A little WTF from academia

Have a look at this:

It's from a genome sequencing project from one of my CS classes. Do you notice anything odd about this database---perhaps a bit WTF-ish?

I Love Ubuntu

I am curious by nature, and I'm always looking to see whether there's something better over the horizon. I installed Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron the day after it was released, and I was impressed. But I knew there were other fine Linux distros out there, like Fedora 9, OpenSUSE, Arch, and others.

Recently I've tried a few of these on my laptop, but I invariably return to Ubuntu Hardy Heron.

Why? Here:

1. It just works. You put the CD in, run the installer, and, after answering a few questions, you get a nice, working Linux system that supports your hardware and is ready to go. No extra configuration, no tweaking of the UI (do you hear me, Foresight?), the drivers are loaded, and everything's happy.
2. The default install is excellent. In the installer, you don't pick packages to install. Instead, you get a default installation, which includes Firefox, Evolution (which I actually could do without), the OpenOffice core, Gnome, and common Gnome apps. That's fine with me. Then, once the system is installed, I can pick the packages I want—Vim, Emacs, Eclipse, Thunderbird, and so on.
3. The package repositories are vast and up-to-date. Want to install Orpie without building it from source? It's available on a few other systems, but I've found that only Ubuntu has version 1.5.0 in the repos. If I want it, chances are high that it's already in Ubuntu's repos. Want to install Emacs 23, which uses Xft font rendering? Install the emacs-snapshot package.
4. It's not paranoid about "non-free" software. Some Linux users might call this a bad thing, but when I need an MP3 codec, I really don't want to have to jump through hoops to get it. Yes, Ubuntu will warn you when you're about to install these, but they're in the repos, and you can just get them. Same with Sun's JDK. For most purposes, I really don't care whether it's "free-as-in-speech" or not.

Those are the four main reasons I like Ubuntu. At this point in the world of Linux distros, if Linux is ever to make any substantial gains into the desktop market, it will be Ubuntu that does it.

Vim tip

In Emacs, you can use C-x-right or C-x-left to switch between buffers. Vim has the commands :bnext and :bprevious which do the same thing, which can be shortened to :bn and :bp. But with these lines in your .vimrc file:

map <C-Tab> :bn <CR>
map <C-S-Tab> :bp <CR>

you can use ctrl+tab and ctrl+shift+tab to switch between buffers. Nifty, eh?

Or better yet, how about this:

map <silent> <C-Tab> :bn! <CR>
map <silent> <C-S-Tab> :bp! <CR>


Amazon SQS CFC

I've just published the first version of a ColdFusion component for the Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS). The SQS CFC uses mostly the query interface to SQS' API, except for the sendMessage method, which uses REST. This is because the query interface version of sendMessage only allows messages with a maximum size of only 8 KB, whereas the REST interface allows messages up to the full 256 KB limit.

A known issue exists with the addGrant method, which, as of 20 Jun 2007, is returning "Service Unavailable."

It's now available at Google Code. Just download the zip file and insert your Amazon Web Services Access Key ID and Secret Access Key into index.cfm, and start queuing.

Amazon SQS CFC - Google Code

Technorati tags: amazon, sqs, simple queue service, coldfusion, cf, cfc, web services, web development

I shall never use Eclipse again

Today, while working on a snazzy ColdFusion component I've been writing for the Amazon SQS API, my IDE, Eclipse, behaved erratically: first, when trying to save the latest changes to the CFC, Eclipse paused for several seconds, and then finally saved the file. Then I continued making changes, and tried to save again. Another pause, and then Eclipse said, "This file has changed outside in the filesystem. Want to reload it?" I elected to reload it, which I now know was not the right thing to do, because I got a file that was zero bytes in size! Eclipse had just destroyed my source file!

I'm sorry, but I can't have that--not while working on serious code. I am furious.

A ColdFusion IDE! A ColdFusion IDE! My kingdom for a ColdFusion IDE!

I shall never use Eclipse again.

An Epiphany: Application.cfc

While working on a project at work, I dumped the Application scope to see what was in it. Then, on a lark, I dumped the This scope to see what would happen. To my surprise, it dumped Application.cfc! Then it occurred to me—Application.cfc really represents the entire application. You never leave its scope; you can always access its methods and members. In essence, each page you access is "inside" Application.cfc. Or, in other words, every page in an application is encapsulated within Application.cfc.

I liked Application.cfc and its power and elegance before, but I love them even more now.

Sorry Ben, But I Hate Dreamweaver

I know that this statement by Ben Forta in support of Dreamweaver is a bit old, but you would think that Dreamweaver would only have improved since then. It hasn't.

Dreamweaver Sucks, Pure and Simple

Adobe Dreamweaver has some nice features, yes—chief among them being support for autocompletion of ColdFusion code, and pretty good syntax highlighting. Of course it has word wrap (cough—Eclipse), as one would expect it to, and it has a somewhat interesting RDS interface to your ColdFusion server, so that you can browse data sources and components, including SOAP web services.

It's not so much the feature set, you see, that has me not so eager to use Dreamweaver. It's the user experience. Call me a weirdo, but user experience is important to me. Dreamweaver is sluggish, sometimes unresponsive, and it is bloated. It's a WYSIWYG HTML editor that's trying to be an IDE, and, while it has nice IDE-like features, it just doesn't cut the mustard for serious CF application development.

But what are the alternatives? Here are the ones I know of:

• CFEclipse: Not too shabby, but nevertheless out of the question because of the Eclipse Team's recalcitrant refusal to support word wrapping. Also suffers somewhat from bloat like Dreamweaver.
• jEdit: No autocompletion. Written with Java and Swing, so it's not exactly the most resource-friendly app.
• Vim: A killer text editor, but it has no autocompletion. (And it's not really an IDE.) Syntax highlighting for ColdFusion is not differentiated from HTML highlighting, which is obviously important.
• CF Studio: Once the preferred ColdFusion IDE, now supplanted by Dreamweaver (and perhaps CFEclipse), its development ceased years ago.
• PrimalScript: No word wrap, and it costs something like $140 for a license.
• TextMate: Has autocompletion—sort of, but it exists solely on the Mac.
• Intype or e: Not really available yet, and they're not really IDEs either, but when they become available, they will have on Windows much of the functionality of TextMate on the Mac.

So, even though I hate Dreamweaver, it's the best ColdFusion IDE available today. But that's not good enough.

The Solution

We need a new IDE, and that's all there is to it. ASP.NET developers get to use Visual Web Developer and Visual Studio, J2EE developers have Eclipse and NetBeans and IntelliJ IDEA. We need an IDE for ColdFusion like those, and we should accept nothing less.

Proposed Features

A ColdFusion IDE should have or do the following:

• Word wrap (I hate to have to state this, but Eclipse doesn't have this. It's like demanding that a toilet have water in it, or that a CD player support stereo sound.)
• Auto-completion like Visual Studio (IntelliSense), NetBeans and Eclipse
• Support highlighting and auto-completion for CFML, (X)HTML, XML, Javascript (including JSON), CSS and SQL
• Component and web service introspection
• Datasource browsing
• Templates (perhaps using the excellent Apache Velocity templating engine) and snippets
• Parsing of included files, components, custom tags and web service interfaces so that auto-completion works with them as well
• Be framework-friendly, but framework-agnostic
• Have a responsive interface (unlike Dreamweaver)
• A scripting interface for automation
• Intelligent, automated deployment
• Support for Subversion or the RCS of your choice
• Wake me up in the morning to the gentle strains of a Schubert piano trio

(I'm kidding about that last one.) I could probably think of more features that I'd like if I had the time right now. I admit that the more features it has, the less likely it will not be bloated and sluggish like Dreamweaver. Perhaps two editions could be made, an Express version and a Professional version, or something.

I'd make an IDE if I had the time. Is anyone else interested in this?

Technorati tags: dreamweaver, adobe, coldfusion, web development