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Here's a quick one that I tried out for the first time today.  Someone asked if it was possible for a CF app to have a desktop notification on the server it's running.  CommandBox servers have a try icon that runs inside the JVM of the server that can create popups and even Swing windows.  Turns out, it's actually really easy to tap into this to get a toaster popup on your desktop.  

I was adding a feature to CommandBox CLI this week when I typed up some code that iterated over the keys in a struct, filtering out the ones it needed and then performed an action on the matching ones.  I used the functional methods structFilter() and structEach() in CFML.  They are an example of functional programming as they accept functions as input.  This also means we can call them "higher order" functions.  But termininologo aside, I typed up the same code using an older interactive approach just to compare the too.  It was an interesting and rather self contained example so I thought I'd share it as a real life use case for FP (functional programming).

There was a Twitter conversation today where Ben Nadel mentioned that one of the continuing issues with ColdFusion was bad JSON support.  I assume by that, he's referring to CF's tendency to change the datatype of variables while serializing them. I mentioned that Lucee Server has much better support for this and I'd like to show very quickly why this is.

Adobe released some new security updates for ColdFusion 10 and 11 yesterday.  This brought with it the usual flurry of twitter activity from security-minded accounts who pounce on the opportunity to retweet every vuln report on the internet.  It's too bad no one takes this much effort to focus on positive news from other languages.  Among the landslide of tweets were also a few people poking at ColdFusion such as this person who went as far as to say businesses should scrap all use of Adobe products in general due to the number of vulnerabilities.

I've been just giddy testing the new Multi-server support in our latest CommandBox 3.1.0 beta.  I never knew starting up a ColdFusion 9 server could be so exciting.  Well it is when you just have to type:

CommandBox> start [email protected]

That's it. You don't need a single thing installed prior other than CommandBox.  Everything necessary will be downloaded and, depending on your internet connection speeds, you'll have a new server running in less than 60 seconds.  Don't worry, it's not limited to ColdFusion 9.  We also are supporting Adobe ColdFusion 10, 11, and 2016 as well as Railo Server 4.2 and Lucee Server 5.0 rc!

Michael Smith has released the full results of this year's State of the CF Union survey over on the TeraTech blog.  I enjoy seeing this data every year as a framework author since it helps us know what engines and types of OS to target with our products.  This year, there's a full write up and a little commentary on each graph.  Note the write up is spread across two blog entries:

http://www.teratech.com/blog/index.cfm/2016/2/19/State-of-the-CF-Union-Survey-2016--Results

http://www.teratech.com/blog/index.cfm/2016/2/19/State-of-the-CF-Union-Survey-2016--Results-Part-II

Notable bits of data were:

• CF9 is finally falling behind CF10 and CF11.  This is good since we'll be dropping support for CF9 in ColdBox soon
• Lucee has left Railo usage in the dust, and a solid amount of people are already using Lucee 5
• Still a lot of people out there using no framework at all or FuseBox!  Of course, I assume this isn't new dev, but rather the same old legacy apps that have been around for years
• A lot of people not using a DI framework. Kind of curious if they're not using CFCs at all.
• Really surprised how many people still use Notepad++ for dev.  
• The "How many years have you used CFML" graph is very depressing.  Very little new blood coming into CFML.
• Love how many people are using CommandBox.  I'm so pleased to see it being useful for the CF world
• A decent chunk of Amazon EC2 users, but it's clear most CF shops aren't doing cloud deploys. Not sure if Adobe doesn't focus on cloud because their users don't care, or if it's the other way around.
• Surprised to see how many home-grown REST frameworks there are. I can't imagine a world in which you wouldn't waste more time doing that from scratch than to drop in something quick and easy like ColdBox 4's REST routing.  There's so much out of the box to be gained.
• There's a decent chunk of CF devs in very large companies, but the majority are in small business's with 1-20 total employees.  That's interesting since it's not where I would have pegged most CF devs to be.
• The comments are very interesting too.  Lots of love for Lucee and lots of frustration for Adobe.  

OK, well there's my thoughts. Head over and check out the data yourself. 

In the beginning was the Web, and the Web was with CFML, and the Web was CFML. It was with CFML in the beginning. Through it all websites were made; without it no websites were made that had been made. In it were tags, and those tags were the productivity of all programmerkind. The productivity shone in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

Ok, maybe I'm overstating CFML a bit, but when it was created it was revolutionary.  It redefined how websites were built and set the bar for other web programming languages.  And though CFML led the pack for a while, there were soon others to follow.  These languages were also productive, came with compelling frameworks, and made building sites fast and fun.  Many of these servers were also free and open source and around them large communities grew.  

Well, the cat is out of the bag now.  Railo, the free open source alternative CFML engine to Adobe's ColdFusion Server has been forked and reborn as a new product called Lucee.  I was lucky to be part of the launch party (via webcam) that happened this morning in London.  This is a major event in the tiny CFML eco-system and it's understandable that there's a  lot of questions floating around and confusion on just exactly what has happened.

There are a lot of large open source projects that have forked before.  For instance, MySQL spawned MariaDB, OpenOffice, begat LibreOffice, Hudson turned into Jenkins, and even recently Node.js was forked int IO.js.  In some cases, the original project continues alongside the new one.  In other cases, the old project basically sits there and everyone stands up, shuffles over to the new one, sits down and continues as if nothing happened.  I personally think Lucee is going to be more like one of those.

I'm throwing together this post to address some questions that have come up over and over again today.  Hopefully they will be answered more fully by the Lucee team as they dig out of this major announcement, but in the mean time this is a compilation of some answers I've given multiple times today around the Internets.  Please note, I am not speaking on behalf of Lucee nor Railo, these are my opinions and observations mixed with some info I've picked up along the way.  I'll happily accept corrects or clarifications in the comments.

In my last post I played with the Media API to add sounds effects to the Roll The Ball game and made an Adobe CF Soundboard.  Today I'll be showing my work with the Geolocation API.  I wish I had some more time to do something more useful, but the CF mobile contest is drawing to a close tonight and I this will be the last feature I have time to put in.