Everything is dead these days

Sounds morbid, but, really, in last few weeks everything died :)

As a ColdFusion developer most noticeable to me was spree of articles & blogs which tried to explain how CF is dead (or is about to die). But that's something I used to. Each time new CF Server comes out, "CF-is-dead wave" hit the coast. What really surprised me was that everything else died.

Few days ago, I read an "old" (for some reason it became popular again) article how UML died and 13 reasons why is so. According to author, this technology is already dead. After reading it, my only question was: What is an alternative? Read a blog, read dozens of comments and no one suggested what can be an alternative to this.

ColdFusion Regular Expression Optimization

Last night I bumped on article talking about regular expression performance tuning. After reading it and since we extensivly use regex to parse article & community content, I decided to see can we do something to bit boost performance on that side. So, here we go.

Startup facts and implications:

a) „ColdFusion is built on top of Java. ColdFusion data types (String, Query, Struct, Array, etc.) are really just custom Java classes that are built on top of things like strings, record sets, hash tables, collections, etc. „
=>
We can use java.lang.String methods on ColdFusion strings. This is more a fact then something we are going to use and you’ll see later why ;)

ColdFusion on Rails

First of all I am not talking here about porting CF in Rails framework, but porting of ideas.

After I heard for millionth time "Ruby on Rails is cool", I've decided to try it myself. Well, that was 6+ months ago: read Ruby language tutorial, few tuts on Rails framework, and that's where I stopped. Don't get me wrong, it is not because I didn't like it, but because of lack of time. Anyway, I think I got point, and point where I sincerely agree: "freedom yes, but not too much" or "too much freedom can kill you".
How is this related with ColdFusion.
Plus/minus some time since I start learning RoR, I also heard (at that time rumor) that Adobe plans to integrate Hibernate in new version of CF Server (code name Centaur).
I'll stop here (for now) and conclude: CF needs to make a choice on MVC framework and CF on Rails is there.

to be continued...

CF Wheels, framework inspired by Ruby on Rails, hit its first final version.

Pingback

Wikipedia:

A Pingback is one of three types of Linkbacks, methods for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to their articles.

Pingback is an XML-RPC request sent from Site A to Site B. This functionality usually comes as part of blogging softwares since it's most commonly used there. Almost all open source blogging applications are written in PHP and only a few in CF and none of them have support for pingback. Therefore I decided to write an CF implementation by myself.

Download source code

pingback.cfc - Pingback implementation
tools.cfc - Various tools used by pingback.cfc
xmlrpc.cfc - Translates XML-RPC packets to and from CFML data structures
xmlrpc.cfm - XML-RPC Server
test.cfm - Test template. Start from this file.

Successfully tested on Railo 3.1 and ColdFusion 8 Enterprise Server.
Should not be a problem to integrate it into blogCFC.

Pingback specification:
http://www.hixie.ch/specs/pingback/pingback

Eclipse: Working Sets

Very neat feature of Eclipse. It is going to help you to locate files. Why would you watch and browse through jungle of files, if you can isolate only part of code (files) that are of your interest? Interested, then Read It!