My Secret Life as a Spaghetti Coder
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This is a story about my journey as a programmer, the major highs and lows I've had along the way, and how this post came to be. It's not about how ecstasy made me a better programmer, so I apologize if that's why you came.

In any case, we'll start at the end, jump to the beginning, and move along back to today. It's long, but I hope the read is as rewarding as the write.

A while back, Reg Braithwaite challenged programing bloggers with three posts he'd love to read (and one that he wouldn't). I loved the idea so much that I've been thinking about all my experiences as a programmer off and on for the last several months, trying to find the links between what I learned from certain languages that made me a better programmer in others, and how they made me better overall. That's how this post came to be. More...

Hey! Why don't you make your life easier and subscribe to the full post or short blurb RSS feed? I'm so confident you'll love my smelly pasta plate wisdom that I'm offering a no-strings-attached, lifetime money back guarantee!



Since the gift buying season is officially upon us, I thought I'd pitch in to the rampant consumerism and list some of the toys I've had a chance to play with this year that would mean fun and learning for the programmer in your life. Plus, the thought of it sounded fun. Here they are, in no particular order other than the one in which I thought of them this morning: More...


When looping over collections, you might find yourself needing elements that match only a certain parameter, rather than all of the elements in the collection. How often do you see something like this?

foreach(x in a)
   if(x < 10)
      doSomething;


Of course, it can get worse, turning into arrow code. More...


The last bit of advice from Chad Fowler's 52 ways to save your job was to be a generalist, so this week's version is the obvious opposite: to be a specialist.

The intersection point between the two seemingly disparate pieces of advice is that you shouldn't use your lack of experience in multiple technologies to call yourself a specialist in another. Just because you develop in Java to the exclusion of .NET (or anything else) doesn't make you a Java specialist. To call yourself that, you need to be "the authority" on all things Java. More...


This morning ColdFusion got another mention on InfoQ, the news source for all things new and hip (or at least not normally dead and dying). The first time I saw it there was back in the summer.

I wonder if, with the new missing method handler allowing you to write even more dynamic code, and its ability to inter-operate so well with both Java and .NET, we might see a resurgence into more mainstream waters. I'd still like to see better cfscripting options available though (more than can be provided with scriptaGulous).


The next few days in Houston are busy for programming technophiles. A couple of quick reminders:

BarCampHouston 2 is this Saturday, August 25, 2007 beginning at 9:00 AM at Houston Technology Center. Update: I had the map wrong since it was wrong on the BarCampHouston wiki page. I hope no one went to the wrong place. Here is the correct one: HTC. I also decided to take the day off and chill out instead of heading up there. My apologies to anyone who had planned to say hello!

HouCFUG is hosting a ColdFusion 8 release party on Tuesday, August 28 from noon to 1:00 PM at Ziggy's Healthy Grill where they'll be giving away a licensed copy of CF 8.

Finally, Agile Houston is hosting a session with Robert Martin, object mentor on Tuesday as well. It's at 6:30 PM in PGH 563 on the University of Houston Campus.

I should be at both BarCamp and at Robert's presentation, but I'll be in class during HouCFUG's meeting.


In the past you used to give and receive advice that keeping form state in a session was a valid way to approach the problem of forms that span several pages. It's no longer sound advice, and it hasn't been for a while.

Even before tabs became popular, a few of us were right-clicking links and opening-in-new-windows. It's a nice way to get more things done quicker: loading another page while waiting for the first one to load so that you are doing something all the time, rather than spending a significant amount of time waiting. It even works well in web applications - not just general surfing. More...


Software Developer has an article, Ghosts in the Machine: 12 Coding Languages that Never Took Off that spotlights twelve of many thousands of languages that never made it big. Some had potential, others were doomed to begin with.

ColdFusion makes the list. So do Haskell, Delphi, and PowerBuilder.

I don't know that I disagree with the assessment based on the thought that "the vast majority of us all use the same dozen or so."

What do you think of the list? I was surprised to see those four languages included with some of the others, but at the same time you still have to ask, have they made it? And if they did make it, are they still there?

(via Venkat)


Let me start out by saying the NFJS conference was incredible! I went in with the intention of blogging as the sessions and days went on, but I was incredibly busy, and felt like my notes didn't do justice to the presentations. So I'm going to review the slides and flesh out my comments, and hopefully do a good job at letting you know what went down. More...


I ran into a couple of stumbling blocks today using a particular company's XML request API, and it made me wonder about the restrictions we put in our software that have no apparent reason.

My plan was simple: create a struct/hash/associative array that matches the structure of the XML document, run it through a 10-line or so function that translates that to XML, and send the data to the service provider. Simple enough - my code doesn't even need to know the structure - the programmer using it would provide that, and the service provider doubles as the validator! My code was almost the perfect code. It did almost nothing, and certainly nothing more than it was meant or needed to do.

But alas, it was not meant to be. Instead, the service provider has a couple of restrictions: More...


Today I was writing this simple function to recursively create XML based on a struct, and ran into a minor gotcha: More...


I thought I had read this somewhere, about not being able to use "cf" as a prefix to a function, but when I defined all those functions in scriptaGulous with that prefix, and it let me, I thought maybe I made the whole thing up.

But then today I was having a look through the docs for cfscript, and I found this:

Caution: ... You cannot put a user-defined function whose name begins with any of these strings within this tag:

  • cf
  • cf_
  • _cf
  • coldfusion
  • coldfusion_
  • _coldfusion
However, so far it has let me with no problems. What shall be done?


Bruce Eckel posted an article on how to use Flex with a Python back end over at Artima.

He said its possible to do the same thing "with any language that has support for creating an XML-RPC server."

In any case, I'm going to look into this in the future (I still haven't hopped onto the bandwagon). Anyone else played with it? What has been your experience?


This one refers to the 40+ minute presentation by Obie Fernandez on Agile DSL Development in Ruby. (Is InfoQ not one of the greatest resources ever?)

You should really view the video for better details, but I'll give a little rundown of the talk here. Obie starts out talking about how you should design the language first with the domain expert, constantly refining it until it is good - and only then should you worry about implementing it (this is about the same procedure you'd follow if you were building an expert system as well). That's where most of the Agility comes into play. More...


Sean Corfield responded in some depth to "Is Rails easy?", and explained what I wish I could have when I said (awkwardly, rereading it now) "I think my cat probably couldn't [code a Rails app]."

Sean makes it quite clear (as did Venkat's original post) that it isn't that using a framework, technology, or tool in general is easy or hard (although, you can certainly do things to make it easier or harder to use). In many cases, what it does for you is easy to begin with - in the case of Rails, it is stuff you do all the time that amounts to time-wasting, repetitive, boring busy-work. Rather, the right way to look at them is that they are tools that make you more productive, and it takes a while to learn to use them.

If you go into them thinking they are easy, you're likely to be disappointed and drop a tool that can really save you time before you learn to use it. And that could be tragic, if you value your time.


I never thought to do this before today, but all of the sudden I had this idea that it would be nice to have a variety of utility methods for every object. I'm talking about things like respondsTo(methodName), to see if a component has a certain method public, or inspect() as an object oriented way to do getMetaData(object), and just things in general that all objects should be able to do to or for themselves.

Rather than creating a class which would be the equivalent of BaseClassToBeExtendedManuallyByAllOtherClasses, I decided I'd like to just replace component.cfc in the CF7 install. As it happened, the component.cfc that was there (CFusionMX7/wwwroot/WEB-INF/cftags) was a 0 byte file. I just added my code for respondsTo(methodName): More...


It's been a couple of months, but cfrails has been "officially" updated (as in, I released a new zip, not just put new code into the repository).

We're a lot closer to 1.0 than one quarter of the way, so soon you should be seeing higher version number jumps. Anyway, here's what's been updated with this release: More...


Timothy Farrar brought up an issue about scriptaGulous that I thought was a good one (and one I've worried a bit about).

Should people start using the scriptaGulous library and Adobe decides to start naming functions after tags (i.e., cfQuery()), then a lot of code will break unless they start honoring your functions over theirs instead of throwing errors, as is currently the case.

He suggested using an underscore convention (_cfQuery(), and Andrew Powell proposed a tagFunctionName() style convention.

But what are the odds Adobe would start naming functions cfTagName()? Any idea from the guys over there would be appreciated, as well as anyone else with any input. Would tagFunctionName() as opposed to cfFunctionName() (or tagQuery() over cfQuery()) work better? I'm partial to the underscore method if it is needed, but obviously I prefer just simple tagName() the most.

What are your thoughts?


First I wanted to thank Andrew Powell for his gracious offer to help on this project. Then, the update:

The ScriptaGulous RIAForge page (as does the SVN repository) has a zip with a file that actually compiles now, so you can start using it in your projects.

There are a couple of tags that were removed, such as cfloop and cfoutput, where it doesn't make sense to have them (unless we decide to use closures). Some tags, such as cfmail and cfhttp include extra parameters for their respective "params." The general guideline followed is that it is an array of structs - each struct is full of name/value pairs that represent the param tag's attributes and values you want to give those attributes. Please have a look at the hints, and if they aren't clear, feel free to ask us (or tell us what doesn't work) at the issue tracker at RIAForge or the scriptaGulous Google group. More...


Last night Thomas Enebo announced on Ruby Talk that JRuby 1.0 RC 3 has been released, and that it "will likely be our final release candidate before our 1.0 release."

I'm interested to deploy a web app trying Ruby on Rails with JRuby (or JRuby on Rails, perhaps), and also in experimenting with Sean Corfield's Scripting for CF 8 to run Ruby within ColdFusion.

Anyone else planning to do good things with JRuby?


Today I put some code into the scriptaGulous repository at RIAForge. (scriptaGulous is a function library that intends to duplicate all the ColdFusion tags (where it makes sense) to make them usable in cfscript blocks).

Basically, I wrote a generator to read the taglib.cftld and generate some code for us to start with. I was going to generate some unit tests too, but I've got to move on to doing some other work.

Anyway, I'm sure plenty of the tags/functions actually do work, but when you cfinclude scriptagulous.cfm, you'll get attribute validation errors in some of the tags.

So now on to the next stage of development: making all the tags work. For that, we need your help! (if you want to use this sooner rather than later) If you'd like to commit to contributing a tag or two (or more!), please join the scriptaGulous Google Group and record which tags you're working on so we don't duplicate our efforts.


That's ScriptaGulous with a big-G (not C). The name is kind of cheesy but there's been a lot of talk lately about being able to have all the tags available for scripting in CF. This is something I've wanted personally for a while as well, and it has been on my to-do list for quite some time (ever since 11/22/2006 after a conversation with Ron Jeffries about how "agile" a tag-based language could be on the XP Yahoo! Group). It's been there for so long with no action on my part, I thought starting a project page at RIAForge would get me moving. It's certainly not going to be a particularly hard project to do, as most of it is repetitive busy-work, but I think it will be very useful. More...


Often when we make a change to some code, if it is not properly designed, the result is that cascading changes need to be done throughout the application because bugs will ripple through the system. That's one of the ideas behind why we want to have low coupling between classes. We also have unit testing to combat the effects of this, but let's just suppose we haven't written any, and haven't used JUnit Factory to create regression tests.

Given that there is a lot of code out there that isn't quite perfect, wouldn't it be nice to have a tool that could analyze changes and where they would affect other code? I can imagine how such a tool might work, but I haven't heard of one before now (that I recall, anyway).

So the point of it all: I heard something about BMC and IBM teaming up on such a tool (my understanding is that BMC started it, and IBM later joined the project). I'm assuming it'd be in Java, but does anyone have information on this? Can anyone confirm or deny the story I heard?


Ok, this is a well known issue (and I feel like a moron for it taking me so long to figure out), but I couldn't figure it out for the life of me (I was looking in the wrong spot the whole time - who would think CF Studio had anything to do with it?).

For the longest time, my FTP was not working, and today we finally narrowed it down to Allaire FTP & RDS. The only problem is, I couldn't set up an FTP site on it, and I couldn't uninstall it (in fact, it looked about half-uninstalled, as it remained under "My Computer" but the icon was dead and you couldn't do anything with it. More...


What if we had functions compile(String sourceCode) and runCompiled(BinaryData compiledCode)? What could you do with it? Could it act as a closure, and bring really dynamic coding to traditionally static languages, perhaps allowing dynamically named variables and functions to languages without them (and much more!)? Could we store our code in a database and mix and match chunks, building programs based on a SQL query?

What do you think? Useful or useless?


Peter Bell's presentation on LightWire generated some comments I found very interesting and thought provoking. (Perhaps Peter is not simply into application generation, but comment generation as well.)

The one I find most interesting is brought up by several people whose opinions I value - Joe Rinehart, Sean Corfield, Jared Rypka-Hauer, and others during and after the presentation. That is: what is the distinction between code and data, and specifically, is XML code or data (assuming there is a difference)? More...


I've been thinking about it lately, and I cant't seem to think of any (in my admittedly small set of knowledge) other language that allows you to be dynamic by leaving out language constructs (such as the type and returntype attributes of parameters and functions), but that, when you do decide to use them, the language acts statically (and is CF even acting statically when it checks the arguments, or is it acting strongly?).

For all you supermultilingual coders out there: do you know of any other language which is dynamic, but allows you to instruct it to become static like CF does? If there are others, is CF the first? More...


It might be petty, but those two three-letter words really get to me. They clutter my code almost as much as semicolons, Object obj = new Object() // assign a new object to the object called "obj" which is is of type Object, and angle brackets. I'm want to do something like newCodebase=rereplace(entireCodebase,"[gs]et","","all").

What if we had a new idiom where calling the method without arguments would cause it to return a value (the get), while calling it with an argument would run the setter? Its easy enough to do. What do you think, am I off my head?


As I'm getting into little details about the generation cfrails is doing, I had a couple of questions I thought the community could provide some insight on better than my own experiences regarding lists.

One of the great things about generating this stuff is that you can have for free all the bells and whistles that used to take a long time to do. In particular, you can have sorting on columns automatically generated, as well as pagination.

So question 1 is: given that you can have sorting for free, would you rather automatically sort on every column, and specify any columns you did not want to sort on, or would you prefer to not have sorting placed automatically, but just specify which columns to sort on?

And question 2: Given that more and more people are on broadband, is it time to up the 10-record limit on results? I find it annoying to have to reload all the time, and if given the option, I normally up the results/page to 50 or 100. What do you think, would you make the default number of results/page higher (and how high would you take it?), or would you cater to the lowest common denominator?


As expected, Ben was a great speaker and gave a good presentation. He said we were quiet, and someone said its because we've read all the blogs about it before he came. He was running a little late, due to some fiasco in Austin where the city commandeered the meeting room and they had to change the venue at the last minute.

Unfortunately, Dave's post about the presentation did act as sort of a spoiler, and Ben didn't give us any scoops (that I noticed). Anyway, that's why I don't have much to add. =)

One important thing though: so far, they have yet to get an error on CF8 running old CF6/7 code (some public facing parts of adobe.com are running on CF8 now, he said). Of course, this is what you would expect, but I remember the nightmare we had moving from 5 to 6 - it wasn't pretty.

Seeing the presentation live did give some perspective to Dave's notes, and it's worth going even without learning anything new. I also wanted to thank the HouCFUG guys for putting all of that together- you guys did a great job (and it was good to meet you!). Finally, congrats to the winners of the raffle prizes. I guess I'm going to have to break out the wallet when 8 comes out. I think I'd buy it just for the inline arrays and structs.


Thanks to Dave Shuck's post about Ben Forta's presentation at Dallas/Fort Worth CFUG, I now know a lot more about CF8 than I did before. He has a long list of new features, but the two I'm most excited about are inline arrays and structs! Dave showed a couple of examples:

<cfset MyArray = ["CFIMAGE","CFWINDOW","CFPOD","CFMENU"] />
<cfset MyStruct = {Name="Dave",FavoriteLanguage="CFML",Cool=true} />


Now, if we could just get closures ... =)


There are a couple of drawbacks (or some incompleteness) to scaffolding being truly useful. The one that seems to be most often cited is that normally (at least in Ruby on Rails, which seems to have popularized it) it looks like crap (it is only scaffolding though). Of course, most who make that complaint also recognize that it is only a starting point from which you should build.

Django has been generating (what I feel is) production-quality "admin" scaffolding since I first heard about it. It looks clean and professional. Compare that to the bare-bones you get by default in Rails, and you're left wondering, "why didn't they do that?" Well, as it happens, it has been done. In particular, there are at least 4 such products for use with Rails: Rails AutoAdmin (which professes to be "heavily inspired by the Django administration system"), ActiveScaffold (which is just entering RC2 status), Hobo, and Streamlined (whose site is down for me at the moment). More...


For more info, see this post or HouCFUG.

The meeting is at 6 pm. And here's a map.


Base on the suggestion from Rob Wilkerson, I decided to pull this out into some code that illustrated the point I made in my last post. For context, see Another great use for closures.

Basically, what's going on is that we have a list() method that takes a query and dynamically outputs a list of its rows (with a heading column as well). It also has the ability to call a closure for a cell instead of doing its normal output, if one exists. More...


Back in December, I had a post about why closures are useful. In particular, I mentioned what I called the "generalized Template Method" pattern as a benefit: basically, you have a function where, when the user calls it, you want them to be able to change its behavior in some way.

I was short of practical examples, but today I came across one. I've got a list() function that behaves identically for each object it is called on. Basically, it figures out what properties the object has that should be listed, and creates a table that lists them for some query result set. Normally, this just outputs the variable's value on a cell with a white background. The slight change in this case was that depending on the value, the list should set a background color to one particular cell. More...


For all you Houston, TX CFers, Ben Forta will be visiting the Houston ColdFusion Users Group a week from today (that's Tuesday, May, 1st, 2007) at 6 pm.

The meeting is at Gulf Coast Regional Blood Center (I hear Ben is a vampire, so we'll need to replenish our supply) which is located at 1400 La Concha Ln, Houston, TX - 77054. That's right behind Reliant Stadium / the Astrodome, so if you park in the lot on Old Spanish Trail at Texans games or the Rodeo (or one of the many other gigs they always have going on there, like my favorite - the monster truck rallies), then you probably walk past it all the time.

If you plan on coming, the HouCFUG guys really want you to RSVP, since there will be food and drinks provided. More info is at the HouCFUG website.

Hope to see you there!


This morning has been strange. On the drive to work, I started out thinking about encapsulation, and how much I hate the thought of generating a bunch of getAttribute() methods for components that extend cfrails.Model (in cfrails, of course). To top it off, I don't know how I'd generate these methods other than to write them to a file and then cfinclude it. But as I said, I really hate the idea of (say in the views) having to write code like #person.getSocialSecurityNumber()#. That's just ugly.

But then again, I don't like the alternative of leaving them public in the this scope either, because then there is no method to override if you wanted to get or set based on some calculations (of course, you could provide your own, but you'd have to remember to use them, and the attributes themselves would remain public. Currently, this is the way its done, because I feel like providing default getters and setters is not really encapsulating anything on its own. The encapsulation part only enters the game when you are hiding some implementation of how they are calculated or set. More...


One of the great benefits of using a framework (in the general sense) is the freedom in portability it often gives you. Rather than writing your own Ajax routines which would need to handle browser incompatibilities, you can rely on Prototype/Scriptaculous, AjaxCFC, Spry, or a seemingly infinite number of Ajax frameworks available. We see the same phenomenon in our use of ColdFusion, which uses Java to be cross-platform. And, you can get the benefit for databases by using a framework like Transfer or Reactor or ActiveRecord in Ruby (all also have a slew of other benefits). In general, we're simply seeing an abstracting away of the differences between low-level things so we can think at a much higher level than "oh crap, what if they're using Lynx!" (Ok, I'm doubting any of those Ajax frameworks fully support Lynx =), but you get the picture) More...


A thought occurred to me today- just because something doesn't offer all you need, doesn't mean you can't put it to good reuse. This goes back to Sean Corfield's post about why you should avoid the not-invented-here syndrome, my own post about why I thought I would release cfrails (and some of the decisions therein), and a multitude of others who realize that reinventing the wheel is not generally productive.

I had the realization today (though, I must admit it is quite obvious!) that there would be nothing wrong with adding an extra layer of abstraction, which would in turn add the features you needed to some other product/library/code. So when I thought "well, I can't use Transfer or Reactor" (what ever happened to Arf!?) because they didn't provide all the metadata I needed, I could have still built on top of them. I guess the thought never occurred to me back then.

In any case, it has now. Although I'm far enough along that I don't think doing this will save me any more time, it's something I plan on investigating- at the very least, it could provide a familiar API to use (and of course, the framework would be generating any XML files rather than having the programmer modify them).

So basically, if you think you don't want to use a pre-made product - at least you should look into the possibility of building on top of it.


Two or three weeks ago, I posted a call for help on the CFCDev mailing list regarding this strange problem I was having regarding sessions. I forget exactly how I described the issue, and I'm too lazy to look it up, so I'll just describe it again (and I'm sure now that I've solved it, this description will be much better than the first one):

Basically, when I posted a form in Adobe ColdFusion 6.1 whose action performed a cflocation with the cgi.query_string appended to the URL, and when links also appended that variable, all the sudden my session would become invalidated. I checked every reference to session. and couldn't find anywhere it would be happening in my code. I couldn't even tell exactly when it was happening even though I put markers in every place I could think of. But finally today I happened to look up at the URL and notice that CFID and CFTOKEN were there multiple times. Clearly that was the problem. After that, I was pretty sure the where the problem lied, so I went straight to it and fixed it. This was never a problem in CF7, that I have been able to reproduce.

If you'd like to reproduce it in CF6.1, here is some simple code to do so: More...


I know this isn't quite hot off the presses, but I just wanted to let everyone in Houston (or nearby) know that Ben Forta is coming to the Houston ColdFusion User Group to demonstrate the next release of CF - Scorpio.

He'll be here May 1, 2007 downtown - Please visit HouCFUG for more details.

That's right around finals time, but you can bet I will be trying my best to be there! Also, they want you to RSVP as soon as possible so they know how much food/drink to buy, space to reserve, etc, so make sure you do that. I'll be posting a reminder as we get closer to that date as well.

Hope to see you there!


Sean Corfield's post about the perils of NIH and RTW and Peter Bell's subsequent one entitled Should you Release Your Framework? got me thinking about my own decision to release cfrails.

Sean mentioned that the not-invented here syndrome, along with reinventing the wheel, "plagues any coherent attempt at Open Source within the ColdFusion community - look at the number of half-baked calendars available (and don't get me started on the unit testing frameworks!)." I wanted to add, "and look at all the generation going on!" (as I can think of at least 5 such projects off the top of my head, my own being one of them.

In general, NIH and RTW are bad things. And Sean is right, to a degree. But I also agree with the sentiment of Peter's post: more is better but if it is substantially similar to another project, it may be better to contribute to that one instead. More...


I'm sure other editors/IDEs have this, and I'm sure plenty of people know about it already, but I stumbled on it by accident the other day and I wanted to share for those who may be in the dark:

To write &nbsp; in CFEclipse, you simply need to hit Ctrl-Enter (on a Windows machine, anyway).

It's already been a great help!


I can't remember the last time I used anything resembling a stack or queue (other than what I'm about to blog about). Of course, I've used lists and arrays, but not with the same intent you often see in the use of a typical LIFO or FIFO mechanism. I did have occasion to use the concept in the last couple of updates to cfrails, however, so I thought I'd bring it up in case anyone else came across the same use as I have. Let me explain how I arrived at the need (which also doubles as a little documentation):

Using cfrails, to make a model you simply go into your project and create a CFC that extends cfrails.model in the model folder. Assuming that file has the same name as a table in your database, you've now got an object (after it is instantiated, of course) with all the basic CRUD methods. The case is similar for the view or controller, where you'd be in the appropriate directory, but name it modelname_view.cfc or modelname_controller.cfc. There is a way to change the name of the table if you don't want the model name to match the table for some reason, but I'll not go over it here, as it's an "undocumented feature" at the moment. More...


If you're not familiar with what cfrails is, it is a somewhat new framework (I started it in November 2006) for building applications in ColdFusion. It does things like saving records, getting records, populating forms, and data validation automatically for you. It also provides nice abstractions for those things which it can't automatically do based on the database metadata (for instance, you may want a month/year date field, rather than a full date). Since I don't want to take too much of your time describing it, more info on it can be found on this blog post about cfrails 0.2.0 or at the cfrails RIAForge project page.

This update is a super-minor version change, but a significant one.

First, a couple of minor items - I added some more aliases to have functions read better. For instance, instead of doing set_title_new() to change the default title on a view's new item form, you can now write newform.set_title(). Similar additions were made to the record listing table and edit forms. There will probably be other small aliases as well, as I discover more awkward function names. Some of those old ones will go away, but I'll keep the ones that aren't awkward. Just as well, I also made a few more aliases of the type camelCaseFunction = camel_case_function, to allow everyone to keep their respective programming styles. However, if you are naming arguments, you're currently at the mercy of whatever I have called them. I plan to standardize soon - its just weird thinking in Ruby and programming in CF - I'm mixing styles a lot. More...


I'm a big fan of ColdFusion, but it is sorely missing some dynamic capabilities that I, for one, would love to see. How often have you seen a new user to CF ask something like, "if I store code in the database, how can I get it to run?" That's some pretty advanced thought, in my eyes. But the standard response is, "you have to write it to a file, and then cfinclude it." Similarly, Sean Corfield's Closures for CFMX accomplishes its feat by writing to the file system.

Why can't evaluate() take a string of code and execute it?

I'd also like to see the ability to create methods dynamically. Why should I need to write a file to generate individual getters and setters for an object (or any other function for that matter)? Well, I could do something like get("property_name"), the generic getter and setter that Peter Bell (and certainly countless others) used in his iterating business object. But what happens when I want some more complex functionality? Wouldn't it be cool to be able to loop over your properties and create methods for each of them? Not only that, if the property hasn't been loaded yet (for instance, its a relationship and you want to load it lazily), you could easily do that too! More...


If you are using version control, what is your setup like, and why did you choose to do it that way?

In Java development, I've got a repository, and I checkout the code to my desktop, check it back in, etc. So, there is no version control on the production server, though. Of course, there is no point (that I see) to have it on the production server, since you don't need many of your source files, but only the compiled classes (I'm assuming web development here).

But in CF, you'll be using all your source files as the actual files to be run, so you might very well set up source control on the production server, and have that be your main code base (say, checking it out to your development server and editing it from there, or to your desktop). Or, do you simply run the version control on your development server, and FTP any changes to production?

There are other ways, to be sure, so if you're using version control on your ColdFusion projects, I'd like to know the different ways you have it set up, and why you chose to do it that way. Any help is appreciated!


When I wrote that PseudoObject.cfc would be useless, I was thinking that all objects created would need 3 file operations, and thus, it would be quite unlikely to perform any better (or even on par with) normal object creation.

Based on the way I implemented it in that post, it would need three file operations.

But sitting in my data management class today, I was reminded of ORM because the professor noted that we wouldn't normally think of methods acting on an entity in the database, while each entity would have every other thing we would find in a typical object.

In any case, I realized you could move the file operations out a bit, and they would only need to be run once if you were building a ton of objects that shared the same type. This, I would think would be a substantial improvement over creating tons of real objects. And where would you do that? In an ORM framework - if you wanted to return an array of structs as objects. Then, each could be manipulated as if they were a real object!

Now, it would be freakin' sweet if you can attach a function to each row of the query like this. I expect it would be straight forward if possible, but if not, we can still see a lot of possibilities for ORMs out there (I'll probably test that tomorrow). I plan to implement something along these lines in cfrails, if it does hold up for thousands of objects.


At times, I like to push the limits of the languages I work in, just to see what I can learn. A while back, I got the idea of using structs as objects in Coldfusion, since instantiating objects is so slow. Of course, this would only be useful if you had tons of objects, and if it was substantially quicker than creating real objects. Anyway, I decided to see what I could come up with.

Unfortunately, I don't think this would be any more efficient (and possibly less), because I need to do three file operations. But, I thought I'd share what I came up with regardless.

Basically, what happens is that you tell pseudo_object.cfc what object you want to create, and it creates a fake object that behaves like a real one. It reads the CFC you tell it you want an object of. It creates a struct, finds the name of the variable you stored it in (multiple references won't matter, to my knowledge), rewrites the methods to use the scope+name of that variable, plus an extra this or variables scope to make up for variables named the same in different scopes within the CFC. Then, it attaches those methods to the struct and you now have a struct which behaves like an object. It won't work if you have any code outside of methods, however. Also, another problem may arise if you have something like this.variables.

Since I'm not entirely sure that made any sense, I'll share the code now: More...


Since building the comments functionality in this blog, I've had probably around 40 spams as comments. I got hit hard the other day with 34. I get emails of all the "possible comment spam." Anyway, Jake Munson's CFFormProtect has correctly identified all of them, and there have been no false positives. I'm not even using the Akismet feature yet.

Anyway, I'm going to try to post nothing else about this, because as he mentions, it can easily be bypassed if they know too much about it. So, the less advertising the better, but I just wanted to make sure I gave him credit for this great idea.

Update: Well over the 1000 mark, and CFFormProtect has caught all of them ... with no false positives. So when I say "seems to be working" I should have called it "is working quite well." I've got this on several of our clients' sites as well, and it is working just as well for them too. Great job on this one Jake...


Do you find yourself writing more classes in other languages than in Coldfusion? I do. For instance, I certainly develop more classes in Java than Coldfusion.

Is it due to the fact that I've developed bad habits in CF and haven't yet broken out of them (i.e., I'm just unable to spot needs for new classes) or is it because CF is so much more high-level than Java? A third option may be that the performance issues with instantiating CFCs contribute to me not wanting to break out? More...


(and functions with arguments can take more than the defined amount)

This may be well known, but I haven't seen a lot (or anything) on it. Of course, as always, I may just be missing something.

In any case, the other day as I was looking over some old code, I (re)discovered this marvelous fact. Now, you may be wondering why on Earth I'd want to use arguments in a function where none were defined. But, I have at least one case where I think it's valuable: suppose you are following the Active Record Pattern, or really writing any ORM. Basically, you want to abstract the query process. Now, that's certainly a noble goal. But, what happens when you want to provide a filter? For instance, you might have a function find_by_id(), a which finds a record based on the id you pass in. That's easy enough. You might even provide methods to find_by_other_columns_even_in_combinations(). More...


For those that don't know, cfrails is supposed to be a very light framework for obtaining MVC architecture with little to no effort (aside from putting custom methods where they belong). It works such that any changes to your database tables are reflected immediately throughout the application.

For instance, if you change the order of the columns, the order of those fields in the form is changed. If you change the name of a column or it's data type, the labels for those form fields are changed, and the validations for that column are also changed, along with the format in which it is displayed (for example, a money field displays with the local currency, datetime in the local format, and so forth). I've also been developing a sort-of DSL for it, so configuration can be performed quite easily programmatically (not just through the database), and you can follow DRY to the extreme. Further, some of this includes (and will include) custom data types (right now, there are only a couple of custom data types based on default data types). More...


Today I was working on some code where an error message could follow one of three basic formats:

[Column Name] is required to be a/n [data type]
[Column Name] is a required field.
[Column Name] must be a/n valid [data type]

The trouble was that [Column Name] isn't known (only the entire message), and doesn't come in the case (as in upper/lower) that I want it displayed. Therefore, I wanted to use rereplace() to end with something like:

<span style='text-transform: capitalize;'>#columnName#</span> [rest of message].

Of course, this isn't very hard. You just need to use a backreference to substitute the old match into the replacement substring:

rereplace(err, "((is[ a]*required)|(must be))" ,"</span>\1","one").

The \1 is the backreference. But, the part that I had forgotten is that you need parenthesis around the matched text that you are referencing. Therefore, all I needed was the outer parentheses.

I know this is actually quite simple, and mostly useless for most people, but I hadn't used it in a while, and forgot how to do it. So, I thought I'd post a little reminder for myself, and anyone else who might need it.


Thankfully for me (and anyone who is interested in using his closures package), Sean Corfield reponded to my Beauty of Closures post and set me straight on a couple of issues.

First, he confirmed that there was indeed a bug when attempting to use a mapping to use the closures, and that in fact, it wasn't a CF 6.1 issue only.

Next, he dove right into the code. So, for easy reference, here is my original code: More...


There are plenty of uses for closures, but two of the most useful ones I've found (in general) are when you really want/need to encapsulate something, and when you want to implement the Template Method pattern. Actually, implementing the Template Method pattern using closures may be misusing it, or I may be mischaracterizing it. It's more of like a "generalized" template method (particularly since we're not following the pattern, but implementing the intent). I still don't understand all of the Gang of Four patterns, so have mercy on me if I've gotten it wrong. =) More on all this below.

So as I get ideas from other languages, I always wonder "how can I use that idea in language X." For instance, I like the way Coldfusion handles queries as a data structure - so I tried to implement something similar in Java (which, I will eventually get around to posting). I encountered closures for the first time in Lisp a few years ago in an Artificial Intelligence course, I'm sure. But it wasn't until more recently in my experience with Ruby that I started to understand them. Naturally, I thought "could this be done in Coldfusion?" More...


OK, maybe its not the stupidist ever, but its almost on par with that error I get from time to time that tells me I need a primary key passed to cfupdate when I've got a primary key passed in, and to top it off it works sometimes (the cfupdate one). This one has to do with lists.

I love lists and list processing in Coldfusion. I use them for everything. But one thing I can't stand (which is something I feel I ought to be able to do), is when I get an exception because the list is too short (or sometimes too long). In this case, I was trying to delete an element from the list, but the element didn't exist. So, I got an "Invalid list index 0" error.

Maybe I'm too used to Ruby and its ability to index arrays with say, -1 to get the last element. But I don't feel its asking too much to have

<cfset listdeleteat(local.hotellist,listcontainsnocase(local.hotellist,"other"))>

not bomb if listcontainsnocase returns 0.

How do you feel? How often do you use lists? All the time like me?


This morning, Ed Griffiths asked on the CFCDev mailing list if it was "possible to interrogate some method or metadata associated with [an object] in order to find out what variable name it has been stored within."

I first pointed out that Per Djurner (contributor to CF on Wheels) and myself were chatting over IM about something similar - but with functions. His solution, which I thought was "awesomely creative" (to quote myself on the CFCDev list), was basically to do this: Throw an exception and catch it. Find the line number you are looking for, read the line number, and figure out the variable name (or in this case, function).

Of course, we both hope to find a better solution. Anyway, back to Ed's problem. From my understanding of his question, he just wanted to know the name of a variable who was holding a reference to a CFC. Responses ranged from things like "why would you want to do that?" to "there is probably a way," to "it's not possible because it may have many references" (these aren't true quotes, but paraphrases really). Even Hal Helms chimed in (and I am a fan of his, albeit just recently). More...


Two of the 3 projects I'm working on right now will be built using cfrails for at least some of the development. The third has such a strange architecture that I've never worked with before as to make it hard to see how I might integrate cfrails with it (it's already in version 1, and we've picked it up for version 2 and 3). With the other two, I've already integrated it, and it's quite simple to do.

Therefore, I thought I'd provide some insight in case someone else needed to do it. Both applications are already well established, but we're basically building new subapplications for them, and I've already integrated it for use with single-table manager mini-apps.

Basically, instead of using the provided index.cfm, which routes all the requests, we've already got index.cfms which are used. Now, two options are available here: either use the cfrails index.cfm, and "include" the old one where it says to include the default page, or just change the name of the cfrails index.cfm entirely.

To avoid any potential trouble, I just changed the name. So, now I have cfrails.cfm, where any links that point to actions that cfrails takes care of should go to. So, instead of having index.cfm/controller/action, you'll have cfrails.cfm/controller/action. More...


After my first couple of trial runs, I was a bit disappointed with the performance of cfrails. It was taking several seconds for simple pages to load, which is completely unacceptable. Of course with everything dynamically synthesized for you, you expect a performance hit, because CF isn't all that fast itself, but several seconds is way too long to wait.

After the disappointment, I tried running it on our production box, and while you could still notice it was a bit slow, it wasn't unacceptable. But, if possible, I want to improve the performance (and I have quite a few ideas on how to acheive that).

So, that brings me to the good news: After about a 3-4 month hiatus on doing anything in Coldfusion (except for the occassional maintenance, for not more than an hour at a time), I'm finally working in a few CF projects again (3, to be exact). Working in CF again cascades the good news to cfrails - our development machine sucks. More...


Just finished writing a survey on some of relatively current literature on k-means, focusing on introducing it, some practical applications of it, some difficulties in it, and how to find k, the number of clusters. I'm still new to the area, so don't expect much groundbreaking to be done.

The second half focuses on my own experiment, trying to find k using two similar, but slightly different techniques. I failed, but if you'd like to go over it and either laugh at me, or perhaps figure out what I've done wrong, you are free to. =)

Obviously, this isn't going to interest many people, so I didn't take time to mark it up - it's just available as a DOC (I had planned on having a PDF version, but my PDF writer has taken a crap on me). If you don't have Word or Open Office, and would like to read it, contact me and I'll try to get the PDF for you in some way or another.

Anyway, the DOC is here if you want to read it. It's over 3600 words, so beware!

I'm interested to know if anyone has built any machine learning libraries or done anything with machine learning in Coldfusion? My immediate thought is "no way!" because I don't think Coldfusion has the performance for it. But, I wouldn't know, since I haven't tried it. Have you? What's been your experience? Drop me a line if you care to.


A couple of days ago I wrote about wanting to do a nice test runner interface to my unit (and integration) tests in Coldfusion. Well, it seems that just a couple of days before that, Laura Arguello (possibly in collaboration with her partner, Nahuel Foronda) released cfcUnit Runner on RIA Forge.

Up until now, I've been using CFUnit, about which she says "I believe it could also used to run CFUnit tests, but CFUnit will need to implement a service façade that Flex can use."

I'm going to get cfcUnit and download cfcUnit runner and try it out sometime soon. It looks really sweet. Then, if I can automatically run tests marked as slow or choose to skip all those marked as such, Laura (and Nahuel?) will have saved me a bunch of time and provided for all of us exactly the system I was thinking I wanted!

Update: Robert Blackburn, creator of CFUnit, said in the comments at Laura and Nahuel's blog that he is indeed working on something similar for CFUnit, and would be willing to implement the service façade Laura mentioned. Awesome!


There's been an ongoing discussion in the Coldfusion community for quite some time now regarding the use of XML for configuration files to your applications. More recently, Peter Bell has written quite a few posts about it in The Benefits of XML Config Files (and why I don't use them), Configuration Files vs. Scripts, and most recently, Should you use XML for you configuration files?

He references Hal Helms, Joe Rinehart (and thanks Jim Collins who wrote (or co-wrote?) config.cfc for these), and Martin Fowler.

This post was sort of "sparked" by Jim's release of config.cfc, then my ensuing question about "when and why" I would want to use it (and no, I didn't mean it to sound that provocative), and then Peter's response to which this post title is addressed as "regarding."

I'm a little late to the party, but I thought I'd chime in nevertheless. More...


As I'm finishing up a Ruby on Rails project today, I've been reflecting on some of the issues we had, and what caused them. One glaring one is our lack of automated tests - in the unit (what Rails calls unit, anyway) test and functional test categories.

The "unit" tests - I'm not too concerned about, overall. These tests run against our models, and since most of them simply inherit from ActiveRecord::Base (ActiveRecord is an ORM for Ruby), with some relationships and validation thrown in (both of which taken care of by ActiveRecord). In the few cases we have some real code to test, we've (for the most part) tested it.

What concerns me are the functional tests (these test our controllers). Of course, Rails generates test code for the scaffolds (if you use them), so we started with a nice, passing, suite of tests. But the speed of development in Rails combined with the lack of a convenient way to run tests and the time it takes to run them has caused us to allow our coverage to degrade, pretty severely. It contributed to very few automated tests being written, compared with what we may have done in a Java project, for example.

Of course, there were some tests written, but not near as many as we'd normally like to have. When a small change takes just a couple of seconds to do and and (say, for instance) 30 seconds to run the test, it becomes too easy to just say, "forget it, I'm moving on to the next item on the list." It definitely takes a lot of discipline to maintain high coverage (I don't have any metrics for this project, but trust me, its nowhere near acceptable).

Well that got me thinking about Coldfusion. I notice myself lacking in tests there as well. I'd traditionally write more in Coldfusion that what we did on this Rails project, but almost certainly I'd write less than in an equivalent Java project. And it's not just less because there is less code in a CF or Rails project than in Java - I'm talking more about the percent of code covered by the tests, rather than the raw number. It's because there is no convenient way to run them, and run them quickly.

For Rails development, I'm using RadRails (an Eclipse plugin), so at least I can run the tests within the IDE. But, there is no easy way to run all the tests. I take that back, there is, but for some reason, it always hangs on me at 66%, and refuses to show me any results. I can also use rake (a Ruby make, in a nutshell) to run all the tests via the console, but it becomes very difficult to see which tests are failing and what the message was with any more than a few tests. Couple this with the execution time, and I've left testing for programming the application.

In Coldfusion, it takes quite a while to run the tests period. This is due partly to the limitations of performance in creating CFCs, but also to the fact I'm testing a lot of queries. But at least I can run them pretty conveniently, although it could be a lot better. Now, I've got some ideas to let you run one set of tests, or even one test at a time, and to separate slow tests from fast ones, and choose which ones you want to run. So, look out in the future for this test runner when I'm done with it (it's not going to be super-sweet, but I expect it could save some much-needed time). And then the next thing to go on my mile-long to-do list will be writing a desktop CF server and integrate the unit testing with CFEclipse... (yeah, right - that's going on the bottom of the list).


A common problem I've been having and seeing lately is dealing with components that should read files in locations they don't know about. For instance, you have component Model in cfrails, which should read a configuration file in the project that is using it. I didn't want to have to create a mapping for every project, and I didn't want to have to figure out the ../../../../etc between the two directories to pass the value in to Model. So, here's a function which takes care of the mapping for you. If you needed, it would be trivially easy to add a new parameter for base template, if you didn't want to use the actual base template as your basis for inclusion.

It doesn't have any associated automated tests, mainly because I can't figure out how I'd test something like this. So, I tested it manually in 3 different directory structures, and it works fine for me. If you ever find a need for this, and encounter problems, I'd like to know about it - especially the directory structures your using so I can replicate and fix it.

So, without further ado, here's the code:

More...


Today I discovered Peter Bell's blog, Application Generation, and it's an absolute gem. It looks like he's working on and interested in a lot of the same stuff I am. What his blog covers is all in the title - application generation, and has a particular bent towards Coldfusion in many posts. However, it's also good general, and I'd reccommend it even for non-CF developers.


So, the last couple of weeks I've been hard at work with school stuff, and also we've started a new (well, massively adding on to an existing one) project at work (and now another new one, as of last Wednesday). Because I seem to be so incredibly busy, and the projects need to be done "yesterday" (don't they all?), I built myself a little helper application that should increase my velocity by a ton - no more repetitive busy-work (well, it is greatly reduced anyway).

I've quite unimaginatively called it cfrails, since it was inspired by Ruby on Rails, and you can find it's project page at RIA Forge.

But first, you might want to read Getting Started with cfrails, so you can see how easily 0 lines of real code can create an interface to your database (the only lines are a couple of setup things, and cfcomponent creation).

I'd like to know what you think, so please leave a comment.


(or scopes as structs, as it were)

So, what would you expect the output of this to be, and why?

<cfset url.test = 1>
<cfset tempurl = structcopy(url)>
<cfset structdelete(tempurl, "test")>
<cfoutput>
   #structkeyexists(url,"test")#
</cfoutput>


I thought it should be "YES", but in fact it is "NO." I'm sure I'm overlooking something - or else I'm stating something everyone already knows. I've posted to the CFCDev list - perhaps someone there can help me understand.

I'm using Macromedia's CFMX 6.1, for reference. I don't know how this behaves in 7. More...


Barry Beattie wrote recently on the CFCDev mailing list a question asking, "if it were Java/JSP, would you bother generating great sections of HTML within the java classes instead of leaving it to the JSP to take care of?"

It got me thinking again about my own use of HTML in CFCs.

At first, I thought it was a valid point - of course I would never consider using HTML in a Java class. But, the more I thought about it, the fuzzier the line got. As it turns out, I could go either way on the CFC/tag issue, depending on the specific case. More...


Well, I guess I lied when I said xorBlog wouldn't be developed until I had caught up on my writing. I still haven't gotten caught up, but this morning I couldn't stand it any more - I had to have a way to categorize posts. Now, I didn't TDD these, and I didn't even put them in the right place. True to the name of the blog, I interspersed code where it was needed. I feel absolutely dirty, but I just couldn't spare the time at the moment to do it right, and I could no longer endure not having any categories. So, I took about 15 minutes, coded up a rudimentary category system, violated DRY in 2 places, and put a few comments like "this needs to be refactored into a CFC" throughout the code (as it needed).

At least I have some categories now (its not as gratifying a feeling as I thought it would be, however). I plan on refactoring this as soon as I have a chance. I'll write about it as well - it might make for some more interesting reading in the TDDing xorBlog series of posts.


It appears that way, with Coldfusion 6.1. I stumbled across this today, so I thought I'd share what I observed.

In a nutshell, I've got a security object, which handles all the login related information and rules. Also, it is stored in the session. Of course, you wouldn't want to do that if you were planning on running on clustered servers, because of Coldfusion's cfc serialization session issue (at least in Macromedia/Adobe's variety). But, that is beside the point.

Basically, what happens is:
  1. If the security object is not defined, create it
  2. The security object creates a cookie which stores the userID (encrypted)
  3. later, I check the userID by calling a method on the security object
The cookie is set to expire when the user logs out, or when they close the browser.

So what happens?

In Firefox, when the browser is closed, both the session and the cookie are destroyed, so that when the user returns, everything happens again as I originally expected.

In Internet Explorer, however, when the browser is closed, only the cookie is destroyed. When the user returns before the session would normally time out, they get an error, because the security object still exists and expects the cookie to exist too.

I wonder where the real difference lies?


It may be that I'm still so new to Java that I don't know a good way around this, or it may be that I'm so used to the convenience of Coldfusion that I build tools in Java to help it act more like Coldfusion, but I was having some trouble with MVC in Java. I didn't see why something in my View layer should be importing anything from the package java.sql, such as ResultSet.

Moreover, I wanted to open and close my Connection to the database (and the Statement/PreparedStatement in the Model layer, and doing so would have prevented the ResultSet from being available to the View.

Enter QueryResult. QueryResult simply takes as a parameter a ResultSet and creates a HashMap where each key is a column name, and accessing it gives you an array of the rows' values for that column.

Thus you can get the fifth row of the column email by doing this:

QueryResult qr = new QueryResult(someResultSet);
String emailInRow4 = (String) qr.get("email")[4];

It's not the greatest thing in the world, but it works better than the alternative. I plan to put the code up here for it later, so maybe it could help someone else as well.


Now that we can insert posts, it is possible to update, select, delete, and search for them. To me, any one of these would be a valid place to go next. However, since I want to keep the database as unchanged as possible, I'll start with test_deletePost(). This way, as posts are inserted for testing, we can easily delete them.

Here is the code I wrote in xorblog/cfcs/tests/test_PostEntity:

<cffunction name="test_deletePost" access="public" returnType="void" output="false">
   <cfset var local = structNew()>   
   <cfset local.newID=_thePostEntity.insertPost(name="blah", meat="blah", originalDate="1/1/1900", author="yoda")>
   <cfset local.wasDeleted = _thePostEntity.deletePost(local.newID)>

   <cfset assertTrue(condition=local.wasDeleted, message="The post was not deleted.")>

   <cfquery name="local.post" datasource="#_datasource#">
      select id from post where id = <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_integer" value="#local.newID#">
   </cfquery>

   <cfset assertEquals(actual = local.post.recordcount, expected = 0)>
</cffunction>

And the corresponding code for deletePost():

<cffunction name="deletePost" output="false" returntype="boolean" access="public">
   <cfargument name="id" required="true" type="numeric">

   <cfset var local = structNew()>
   <cfset local.result = false>
   <cftry>
      <cfquery name="local.del" datasource="#_datasource#">
         delete from post where id = <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_integer" value="#id#">
      </cfquery>
      <cfset local.result=true>
   <cfcatch>
   
   </cfcatch>
   </cftry>
   <cfreturn local.result>
</cffunction>

Originally, I just left the test as asserting that local.wasDeleted was true. However, writing just enough of deletePost() in xorblog/cfcs/tests/PostEntity to get the test to pass resulted in the simple line <cfreturn true>. Since that would always pass, I also added a check that the inserted post no longer existed.

Now that we have some duplicate code, its definitely time to do some refactoring. More on that next time. (To be continued...)


We left off after writing the test for the insertPost() method. Now, we're going to make that test pass by writing the code for it. First you'll need to create PostEntity.cfc in the xorblog/cfcs/src directory, and make sure to surround it in the proper <cfcomponent> tags. What follows is that code:

<cffunction name="insertPost" output="false" returntype="numeric" access="public">
   <cfargument name="name" required="true" type="string">
   <cfargument name="meat" required="true" type="string">
   <cfargument name="originalDate" required="true" type="date">
   <cfargument name="author" required="true" type="string">
   
   <cfset var local = structNew()>
   <cftransaction>
   <cfquery name="local.ins" datasource="#variables._datasource#">
      insert into post
      (name, meat, originalDate, lastModifiedDate, author)
      values
      (<cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_varchar" value="#arguments.name#">,
       <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_longvarchar" value="#arguments.meat#">,
       <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_timestamp" value="#arguments.originalDate#">,
       <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_timestamp" value="#arguments.originalDate#">,
       <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_varchar" value="#arguments.author#">,
   </cfquery>

   <cfquery name="local.result" datasource="#_datasource#">
      select max(id) as newID from post
      where originalDate=<cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_timestamp" value="#arguments.originalDate#">
      and name=<cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_varchar" value="#arguments.name#">
   </cfquery>
   </cftransaction>
   <cfif local.result.recordcount is 0>
      <cfthrow message="The new post was not properly inserted.">
   </cfif>
   <cfreturn local.result.newID>
   </cffunction>

There isn't really anything special here, unless you are new to Coldfusion. If that's the case, you'll want to take note of the <cfqueryparam> tag - using it is considered a "best practice" by most (if not all) experienced Coldfusion developers.

The other item of note is that if you were to run this code by itself, it still wouldn't work, since we haven't defined variables._datasource. Many developers would do this in a function called init() that they call each time they create an object. I've done it as well.

I suppose if you were rigorously following the YAGNI principle, you might wait until creating the next method that would use that variable before defining it. I certainly like YAGNI, but my OCD is not so bad that I won't occasionally allow my ESP to tell me that I'm going to use something, even if I don't yet need it. With that said, I try only do it in the most obvious of cases, such as this one.

Now that we've written the code for insertPost(), its time to run the test again. Doing so, I see that I have two test that run green (this one, and our test_hookup() from earlier. We've gone red-green, so now it's time to refactor. Unfortunately, I don't see any places to do that yet, but I think they'll reveal themselves next time when we write our second test and second method in PostEntity. (To be continued...)


So we decided that blog software centers around posts and that for any other feature to be useful, we'd need them first. Therefore, we'll start with a model component for our posts, and we'll call it PostEntity. Before I create that file though, I'm going to go back into my test_PostEntity.cfc file and write a test or two for some functionality that PostEntity should provide.

Thinking of things we should be able to do regarding the storage of posts, it's easy to identify at least insert(), update(), and delete(). However, since you can't update or delete a post that doesn't exist, I figured I'd start with adding a post. I came up with the following test:

<cffunction name="test_insertPost" access="public" returntype="void" output="false">
      <cfset var local = structNew()>
      <cfset local.nameOfPost = "My Test Post" & left(createUUID(),8)>
      <cfset local.meatOfPost = "The meat of the post is that this is a test." & left(createUUID(),8)>
      <cfset local.dateOfPost = now()>
      <cfset local.author = "Sam #createUUID()#">

      <cfset local.newID=_thePostEntity.insertPost(name=local.nameOfPost, meat=local.meatOfPost, originalDate=local.dateOfPost, lastModifiedDate=local.dateOfPost, author=local.author)>

      <cfquery name="local.post" datasource="#variables._datasource#">
         select name, meat, originalDate, author
         from post
         where id = <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_integer" value="#local.newID#">
      </cfquery>

      <cfset assertEquals(actual=local.post.name, expected=local.nameOfPost)>
      <cfset assertEquals(actual=local.post.meat, expected=local.meatOfPost)>
      <cfset assertEquals(actual=local.post.author, expected=local.author)>

      <!--- dateCompare isn't working correctly, so we are testing each datepart --->      
      <cfset assertEquals(actual=month(local.post.originalDate), expected=month(local.dateOfPost))>
      <cfset assertEquals(actual=day(local.post.originalDate), expected=day(local.dateOfPost))>
      <cfset assertEquals(actual=year(local.post.originalDate), expected=year(local.dateOfPost))>
      <cfset assertEquals(actual=hour(local.post.originalDate), expected=hour(local.dateOfPost))>
      <cfset assertEquals(actual=minute(local.post.originalDate), expected=minute(local.dateOfPost))>
      <cfset assertEquals(actual=second(local.post.originalDate), expected=second(local.dateOfPost))>

      <!--- clean up --->
      <cfquery datasource="#_datasource#">
         delete from post where id = #local.newID#
      </cfquery>
   </cffunction>

You'll notice I used a UUID as part of the data. There's no real point to it, I suppose. I just wanted to have different data each time, and thought this would be a good way to achieve that.

You should also be uncomfortable about the comment saying dateCompare isn't working - I am anyway. It doesn't always fail, but occasionally it does, and for reasons I can't figure out, CFUnit isn't reporting why. For now, so I can move on, I'm assuming it is a bug in CFUnit. Since I can test each date part that is important to me individually and be sure the dates are the same if they all match, I don't feel too bad.

Another thing to note is the use of the var local. By default, any variables created are available everywhere, so to keep them local to a function, you need to use the var keyword. I like to just create a struct called local and put all the local variables in there - it just makes things easier.

Finally, some people might not like the length of that test. Right now, I don't either, but we'll see what we can do about that later. Others may also object to using more than one assertion per test. I don't mind it so much in this case since we really are only testing one thing. If you like, you could also create a struct out of each and write a UDF like structCompare() and do the assertion that way. I haven't tested this one personally, but there is one available at cflib. In either case, I don't see much difference, other than one way I have to write more code than I need.

Now I run the test file we created and find that, as expected, the test still fails. Besides the fact that we don't even have a PostEntity.cfc, we haven't yet instantiated an object of that type, nor have we defined _datasource and the like. Let's do that in the setUp() method.

<cffunction name="setUp" access="public" returntype="void" output="false">
   <cfset variables._datasource="xorblog">
   <cfset variables.pathToXorblog = "domains.xorblog">
   <cfset variables._thePostEntity = createObject("component", "#variables.pathToXorblog#cfcs.src.PostEntity").init(datasource=_datasource)>
</cffunction>

Now our tests still fail, because we have no code or database. So create the datasource and database with columns as needed:

id (int, primary key, autonumber)
name (nvarchar 50)
meat (ntext)
originalDate (datetime)
lastModifiedDate (datetime)
author (nvarchar 50)

Next time, we'll start coding and get our first green test. (To be continued...)


I know there is a general disdain for using CFCs to produce the view layer in applications, but I wanted to take the time to explain when I use it: in situations where several customers will be using the same application (hosted on the same server as well).

In my more inept days, long before CFCs were introduced, I just deployed different versions of the same application to the different directories that housed each client's specific version of the application. This was nice because it allowed customization, but of course it became a giant pain having to fix the same bugs in several different places. The same was true if there was an improvement which would benefit everyone.

Eventually, (still before CFCs) I had the idea to just keep a common code base and <cfinclude> the needed files in each client's own directory. I even built the application(s) such that they would <cfinclude> some custom code in spots that required customer-specific computations or outputs. As you might expect, it wasn't long before customers started asking for changes which couldn't be done in the "customer-specific" includes very easily. It became much easier just to write

<cfif customerID is theCustomerRequestingThisChange>
   ... do something ...
<cfelse>
   ... do something for everyone else ...
</cfif>

in the middle of the common code rather than do it correctly. Because of the problems with the different versions I mentioned above, I was very reluctant to "branch" clients into differing code bases - so the code became littered with <cfif>'s and got to be a nightmare to maintain.

Finally, along came CFCs. I could have a component and aggregate it into another or inherit from it in another, and only make the changes I needed to those methods which needed it for those clients who needed it. A silver bullet (almost) for all my problems! The werecode was killed!

But, everywhere I look I see everyone telling me not to use HTML in CFCs! So what do you do in the situation where one client's form has to differ slightly from the common code? For instance, you might have a form that has a name section, a contact information section, an address section (or two), and perhaps more. Suppose one client wants to track some other information specific to them, and they want it placed just below the name section and just above the contact information. Do you rewrite the form for that client? While you would be following "best practices," this can lead to similar situations as described above.

I've been placing the common code in CFCs - and with great results. Each section of the form can be its own function, to be called in a main displayForm() function. Then, if a client needs a new section, I simply have to rewrite displayForm() and write the new part of the form. If they need to change the order of some fields within a section, I only have to rewrite that section. Its really helped me cut down on duplicate code and helped me follow the DRY principle.

What do you do in similar situations?


Since I wanted to start this blog, I thought it would be good practice to write the software that runs it using test-driven development. I've used a bit of TDD recently for additions to existing applications, but I've not yet started writing an application using it from beginning to end. I'm getting sick of eating Italian microwaveable dinners when I have to maintain code. This is my chance to eat something else. So, without further ado, we'll jump right in.

The first thing I did of course, was to create my directory structure. For the time being, we have:

xorblog/cfcs/src

and

xorblog/cfcs/tests

I like to keep the tests separate from the source. I don't have a reason behind it, other than it helps keep me a bit organized.

Next, I thought about what a blog needs. We want to deliver items that have the highest business value first, and move on to things that are lower on the value scale later. In doing this, we get a working application sooner rather than later, and hence the blog can be used at the earliest possible moment in its development.

With that in mind, we probably shouldn't start with things like Comments or functionality that lets us get included in places like Technorati. Since you need content to make anything else useful, I thought I'd start with that. Indeed, the Post is the core part of a blog. Therefore, the first thing I did was create test_PostEntity.cfc under xorblog/cfcs/tests.

Now, I'm using CFUnit for my tests, and this assumes you already have it set up. If you need help on that, you can visit CFUnit on SourceForge.

The first thing I do in test_PostEntity.cfc is write test_hookup(), to make sure everything is working:

<cfcomponent extends="net.sourceforge.cfunit.framework.TestCase" output="false" name="test_PostEntity">
   <cffunction name="test_hookup" access="public" returntype="void" output="false">
      <cfset assertEquals(expected=4, actual=2+2)>
   </cffunction>
</cfcomponent>

Next, we need a way to see the status of and run our tests. For this we have test_runner.cfm, which for the most part just copies what you'll find at the CFUnit site linked above:

<cfset testClasses = ArrayNew(1)>
<cfset ArrayAppend(testClasses, "domains.xorblog.cfcs.tests.test_PostEntity")>
<!--- Add as many test classes as you would like to the array --->
<cfset suite = CreateObject("component", "globalcomponents.net.sourceforge.cfunit.framework.TestSuite").init( testClasses )>
<cfoutput>
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
   <title>Unit Tests for xorBlog</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>xorBlog Unit Tests</h1>
<cfscript>
   createobject("component", "globalcomponents.net.sourceforge.cfunit.framework.TestRunner").run(suite,'');
</cfscript>
</body>
</html>
</cfoutput>


Finally, we run that page in a browser to make sure the test runs green - and it does. Now that we have our test environment set up, we can start writing tests for our PostEntity that doesn't yet exist. (To be continued...)


I'm either an idiot, or a moron. But, I have courage and that's what matters. Let me explain:

Ever since I started messing with inheritance with CFCs in Coldfusion, I have lamented the "fact" they didn't have a way to override a parent's method while retaining the functionality via a call to super.methodInQuestion(). I got so sick of it, in fact, I came up with this brilliant way to re-use code and not repeat myself - I'd have component Parent with methods foo(arg1, arg2) and theRealFoo(arg1, arg2) where foo() simply called theRealFoo() with the arguments it had been passed. Following me so far?

Then in component Child, when I needed to slightly modify the behavior of foo() and still use its code, I could simply do so by calling theRealFoo() within my Child version of the method. Sweet!

Of course I had tried using super, but I kept getting this strange error:

Error Occurred While Processing Request

Cannot invoke method method1 on an object of type coldfusion.runtime.Struct with named arguments.

Use ordered arguments instead.


What? I wasn't trying to invoke a method on a struct, was I? I thought this was just one of those random CF errors that get thrown which seem to have nothing to do with the problem, especially since it was right there in big bold letters. I never read the fine print.

Well, since then I had read that it did exist, and I tried again - but got the same error. I came to the conclusion that it became part of the language in version 7.0, since I don't yet have it. And lately I've been reading and writing with the Gurus on the CFCDev mailing list, and I finally decided to ask: Am I a moron or is there no super in CF6.1? Well, as it turns out, I am a moron. I should have read the fine print.



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