Just a quick note to say that there has been a few additions to my Ultimate ColdFusion Tools List as submitted by Richard Rein. The additions are all in the frameworks area, namely: MXUnit, Model-Glue, Mach-ii, Transfer, Reactor, Coldspring, Coldbox and Fusebox. See the list for links and more information.
As always, if anyone can think of anything else, please let me know and I’ll add it.
Today I rolled out my new blog skin for neilmiddleton.com. I did change it a few weeks ago but I was finding quite hard to read and quite crowded. For me, what I have now has a little more thought behind it, and it is more intuitive.
But, when I was working on this I had a thought. How many of you out there actually care that I even have a blog style? I would have thought that on the modern semantic web most of you will be reading this in various feed readers, or aggregators like feed-squirrel.com, therefore, to you I am merely a paragraph of text.
Some people spend ages working on their blog designs, working it up from a clean sheet of paper to a implemented design and for me this makes sense coming from a design background. However, if you are like me, you download and tweak one of the many designs already out there.
But, and here’s the question, does anyone really care?
I was talking to a friend of mine today about their shiny new MacBook Pro and was suprised to see that they didn’t use Quicksilver, the application launcher widget for OSX, which was something that I thought everyone knew about.
Well, it turns out they didn’t so I thought I would blog about it.
To save me repeating what is already out there, here’s the wikipedia page about quicksilver which is way more useful than anything I can say. All I can suggest is that if you don’t have it, install it and get into the habit of using it. If, on the other hand, you don’t have a Mac, go out and get one then install it.
You’ll love it.
Yup, thats me.. Mr Server-side with a whole lack of Rich Internet goodness in my head.
If you’re anything like me you’re a CF (or server side) developer who’s kinda intrigued by the whole RIA movement that’s occuring. You’ve probably also dabbled in Flex, DHTML, Silverlight etc and not really got anywhere.
Well, I’ve been thinking about this problem and have decided to make a concerted effort to get better at producing RIAs whilst sharing the knowledge with everyone as I go along. What I plan to do, is work my way through some material (suggestions welcome) that will take me through a subject (Flex will be first - then probably AIR). From here, and at regular intervals I will write up in this blog what I have learnt in a way that I (and you, oh server-side developers) can relate to. I help you via the articles, and hopefully, you lot can help me via comments.
Hopefully by the end of it, I’ll end up knowing how to use the tools, as will you, and we’ll also up with a repository of tutorial style items aimed at server-side developers.
Before I start though, does anyone have anything in particular that they would like to see taken into consideration? Anything that they particularly want me to cover?
How many of you out there use a Mac? How many use a PC? How many of you are aware of a text editor called Textmate (Mac) or e (Windows)?
From Wikipedia: “TextMate is a general-purpose GUI text editor for Mac OS X, created by Allan Odgaard. It provides users with innovative abstractions to support declarative customizations which are at once transparent and flexible.
Though its users are mostly programmers and its basic feature set may require more learning than simpler graphical editors, TextMate is much easier to customize than many other text editors. Notable features include tabs, recordable macros, folding sections and snippets, shell integration, and an extensible bundle system, all built around its novel scope system.”
So, why is this relevant? Well, for the last couple of weeks I have been working on CFTextmate - a Coldfusion bundle for textmate.
The long term goal of the CFTextmate project is to create a bundle for textmate and e (therefore covering both windows and Mac) providing support for both CFMX and Bluedragon. Additional features over time may well include Framework support, CFQuickdocs support, as well as a stack of common tasks familiar to CFML programmers.
Currently there are no milestone releases, but the bleeding edge version in svn is nearly CF8 complete, as well as containing a load of cool tweaks. Once this stage is complete a full v1 release will be announced.
So, if you have a textmate or e license, download the bundle and try it out. There’s an issue tracker on riaforge, as well as the discussion group on google groups. As always, any feedback/ideas are gratefully received.
Well, the Ultimate Coldfusion Tools List is now underway. I’ve got a few entries on there already and I’ve been spending a little time bulking it out. So, why am I blogging about it? Well, I see this as a very collaborative list, I’d like to know what you all use, and I could also do with some help describing the tools.
So please, take a look, and, as always, all contributions gratefully received.
If like me, you are a CFML developer and looking to pick up additional skills (namely .NET) you might be interested to know that there are three webcasts on Microsoft.com that you can watch explicitly targetted at yourselves.
Personally, I have only had time to watch a couple, but if you would like a quick primer in ASP.NET and how it directly relates to CFML, check them out. Even if you have no interest in .NET, it’s always good to be aware. If you are Bluedragon.NET user, then these are definitely worth a look.
I love things like this - they help me with my target of learning a new language every year.
A couple of people have asked me what feeds I read on a daily basis, seeing as I am constantly monitoring 1,200 feeds floating past on feed-squirrel.
Well, that’s easy to answer because Google Reader (my RSS reader of choice) allows OPML export.
So, here’s mine. Let’s see yours….
Last week, Ben Forta posted up some figures from the Adobe testing of CF8 running various tags over and over too see what sort of numbers came out the other end. The result? In Forta’s eyes, CF8 is “fast, really fast”.
Not being one to just take this, I decided to do my own testing. Admittedly not the same sort of testing, but consistent across the three platforms I decided to test: Coldfusion 7.02, Coldfusion 8 (current Beta), and Bluedragon 7.0 .NET. All these tests were carried out on Windows Vista and IIS7 on my laptop (hardware etc all exactly the same for each test). All tests were run several times, and an average taken. Below is the various snippets of code I ran, and how long each system was taking:
<cfloop from="1" to="10000" index="i">
<cfset foo = createObject("component","foo")>
</cfloop>
CF7: 14000ms CF8: 2100ms BD.NET: 950ms
<cfloop from="1" to="10000" index="i"> <cfparam name="myName" default="dave"> </cfloop>
CF7: 31ms CF8:16ms BD:NET:135ms
<cfloop from="1" to="1000000" index="i"> <cfset foo = "poo"> </cfloop>
CF7: 47ms CF8: 31ms BD:NET:1755ms
<cfloop from="1" to="100000" index="i"> <cfset foo = arrayNew(1)> <cfset arrayAppend(foo, "This is an item")> </cfloop>
CF7: 350ms CF8: 1500ms BD:NET: 500ms
<cfloop from="1" to="100000" index="i"> <cfset foo = structNew()> <cfset foo.poo = "1"> </cfloop>
CF7: 500ms CF8: 1266ms BD:NET: 800ms
<cfscript>
for (i=1;i lte 100000;i=i+1)
{
foo = structNew();
foo.poo = "1";
}
</cfscript>
CF7: 157ms CF8: 78ms BD:NET: 851ms
Now, you must realise that these are not a good way of testing how an application will run on any given server platform, but it does give you an insight into how they directly compare at a very simple level. You should always test the performance of your own application on each to see how they fly (In theory you can do this for free using the 30 day trials CFMX and development/testing licence of BD.NET which happens to be free (Hear that Adobe??)
After running through these tests, CF8 does appear to be the fastest overall, but is still hampered where it counts (for me, Array and Structure manipulation need to be as fast as possible). BD.NET seems to be lagging somewhat behind (although I get the feeling that real world apps might run faster on this platform).
Anyone else have any findings?
I was taking a look through the logs for Feed-Squirrel today and noticed something new. Back when the site was launched early last year, the CF category was by far and away the most popular category on the site.
Now it seems Flex has taken this mantle, and even Flash has moved up into second position. So, considering the buzz around CF8, it would appear CF interest is now lower than that of the Flash Platform (admittedly with help from Apollo, Flex 3 and Flash CS3 news).
