CFInternals

ColdFusion Job Trends

Reader Soja just posted two interesting links in response to the ColdFusion relevancy article that show ColdFusion job and search trends in relationship to PHP, Ruby, .NET, and JSP.

ColdFusion CFCs vs. Custom Tags: Examples...

The "doing-it-in-a-CFC" debate has been continuing over on Ray's blog, with several people coming down on the side of custom tags and tagset lbraries.

Can a CFC contain HTML?

A comon question asked is whether or not ColdFusion components should contain HTML, with the conventional wisdom being a firm "NO". Well, hold on, because I'm going to tell you why they should, and why your objects should do the same.

Scalability, Application Servers, and Business Objects

On Friday we discussed how some of Twitter's problems might be solved by adding application servers to the mix, something that can easily be done in ColdFusion as well. I also mentioned how you can save yourself a lot of time and aggravation later by being smart about your application design up front. Here's how.

Scalability: The Server Solution

Yesterday we discussed the scalability issues Twitter is having, and how the same design constraints can impact ColdFusion sites. Today seems like a good time to touch on one little-mentioned way of solving the problem.

Twitter, Ruby, and Scalability

If you haven't paid attention to other platforms, you may have missed the flack over the popular web site Twitter, which is having issues scaling up to meet the demand. Twitter is implemented with Ruby and Ruby-on-Rails, and suffers from a serious design issue that can also bottleneck ColdFusion projects, especially those developed using similar framework systems like Reactor and Model-Glue.

ColdFusion vs. Open-Source: Philosophy

The previous article which asked "Is ColdFusion still relevant" generated some interesting replies and emails, including a thoughtful and well-reasoned comment by Adrock from Adobe's ColdFusion team regarding its future.

One part stands out, in which he says, "Personally, I'm seeing new ColdFusion developers/customers coming from two new places. Companies moving towards Flex/Apollo choose ColdFusion as the logical middle-ware and enterprise Java shops who are just now coming to terms that enterprise Java development isn't the best fit for departmental smaller applications."

This, to me, says that ColdFusion growth is being driven in more of a "top-down" fashion, dictated by management's decisions and choices, as opposed to the "bottom-up" grass-roots popularity more commonly associated with the open-source movement.

Is ColdFusion still relevant?

Over at Forta's site Ben discusses an article Andrew Binstock at InfoWorld has written on dynamic languages ... and which totally fails to mention our favorite language of choice.

Is it just an oversight? Or a warning of things to come?

Sometimes, making an assumption is a good thing... redux.

This is a repost of the Sometimes, making an assumption is a good thing... article, where I talk about the "Assumed Existence" pattern and its place in multi-threaded systems.

Turns out that FeedBurner doesn't like displaying code in the summary. Who knew?

Sometimes, making an assumption is a good thing...

How often have you seen (or written) code like the following:

<cffunction name="getProductInfo" returntype="struct">
  <cfargument name="sku" type="string">
  <cfif not structKeyExists(application.products,arguments.sku)>
    <cfset application.products[arguments.sku] =
      this.loadProductInfo(arguments.sku)>
  </cfif>
  <cfreturn application.products[arguments.sku]>
</cffunction>

Typical "if it doesn't exist make one" test, right? Now, how many people know that under the right circumstances, this function can blow up with an error?