I was on the way to work this morning at Bank station and on the wall opposite the platform was a moving advert. Initially I thought it was a screen embedded into the wall. On closer inspection I realised it was being projected from across the platform. It stopped being displayed when my tube arrived. A bit of digging turned up this from CBS. No doubt in the future it will be able to display downloaded content perhaps live, although my understanding is that there are some infrastructure issues to be resolved before this can be possible. Wireless isn't available on the Underground for one, and I don't see Transport for London allowing a third party to utilise whatever infrastructure they already have in place to achieve this.

[update] I found a video on YouTube... 

 

 

On windows one useful way to boot someone off of a windows server who has logged in via remote desktop (but hasn't yet logged off correctly) is to start the remote desktop client from the command line with the console switch :

-> start ->run mstsc /console

I've been looking for a way to do this for ages with the remote desktop connection client for mac. The latest version allows you to now do this by entering the IP address followed by /console.

 

UPDATE: In a race to find out who could find out how to do this on Linux - my colleague Mike discovered that if you click on the performance tab - there is an option to 'attach to client'  :)

Bit late picking up on this but Ted Neward has written an article on the myths of running apps on multi-core systems. While he makes some good points, I think it falls slightly short in addressing some of the issues raised. This is quite pertinent for me as I work in a place where we seem to be buying up quad core billion processor machines with little regard to how well the applications being deployed will make use of multi-core CPUs. I think developing for multi-core machines in future is going to require much more thought and this could be one reason why people are looking at languages such as Erlang. The days of "we'll just throw more hardware at it" are at an end, while I am a firm believer in avoiding premature optimisation - I also think performance is an important architectural concern.

This paper on Highscalability.com takes a look at the architecture behind wikimedia.com the platform for Wikipedia.com and a number of other sites.

CFrameworks.com are giving away a free copy of CF8! Come along to the CFrameworks meeting next Thursday if you're in or around London, for some drinks and the chance to win a copy of CF8 at the Abacus bar .

 

Next Thursday the British Computer Society have organised a talk on modern technology choices. There will be talks from people (not vendors) representing the Java, .Net, Ruby and Flex camps from the respective user groups (I wasn't even aware there was a London Flex usergroup). This is a free event and should be an interesting look over the fence at the various communities surrounding the various technologies.

I was partly prompted to write this on the back of Brian's recent blog post on gateways. I've been meaning to talk about this for a while now as it has sort of bugged me. Far too often when people I meet mention OO in ColdFusion - the very next thing they mention is DAOs, Gateways and Beans as if thats all there is to it. In fact its almost expected that if you are writing an OO application in ColdFusion there will almost certainly be a DAO in there. What bothers me about this is it kind of smacks of a herd mentality. I'm convinced that there are many people who don't understand the trade offs of the design patterns they actually use and worse still aren't even aware of the alternatives out there. Many of the people I talk to who actually use gateways aren't even aware of Martin Fowler's book. Why is this an issue? Well because before you use a design pattern you should be aware of the intent, where it is applicable, the consequences and trade offs. More importantly for the ColdFusion community what are the alternatives to the gateway and or a DAO? Can you name any?  So come on guys what ever happened to the Observer pattern, Active Record or  (two of my favourites) the Strategy pattern or the Specification pattern? There are tons of design patterns out there and it worries me a bit that many (not all) ColdFusion programmers have a toolbox which only includes 3 types of hammers - don't use any other hammers and haven't even read the instructions for the ones they use.

 

Following on from Charlie Areharts list of people who had blogged about CFEclipse - I've added a CFEclipse category to my blog. While searching my blog posts from the past four years I found a handful of one line posts on CFEclipse short cut keys which I had blogged but never actually published from June last year. By now there are more comprehensive lists and I'm sure everyone knows these by now but just incase...

TIP1: For a drop down list of all available files currently open: press cntrl-e

TIP2: To create a cfdump with a positioned cursor: shift + cntrl + D

TIP3: To delete a line: cntrl + D

TIP3: To insert opening and closing cfoutput tags, select the code you want to be wrapped up in cfoutput tags and then press cntrl-O

Tomorrow I'm off to celebration Europe which will be attended by Boba Fett and C-3PO! Now if I can only find my purple Light Sabre.

Some of my female friends in the past have commented that they never really understood what all the fuss around Starwars was. To them I say this - to understand men you need to understand Star Wars

Well for the first time in the last 4 years I won't be making it across the pond to cfunited. Instead I will be at home sulking over Thiery Henry leaving Arsenal!

My colleague Peter Boughton has an entry on his blog on 20 reasons to consider Railo 2

 

Brian Rinaldi will be doing a cfframeworks workshop on his Illudium code generator. The illudium code generator. ..

"generates ColdFusion components (i.e. bean, DAO, gateway, service), ColdSpring XML, Transfer XML, and ActionScript Value-Objects using the admin api and database introspection. The front-end is built in Flex 2. The code outputted for easily pasting or saving into a project to allow you to get a head-start on some of the grunt work of doing OO in CF."

So if you never have the time to play with it yourself come to the cfframeworks workshop to see it in action. More details on cfframeworks.com  

Just checked into my hotel in Scotland - I must say this place is beautiful! Getting ready to meet up with Nick , Mark , Daniel , Peter , Andy , Peter , Stephen , Kevin , Andy and the rest of the guys. If you're around come down and say hi !

A while back my colleague James mentioned a hidden cfant tag for running ant build files. I finally got around to playing with it. It's still not clear what all the arguments are for despite their seemingly obvious names. The usual disclaimer about using undocumented tags/features applies!

 

<cfant buildFile="completePathToBuildFile"  defaultDirectory="seemsTobeIgnoredButMustBePresent"  anthome="alsoSeemsToBeIgnoredButMayNeedToHaveAnEnvironmentVariableSetup"  messages="coldFusionVariableToHoldOutPutMessages"  target="defaultTarget" />

 15 cool firefox tricks . Some good tips to improve your firefox experience as well a some shortcuts I wasn't aware of.

An article I wrote on  ColdFusion components and the Law of Demeter has recently been published in the (now only available in PDF) ColdFusion Developer's Journal.

In an image re-invention that would give Madonna a run for her money - in a short space of time Flash has done well to reinvent itself from being the 'skip intro' technology to one of the stars of (I hate saying it) web 2.0. Chris Adamson touched on this in his latest onjava post:

“But think about this: when did Flash become ubiquitous, and when did we all stop hating it? Just two years ago, Flash was largely known for being the technology behind all the goddamned annoying interactive banner ads: Club the baby panda and win a PlayStation 3!!! There were good uses of the technology of course, but it certainly feels more respectable today than it did then. And that’s funny, if you think about it, because the rise of Flash’s acceptance as a rich client-side technology runs concurrent with the rise of Ajax — if Flash was loathed then, and faced a challenge from the hip and trendy Ajax, then what made it succeed?”

 

Was it the rise of Ajax? Or perhaps YouTube? I have my own take on this Flash became sexy when Flex became affordable! Thats not to say people were not doing cool things with Flash and Flex before then. But putting the tools into everybody's hands (for less than 20K) put consultants, digital agencies, developers, designers and many others in a position to finally be able to change people's perception of this technology.

Since CF 6.0 we have been able to use the $ as part of a variable name but I have yet to come across any code that actually uses it. Does anyone actually use it? Perhaps as part of some naming convention to indicate Constants for example?

What ColdFusion tools do you want?

Following on from my last post discussing Java tools support and whether it made working in Java more productive , I'd thought I would point out some of the tools that are missing from the ColdFusion landscape. ColdFusion has matured quite a bit since CFMX, we now have unit testing frameworks, debuggers and an open source IDE .
But there are still a number of tools missing which are availble in Java which I would love to see.

Top of my list is code review tools - I'm yet to look fully into whether I can utilise checkstyle for ColdFusion. I could kill for an automated ColdFusion code review tool, one that I could integrate into a build process.

Rules engine - Typically quite expensive although it should be possible to wrap something like Drools up in a ColdFusion API.

Code coverage tools - I'm not one of those people who obsesses over reaching the magical figure of 100% code coverage, but for those that are, something similar to Clover would be useful.

UML cfc generator - Enterprise architect allows generation of code from a UML diagram for both Java and C#. Does anyone have
an XMI UML to CFC converter. One that supported round-tripping as well would be ace! :)

Any more?

If you've used both you'll probably answer yes. Sean's recent blog post about working with Eclipse reminded me of a discussion I had with a friend recently which made me re-consider whether working in ColdFusion is more productive than Java. My friend's point was that the tool support in Java (IDEs, Unit testing frameworks, Code coverage tools, code review tools etc.) actually made you much more productive. Certainly when I use Eclipse for writing Java I'm reminded of everything I miss (but thats more down to the fact that Java is strongly typed). Small things such as the refactoring support, being able to automatically jump to class references, automatically organise imports etc. I feel more productive in ColdFusion but that's just a feeling.

If you work with both, whats your thoughts on this?