An Architect's View

An updated version of my slide deck for my case study talk about Clojure and CFML at World Singles has been posted to my presentations page. I'm happy to give the talk to other user groups, even remotely if you have the capability for a remote presenter. The talk runs about two hours, or longer depending on the amount of Q&A.

World Singles is looking for a smart, motivated developer to join our small, fully distributed team of engineers, working on our multi-lingual, multi-tenant Internet dating platform. We're after someone with strong data management skills who can help us mine and analyze data in both MySQL and MongoDB, as well as help us leverage both more effectively. For more details: http://bit.ly/worldsinglesjob

The World Singles code base is a blend of CFML and Clojure - this role would be mainly on the Clojure side of the house but the primary skills needed are MySQL / MongoDB.

As my readers will no doubt know by now, I have a large CFML application and I'm migrating low-level parts of it to Clojure to that I can reuse those pieces from both CFML and Clojure (and Scala). I recently migrated all of the environment control logic, which automatically configures the application based on which server the code is running on top of, to Clojure so that my CFML, Clojure and Scala code could all leverage the same environment control logic. I'll probably blog about that at some point. I've also created a Clojure replacement for the CFML ORM we've been using (Reactor). Today, however, I want to talk about logging.

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This year's cf.Objective() is offering SIX pre-conference classes! You can choose from Building Secure CFML Applications, ColdBox: 100 Training, Developing Applications with ColdFusion 9 ORM, Getting Started with Flex / AIR Development, Mach-II / OOP from the Ground Up, Rapid Development with Model-Glue 3! Wow! Some of these are one-day courses (Wednesday April 21st) and some are two-day courses (Tuesday April 20th and Wednesday April 21st).

Since I spent quite a bit of time wrestling with this over the last week, I figured this blog post may help others. First off, a caveat: I'm running the latest version of ColdBox 3.0.0 from SVN which is "almost" Beta 4 and the details of error handling have changed a little over the last few Betas (for the better). ColdBox provides a number of ways to handle different types of errors. I'll cover the following options:

• onMissingAction
• onInvalidEvent
• ExceptionHandler
• onException
• MissingTemplateHandler

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Today I needed to update a custom tag we use to display form fields in a ColdBox app to treat the labels as i18n resource keys. Normally in a view you can just call getResource(key) and get back the translated value based on the current locale. Simple. Part of what makes ColdBox great for international apps! However, you can't call getResource() inside a custom tag called from a view. You might think you can just do caller.getResource(key) but that fails with an exception that the variable controller is not defined. That's because your views run in the context of a CFC and the custom tag has its own context. I initially came up with a slightly complicated way to pass things to the custom tag but I ended up having to make getResource() public in ColdBox's FrameworkSuperType.cfc. Not ideal. It worked but it was clearly a hack. I complained to Luis about how hard this seemed to be and he sent me the following code snippet to use in a custom tag: Remember that you're in the context of a CFC in your view? Well, getResource() is in the variables scope and it, in turn, references controller - which is in the variables scope of the view... or rather the context that the view is executed in. So by setting variables.controller in the custom tag, the call to caller.getResource() finds it and runs properly. It's still a bit of a hack in my opinion but it's slightly more elegant than what I was trying to do so thank you Luis. I'm posting it here so a) I can find it again in future and b) others may benefit from this.

I'm working on a ColdBox project right now for a client and, as some may have gathered from my occasional tweets, I've set up Hudson as a Continuous Integration server that pulls the latest code from git, restarts the test server instance, reloads the test database and automatically runs the MXUnit-based test suite, whenever someone commits files to the main git repository. We have unit tests for individual components and we have integration tests for the ColdBox event handlers. Luis has provided pretty good documentation for writing such tests but one of the challenges I faced in getting some of the integration tests working was that they redirected to a new event!

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Luis Majano just announced ColdBox training the day before CFUnited. If you're going to CFUnited this year and you're interested in learning more about ColdBox from the creator of the framework, I can highly recommend this intense, one-day pre-conference training class! I was privileged to sit in on parts of this course before cf.Objective() this year and was very impressed at the amount of material covered, the quality (and thickness!) of the handouts and the hands-on approach that Luis takes.

I've almost recovered from this year's cf.Objective() so I wanted to get my thoughts on paper before the memory blurs too much. As usual, it was an excellent conference with top-quality sessions from top-quality speakers. It's the only conference that I would pay to attend - and would pay out of my own pocket if I had to. I learn plenty of new things at cf.Objective() every year and the networking is phenomenal because it's a relatively small, friendly conference (around 200 attendees this year).

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In the absence of a printable schedule - sorry, Joe Rinehart says it's a problem with the Media3 hosting and he's been trying to get them to fix it for months! - here is my schedule for cf.Objective() 2009:

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