Ironic Productivity

It seems my life is often to be encircled by a bitter irony that pervades my goals and intolerably toys with my desired outcomes. Sometimes we are required to extend ourselves to the point where we are well and truly outside our comfort zone, I like this, others do not.

I have been working very hard to introduce the Rapid Application Development, NodeJS and MongoDB, stack to my workplace for years. Tragically I've been met with technophobic levels of resistance by technology stack conservationists of the Microsoft fanboy ilk. However, this all changed recently when the last major blockage to disruptive change was removed and my team got the green light to create a proof of concept on Mongo+Node and within months the team has transformed to one that appears to enjoy their work, gets excited by the things they are learning, excited by the performance boosts and look forward to each release as the users gush over the modern tooled interfaces and UX.

To their credit and admirable abilities, the .NET developers addapted quickly to the new technology and are flourishing on the new platform. I am so impressed with how they are embracing the change I for so long thought they would never accept, perhaps that is a prejudice of my own I need to work on!

There is no reason in 2013 that you as the nerd in the room at your workplace can't be the nagging annoying guy pushing for change like I was. It may be slow, but once change starts it is so powerful it is hard for even the greatest and most effective ludite to stop!

However there is a problem in my situation. All is not rosey in this garden of progressive Eden.

Legacy application support.

It turns out I am the only developer capable of supporting several different legacy systems as some of the other staff made redundant were also the lead developers on critical business applications. So as the former .NET developers experience the joys of the new technology stack and the graduates join them in this new and exciting realm. I... I spend all my time working on a ColdFusion application a decade old and a ITSM tool that is also prehistoric.

So be weary my future loving friends for as you push for your workplace to break free from the shakles of the Microsoft .NET universe or overcome their Oracle Java addiction, make sure you don't end up being the last remaining person who can support the legacy applications! Your suffrage under a dark passenger riding you to early burn out is all there is to look forward to if you get stuck working in the legacy zone.

I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemies.

You've been warned, be cautious, but don't give up in the quest to re-shape the IT landscape, it just doesn't have to be so hard anymore... MJB

Node.JS FTW!

Node JS has answered my JavaScript prayers and is now my primary source of inspiration for server-side development. I have recently installed the open source Oracle VM VirtualBox and loaded up an instance of the open source Ubuntu 11.4 Natty Narwhal so I could take NodeJS for a spin.

Installation is a breeze and took only a few minutes, then I was ready to install Node Package Manager which allows the user to install any of the extremely numerous packages designed to improve the deployment of various types of Node server application.

It is important to note and be aware of all the required packages required by Node and NPM to operate correctly as missing one them can make installing NPM painful with errors that don't give a lot of instruction on their real causes. In my case the NPM install command "curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sh" would not work until I updated it to "curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sudo sh". I assume I had issues with my user setup that didn't give me enough rights.

Anyway with Ubuntu, NodeJS and NPM all installed it was onto the packages and which should I install to get started?!

CFJS, one step closer to paradise

I have been obsessed for a long long time about JavaScript and the need for it to be a core factor in bringing ColdFusion out of the niche and into the mainstream. I have a dream, that dream is CFJS a JavaScript specification for CFML. A spec for CFML engines to implement so that they can create the first real consensus of a JavaScript server standard, with potentially three different servers all implementing the same spec that'd be two more than any other implementation! There are plenty of JavaScript servers out there, Rhino hacked into them in one way of form, but none that really offer any real appeal or power behind them. All ColdFusion engines offer superior clustering and database handling with well established power and performance and with integrated JavaScript with mapped functions and classes there's no reason for it not to take off among developers who love both ColdFusion and also the new masses of JavaScript developers who have come into the fold via jQuery.

CFJS is a concept that is almost a reality in one form now thanks to Alan Williamson over at Open Blue Dragon: http://alan.blog-city.com/cfjs_alpha.htm While I really like the work Alan has done there are a few things I would suggest, the first being the JavaScript scope/namespace to be used, currently $cf I would prefer to see one of CFjs, CfJs or preferably cfjs if it is encapsulated by a closure then developers can use whatever shortcut they like just as they do with jQuery becoming $ within a closure when making plugins (when they're done well! ;).

My next desire is to create a clear specification for running frameworks within CFJS, a clear definition within the Application.cfjs file for a framework scope with functions to enable/disable and choose versions of frameworks to use, so cfjs.framework.list() would return an array of framework property objects with their versions and they could be used like:

$ = cfjs.framework('jQuery','1.4');
Fb = cfjs.framework('FuseBox','6.0');  \\(-_o)//
Spry = cfjs.framework('Spry','0.1.6');
CommonJS = cfjs.framework('CommonJS','1.0');
cfjs.application({
    onApplicationStart: function(){}
})

Then the frameworks could be pre-loaded compiled and poentially optimised to hopefully be even faster.

Speaking of compiled and faster, have you seen John Resig's Micro Templating project example?

http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-micro-templating/



I like the  idea of using something like that only adding
a (potentially jQuery based) compiler so there are no variables in your HTML code AT ALL. I wrote
some code earlier and included three tbody tags in a table one
with a class for no-data-items one for data-items and another called
data-item-template.



The template version looked kind of like:

<tr class="data-items template">


    <input type="hidden" name="temp-id" class="data-item-id" value="temp-value" />



    <td class="data-item-name">User Name</td>



    <td class="data-item-email">User Email</td>


</tr>



I then added a call to:

jQuery(HTML template selector).template(array, function(template, record){


    template.find('data-item-id').val(record.id);


    template.find('data-item-name').text(record.name);


    template.find('data-item-email').text(record.email);

    tbodyData.append(template);


});



Now I haven't actually built it to work yet just throwing ideas around
in my head of just how beautiful templating in server-side JavaScript
can be, but what I intend on checking when I have time is how fast this
performs and whether or not parsing the template first so record.id
would be the text '<cfout>record.id</cfout>' and then using
Mr Resig's templater to do the rest would potentially be faster given
it wouldn't need to continually run a bunch of jQuery calls. Then
there's the option of e4x which I suspect would be faster again. I really wish I had more time each day to play with cfml!