Hi all,
I have been sitting here this evening nice and warm and cozy in front of
the heater playing with some quasi-wiki code based on the cfwiki cfc
made by our friends down south in icy-cold land when I got distracted by
the item on the lovely little train down in the depths of Argentina that
was just shown on "Foreign Correspondent" on the ABC. It distracted me
from my coding experiments and made me think of where we have come in
the last ten years, just as little steam engines have evolved in the
mighty Diesel-Electric locos of today or, for that matter, how folk can
survive in Antarctica in relative comfort for long periods of time
compared to older days.
I started thinking back over the last 9-and-a-bit years of my
involvement with CF and how things have changed and what has come and
gone, or come and kept going. iHTML for a start. I was discovered it
back in those early days of Dynamic Internet Applications coming into
existence and it was pretty even-steven as to which was the best
product. CF 2 was a screamer and I converted the demo shopping cart
application that iHTML offered as a marketing suck-you-in to CF code to
see how they compared. The conversion was easy and CF had minor
advantages so we went with that. Now 9+ years later I wonder what ever
happened to iHTML, you don't exactly hear of it very much, so a quick
Google produced: http://www.ihtml.com/, its still there! A "Latest News"
on the home page with the latest item a year old and its just gone to
version 2 after all this time, um........
Umm, distraction at 11pm, and now back at 01:30 and I'm not going to
write any more at this time of night! :-)
So now its lunchtime on Wed and I had wanted to get this out for
everyone to read this morning, oh well.....
So now I am at an old client's site, updating a CMS written almost 4
years back in CF5 to CF7, adding the latest version of eWebEditPro, etc.
All good fun and not too brain-strainy and when I look into the whole
CMS I can see that quite a few folk have stuck their fingers into it
over the last 3 years or so since it went live, and do their different
coding techniques stick out! The original CMS was written by about 4
different folk working for us back then, all experienced developers and
all coding in similar "house" style. Not so the other folk, including
in-house coders here in this Govt dept. It made me do some more
reminiscing about how we worked out how to code for web applications way
back when there was no precedent to follow.
As I have mentioned before I came up the programming path of
assembler/basic, etc so a tag-based language like CF was perfect for me,
a natural fit, and doing things very sequentially was also natural so
those original form pages in KAOS were very sequential, form submits to
a validate/confirmation(do you really mean it?) page and then on to
another page that did the actual work. And different pages for adding
items to editing items. Not so good if you have 15+ fields in a page and
want to make a change, a lot of work suddenly appears! Needless to say
it wasn't long before we collectively thought of re-entrant pages that
do all of the above. A lot of code at the top of the page to do the work
(more often than not an *awful* lot of code) then a small and consistent
and singular instance of html at the bottom for the form itself.
Wonderful! Productivity through the roof on the spot :-) Then the pages
got too big but includes came along about then so then we put each block
of code functionality into an include file and things became manageable
again. You can see where this is going, the path through custom
tags/modules, then UDFs and now CFCs, all steps to make things more
manageable and more maintainable. And back then the simple idea of
putting all of the CF code at the top of the page before the HTML
started and minimal CF actually down in the HTML. Obvious now but we had
to think of it back then :-)
Now we have developers who are from a computer science education and
object orientation and the like comes naturally to them so a CFC is
kind-of normal, not some wonderful new goody to use. That's good but I
just bumped into a page here that made me almost fall off the chair in
surprise because of the dramatic style change that has almost surely
come from that difference in backgrounds, education and experience. How
about a page that had from top down a string of <cffunction> tags
defining functions unique to the page, some of which did actions, some
of which output html and then at the bottom of the page a code block
that just called the functions one at a time. Interesting technique,
very neat but why not just a page with the code and the HTML? No doubt
there was a good reason for doing that but it did dramatically show the
difference in style between myself and that coder (whoever he/she was,
absolutely no comments at the top of the page whatsoever to say what had
been done and why and by whom)
Oh well, lunch over and back to the wheel before the fun of this evening!
FYI, its an Allaire winter-weight top as compromise casual attire in a
client's premises but I have a couple of tops in the backpack, including
the "Down Under" top to embarrass Nick with tonight :-)
all in fun,
Kym K
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