Mark Drew (Redux)- cf_etc...

Following on from a post that Visual Studio has an Achievements Plugin (very funny if you play on the XBox, Steam or PS3) I was just thinking what Achievements  could we unlock if we had a plugin for CFEclipse (or CFBuilder) whilst coding CFML?

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I have been doing a lot of JavaScript development recently and finally got my head round Ternary operations. Something that Railo Server has had for a while and I think was introduced to Adobe CF8 CF9 a while ago too. I just never got round to making it part of my standard coding practices, so I thought I would share.

If you have been doing this for a while, no need to point and laugh at me, but if you haven't, let me explain.

In your code you get to points where you have some code that looks like this:
<cfif MyVar EQ "something">
   <cfset myResult = 1>
<cfelse>
   <cfset myResult = 0>
</cfif>

When I see that, I tend to think, what is the fastest way to do this? What makes more sense? In the code above, in *theory* the variable myResult will always be created, but since it is always created, why have the cfelse statement?

I started coding in this manner subsequently:
<cfset myResult = 0>

   <cfif MyVar EQ "something">
      <cfset myResult = 1>
   </cfif>

This way the myResult variable is always set to a "default" and only modified if the statement becomes true. For some reason this makes me feel happier and that the code is more robust (and of course, there is less of it).

With a ternary operation, you can even reduce ALL that code (omg! 4 lines of code!) into a single line:
<cfset myResult = MyVar EQ "something" ? 1 : 0>

The code above now is all in one line. The whole logic relating to the myResult variable is neatly encompassed in one line. Suddenly I feel so much happier.

The CFEclipse Team, lead by the awesome Den have managed to get another release of CFEclipse out!

Check out the "What's new" page for the new features in 1.4.4

Remember, you can always update CFEclipse from your Software update in Eclipse with the update site of http://www.cfeclipse.org/update/

If you have any issues, why not join the CFEclipse google group, this is where a bunch of friendly people will be able to help you! http://groups.google.com/group/cfeclipse-users

Enjoy!

We are running a great little competition that with just a few lines of code (ok, 4K total file size) you can win a ticket to cf.Objective on April 22-24, 2010 at the Hyatt Regency Minneapolis, MN! 

There are few rules to the competition, but basically just write some code that shows off Railo Open Source server's features.

Check out the rules and some ideas over at the Railo Blog!

I am not sure if people know this (and yes, I shall get round to putting up a banner) but the guys at EdgeWebHosting have been hosting my site on a dedicated server that allows me to both maintain this blog as well as a bunch of small projects that I have for quite a while now. I have always got on with Vlad at all the conferences and the choice seemed good. 

So far the service has been stellar, no downtime etc. But normally, that is what you expect right? A true test really comes when things go wrong. 

And on Tuesday apparently they did. 

I woke up to find that I had a missing call from the USA. A bit confusing, but when I heard the voicemail, it was Dave, one of the support engineers at Edge Web Hosting that had spotted suspicious activity on my site. I wont go into all the details here of the exploit (lets say that it looked a lot worse than it ended up being and nothing was actually compromised) , but throughout Tuesday, they were the most on the ball company I have ever hosted with in keeping me up to date. 

(before you ask, it was a mis configuration I did to apache, for a quick job that I should have removed and was exploited. Let's leave it at that)

I can't recommend them enough, and even through emails updating me on the findings of the supposed intrusion including IM'ing for information etc. 

When was the last time YOU had service like that eh?

So all in all big thanks to the guys at Edge Web Hosting! 

Spotted today on twitter, a great article: Introduction to Railo Open Source by  Andrew Schwabe on http://www.packtpub.com/

It's great to see the community writing articles that spread the word about Railo far out into other communities, which surely spreads what CFML developer's have known all along that CFML and Railo just gets things done! 

I have created a video using code_swarm to show the history of CFEclipse's development history, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did! I am using this for other projects as a beautiful as well as useful way to see how a project progresses over time:

Edit: Since we moved CFEclipse from tigris.org back in 2006 I missed out the main people that worked on the Project such as Rob Rohan, Spike Milligan and Oliver Tupman (to mention a few!).

Part 1 (pre SVN with the initial commits etc!)

View Part 2  on youtube

Today I was writing a little app that helps me keep up with my Todo list, since I wanted to have a web interface for some reporting into my tasks.

The issue is that my todo list is just a text file (and before you go saying there are various apps, I am happy with my text file ok? for various reasons which are not part of this post), so I built a nice web interface to it, but the problem is that since I can modify it, and whilst I was developing it I wanted a way to back this file up. I mean, whist I am coding this app, I might make mistakes and want to roll back. 

So I got thinking of a way to do this and realised I do this every day anyway, using git!. So, I thought, for every change I do to the file, why not check it into its repository.

I fiddled about with cfexecute, which to be honest I haven't used much previously but I couldn't change the working directory, so, thanks to Tim Blair's post I managed to do the following: 

<!--- since we have made modifications to the files, we need to commit them in git --->

 <cfscript>  

     // first of we set the command to call  

     cmd1 = "git add TODO.txt";  

     cmd2 = "git commit -m 'autobackup'";

     // the environment variable is empty  

     envp = arraynew(1);  

     // and we want to run from a given "root"  

     path = "/Volumes/iDisk/Documents/TODO";  

     dir = createobject("java", "java.io.File").init(path);  

     // get the java runtime object  

     rt = createobject("java", "java.lang.Runtime").getRuntime();  

     // and make the exec call to run the command  

rt.exec(cmd1, envp, dir);

rt.exec(cmd2, envp, dir);  

 </cfscript>

And that's it. Every time the file is changed, it is added to my git repo locally. Handy!