Digital Ninja

Thoughts while performing an upgrade while at the office in the late hours.

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Despite having worked with ColdFusion for some years now, I'm finding myself horrible at administering the server these days. Back in 5.0 and 6.0 I was pretty good at it and I knew what I was doing. But it's been so busy in the development world since then that I haven't lifted my head out of the code to soak up all the nuances that 7.0 and now 8.0 have brought to the table.

So far today the development server has hung up twice, both times with ColdFusion consuming over 640MB of memory. The first time it heeded a service shut down command. The second time I had to "End Process Tree" from the task manager. This isn't looking good, as I don't know what's causing it. Everyone is at lunch for crying out loud!

I rebooted the server and now I'm going to look into some of the code that I know is being run today on it. We'll see what that yields.

I've decided to fully replace my Blogger (Google) blog with Mango Blog. It's easy to configure, use, and it's free under the Apache license. Thanks, Mango Blog!

So far I've only hand-imported this year's posts. Luckily (I suppose) I'm not a heavy blogger, else that would have become a huge ordeal. I will definitely get to moving those other posts over here as soon as I have another small chunk of time. As I consider it, I shouldn't have used the time I did. I was actually over at Mark Drew's Blog and took a fancy to it. He's also using Mango.

If you have a ColdFusion server and want an easy to use, quick to setup blog, I highly recommend Mango!

It seems at the office that we've always done things a little bit differently. I mean, who doesn't? It makes perfect sense that any business would, after time and some isolation, start to invent their own wheel, or set of wheels. There was a time a year or so ago that I was starting to think that our strange little habits were going to have to give way to the powerful trends in the community.

Lately, however, I'm starting to feel a different direction. We - as a team - have come up with some very interesting innovations that have enhanced our "habits" and they are now forming into their very own design pattern. Complete with rules, consistencies, and niceties. I've become rather proud of it, in fact!

The only concerns I have are two fold. The first is whether or not we have the time to train up new hires as the system becomes more and more sophisticated. It's certainly getting to the point where you've pretty much got to be a seasoned ColdFusion developer with advanced component authoring under your belt, as well as some OOP chops if you want to do any architecting or enhancing to the API. The other concern I have is that the deep wealth of community tools and automation utilities such as code generators, etc. are not going to work for us. This is very unfortunate, because we're having to hand code our beans, which is somewhat archaic. Of course, that's only going to happen for as long as it takes me or someone else on the team to write some of our own generation tools.

So as you can see there is something of a conundrum here. We could embrace our own creativity and trod along down this exciting interesting path we're on, or we could wipe everything off the table and go the DAO or Active Record route. Doing that invalidates years of work, and would make the very next project a complete departure in approach from anything we've done before, rather than a single step or two farther down this path of evolution I feel we're walking.

Decisions decisions...