yet another coldfusion blog

First, let me start off by saying I try not to write more than one "editorial" blog a month, simply because I find them distracting and less helpful than say, an actual tutorial or development experience. Being at CFUnited, however, has not only cast some illumination on perceptions (and perhaps misconceptions) I've had, but also those of people I've met. The particular one that triggers this is the "you're a Railo guy, right?" question that was directed my way last night. "No, I'm a CF guy" was my reply.

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What makes you a good ColdFusion programmer? This is a question that came up recently over a couple of beers with some CF developers I really respect. This is something I always get pretty passionate and defensive about. Our talk evolved from a discussion on the CF Community in general, and being at CFUnited right now it seemed really important to talk about.

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An important part of the Meld FormBuilder application I'm working on is the Meld DataProvider, a utility which in this case provides lists for multi-choice items for dropdowns, radioboxes, etc.  I want these lists to hold typed and validated data, and to be able to sort on the secondary columns that can be added beyond the "label", but I want to store all the values in a single database table.  The problem that arises is that we also need to be able to sort results on any of the columns, which because of their generic nature are all type "VARCHAR".

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Ever get one of those "if only it could do this" urges when usings somebody else's program, and suddenly you are rebuilding the entire thing?  I have, and because I like to tinker it usually leads to trouble.

In this case the application was Brian Rinaldi's Illudium cfcgenerator tool, a most excellent tool for converting your database tables into and MVC framework.

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I have a simple rule when it comes to writing to the database; it should be considered like spanking a child:

• Only do it when it is really, absolutely necessary
• Feel a little guilty every time you do it
• If you are doing it too often, seek professional help

Sure, this is a little tongue-in-cheek, but there is a pretty serious side to it to. The other day on Slashdot I saw a discussion on managing open file/record locks in a database, and a 'marked informative' suggested solution was to update a date field in the database every 10 seconds via Ajax, with an overall 30 second window to allow for network failures/etc.  In other words, what was proposed (and popularized) was that every active record should call home every 10 seconds merely to say somebody is looking at it.  Gads!!!!!  This would add a huge amount of wasted database processing to an application and performance drain on a grand scale (especially if it required transactions and/or write locks).

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