the Twitter Blog has something posted that I thought was a nice in site.

“For stressed engineers, it’s tempting to think that another solution - anything but what you’re using now! - will solve all your problems. Maybe you start dreaming up the perfect framework on a whiteboard, or maybe you start scouring the web for the fastest, newest, most experimental technology. In the long run, picking a foundation you’re comfortable with and making sensible iterations towards your performance goals will yield a bigger win. You have to be careful while iterating: watch your database, test thoroughly, and be ready to roll back when things break (and they will).”

ColdFusion has suffered from this. Since it’s ease of use invites users to create applications that may not be the best methodologies means that sometimes legacy apps can be crap. I look at some of the stuff I wrote 8 years ago and Good Lord it makes me cringe.

Though they are talking about Ruby and the Rails framework I think that it applies to just about any language. They all have their strengths and weaknesses and in the end will probably serve about 90% of all your needs with the other 10% just being a rethink of the way you do things.

 I think that if more people concentrated on making their apps better then complaining and wanting to move to the “New Kid On the Block” that their programming life would be a LOT less stressful.

Now we know!

As we all know CFDump is probably the coolest and the most used tag in development. To be able to dump anything and everything in a nice concise format is worth it’s weight in gold. I have gone ahead and installed CF8 beta on my laptop and have been using it for everyday development. Mainly this is just to make sure that everything we have is compatiable with CF8 so when it is released we can deploy it ASAP.

So in the course of my development work I noticed that CFdump has had a few things added to it. Used to when you dumped a query it would give you a structure type display and give you just the columns and the data.

Cfdump in CF8 now does a structure dump with keys such as resultset, cached, execution time, SQL Statement used, and Parameters passed in, and in an array to boot.

One of the other things that they have done is added a “show” parameter. you just do <cfdump var=”#queryname#” show=”column1, column2″>.

You can also in the same vain hide columns from a query.

<cfdump var=”#queryname#” hide=”column1, column2″>

As you can see it also tells you that it is filtered so that is always good.

All in all it looks like CF8 is going to be an awesome release and it has been fun really digging in and seeing all the fun things they have in store for us.

Off and on throughout my web career I have been a remote web worker; Because of this I utilize the services of many a franchise locations. I was excited when one of my favorite blogs Web Worker Daily (and fellow WordPress user) had a post and listed one of my favorite hang outs, Panera, as a web worker friendly place.

Go check out the article!

CF-Talk has had a discussion started by my buddy Andy about the whole javax scripting that is in Java 6 and thus available for use in CF8. What it allows is basically the ability to use different languages (.NET, Ruby, PHP, Python) inside of your CFML. Now at first glance someone would say “why they heck would you do this?” but I see the endless possibilities here.

2 cases I can think of that I have come across in the last 2 years.

1. Integration

I worked on a project where I needed to encrypt a string and send it to a web-service. Now I was given C# code and told “here is how we encrypt it”. Of course the best way would have been to just SSL it which we were doing anyways, and encrypt it on the other end. But Alas this guy gave me his whole private encryption key and wanted me to do it on my end (yes this was a major credit card processor and yes the text strings were credit cards)

I couldn’t for the life of me get CF to work using the encryption method that he was claiming was needed. I ended up creating a page in ASP.NET and posting to it and having it give me back the encryption. yeah MAJOR hack.

It would have been WAY easier to just drop his encryption code in from .NET and BAM be done with it.

2. Sometimes CF just doesn’t cut it

Yes sometimes CF just doesn’t do what you need to do. Case in point I had an XML “database” from a partner that I needed to parse. Any CF’er that gets the old “Just FTP it down and parse it”… yeah it was 80 freak’n meg!

CF would puke just about every time.

Along comes Python and the ability to parse an XML doc one line at a time instead of moving it all into memory THEN parsing it. If I was able to drop a few lines of Python in it would have made my life and 3 weeks a LOT easier… heck I could have taken 2.5 weeks off.

So yes if you can harness the power of other languages then do it. I don’t recommend writing it all in PHP wrapped in CF but at least it is a starting point.

I have worked in the web world for about 9 years and about 80% of that has been working at home. Whether it was working for a company or doing my own thing I have always loved the liberty and the comfort of working from my house. Web Worker Daily is one of my favorite blogs and they have a great post about the “9 Best Practices for Home-Based Web Workers“.

For those of you that use MySQL… which should be EVERYONE… you may have noticed (as Ray just reported) that there is native MySQL 4/5 support. No more jumping through hoops to get it working.

Forta is talking about a cool thing about ColdFusion 8 that is the new CFPRINT tag. It allows you to do server side printing. I think that Adobe really gets who their client is… it is companies trying to do stuff on a larger WAN type environment IE Intra nets.

We have this large format printer at work that we use to print off blueprints… We have always wanted to monetize this and I think this will let us. How about a service that let’s you print blueprints from the server and they are mailed to you. hmm yeah that is cool.

Dopefly has a post talking about the new features that are being talked about for Fusebox 6. I think one of the coolest things is how you can now call Do’s by doing myFusebox.do(”circuit.fuseaction”).. Thank you Jebbus!