As folks know, I’m a big advocate of automated testing in general and unit testing in particular. I’ve gradually become a big fan of Test-Driven Development (TDD) where you write tests first and then write the code to satisfy the tests. I’m pleased to see unit testing well enough established in CFML development now that we have several unit testing frameworks (my current favorite being MXUnit, which I think has become the de facto standard choice for most CFers who are doing unit testing).

Getting into TDD is not easy, however, and I think there are a couple of conceptual problems that take a while to get your head around. One is just a simple case of “Where do I start?”. Given a blank piece of paper, how do you just start writing tests that are an accurate representation of what the yet-to-be-written system is supposed to do?

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I just received my final evaluation forms from MAX 2008. With the exception of one person who “Fell asleep during presentation. It was offensive.”, the comments were mostly positive. There was, however, an interesting undercurrent…

The talk - Event-Driven Programming in ColdFusion - shows how to apply the same style of programming that is common in Flex to your server-side CFML code. Consequently, it uses several examples from Flex to set the scene. The intent of the talk is two-fold: 1. to show folks who are new to Flex how to start practicing that style of programming, by way of preparation for Flex; 2. to show folks who are alreday using Flex how to leverage the same style in CFML, making it less jarring to switch back and forth between client and server code.

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cf.Objective() Call for Speakers

Invites have gone out to an initial round of speakers (with suggested topics). Now is the time to throw the doors open wide and accept suggestions / submissions from everyone to fill the remaining slots! See the cf.Objective() 2009 call for speakers.

Scotch on the Road 2009

Big Mad Kev has made it official: Scotch on the Rocks will hit the road in early June 2009! The plan is a day in London on June 1st focusing on CFML, a day in Edinburgh on June 3rd focusing on CFML and Flex and a day in Dublin on June 5th focusing on Flex and AIR. The tentative schedule allows for seven sessions, starting at a leisurely 10am (registration starts at 9:30am). The intent is to reduce your costs by having the conference come to a city near you instead of you having to travel and stay somewhere.

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I just noticed that Mach-II 1.6.0 Release Candidate 1 has just been released! Read the rest of this entry »

People love music and they love movies.  So it makes sense that music videos can be pretty popular, too, and it should come as no surprise that a new site called MTV Music has caught the eye of the ColdFusion crowd.

Enjoy Metallica?  Or maybe Radiohead?  Take a moment to explore the site, if you want - we’ll be here when you get back.  MTV’s gathered together music videos featuring all sorts of artists, and some interviews and live performance clips, too, so there’s definitely some fun stuff to see.

Now, we’ll move on to how MTV Music relates to ColdFusion.  Two days ago, Raymond Camden wrote, “[T]hey have a nice API: MTVN Content API.  Let’s see who can get the first CFC wrapper done.”  Earlier today, Matt Gifford stepped forward with some things to say and show.

Gifford stated, “My main aim was to create a CFC that would bring back as much combined detail for the user as possible, all contained within a structure and arrays within.  I am really happy with the results so far, and look forward to working on it to tidy it up, add more features, and release it to the big wide open(source).”

Also, as things stand, you can play with his CFC wrapper here.

Here’s hoping you have some fun with the concept.  And since it’s almost Halloween, here’s a fairy tale/horror story of sorts not available on MTV Music.

I said I’d blog more about Adam Lehman’s keynote at A Wee Dram so here it is…

Adam talked about the success of CF8 and the huge uptick in the number of developers since 2007 (I forgot to write down the name of the research company that provided that data but it was a third party, not Adobe). He said that the increase in interest and use of ColdFusion has meant that the lack of (good) developers was one of the primary problems that companies face. Claude Englebert, Adobe’s EMEA CF specialist, confirmed that after meeting with companies all over Europe, CF is very strong but the problem is finding (good) developers.

Adam talked a bit about the various advisory committees (both internal and the public CFML group that I chair) and the free-for-educational-use availability of CF8 from https://freeriatools.adobe.com/coldfusion/.

Next Adam ran through the proposed features for Centaur, including a few new things. He covered the language enhancements around cfscript and CFCs as well as touching on the Hibernate integration.

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Gert Franz just announced the release of Railo 3.0 and one of the important changes for many CFers is that this release combines the previous Community and Professional editions into a single free edition with no restrictions for use (it’s a single “web” with no clustering support but there’s always the commercial Enterprise edition if you need those features).

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ColdFusion is receiving more positive news coverage from mainstream tech sites.

Over at Fusion Authority they point to an article by Joe Rinehart on Dr. Dobb’s Portal. Rinehart says ColdFusion has become his application server of choice. He says he prefers it because it combines straightforward development with features such as Flash Remoting and real-time messaging gateways that make communication between the application server and Flex RIAs simpler.

On the HTML Goodies site, Doug Hughes writes favorably of ColdFusion. “ColdFusion has always focused on making complex and difficult tasks easy. The classic example of this is the ease of querying databases”.

“In most languages you need to have several lines of code to establish a connection to a database server (more if you’re using connection pooling), several lines to build your SQL statement, a couple lines to send the request, more to close the connection and then several more lines of code just to output data from the query into an HTML list. However, early versions of ColdFusion consolidated most of this tedious process into one tag that wraps the SQL statement you’re running and one tag that iterates over results.”

Its good to see ColdFusion receive some positive coverage from other mainstream tech sites.

People who hate surprises may want to steer clear, and those who often find themselves without even a few minutes to spare should be cautious, as well. An Online ColdFusion Meetup is approaching, though, and the event’s open-ended schedule looks like it could play in some attendees’ favor.

Is your calendar clear on August 21st at around noon eastern time? Raymond Camden will be speaking, and on his ColdFusion blog, he wrote, “I’d love it if folks who are planning on attending could give me some topic suggestions. Anything but ColdFusion 8 and Ajax, which is cool and all, but I’ve given that presentation about 10 times this year, and don’t want to give it again until I have to at MAX.”

Only twelve comments have been made following that post, and since one was a joke and another was from Camden, you still have a very good chance of getting your recommendations noticed. Or, if you feel like following the crowd - or just want to know what’s likely to happen - the audience is currently favoring a discussion of CFCs.

All that’s left for you to do beyond the point of weighing in is the simple act of joining up. On the appropriate date and a little before the correct time, visit http://experts.acrobat.com/cfmeetup and select the “log in as guest” option. Then you should be a part of the Online ColdFusion Meetup.

Have fun and learn a lot.

Over on Will Tomlinson’s blog there’s a piece about using structCopy() to create a copy of a struct and a note from Charlie Griefer cautioning that for Will’s example, he probably needed to use duplicate() instead. After discussing this will Will on IM, I figured it might be instructive to look at how structCopy() differs from duplicate() and why you might use it instead.

First off, let me say that the reason I think this causes confusion for a lot of CFers is that they don’t have a Computer Science background so they’ve not had the “Memory and Pointers 101″ course that makes this stuff a lot clearer. Hopefully, this blog post will help fill in some of the gaps.

Some basics. When you assign something to a variable in CFML, you are really doing two things: you are creating a label (the variable name) and you are allocating some memory to associate the label with the data. In particular, with structs, the struct itself exists in a block of memory (well, lots of connected blocks of memory) and then the variable “points to” the struct data.

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