For a while now, Luis Majano and I have been working on CodexWiki , a ColdBox , Transfer and ColdSpring powered wiki.
The features in it have come together really nicely, including one of the slickest wiki editors I have ever seen, and it has finally gotten to the point where there was no point in keeping it in private beta any longer.
If you are interested in checking out go to http://www.codexwiki.org , and if you wander over to the ColdBox blog , you can see some great screenshots.
Its been great working with Luis, and we have many more ideas for this wiki in the coming future! Watch out :oD
ColdDoc 0.1 is finally ready as a release version.
ColdDoc is a port of JavaDoc for ColdFusion, and generates static .html files that display API information for a collection of CFCs.
ColdDoc was initially written to output the API documentation for Transfer, which can be seen here .
The benefits of outputting documentation to static html files, rather than doing it dynamically include:
- Less processing at run time
- Documentation can be linked to, without fear of page names and/or anchors changing
- The ability to generate API details such as Direct known subclasses and Method Overrides information which would be too expensive to determine at run time.
Currently ColdDoc only supports a single root path, and is missing some JavaDoc implementations, such as a Index page, and Interface documentation, and can only run on ColdFusion 8.
ColdDoc can be downloaded from here .
The last Melbourne CFUG for the year!
Location:
NGA.net, Level 2, 17 Raglan St, South Melbourne
Map: http://link.toolbot.com/google.com/73016
When:
November 20, Meeting starts at 7:00, so get there before hand (doors
open at 6:30).
Agenda:
Steve Onnis talks about virtualisation
Steve will be presenting on server virtualisation using VMWare. VMWare allows you to create
virtual operating systems that run independent of your main operating systems giving you the
flexibility to create development environments for testing.
Demonstrating the setup process and vm tools, you will gain an understanding of what virtualisation
is and an insight into what virtualisation can do for you.
If you are going to attend, please RSVP to mark (dot) mandel (at) gmail.com.
Only those that RSVP are eligible for the door prizes, so make sure you apply!
See the CFUG Melbourne Calendar at:
http://www.cfcentral.com.au/Events/index.cfm
Or add to your Google Calendar - search for 'CFUG Melbourne'.
As per usual, we'll grab pizza during the evening, so we have
something to scoff down!
Look forward to seeing you all there.
I officially closed the
Transfer
survey a short time ago, as results had slowed to a crawl. Overall we
had 87 respondents, and it was really, really useful to get the
feedback.
I can honestly say the feedback from this survey has changed the road-map for the next two releases of Transfer.
Transfer Experience
This was a really interesting set of questions. 41% of respondents say that they use Transfer
every day, which is really exciting. Only 1 person responded with
What is Transfer?, which hopefully means I'm doing a decent job of getting at least the name 'Transfer' in people's knowledge sphere.
Most
people have been using Transfer for only 1-6 months (30%), while coming
second place (26%), 6 months to a year, and third 18% for 1-2 years.
Only 2 people have been using it for more than 2 years, but since the
project has only been around for 3, and the first year, itwasn't all that stable, I'm very happy with these results.
The version of Transfer that people are using totally shocked me!
73% of
people where running either 1.1 (which at the time was RC), or the BER
release of Transfer. 36% of people were running 1.0. Only 3 people were
running 0.6.3, which is a good thing, as it was a really buggy
release. I'm so pleased to see the adoption rate is so high!
Other ORMs people have used
This
was another interesting section, in that Reactor scored the highest at
51%, and Hibernate came in second at 21%. Interestingly enough, 31% of
people had
never used an ORM before Transfer.
Transfer Enhancements
Not surprisingly, 58% of people that that Performance improvements were most important. I wasn't
surprised by this, and I expect this won't change no matter how fast I
make Transfer. The annoying thing is being constrained quite severely
by how fast ColdFusion can createCFCs, which isn't nearly as fast as I would like.
Several comparisons where made between Hibernate (and other Java/Groovy ORMs)
and Transfer, and while it is understood that Java will always be
faster, they still want comparative speed out of Transfer. Not sure
how I'm going to get that to happen, but I know I will try my best.
To quote a survey taker:
'...the
whole thing about not really being able to instantiate collections of
associated objects with decent performance - therefore you do your head
in constantly switching between object-think and query-think. This is
the #1 reason I'd choose Java over CF for a decent-sized domain layer.'
The
fact of the matter is, he is right on what he's saying, and I hope its
something that Adobe listens to with future versions of ColdFusion.
Interestingly
enough, there were several requests specifically to be able to retrieve
arrays of Transfer generated Objects. I had purposely avoided it due
to performance concerns, but I think this may be something that will
end up being discussed on the Transfer mailing list further, as there
were a few people who were interested in this feature.
Integrated
Flex support was another hot topic. I'm currently in the process of
learning Flex at the moment, so expect to hear solutions for this
common problem around the corner.
DB introspection was a
huge draw card, with multiple comments like '
...config file generation without using illudium...' and '
...non-generative XML can be burdensome in large applications...',
which is all true. In the next few releases we'll be looking at doing
property auto-generation from the database, and also providingDDL support for Transfer to generate your database for you.
Inheritance
mapping was also a big feature request (far more so than I had
originally ever thought it would be, and this is even before the
recent spate of
ORM
articles), and got me thinking about it a whole lot more. To that
effect, expect to see Inheritance mapping as one of the next big
features in the next release of Transfer.
Some other interesting requests that came through were:
- Annotations in Transfer XML data
- Railo support
- Generate methods for setting object properties from a struct
- Query paging / Query limits
- Bidirectional M2M compositions.
- TQL aggregates
Support and Documentation
Support
seems to be well received, with 46% of people giving Transfer support a
4, and 30% giving it a 5, where 5 was 'Very useful' and 1 was 'Not
Useful'.
That being said, ease of learning could be better, as
on a scale of 1 (Easy) to 5 (Really hard), the majority, 43%, sat in
the middle at, 3, although 34% gave it a 2.
From reading
comments, the big element to help Transfer learning, is examples,
examples, and when done, some more examples. Comments include: '
Beginner Tutorials, step-by-step type. Maybe even videos...', '
Lack of tutorial type documentation. Especially for advanced topics.', '
The examples on the site are a bit limited...', '
More examples, and more advanced examples...',
so the pathways are pretty clear. I will be contacting members of the
Transfer community and contacting people who participated in the survey
to help with this.
Conclusion
I'll be finalising the road-maps for the next 2 releases of Transfer based on this feedback, however, I'm looking at moving to Skweegee from Project Tracker, so once I've made a decision in that area, and how to manage previously completed tickets and milestones, I'll get stuck in.
Thanks to all who participated, it was really useful to get the feedback!
