach surprised them.

Anyway, this festered in my head for a coupla weeks, and popped back into it this morning on the train on the way into work.

Survey Results: where to focus Adobe's efforts to improve CFML's CFScript coverage

G'day:
Thanks to a coupla people fwding my Twitter status updates asking for participation, and I guess repeated nagging from myself; on Friday last week I finally hit my target of 50 responses.  I've closed that survey now.

The results were fairly predictable, I guess: no-one's interested in UI-ish things (form, layout & UI widgets) being availed in CFScript, and a bit of a mix in between.  Basically people thought "internal" type stuff, or integration with some external systems warranted inclusion in CFScript, but were a bit "meh" about it other than that.

Final Call for survey participation

G'day:
Hey, I've decided to start collating the results of the survey I've been running on where the priority ought to go in porting the remaining non-CFScript-ready CFML functionality to CFScript.

Update:
This survey is now complete. The results can be found here.

"Too-hard basket"

G'day:

Update:
This survey is now complete. The results can be found here.

Yesterday I nudged my readers about the survey I'm doing about CFScript improvements in CF11.  I had some feedback overnight from Charlie (in the comments below) and another person saying much the same thing: the survey is a bit hard to fill out.  Indeed the anonymous comment in the survey answers was precisely:

God that was hard to complete. You should have grouped tags from the same family into one. e.g. all the cfform tags as 1 option.

Where to focus Adobe's efforts to improve CFML's CFScript coverage

G'day:
It's time for another survey. This time it's about where Adobe should focus its improvements to CFScript for ColdFusion 11.

Update:
This survey is now complete. The results can be found here.

CF11 is around the corner, so this is perhaps a good time to think about where we (as the community) think efforts should be put into improving CFML.  I've always been a huge "advocate" of CFScript for non-view code, and have always preferred it to tags.  I think tags have their place, but that place is seldom in business logic; they're great for view logic though (ie: mungled up with mark-up).

Your IDE of choice: survey results

G'day;
I almost forgot about this one, what with all the flurry about what framework I should use, and trying to actually make some headway with it.

But there was that last survey I solicited: what IDE do y'all use.

So I've closed that one off now, and here are the results.  Cheers to the 73 people who responded to that.  That's the best participation I have had so far (which is good that it's the best response; not so good that the best response I can garner is 73 people! Not to worry: I'm not here to win any popularity contests ;-).

I've picked a framework. Well: you've picked it for me (UPDATED)

G'day:
Right, so it's 07:45 on Saturday, I've been up since 05:00, and I'm at LHR sitting at the gate for my fortnightly trip to Ireland to see my son. And I've got an age to wait before boarding, so I'm gonna get as much of my article written as I can on which framework you've decided I should use (based on me following the groupthink).

Firstly: thanks everyone for filling-in my frameworks survey: it got over 50 responses - and fairly quickly - which is great. I've parked it now.

Here's the analysis of the breakdown.

Oops
Thanks to Seb (in then comments) for pointing out some errors in my analysis.  It seems that in the process of transferring data from various devices and apps I'd copy and pasted some stuff incorrectly.  And I concede I did not recheck them before committing them, which is a bit of a schoolboy error.  I'm glad someone is paying attention to what I'm doing (as I'm clearly not!).

So, anyway, I'm updating the results below (and will indicate clearly where they've changed).

One thing to note... the bottom line now has me using a different framework than I had indicated I was going to yesterday...

No I'm NOT the only person in the UK using CF10!

G'day:
OK so that title seems like I'm stating the obvious, but it's a reaction to my earlier article which questioned whether I was. I was questioning this because Rakshith from Adobe had suggested I was, as far as he knew. I didn't believe him, so I decided to try to find out (by running a survey).

Firstly: thanks to everyone who responded.  I got 56 responses which is quite good for the surveys I run.

Secondly: yes, I can confirm that there are people in the UK other than myself using CF10.  Phew.

Enough with the Surveys, Cameron! This time: frameworks

G'day
Yeah, sorry, I'm going to ask you to do yet another survey (update: I've stopped collecting results for this, and have done the analysis on it in this article).  I'll stop for a while after that.  Unless I think of something else about your practices I want to find out about, I mean ;-)

Unlike the other ones where I want to simply get a sense of the zeitgeist (and perhaps get it onto Adobe's radar), this one is to help me out with my dev work.

What CFML IDE do you use?

G'day:
This article / question was prompted by a few things. I've been using CF Builder since before it was first released (one of the benefits of bring on the Pre-release Programme), but have had a mixed experience with it, so I'm always questioning its merits, and listening to what other people have to say about it.

I'm the only person in the UK using ColdFusion 10???

G'day:
Sorry for the attention-grabbing headline, but it's not a complete work of speculative fiction (although I kinda hope it is).

Survey Results: How ColdFusion updaters should handle CF's version number

G'day
I ran a survey a while ago entitled "Which version of ColdFusion am I actually running?", which was in reaction to Adobe not updating the CF10 version number when ColdFusion "10.0.1" 9as they have been referring to it as) was released.  I had observed in bug 3323518 to them that they neglected to update the version number, to which Rupesh responded along the lines of "oh, we did that on purpose, so it's not a bug".  Err... no, Rupesh: just because you did something on purpose does not mean it's not a bug.  For a start, Adobe has well-documented how version numbers are supposed to be handled, and yer not doing it the way your bosses have told you too.  Secondly: to claim that something that is called "10.0.1" should actually have a version number of "10.0.0" is just daft.  Fortunately cooler heads have prevailed - Hemant (scroll down to his comment) and Rakshith's - and they've agreed that this needs fixing.

Survey Results: ColdFusion Modularisation

G'day:
The third survey (there's a first and a second that I have also recently written up) I ran was about how we might think ColdFusion might be modularised: it was to determine how important various areas of ColdFusion are to us, how much we use them, whether we're happy to pay for them or would roll our own or simply do without if they were paid-for options.

I didn't get quite as many answers for this as I did the previous two, which is strange as this one seemed to be the most popular one (going by hits to the page).  Perhaps because there were more options to select on this one, and people couldn't be arsed.  Or having done two surveys already, people got bored.  Oh well (and I completely understand both those positions!).

Anyway, I had to scratch my head for a while as to how to present the data in a useful way, because the questions were large matrices of options, which don't lend themselves well to my fetish-of-the-week: Zingcharts (look at the results of the first two surveys to see what I mean).

Survey Results: The importance of backwards compat between ColdFusion versions

This survey was all about getting a feel for how people upgrade ColdFusion, and the path they take. And, given that, what there experiences with rework to effect the upgrade was, and how much of an issue it was. And with that in mind: what their thoughts about the weighting Adobe give to this "backwards compatibility at almost any cost" (including, at times, at the expense of common sense).  I discuss the latter notion in a dedicated article.

Survey Results: CF strings being interpreted as dates and integers

G'day:
No articles for a few days, sorry (if indeed I can be so self-indulgent as to think anyone actually gives a toss one way or the other ;-)... I had a busy weekend flitting from London to the other side of Ireland and back in the space of about 40 hours, and have been pretty much shattered as a result.  But here we go now.
 
I've been running some surveys for a while (see the list of them in the right sidebar), and I've finally got enough results to give some analysis. I decided there was no point in reporting back on a survey unless I got at least 50 results. On a couple of them I'm now well over that, so I'll share the results and editorialise a bit.