What should I learn?  I’ve heard this proverbial question asked again and again when interviewing job candidates, talking to new CFer’s, and on blog comments.  After tackling an advanced topic like duck typing I thought I would throw a bone to those newbies out there.  Or maybe those that have been developing CF for several years and have become stagnate in their skill level.  Well, if I were forced to create a list of important skills that CF folks should have here would be my list:

1. Learn the language – I know, this sounds trivial but hear me out.  Many developers have come way back from the Coldfusion 4.5 and later days.  When you have been using CF that long you tend to get comfortable with the set of tags that you use and don’t attempt to learn newly released tags.  Regularly browse through the CF documentation and try to write some small test applications that use each of the CF tags and functions.  You will be amazed at how efficient your code will become.  It seems I’m always learning new tags/attributes that make my code shorter, more understandable, and more elegant.  It would also be wise to take the CF certification exam.  While not exactly a necessity it would be a wise career and personal move.  The key is first become an expert on the language.

2. Learn proper database design – Coldfusion was designed in part to make database access trivial.  With its roots grounded in this area and the fact that most (if not all) large web applications are database driven it is important to learn database concepts. Learn proper table structure, proper relationships between tables, and learn SQL.  Grab a good book on database design including a discussion on normal forms, what constitutes good vs. bad design, and how to optimize your SQL statements.

3. Learn client side scripting and other web technologies – After nailing the CF language and learning proper database design and SQL move on to studying Javascript, AJAX, and any other web technologies that you feel you can use (there is ample supply of summaries and overviews of web technologies scattered all over the web, I’m sure there will be several comments on good resources).  It is not imperative that you become an expert on all web technologies, however, it is imperative that you are buzzword compliant and know what the technology is, what its strengths are, and what its weaknesses are.  Once you know the synopsis of the language you can begin to learn when you need it and when you don’t.

4. Learn object oriented design and programming – Oh boy, this is the biggie.  This weeds out the men from the boys.  There are many classical books on OO design and programming so instead of attempting to explain why this is important just learn it now and you can thank me later.

5. Learn an application development methodology…..or two – Well, if you’ve made it this far you are well on your way to becoming a Coldfusion web application guru.  There are a few last pieces to the puzzle.  One final piece is learning an application development methodology.  This simply means learn the process of how to create successful web applications.  There are many methodologies out there from classical (waterfall, iterative prototype) and many new ones (the agile movement, although many people feel this is a take off on the iterative prototype).  What you will find is that you rarely use just one and most projects will call for a blending of several different processes.

6. Learn a framework and study your design patterns – this could actually be moved up in the list but it doesn’t fit too terribly bad right at number 5.  Learn to use an application development framework.  A framework is basically a template you can use to help get a running start on your application (from a design perspective and a coding perspective) and create consistency throughout your code which becomes important as the number of developers on your projects increases. 

7.  Plug into the community – this kind of goes without saying.  After learning/studying items 1-6 you will surely find enough websites, books, blogs, podcasts,  and user groups to fill your time.  Let’s face it, we are all short on time but it doesn’t take much to spend the first 5-10 minutes of everyday hitting a couple of blogs or spending the ride home listening to a podcast – and the benefit is huge.

8. Start over – that’s right!  Now that you’ve made it through number 7 good old Adobe has released more CF tags for you to learn so get busy.  Reread the Pragmatic Programmer or the Mythical Man Month, restudy those CF functions, and reread my post on duck typing (shameless plug that is bound to spark some rants!).

These items aren’t meant to be in any particular order (we could probably have many good discussions regarding which should be learned first) but the order I presented is definitely one such avenue.

Good luck.

Just started reading Agile Project Management and came across this statement:

The idea of enough structure, but not too much, drives agile managers to continually ask the question, “How little structure can I get away with?”  Too much structure stifles creativity.  Too little structure breeds inefficency.

So far this book has been create.  I’ll be sure to post other little gems I come across.

I’m back from CFUnited and I have to say it was great. It was my first trip to the conference and I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’ve been to many lame training classes before where screwing with the trainers computer was the most interesting thing, however, I was very impressed by the amount of information available. Everyone seemed very knowledgable about the topics they presented and it was very rewarding to talk to the other attendees. Adobe team members made themselves available to all attendees and I was able to speak with many big time CFer’s. Here is a synopsis of some of the sessions I attended and what I seemed to glean from them:

Managing CF Components with Factories – Sean Corfield

• This talk centered around the fact that we can create these things called Factories to create/instantiate objects for us in code. This can help us manage dependencies on objects and keep all hardcoded paths (which are needed when you instantiate an object) in the factory instead of sprinkled throughout our application.

Government Accessibility and Section 508 – Adam Lehman

• The bottom line is that if disabled people cannot access your site and you don’t take reasonable steps to provide access (even through an alternative site) then you can be held liable. Adam told a story of the Sydney Olympic webpage did not make an attempt to resolve problems with their accessibility and they were eventually sued. There are simple steps to take which can easily be found on the internet.

Farcry 3.0 – Steve Rittler

• Farcry is an open-source free content management system. If you could use a CMS check this out before you buy.

Agile CF: Delivering Applications in Less Time: John Paul Ashenfelter

• Very, very solid session. John Paul spoke about the Agile movement in software development. He mentioned the importance of being Agile, responsive to continuous changes in requirements, technologies, etc. He advised the attendees to read the Agile series of books (Agile Software Development, Agile Project Management). I bought the Agile Project Management book at the conference and have really enjoyed it so far.

MVC for You and Me – Joe Rinehart

• Great overview on the MVC design pattern. Joe is now living in the Raleigh-Durham area where I work so I hope to run into him again.

Practical Design Patterns – Sean Corfield filling in for Hal Helms

• This was a solid session. There is a jump from being knowledgable of object oriented design to using design patterns. There are a handfull of design patterns that come up fairly often then a bunch that are very unique and specific for a situation. I would advise learning the MVC and the Factory pattern. If you are totally new to patterns I would start with those since they seem to be the two that come up most often.

Inversion of Control and Coldfusion: Using Coldspring – Dave Ross

• Typically in applications that use a well defined MVC framework you would pass values such as a DSN value down through your objects to your DAO/Gateways. Insteand of passing these values top-down you can use an inversion of control design pattern (IOC) to manage the dependencies of your objects. Basically this entails setting up an XML file stating the dependencies and asking the a Factory object to request the objects. That way you can allow the Factory to manage the dependencies and you can make all changes to one XML file. If you have no idea what this means then start off by learning the MVC and factory pattern by using a framework such as Model Glue.

CFMX Server Configuration and Troubleshooting – Dave Watts

• This guy was on top of his game. He gave many good tips and tricks to optimizing your CF server. If you are using components and object oriented design it will become much more important to tune your application server. As objects get created/destroyed and persist in places like the application scope it becomes much more important to make sure that you are caching the correct amount of templates and so forth. It used to be that many developers never had to make any changes to performance in the CF administrator, however, if you are making the jump to OOD you will without a doubt be making some changes.

The conference was great. If you haven’t attended and it looks like these sessions would have interested you then you should really try to attend next year. I would even consider paying my own way if necessary, I think it was that informative.

So it seems after attending the CFUnited 2006 conference that yet another feud is brewing in the Coldfusion community. The all eternal question is arising – to duck type or not to duck type. I can see it now, next year we will have the Duck Type Celebrity Death Match between Sean Corfield and Hal Helms against……well…….no one yet……..hey…….maybe that Simon guy will throw on the gloves again.

For those of you sitting at home going quackers maybe I can help explain.

Duck typing is the basic concept of not typing CF functions and function arguments. This simply means you leave off the ‘returntype’ and ‘type’ attributes in cffunction and cfargument tags, respectively. So why would someone want to do that….I’m glad you asked.

Let’s pretend you have two different objects, a car object and a plane object. These objects are clearly different and cannot really be subclassed (one cannot extend the other by nature). However, they may have many similar functions. Let’s suppose they both have high level functions that passengers may want to call, namely, GetIn(), BuckleSeatBelt(), and EnjoyRide(). Although the functions have the same names the details are quite different. For instance, getting into a car means opening the door and stepping in. Getting into a plane involves climbing stairs or walking through the tunnel to the aircraft. The same could be said for EnjoyRide(), in a car you might listen to music but in a plane you might want to order a Pepsi. Clearly we have two objects with the same function names but the code in the functions are different.

Now, let’s say we have a Transportation() function that calls the three functions GetIn(), BuckleSeatBelt(), EnjoyRide(). We will pass it the mode of transportation and let it call the functions for us. If we type the Transportation() function argument we must provide the cfargument type=Car or type=Plane but we cannot define both. Therefore we might create two functions, one that accepts cars and one that accepts planes. This would be the method of choice in language that supports true polymorphism (two identically named functions that take different argument types), however, CF does not support this type of polymorphism. So the next best thing is to take away the type attribute of the cfargument tag. That way either object can be passed in and have their functions invoked.

There are other scenarios where duck typing is essential.  Since Coldfusion is in the minority of languages that actually allows you to do it we should definitely take advantage. However, there are downsides.  For instance, what if you are working on a large development project and you spot another developers function that you want to use. It requires 5 parameters but displays no type attribute information. How do you know what to pass that function? Well, either you hope the developer left a nice comment for you (and we know how common that is) or you can look through his code (ok you can stop laughing now). Neither solution is good.

Another point to throw into the mix is that it takes time for CF to type check at runtime. If you have a function that is continually called with multiple paramters that contain types then CF must check those types everytime before the function is run. Taking out the types can speed up the run time of the application.

My advice would be to use typing when you are developing an API that will be used by other developers, however, you should then strip out the typing information as part of your build process.  This will allow you to keep typing information on the development environment but not in production when performance counts.  If you are not developing API code,  or you are the only person that will be working with the code, or you need duck typing to tackle a particular problem then take out the typing information in development as well as production.

That should sum up the issue, shoot me a comment on your thoughts.

Today the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 1.2% and the NASDAQ dropped 2.1%. This was attributed mostly to the Federal Reserves recent decision to raise interest rates. But what does that mean? How do interest rates effect the stock market anyway? I’ll try to answer.

A large component of a stock’s price is tied to the expected earnings of the corporation. Analysts forecast the future growth prospects of a company and designate buy or sell recommendations based on their research. This can seem strange to people at first. For instance, company XYZ might increase their revenues (and net income) by 33% and the stock price still drop. Why? Because analysts might be expecting an increase of 34%, and if the stock price is priced with the expectation of 34% growth then anything less could cause the stock price to drop (potentially).

This brings us back to the interest rate question. By and large interest rate increases curb growth. Organizations are less likely to finance projects through loans since the interest payments will increase. Customers also tend to cut back on spending in times of interest rate hikes which can cause higher mortage payments, higher credit card payments, and other increases in a family’s budget.

To put it simply:

interest rates go up -> less cash available to borrow -> less spending -> company earnings do down -> stock prices drop

Hello everyone. Welcome to my first post.  I've finally made the leap to having my own blog and I hope you find my posts mildly interesting.  As you might have noticed the topics I'm going to start off with are Coldfusion and Business.  Why?  Well, I've been programming for about 8 years now and 4 of those have been using a great programming language named Coldfusion.  I'll blog more about that at another date.  As for business, I'm going through the MBA program at East Carolina University.  I'll be posting information I get from my classes along with other general information I collect and ideas that I have.  I might break out the business section into seperate topics but for now it will be a hodgepodge of different topics.  I hope you come back and find something I say mildly thoughtful!