Muse Reviews - Key Note, Day One at Cfobjective
Rakshith Naresh and Hemant Khandelwal from Adobe did an outstanding job at the keynote. They are not the most compelling speakers but like a lot of engineers their eyes light up when they engage on the topic of their favorite technology (in this case ColdFusion 10). I was impressed by the litany of efforts and initiatives they have underway - and the general direction of the platform. Key notes (some of this old news):
- Extensive HTML 5 support (video, sockets, canvas, charts)
- Major security enhancements
- Better update and upgrade paths with automatic install and rollback from within the admin.
- More thought and effort toward expanding the number of developers through extending Java skills as well as supporting the community through events like CF Objective.
The big news or announcement was that ColdFusion 10 will be available on the AWS cloud as an AMI in the near future in both medium and large instances with a price point of 60-80 dollars per month. The Muse thinks this will make a VPS deployment within reach of some folks who currently suffer through shared CF hosting nightmares.
Cfobjective - the Social
Cf.Ojective - the Social
Last night was the reception for Cfobjective. I met some old friends as well as some fantastic new folks. CF Webtools standouts Ed Bartram, Jason Durham and Denny Springle were all there schmoozing with the geek crowd. Dan Skaggs spoke with me about an interesting new product that I'll have to keep an eye on. I met a fellow named Steve who was originally from Ireland but his brogue was slightly disappointing (come on Steve - don't assimilate!). I spent some time With Jordan and Mike the guys from the outstanding Vivio Tech (check them out if you don't already know who they are - they have a booth). I caught up with Dan Vega. I met Steve Withington (again) and finally ended up the night hob-knobbing with Charlie Arehart, Scott Strutz (or Nathan Strozz... something with a single syllable "st" sound) and (a new frend) Darren Pywell who brought us Fusion Reactor.
Like most geek crowds we are a largely male audience, but this year's conference features a lot more women than I remember. Actually that could be my imagination but it's helped along by the fact that virtually all of them sat at the same table. That's one single table (if that gives the rest of you an idea of volume). The rest of the room gave them about 10 foot of padding and I saw many a male developer circling carefully. The Muse - who's lack of inhibition is exceeded only by a lack of modesty (and who's old enough to have fathered most of the folks here)- sauntered up and chatted with them for a while. By the time I left the reception they had at least one non-estrogen dominant member (I'm going on looks here) so perhaps they were making progress... or perhaps he was an unwelcome intruder (ticks are bad in MN). I couldn't tell.
In any case it's shaping up to be a fantastic conference and CF 10 is all the buzz. I'll be checking in throughout the day so keep an eye out for new tidbits. Remember, I'm wandering around in a Red shirt trying my best to be gregarious. Make sure and say hello!
Muse Abroad - the Ugly ColdFusian
Muse readers - next week I'll be in Minneapolis MN at the Cf.objective conference. I'll be waxing eloquent in the ad hoc room (TBD) about 2 topics near to my heard. The first is web sockets and the second is consulting. It seems like that's something these conferences could do well to address as the employment landscape changes. Indeed if you are a consultant, freelancer, company owner or whatever and you want Muse tips on getting paid, landing contracts, selling yourself and your technologies, saving troubled customers, getting beyond your skill set, hiring your first and tenth employee etc. - come to that one for a lively discussion. If you are a corporate lackey you can come too, but we may look at you suspiciously out of the corner of one eye.
I also have a new plan for cfobjective this year. Since I actually don't do a lot of hard core programming any more I'm not going to dig into a specific topic and try to gain a lion's share of expertise. Instead my plan is to:
- Flit from room to rom and booth to booth and pick up as much general knowledge and witty banter as I can.
- Tweet copiously from the conference about everything and anything of interest to me. My twitter handle is @cfwebtools and the hash tag for cf.objective is #cfobjective.
- Blog a few times per day. Naturally these will not be my typical wordy tomes of dubious length. Instead I plan on a few paragraphs highlighting various workshops or interesting thoughts or even people I've met who are blog-worthy.
If you are going to be at CF Objective and would like to chat about consulting, working for CFWT, the next big thing, why CF is dead (again - Lord Beric eat your heart out), or anything else I'd be thrilled to meet you and hear about your latest project or pet mice or see your knitting or whatever. I'll make it a point to wear a RED SHIRT every day. I'm 6', a little pudgy, balding, with lovely blue eyes (says my wife), a little too verbal and over-confident, and I'll be hanging around everywhere like a ubiquitous traveling salesman. So don't be shy - if you see me give a shout! Let's have a drink, pants Ray, make fun of Mark Drew's accent or at least put soap in the hotel fountain or something. Don't leave me hanging.
Datasource Attribute in Application.cfc
You may know about the "datasource" property in ColdFusion 9. It allows you to create a variable in your Application.cfc file called "datasource" and then skip the "datasource" attribute of your query tags. That's pretty neato. Here's how it works. In the Application.cfc properties...
<cfscript>
this.name = 'mort';
this.sessionmanagement = true;
this.datasource = 'myDsn';
</cfscript>
....
<cffunction name="getAllUsers">
<cfset var 'myQry = ''/>
<cfquery name="myQry">
SELECT username, email
FROM users
</cfquery>
<cfreturn myQry/>
</cffunction>
A Minor Detail
There is one issue that I was made aware of with this approach. Super genius guru Phillip Senn had a head scratching problem where he would set this variable in Application.cfc. Periodically he began getting and error which said:
So if you are using this Application based this.datasource approach and you get some random errors where the variable seems undefined - or seems defined as a blank string - start looking for vars that are not properly scoped within your components. It may just fix you right up.
Able Commerce 5 on CF - Email Problem
A while back a product called "Able Commerce Builder" (ACB) was a popular (or pseudo popular) platform for CF folks. This would have been as far back as 1999. At some point they hired one of those developers who believe his technology choices are up there with the Scripture and the Holy Grail – but "he chose poorly".
He rewrote the entire application in Java with a ColdFusion facade. He moved everything into objects and the code became a byzantine maze of object instantiation and java arrays and objects and looping. Of course none of ColdFusion's strengths were on display (easy to read code, modifiable queries, list handling, looping and outputing, query objects etc. Thankfully ACB moved on to .NET and left CF behind - and good riddance! They were giving it a bad name. I trust their new platform was written by actual .NET developers - let's hope anyway. I wish them well.
Over the past couple of days ACB on CF has risen its ugly head again. I've been trying (with the help of super Tech Kevin Fatkin at Edge Web) to fix an issue with an ACB server. After an upgrade of the JVM and some hotfixes on a CF server running ACB, the customer discovered email had suddenly stopped going out. The fix for that is simple right? Check out the cfmail tags, double-check resolution, run a few telnets etc. Install a cert etc. Ah... if it were only that easy. In fact ACB under the hood (in keeping with its face melting decision making) reinvented the wheel and deployed its own Java based mail classes. Something changed, email is not going out, and we can't modify it the code in any real way. It's enough to make me want to have my leg chewed off by a Laplander. Fortunately if you have this problem we actually did find a solution.
Read MoreA Whole Heaping Helping of Normal
When I'm called into a data center or large application to look at a ColdFusion performance problem I often find myself in a "war room" with highly skilled technicians and admins who may or may not know much about the JVM runtime. One of the things that require experience is knowing what normal memory patterns look like for a typical production heap. Windows admins will often go directly to the task manager or resource monitor to examine memory usage. If they are uninitiated the first thing they say is "Wow... Jrun is using a lot of memory." This often doesn't sit right to them, particularly if the site is idle. So this post is to help those windows folks (and Linux as well) to an understanding of what normal heap activity looks like.
Read MoreDB Indexing Matters: Using the "Database Engine Tuning Advisor - MSSQL 2008
Here's a Muse mantra you can hang your hat on (and your overalls and duck suite as well). Application performance starts at the database. Sure JVM tuning is important. So is networking, processor power, memory, file i/o and keeping cousin Eustace from pressing the red button on the front of the server. It's all important and it all has a place. But as someone who does an interminable amount of application tuning I can tell you that after setting an appropriate heap size 8 out of 10 performance issues are DB related. And 8 out of 10 DB performance problems are related to indexing. So the first thing a Muse troubleshooter does is check for appropriate indexing.
This is often a matter of pouring over the longest page requests or queries and making educated attempts at new indexes (or removing and changing old ones). But more often than not it's simply a matter of informing the client there is no indexing and some will need to be added. This begs the question, why don't developers think about indexing when they create table schemas? Surely they can't all have come from enormous shops with in-house DBA's (who are just as likely to forget indexing in my experience). In this post I'm going to share a helpful tip for those of you lucky enough to be using MS SQL Server. The specifics below are for MSSQL server 2005 or 2008, but there is a version of this tool in the MSSQL 2000 profiler as well.
Read MoreYou Might be a Muse All-Star
About twice a week I have a developer send me an email chatting about their current job and wondering if they should send me a resume. The answer is always yes! Send me a resume! I mean... what could it hurt? Generally I will walk you through our CF Testing procedure and "pre-qualify" you to work on the CF Webtools (CFWT) team. Then if I have openings you might get an offer, but even if I do not have openings I can guarantee that sooner rather than later I will have openings. With 27 developers you can bet we will be looking for new CF Talent - and other talent as well. In fact, let's play "...you might be a Muse all-star".
- If you think pouring through the latest CF 10 docs looking for "hidden gems" is the equivalent of a day at the Louvre... you might be a Muse all-star.
- If you have turned down a night out so you could sit at home and migrate a fusebox app to FW/1... you might be a Muse all-star.
- If you have traveled more than 50 miles to attend a meeting just because Ray Camden, Sam Farmer, Ben Forta, Ben Nadel or Sean Corefield was presenting ... you might be a Muse all-star (extra points if it was actually a webcast).
- If you have made more than 2 useful comments on this blog... you might be a Muse all-star.
- If you have a technical blog that I've ever linked to... you might be a Muse all-star.
- If you have ever refactored an entire CFC service layer "just so you could see what it looked like in pure cfscript"... you might be a Muse all-star.
- If you love frameworks but are not married to any one of them... you might be a Muse all-star.
- If you like ribbing windows experts (or mac experts or Linux experts) but can still be friends with them... you might be a Muse all-star. (If not move back home you still need your mother)
- If your skill set is eclectic enough to include high level skills in at least 3 IT areas including ColdFusion... you might be a Muse all-star.
- If you think "exercising your right to vote" has something to do with the CF 10 bug list... you might be a Muse all-star.
- If your mouth waters just a little when you hear about a programming problem that someone couldn't solve... you might be a Muse all-star.
- If you like other developers, other people, communities both real and virtual and hob knobbing with folks who are experts at something other than IT... you might be a Muse all-star.
- If you are ready for a change that includes well supported SDLC infrastructure, full time remote development (live where you want to), great flexibility, benefits, and a terrific community of developers... you might be a Muse all-star.
As of right now the Muse is looking for ColdFusion developers and IOS/Android developers. We are giving special consideration to any developer with a high level skill set in ColdFusion and either .NET or PHP (not dabblers - you have to be good at both). Our sales projections show us growing to add at least 4-6 developers by the end of this fiscal quarter. So if you are in the market to make a change, or if you are a contractor who loves working from home but is tired of having to gin up your own work, do please send me your resume. You can send it to jobs@cfwebtools.com or send it to mkruger - or tweet me at @cfwebtools and let me know you want to explore the possibilities.
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