Survey: to scope or not to scope

G'day:
And, indeed as the old trope goes: "that's the question". I have been looking at some code that follows one coding standard, which says "thou shalt scope all variables". And I look at my code, in which I only scope when needed, and I really feel the former is a pile of... clutter compared to my own code.

However the scope of my own code is much narrower and much less mission critical. And only I work on it. So just because I prefer to do something a given way which specifically suits me doesn't mean that's the best way to do it.

So I want to know how you do it. And with that in mind, here's a survey for you to fill out, if you so choose: "Scoping of variables scope variables".

Survey Results: A REST API

G'day:
A few days back I ran a survey on Survey Monkey asking:

A client has a rusty-old SOAP API written in CFML which needs overhauling. We possibly have the opportunity to rewrite it. The rest of the codebase is CFML, and the team's strengths lie in CFML and C#, with passable clientside JS. This survey is soliciting community advice as to which language we should considerfor this implementation.

Note: for the purposes of this survey, the existing skill set is a reasonable consideration, but not necessarily the only one.

I've had 54 responses for it, so I'll call time on the responses and summarise them here.

The bottom line is:

Option	%age	Votes
CFML	53.70%	29
Node.js	22.22%	12
Groovy	1.85%	1
Clojure	0.00%	0
Scala	0.00%	0
Ruby	1.85%	1
Python	1.85%	1
C#	9.26%	5
Other (please specify)	9.26%	5

Reminder: REST API survey

G'day:
I'm still a few submissions shy of enough to warrant aggregating 'em, so if you haven't done my REST API survey ("A new survey: which language would you use to develop a new REST API?"), it'd be cool if you did. The survey URL is https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/96XVQGR.

I'll report back on the results tomorrow, either way.

Thanks to the people who already have completed it, I've got some really thoughtful responses in there.

Cheers.

--
Adam

A new survey: which language would you use to develop a new REST API?

G'day:
SSIA, really. As per the survey intro text:

A client has a rusty-old SOAP API written in CFML which needs overhauling. We possibly have the opportunity to rewrite it. The rest of the codebase is CFML, and the team's strengths lie in CFML and C#, with passable clientside JS. This survey is soliciting community advice as to which language we should considerfor this implementation.

Note: for the purposes of this survey, the existing skill set is a reasonable consideration, but not necessarily the only one.

The survey is here: "A REST API". It's only two questions - one multi-choice to pick a language, and one to explain why.

Once I get a reasonable amount or replies, I'll aggregate them in a follow-up article.

Do not, however, just comment against this article. Fill-in the survey. I will not be paying attention to the comments against this article when it comes to aggregating the results.

Oh, and hey... if your reach is outside of the CFML community, it'd be cool if you could forward this on to your colleagues who focus on other languages too. It is a major consideration that the codebase & personnel are heavily CFML and C# influenced, but it's only one consideration. I like the idea of trying to diversity from those languages, if possible.

Cheers!

--
Adam

Survey results: lists in CFML, and the naming of list member functions

G'day:
I didn't quite get 50 results for this survey, but so be it. It wasn't a terribly interesting one, granted. So, what do people think about lists, list functions, and what the approach to the naming of list member functions should be?

The subject line of the survey was:

ColdFusion 11 and Railo 4 have added "member functions" to CFML, so one can call a method on an object, rather than pass an object to a function. ColdFusion has implemented list functions as member functions of a string, and in the process have blurred the distinction between what's a list function and what's a string function. There is conversation about this on the Railo Google Group, and this has lead me to wonder what the community participants think about Adobe's approach here.

There were five questions.

CFML: Survey follow-up (no results yet sorry): need some more input

G'day:
I realise it's not a very exciting survey, but my recent "Survey: lists in CFML, and the naming of list member functions" isn't getting an amount of attention that makes it meaningful for me to report on. I will be writing up the results - whatever they are - tomorrow anyhow, but it'd be good if you could put your oar in between now and then. If you haven't already, I mean.

The direct link to the survey is thus: "List function support as member functions in CFML".

Cheers!

--
Adam

Survey: lists in CFML, and the naming of list member functions

G'day:
There's a conversation brewing on the Railo Google Group regarding string / list member functions ("String member functions and list functions"), and this touches on ColdFusion's approach to these.

TL;DR: the survey is here: "List function support as member functions in CFML"

Update:

The survey is now closed. Results are here.

The question being asked on the Railo forum is whether to bother supporting list member functions in Railo at all. And as an aside to this, some lack of uniformity in how ColdFusion 11 has implemented these has cropped-up.

Firstly, I'll "go on record" as saying that I think having a specific concept as a "list" as a (pseudo) data type in CFML is a bit rubbish. Strings aren't intended for implementing data collections, and aren't very good at doing it, so - IMO - it was a poor idea to facilitate it. If Railo and ColdFusion deprecated the concept of lists entirely, the (CFML) world would be a better place.

That said, they are in the language as a concept, so we have to acknowledge this I guess.

Adobe have added list member functions to CFML in ColdFusion 11.  Here's a table of their implementation ("Supported List member functions"):

Survey results: Adobe's approach to client communications regarding security issues

G'day:
Well today's last minute push ("3") to get the survey over 50 results has worked. I've got 5679 (the number changed cos I started this on Fri, but finished it on Sun; the other responses came in during that period) now. So here're the results.

Just to remind you, the topic was:

This is just a quick survey to gauge how effective Adobe have been at communicating to their clients regarding security issues that have arisen in ColdFusion

Survey: three more responses please

G'day:
I've got 47 responses to the survey I started earlier in the week "Adobe's approach to client communications regarding security issues" (direct link to survey); I'd like to get 50 before I collate the information.

So if you have a moment and an opinion, it'd be cool if you could spend that moment clicking some radio buttons for me.

Cheers.

--
Adam

Survey: Adobe's approach to client communications regarding security issues

G'day:
I haven't done a survey for a while! This is a follow-up to my earlier article "It is Adobe's fault, OK?", and just to capture the zeitgeist.

Update:

This survey is now closed. The results are here: "Survey results: Adobe's approach to client communications regarding security issues ".

So here it is: "Adobe Communications", and the description text is:

This is just a quick survey to gauge how effective Adobe have been at communicating to their clients regarding security issues that have arisen in ColdFusion

There's seven questions: all bar one can be answered via a mouseclick, and the last asks for a comment. There's other boxes for comments along the way too.

I will always remind people that I do not target a statistically meaningful demographic, nor do I gather enough results to be sensibly analysed, but it is nice to see other people's opinions on stuff sometimes.

So go fill it out if you like. I'll summarise the results when the response stream dries up.

Cheers.

--
Adam

State of the CF(ML?) Union survey 2014

G'day:
Just a quicky... I was astounded to see that the CFUnited blog is still "a thing", but it is. And they're currently running a survey entitled "State of the CF Union".

I think the survey is misnamed for where the CFML community is at these days, but - having filled it out - it's clear it's not a ColdFusion-specific thing, it's actually targeted at the CFML community as a whole.

So whether you use ColdFusion or Railo or OpenBD... go and fill it in! And spread the word about it. I know how hard it is to get CFMLers to fill in a survey, so the CFUnited bods could probably use all the help they can get.

Cheers.

--
Adam

CFML: Results of survey about function expressions in tag-based code

G'day:
A few days ago I opened a survey, "A quick survey about tags & script in the same statement" (it's still open, so go have your say if you haven't already: I'll update the results posted here). This was in response to a comment from Rupesh:

I am questioning whether this syntax can cause confusion

The syntax in question relates to being able to use function expressions in tag-based code, eg:

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

I contended that was pretty bloody patronising, and I doubted anyone who was going to be using function expressions would be thrown by this sort of thing.

Still... what do I know? And I decided to poll my readers to see what they thought.

Now I get that no survey I run on this blog is going to be statistically meaningful, due to the way demographics work, and how low my readership is, and accordingly how few responses I get. But I figured in this case it might be slightly more representation of the audience for this question because stuff like function expressions is probably going to be limited to the more... erm... "engaged" people in the CFML community, and not that I reach out to all of them, but the people who take time to read blogs are going to be part of that "more engaged" demographic.

So, anyway, I was hoping for 50+ responses before I reported back, but the news is getting "stale" now, and I seem to have stalled on 49 responses. Near enough.

A quick survey about tags & script in the same statement

G'day:
Here's a quick survey for y'all: '"Closure" confusion'.

Update:

As one of my respondents observed... the question has nothing to do with "closure" but is entirely relating to anonymous functions / function expressions. For better or for worse, people use the term "closure" incorrectly to describe these things. A function expression implements closure, but there's no such thing as "a closure" (no matter how many people will it to be the case). Closure is not a countable noun; it's a concept. I am fully aware of this, I was just mocking Adobe's usage of the term. Hence me referring to it in quotes.

The narrative for the survey is as follows:

This is a quick survey to determine how clear some suggested CFML syntax would be. It relates to the bug tracker issue described here: https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3648781

The contention is that the suggested syntax would be confusing for CFML developers.

I am just wanting to gauge your thoughts on this.

I will collate the responses after I have received a reasonable number of them, and post them on my blog.

Cheers.

CFML: Referencing a query column via dot notation or associative array notation

G'day:
A few days back I asked a question via a Survey Monkey survey, relating to people's awareness of some CFML syntax relating to query columns.

The question was this:

What values for "dotNotation" and "arrayNotation" does this code return:

<cfscript>
q = queryNew("");
queryAddColumn(q, "id", "varchar", ["a","b","c","d","e"]);

writeDump({
    dotNotation        = isArray(q.id),
    arrayNotation    = isArray(q["id"])
});
</cfscript>

(NB: originally the values in the query column were 1-5, but as there was some question about values being treated as booleans, I changed that (the values were irrelevant to the question)).

Is a query column an array?

G'day:
Can you pls help me gather some code-awareness metrics by answering this very quick, single-question survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/HHV2TQQ

As per the question text, it's not a trick question, and I'm not after you working out "the correct answer", I'm just wanting to know what you understood of the CFML in question.

If you have an online presence and can circulate this, that'd be helpful too: the more answers the merrier.

Thanks for helping out.


--
Adam

A very uncontroversial survey from Adobe regarding ColdFusion deprecation

G'day:
I almost got "excited" about some forward thinking from Adobe here. Rakshith just posted this on Twitter:

Take this #ColdFusion survey to let #Adobe know features that need to be deprecated/retained/replaced https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/XCKLJXH
Twitter

I thought "woohoo! let's get rid of some cruft". And you should go fill it out.

Java 6 to 7 migration: a paucity of gotchas

G'day:
After some confusion arose from changes in behaviour of arraySort() if running ColdFusion 9 on either Java 6 or Java 7, Ray encouraged me to have a look into what problems people had had / were having, so I ran a quick survey to try to elicit this info from people.

Survey: "ColdFusion Migration issues: Java 6 to Java 7"

G'day:
I've decided I want to know more about any CFML code incompatibilities / issues that arise from migrating the underlying JVM from Java 6 to Java 7. I've created a quick - single question, written answer - survey to gather info from people. Here's the intro text from it:

ColdFusion / Railo WebSockets survey results

G'day:
I didn't get much interest in the "ColdFusion / Railo WebSockets: do you use 'em?" survey as mentioned in my article the other day. Not to worry. I think that speaks for itself in a way: plenty of people looked at the article, but not so many figured it was worth their while / interest in filling out the survey.

I only got 24 responses, but here's the breakdown of those I got.

ColdFusion / Railo WebSockets: do you use 'em? (survey)

G'day:
I've just started looking at the technical side of the WebSocket offering in ColdFusion 10. It's an interesting-looking technology, but I'm just wondering what real world practical applications people are putting them to. I've seen plenty of "chat demos" and the like, but nothing that one would really want to do in the real world. So I'm just gauging the community's usage of them.

As far as I can tell Railo doesn't have WebSocket supprot built-in, but there's a WebSockets Extension. I've not tried it. But I will at some stage.

Anyway, I want to know about your usage of WebSockets, or also if you've not used them and/or have no interest in them at all. I've knocked together a quick survey (four questions). If you fancy filling it in: good for you, and thanks. If you feel like re-sending the Twitter message I will send out advising of said survey, that'd be cool too: the more responses the merrier.

Cheers.

--
Adam