CFML: A rare mishit from Railo: function caching

G'day:
Railo are pretty much where it's at as far as enhancing CFML goes. Adobe - due to a criminally long dev cycle, and seemingly complete ignorance of web development trends & practices - just drag the chain as far as keeping CFML competetive with other web dev options goes; and I believe Adobe are singularly responsible for diluting the relevance of CFML as a language ("I've come to a conclusion"). Railo's increased confidence with leading CFML enhancement - rather than just following in Adobe's shadow - gives me faith than CFML isn't "dead" as far as being an option for new projects and new developer interest goes.

However Railo is not a panacea, and sometimes they balls things up. Here's a situation in which I think they have let themselves down.

A while back Railo added function-result-caching to CFML. This was - I think - due to a suggestion that bubbled out from the community. It's good to listen to the community, but I think this is an example where there's a difference between "hearing" and "listening". They should have heard what the community said, but they shouldn't necessarily have listened. The issue is here - and obviously this is just my own opinion - the suggestion from the community was a bloody stupid one. But Railo implemented it.

Now I am not suggesting function-result-caching is not a desirable feature, but the way Railo chose to implement was basically to take exactly what the community discussion suggested, didn't sanity check it or assess how best a solution might be implemented in a programming language (rather than... for example... an application, or basically some implementation code), and built a very situation-specific solution into CFML.

CFML: Quicky: another feed going to @CfmlNotifier

G'day:
If you follow @CfmlNotifier on Twitter (and if yer a CF developer, you should be!), you'll note I've started another feed to it, reporting along the lines of:

2014-04-05 14:36 Untriaged ColdFusion 10 bug count: 61. List: http://t.co/XGoReqPrfq
— CfmlNotifier (@CfmlNotifier) April 5, 2014

I'm doing a status update on that every six hours 24 hours. It'll be interesting to see how the count changes. Due to how Twitter works, if I duplicate a status message (eg: in six hours time there's still 87 untriaged ColdFusion 10 bugs), the latter update will possibly be marked as a duplicate and not sent. I think this is OK: "no news is... well, not good news, but at least the status quo".

Hopefully you find this at least mildly informative.

And don't forget to vote for bugs that affect you, or if you need to give Adobe further information (like "why did you close this ticket saying 'never fix'? It's a right sball-ache for me!"). They do listen.

FYI, the count was over 100 a coupla days ago, so they do seem to be doing some triage at the moment. So that's good news. And it's certainly an improvement from when I wrote this: "212 untriaged ColdFusion 10 bugs" (back in May). Good work Adobe, but... hey... there's still quite a way to go, eh? All this stuff should be triaged already. They don't need to be fixed, but they should be triaged as soon as they're raised. Not months / years later.

Oh, and I know I've been a bit quiet this week (on the blog, anyhow). Work's been busy, and I've been a bit crook with a cold, so just watching telly in the evenings. I've got a coupla articles on the go, I just need the code sorted out.

Righto.

--
Adam

Help me with some code, if you have a moment: numberFormat()

G'day:
Hey, I'm trying to come up with the most expedient way to effect this. I have a number which could be zero or more decimal places. If there are zero decimal places, I just want to display it as an integer. If it has a decimal component, I want to display up to two decimal places, but without any trailing zeros. EG:

Value	Desired rendering
0	0
0.0	0
0.00	0
0.000	0
0.001	0
0.1	0.1
0.10	0.1
0.100	0.1
0.101	0.1
0.11	0.11
0.110	0.11
0.111	0.11

I would have thought this would be easily achievable with just numberFormat(), but it only has a mandatory decimal point, it does not have an optional one. Also "9" does not work as documented: it always displays a digit on the right-hand-side of the decimal point. So numberFormat("1.0", "9.9") returns "1.0", whereas if it's optional, it should return "1" (although the "." being mandatory would cause issues still here, as that would mean I'd get "1.", which helps no-one).

Obviously this is not a tricky problem to solve other ways, with a regex or a coupla separate statements, but I thought I'd pick yer brains in case I'm missing something obvious, or someone can come up with a nice single-expression solution.

I've created a testRig.cfm gist here:

If you fancy it, post yer own gist with your treatment of this inserted where indicated. Wouldn't it be nice if we had a CFMLFiddle type thing?


Thanks for any suggestions!


--
Adam

Things I don't know much about: SEO and WordPress

G'day:
A reader has sent me an email asking for help, but I don't know much about the topics they're asking about. So perhaps you lot can offer some insight...

I should pay attention to what my readers tell me! expectException()

G'day:
Sometimes I don't pay attention very well, or my attention span wanders...

... what was I saying?

Oh yeah, MXUnit. And me not paying attention to good advice people give me. I've just adjusted a bunch of my tests from previous articles in my unit testing / TDD series, to handle exceptions better.

trycf.com

G'day:
One of our CFML community colleagues has dun good. Abram Adams has created a site trycf.com, which deserve our attention and our support. It's based on the same concept as tryruby.org, which is also a handy site. Basically it offers CFML tutorials, which one completes interactively and in-browser, with a built-in CFML edit / execute window.

Something I'd not looked at before: ColdFusion security sandboxes

G'day:
Russ posted a question on Twitter yesterday:

has anyone else had problems with security sandboxes not working in #coldfusion 10, as in everything works even when it is disabled
— Russ Michaels (@RussMichaels) December 8, 2013

I have to concede this is part of ColdFusion I have never looked at. He didn't get any useful responses over night, so I decided to check whether I could either confirm the behaviour he was seeing, or declare "works OK on my machine".