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Why Coldfusion / CFML has its place and is worth to learn it

By on February 4, 2012 in CFML, Development, open source

I actually never indulge in conversations why one programming language is better then another, because what is right to you, does not automatically mean, it is right for someone else. So, for me ColdFusion, or as we call the language itself – CFML, works very well.

Nevertheless, in this post I like to clear up some confusion that has been around. I can see where the confusion comes from as Coldfusion has gone from Allaire to Macromedia and is now “in the hands” of Adobe.

In any case, here are some reasons why CFML is still worth for you to learn.

  • CFML is open source and yes you can use it for free. I guess, many people are put off by the fact that Coldfusion has had a big price tag on it in the past. True, given the nature of PHP, Java, Phyton, Ruby, etc. being free, there was actually no reason to shell out your hard earned buck for some application server and on top of it even learn the language. Thanks to the short sighted business decisions of Macromedia and now Adobe or shall we say with the greedy money making mentality of its management, Coldfusion has been faced with a drainage of developers.
    Fortunately, this has all changed with the advent of OpenBD – the first real open source CFML server, followed shortly by Railo, another popular open source CFML server. In other words, to learn CFML and to deploy your applications, is now free and free to be.
  • Write less code. Compared to PHP, Java, C++, even Ruby and Python – CFML allows you to write the same program with much much fewer lines of code. Why would you want spend your precious time writing more code when you can do it for less? As a matter of fact, you can write your application in CFML so efficiently, that the same application written by you alone would probably need a team with Java, Ruby, etc. This is a proven fact.
  • Well designed. The CFML language is well designed and many required functions already exists for you to use. There is no need to write a wrapper for a email sending function. I mean, you don’t even need a framework, to achieve a simple tag like “<cfmail…>”. There is no obnoxious, framework to learn or write functions for this. Compare this to Java, PHP, Ruby, etc. you are very well off with CFML. (again all without a framework)
  • Build web applications fast. Due to the nature of writing less code with CFML and with the built in function, you will be writing your next web application in weeks, instead of months. On top of that, you will have a full scalable enterprise model on your hand to scale when your startup takes off. Heard about the stories of PHP web apps, that had to be converted to xyz language just to scope with the traffic. Again, if you would deploy your web application with CFML and OpenBD, you can deploy on any Java application server (Tomcat, JBoss, Websphere, etc.), connect to any database (MongoDB, H2, Oracle, MySQL, MS SQL, DB2, you name it…) and have your cluster, load balancing, caching setup done.

If you are in for writing less code and building your next web application the fast way, then I simply urge you to give CFML a try. I’m certain that you will get your project done in half the time then in another language. There is simply nothing to loose for you!

 

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Simply awesome: How great software is being done

By on January 31, 2012 in Development, efficiency, entrepreneur, Internet Zeitgeist

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How to wait until a file is downloaded or why cfthread is a bad idea within a cfloop

By on September 13, 2011 in CFML, Development

I just run into an issue where one of our servers was totally bogged down when users started to download 100 or more files. See, the problem is that we had to check that each file was downloaded successfully before processing with the rest of the code. In other words;

1) Query for files that need to be downloaded
2) Loop over the records
3) Within loop download the file
4) check if file has been downloaded successfully
5) continue with the code.

In Coldfusion (or CFML to be general) your code would look like:

<cfloop query…>
<cfthread…>
<cfhttp…>
<cfthread action=”join”…>

As I mentioned above, we need to check if the file has been downloaded successfully before continuing with the next download. That’s why  there is a cfthread in this code.  Now, while this might be a good idea with small download, it has a hazardous effect if you will trigger 1000 downloads, which again would create 1000 threads!!!

So, there are actually 2 things I’ve learned from this:

  1. There is no need for the cfthread. Since cfhttp will halt the code process until the file has been downloaded, creating the thread is not needed.
  2. Creating a thread within the iteration of your resultset (cfloop) is a VERY  bad idea!

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svn: warning: cannot set LC_CTYPE locale

By on July 17, 2011 in Development, linux, open source

Somehow with the recent Ubuntu 10.04 LTS updates or maybe with a subversion update, I received some errors message of the type “locale…”. To be more precise the errors are;

svn: warning: cannot set LC_CTYPE locale
svn: warning: environment variable LC_CTYPE is UTF-8
svn: warning: please check that your locale name is correct

While all SVN commands still worked, it was something I didn’t tackle with immediately. But today, I set out to fix it. Well, it only took a minute or so :)

So, if you want to fix this all you have to do is to set the “LC_ALL” variable manually. To make it permanent just edit the file “/etc/environment” and add the line:

LC_ALL=C

Save the file and exit the editor. In order for it to apply you have to logout of the current shell session. The next time you log in, the issue with SVN will be gone.

 

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