I’ve been using Brian Kotek’s ColdMock for a while and I really like how easy it makes it to test CFCs that depend on several other CFCs - because you can create “mock” versions of those CFCs on the fly that return specific values. Mock objects are a good way to provide a consistent environment for your CFCs under test, as well as a way to let your CFCs be tested without them affected the “real” environment (because you can create a “mock” environment which can even include things such as data access objects to fake the whole database layer).

As I blogged recently, I’ve switched from cfcUnit to MXUnit and the mailing list is pretty active. Mike Steele posted that he had ported EasyMock to CFML. My first reaction was “Have you looked at Brian Kotek’s ColdMock project?” and Mike explained that EasyMock isn’t just about creating simple mock objects but about verifying behavior in those mock objects.

Intrigued, I read about EasyMock, a Java project that targets JUnit, and realized the power of being able to create mock objects that expect to be called in certain ways and can, as part of your unit test, actually verify the calls made on them!

I asked Mike to send me a build and I played with it and liked it a lot, pretty much instantly. I sent him some feedback and very soon I got an updated build that incorporated much of my feedback - and a note saying he was already going in that direction. Nice to find a project where I’m on the same page as the author!

You can download the latest build from the CFEasyMock project page on RIAForge. It’s a very simple but very powerful concept that should really help you with your unit testing!

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Since unit testing has become an increasingly important part of any project that I work on, I’ve had to review what else is available. Right now, the best of breed for ColdFusion seems to be MXUnit.

The documentation is still somewhat thin, albeit somewhat better than cfcUnit, but it has a rock solid ant integration and a very slick Eclipse plugin, as well as a very convenient way to automatically run any unit tests found within an entire directory tree.

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Every quarter, Fusion Authority provide you with the well-written, up-to-date, comprehensive articles that you need to be a ColdFusion professional. Each issue is a mini-book of at least 80 pages of content written by experts — Sean Corfield, Raymond Camden, Michael Dinowitz, Hal Helms, Jared Rypka-Hauer, Joe Rinehart and Matt Woodward and many others.

Personally, I’m not into ColdFusion development but I just loved to keep a tap on top of technologies I’m involved with in a team. ColdFusion developers in our team, however, love the articles which they say, “are well focussed, straight forward and well up-to-date.”

Their latest “ColdFusion 8 Special Edition” is already out, you can sign up for a subscription to the FAQ-U on their Quarterly Page. This issue highlights some new and interesting features of ColdFusion 8. Brian Rinaldi, Ben Nadel, C. Halton Humphrey, Key Smoljak, Brian Meloche have teamed up to give you What’s Hot? What’s Not? in ColdFusion 8.

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Brian’s is more sophisticated and, hopefully, will be integrated into ColdSpring in due course.

Now I can use his version instead of mine and know that I’m using a community-supported resource.

I know Brian Ghidinelli also ran into this issue and had started to write his own as well.

I expect he’ll switch to Brian Kotek’s version now.

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What is the point of this guide? Unless you are a perfect code, there is a chance that your ColdFusion application will have errors in it. The question is - what are you doing with your errors? What was the last error that occurred on your site? If I asked you how many errors your site threw yesterday, could you answer with 100% complete accuracy? I’d be willing to bet most people would say no. Shoot, I know I couldn’t answer that. So what do we do to help resolve this issue?

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I have a simple page that loops a couple queries and randomly issues the question and choices. I have the loop go from 1 to 10; however sense I do not want to have duplicate questions, I did a conditional that does not allow dups to be shown. In turn, instead of giving me my nice 1-10 quiz, I get random amount of questions. I completely understand why this is happening, but have trouble coming up with a solution.

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I am attempting to create a new RIA app using the new Ajax tools in CF8. Is there a special trick needed to display a FlashPaper or PDF in a cflayoutarea?

I am calling the report with this link:

<a href=”javaScript:ColdFusion.navigate(’DebtMFReport.pdf’,'center’)”>
Agency Scheduled Payments Report</a>

All that displays is text like this:

(freaky stuff here)

It doesn’t matter if I am using an existing PDF file or a PDF generated by a cfr file.

Any suggestions?

What you have to remember is that when you run ColdFusion.navigate, the JavaScript will request the remote URL and take the resultant HTML and place it in the container (whether it be cflayout, cfdiv, etc). When you pointed to a binary file, ColdFusion attempted to write out the binary data to the container, which obviously won’t work well. PDFs can’t be embedded in a page. They must take over the complete page to work. So you are out of luck.
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It’s actually quite simple, to get a list of all the EXIF tags simply use the ImageGetExifMetaData function.

Here’s a quick example:

<cfimage action="read" source="#ExpandPath("lobster.jpg")#" name="img">

<cfset exif = ImageGetEXIFMetaData(img)>

<cfdump var=”#exif#”>

Here’s a screen shot of a CFDUMP of the EXIF Image Metadata.
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This got me thinking about what features/types of code/practices should be avoided in ColdFusion.

Some are obvious - for example, not using deprecated code. Did you know that CFML Reference guide contains a list of deprecated code for both tags and functions? Also listed are obsolete tags and functions. These functions/tags won’t work at all in ColdFusion 8.

But what else would you add to this list? I do not want to turn this entry into a “bash CF” entry (obviously, I love ColdFusion!). If you don’t like a feature, I don’t want to hear about it as we all have features we don’t like. But what things would you caution developers against? Or at least warn them? What tags/functions throw a red flag in your mind when you see the code.
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