RSS feeds again

G'day:
I blame Simon for this post ;-)

OK, so I've turned the full feeds back on, but I've made a coupla smaller feeds as well.  Here're the details (also to be found on the right-hand side bar):

• Default feed
• Last ten articles (full)
• Last ten articles (summary)

The default feed is the one provided by BlogSpot by default, which lists the last n articles (I didn't count how many), and provides the full text.

The other two are provided by Feedburner, and just give the last ten full articles, or the first 500 chars of those articles, respectively.

I hope this covers all the bases for everyone (when I say "everyone" that's bigging-up the half dozen people who read this thing ;-)

I'll have a proper article up at some stage later today.  I meant to write something decent yesterday, but got bogged down on the Railo forums all afternoon, "politely discussing" [cough] some vagaries of Railo I'd found. This was basically the follow-up from that previous article I wrote about the member function methods Railo has for arrays (arrayFindAll(), arrayReverse() (RAILO-2070), and arraySort() (RAILO-2069: already fixed!)), and some back and forth on Railo's <cfdump>.  Inspiring stuff.

But first I need some breakfast (am not working today).

Righto.

--
Adam

Bloody RSS feed (and bloody stupid me)

G'day:
The guys @ CFHOUR pointed out to me that I had my RSS feedback configured incorrectly, in that it was spewing out each entire article instead of just the "above the fold bit".

Arrays in Railo (appendix to the earlier 4-part series)

G'day:
Just when you thought it was safe... here's some more on arrays in ColdFusionRailo. I've already blathered on about the ins and outs of arrays in ColdFusion... well more like arrays in CFML as I cover some stuff in not only ColdFusion but also Railo and a bit on OpenBD too:

• Arrays in ColdFusion (part 1)
• Arrays in ColdFusion (part 2)
• Arrays in ColdFusion (part 3)
• Arrays in ColdFusion (part 4)

But a comment from Gert against one of my blog posts was tucked away in the back of my mind... Railo does some of its own thing when it comes to arrays (and structs, lists, etc).

Improving CFML's documentation

G'day
I started rambling on in response to a thread on the Railo newsgroup, but after I'd typed about 500 words I thought it was getting a bit long for a forum response, plus it's relevant to more than just Railo anyhow, so I'd centralise it here, and put a summary on the forum and a link back to here.

The gist of the bit of the discussion I was interested in is this bit:

Alan Holden said:

On the documentation front... and this transcends Railo a bit:

I wish there was a "CFML Rosetta Stone". It would be something like CFDocs, but with a matrix architecture so you could quickly x-reference a tag or function across ACF, Railo and OpenBD (& even desktop, cloud, Jakarta, Tomcat versions, etc). This would help us develop apps that worked across the spectrum, help us solve those "it worked here, why not here?" bugs, and thereby help to advance CFML in general - to the benefit of all.

Unfortunately, this will probably remain a wish for some time... for it would probably need to be housed and managed separately, and would take a little chunk of time (and money) to develop and maintain.

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.