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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Happy New Year dear readers of my little blog! Just before the break for the holidays I was informed by the awesome guys and gals at Packt Publishing that my book "Railo 3: Beginner's Guide" was finally out!

It wasn't enough that they told me it was out, they even sent me a few paper versions of the book, which I shall of course treasure as my first work in print!

Anyway, the book that is over 300 pages long (actually 364), has 10 chock-a-block chapters filled with Railo Server Goodness:

• Chapter 1: Introducing Railo Server
• Chapter 2: Installing Railo Server
• Chapter 3: CFML Language
• Chapter 4: Railo Server Administration
• Chapter 5: Developing Applications with Railo Server
• Chapter 6: Advanced CFML Functionality
• Chapter 7: Multimedia and AJAX
• Chapter 8: Resources and Mappings
• Chapter 9: Extending Railo Server
• Chapter 10: Creating a Video-sharing Application

Of course, if just reading that list is not enough, why not check out the FULL listing or even download a Sample Chapter?

But instead of just skimming over the top, why not get a full copy if the book? You can get it HERE from the Packt Publishing website! It comes in many flavours, including Paper,PDF, ePub and Mobi downloads and also on PacktLib

If you do get a copy, let me know what you think! I am currently thinking of the next book too!

I have to get this off my chest: the tag cfloop *REALLY* annoys me.

Not in all it's manifestations mind you, just in one of them, and that is... cfloop array. Why you might ask?
Well, if you want to loop an array you can do:

What "a" is in the index, is the actual item in the array. I think this is totally wrong to the point that if I had hair I would pull it out.
When the array attribute was introduced, I really think the developers had a brain fart.
They could have so easily used another attribute, maybe one that is already there. The attribute of "item" for example! I mean, it was there loitering in the tag lib, being used for collections, such as:

Now THAT makes sense! But why all the whining you might ask? Well, let's consider if you want to actually get the index of the array, what do you have to do? Oh yeah... set up another damn variable:

Wouldn't it have made a LOT more sense to do the following?:

See? now "a" can be the *ITEM* in the array and "counter" can be the *index* of the array.

Side rant: Why name it "collection" when we could have named it "struct"? <cfloop struct="#myStruct#" item="st">
      
   </cfloop>

Steve Bryant came up with the excellent idea of August 1st being designated How I Got Started In ColdFusion Day, for which ColdFusion users tell their origin story, So here goes mine!

Back in the mists of time, I had started a company called Creative Overload. We were mainly doing flat HTML websites, but specialised in VRML sites, and had done some interesting work for Brixton Academy and Virgin Radio at the time. Sadly, I saw myself as not experienced enough to be running such a company and left it in the capable hands of my then co-directors and left to find a new job somewhere else.

The job that I ended up taking was of Lead Web Developer at an ISP/Web Agency called NETTEC PLC. It was here (and over the many years I worked there) that I managed to work with many clients that were absolutely amazing. But I digress...

In the first few months that I was at Nettec Plc, we started working on a large Intershop site, the first CD's, Videos and games website in the UK with full transaction capabilities, and awesome side project of the Kingfisher Group, which at the time owned Wollies and other stores, but it was not for this project I used ColdFusion, it was actually an insurance company down the road that were looking to make choosing a policy much easier.

I don't recall from where it come, but I had a version of ColdFusion Studio installed on my machine and it had an awesome little wizzard attached to create a master detail page. And within a few hours and their database I had manged to do just that! I was amazed! I mean, I had been working with Perl so far and here was something that made sense, didn't need so many strange characters and just fit!

At Nettec we then did a lot of projects with ColdFusion, even being one of the main Allaire and then Macromedia partners in the UK, I even moved on to be a Spectra Specialist (for my sins) which I did all the way up to 2004/5

There you have it. How I got started with ColdFusion

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.

Hot on the heels of the previous 1.3.5 release, the CFEclipse team have released a maintenance release. 

You might wonder why so many releases nowadays? Well, the team have a new release schedule, which like all nighttime coders, is based on the cycles of the moon. So what has been fixed you ask? Checkout the full listing but a summary is here:

#509    Errors with implicit structure/array creation
#106     mishandling of multiline strings        
#478     attribute validation with spaces    
#486     asking for content assist when you have a broken parse tree throws error
#496     word wrap throws null pointer exception    
#510     insert cfabort action, doesn't
#512     useSmartPaste preference default is not initialized
#513     context menu added with each file opened
#515     smartpaste preference doesn't seem to take
#516     Code Formatting splits regex onto 2 lines    
#520     syntax errors inside comments
#521     space at the end of strings/single quotes inside double quotes    
#523     Code Parsing error with cfinterface/cffunction
#504     cfdump and cfabort tags should print out their respective dump() and abort() functions in cfscript
#517     Content Format menu option incorrect display
#518     Code Parsing and formatting

An awesome job to everyone involved!

So this is a bit of a fishing post (at least I am being honest!)

In the next few months Railo Technologies will be working on a number of projects and we are  looking to build up a good list of contractors that can work on these projects with us.

I am not posting details of specific jobs of course, but you should have a variety of skills round CFML and CFML development, such as frameworks, ORM techniques, code optimisation and  load testing etc.

Please, read carefully now, I am not looking for agents, I am sure you have wonderful contractors and reasonable rates and make coffee to die for but please do NOT contact me.

So, if you are contracting at the moment, or will be looking for contracts in the UK and Europe over the next few months send me an email with your CV, letting me know which areas you enjoy/are good at/ both/ want to get into etc.

IF YOU ARE NOT AN AGENT, email me over at mark at getrailo dot com

Finally, as previously mentioned, I shall be treating emails from agents with the contempt they deserve, so don't ruin your day eh?

This weekend I got a package in the post, with an awesome t-shirt from the NYCFUG! I want to thank Clark Valberg and Ben Nadel from Epicenter Consulting for sending me such an awesome item as well as for the fantastic reception I had at the NYCFUG in May! 

I am currently in Zürich, after doing two days training on ModelGlue, Reactor, ColdSpring, Test Driven Development and Ant (a lot packed into two days I tell you!) as well as hanging out with Gert Franz, the first time since we both starting working with each other!

Anyway, on Friday the 8th of May I am heading off to New York City to hang out with Peter Bell for a few days which shall be a blast again, just before cfObjective, and to present at the New York CFUG on the 12th of May.

Find out more details over at the New York CFUG (http://www.nycfug.com/) come over and join us, as well as having a beer (they do beer in NYC right?)

In my last post I wrote about using ZIP and FTP as resource locations.

Today, I want to focus on why you might want to use RAM as a resource. Imagine the situation, for some crazy reason, you happen to have some code in your database, that you want to actually run. Its in fact just a text string, but you want to run this code. Let's say it is a code example in a blog post or something. How would you get this code to run?

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