Thought Delimited

If you've been following my updates on Twitter, you know that I was at the CFUnited conference last week. I didn't post anything during the conference because, quite frankly, I didn't set aside any time to do so, and there was lot going on most of the time.

I'm not going to try and sum up everything that was presented at the conference: I'm not sure any one person can. But there were a number of news items and developments that came about either just before the conference or during the conference that I thought were worth pointing out:

• ColdFusion 9 in the Cloud: In the opening CFUnited keynote, Ben Forta and the Adobe team announced that ColdFusion 9 would include licensing options for running ColdFusion in cloud environments, and that they would specifically support the use of ColdFusion 9 on Amazon's EC2 cloud environment. Details (sparse though they are) can be found on Ben's blog post on the subject. Though I'm not a fan boy of cloud computing, having this option is important for ColdFusion developers who have an idea for a high-traffic web application but don't have the money to invest in their own server farm.
  
  
• 4CFF: 4CFF is the acronym for the For ColdFusion Foundation, a new non-profit foundations founded by several member of the CF community with the goal of providing assistance and resources to ColdFusion open-source projects and establishing a "professional membership society for the ColdFusion Community at large." I missed their unofficial announcement/presentation, so I can't provide any information about how they plan to move forward with their goals, but I think the idea of having a resource where CF programmers can get help with the non-programming challenges involved in starting and maintaining an open-source project is a good one.
  
  
• Framework updates/changes: The final, production version of Model-Glue 3.0 (Gesture) was released just prior to the conference, while the beta release of ColdBox 3.0 was announced on the first day of the conference. But perhaps the most dramatic framework announcement was that Adam Haskell, previously the lead developer for the Fusebox framework, was going to resign from that role and lead the development of a new and separate version of Fusebox called FuseNG (Fusebox Next Generation), citing irreconcilable difference between himself and TeraTech, the Maryland-based CF development/training shop that currently controls the domain name and source code behind Fusebox. As a developer who uses Fusebox, I'm curious to see how this decision will play out. The current version of Fusebox is a very effective, usable, and mature framework, but Adam's a smart guy and it'll be interesting to see what he and the other developers involved in FuseNG will come up with.
  
  
• The Merlin Manager beta: The final event on Friday at the conference was the Demo Derby, where developers got several minutes to show off a project of theirs. While all of the presentations were noteworthy (and in two instances quite humorous), the one I thought really needed to be brought to the attention of the CF community as a whole was John Mason's Merlin Manager. One of the announcements regarding ColdFusion 9 was that it would provide an AIR-powered desktop application that would let ColdFusion server administrators manage and compare multiple ColdFusion server instances from one dashboard. John's Merlin Manager is also an AIR-powered CF server manager, but it's built to work with ColdFusion 7 and 8 servers. He demonstrated how his app provided real-time status information for a server, how it let you store current server settings as a snapshot prior to making a settings change, and that it could compare the settings between two different servers, highlighting where the settings differed. Even though the project is still in beta, it looked very feature-complete and could be of real benefit to those CF shops that won't be upgrading to CF 9 anytime soon. John is looking for volunteers to participate in evaluating the beta: if you're interested, visit http://www.merlinmanager.com/ to sign up.

As for the conference as a whole, I have to echo everyone who's already commented about it on their blogs and via Twitter: it was an excellent, informative, and fun conference, the best I've ever attended. And that statement is coming from someone who, for various personal and professional reasons, wasn't all that worked up about attending. Everyone involved in the planning and execution of the conferences, especially the folks from Stellr and those presenters who stepped up to fill in for last-minute speaker cancellations (all the presenters deserve credit, but those folks especially) should be proud of the work they did.

For those folks who weren't able to attend, be aware that a number of the presenters will be posting their presentations online, either on their own blogs, SlideSix, or both, so keep an eye out for announcements about those (and note that some of those posting and announcements were made last week during the conference itself).

One of my favorite podcasts is Buzz Out Loud, a weekday live video stream and podcast from CNET.com that reports, analyzes, and banters about the tech news of the day. This past week, they conducted an interview with Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra, which I just finished listening to today.

The entire interview was quite interesting, but there were two particular discussions that struck me.

The first one was about broadband penetration: the Buzz Out Loud podcasters wanted to know what plans, if any, were being made to promote the rollout of broadband to those areas where such service was limited or unavailable. Chopra said that they hoped to address that issue with a national broadband plan due to be revealed in February 2010, but he said that his personal focus was more on encouraging innovation in developing applications that would further the adoption and development of a robust broadband infrastructure. In other words, it's not just about building the infrastructure for people, businesses, and government organizations to have, but creating compelling applications of that infrastructure that bring people on board and give them more reasons for wanting ubiquitous Internet access.

As web/Internet application developers, we tend to think of broadband, high bandwith, and Internet access as the infrastructure that allows us to build robust applications. It's kind of exciting to look at it the other way around, that creating useful, effective, compelling applications that people want (or perhaps even need) could promote and justify the expanse of the broadband infrastructure.

The second discussion was in response to a viewer question about the use of open source software within government agencies (SUSE and RedHat were specifically mentioned). Chopra said that that was really in the federal CIO's arena of concern, but that he personally was more interested in promoting the principles of "open collaboration" and the "sharing of intellectual property as we build value." He went on to explain that what he meant by that was that he didn't care so much if an application built for the government was built on a proprietary platform so long as that application became shared intellectual property between government agencies. That again was another point that I hadn't heard anyone make before.

I'd encourage anyone who has an interest in how the federal government hopes to leverage technology to the country's advantage to listen to this podcast episode. You can watch the video version or listen to the audio version, either streaming or as a download, at the following address:

http://www.cnet.com/8301-19709_1-10302978-10.html?tag=mncol;title

Before I went on vacation last week, I read a blog post by Ben Nadel where he demonstrated code for stepping through the search path of a jQuery selector in order to debug the selector. As Ben pointed out, if you make a mistake in your selector, it will fail silently, making it hard to figure out exactly where you went wrong.

In the comments to the blog post, Shayne Sweeny pointed out that you can run jQuery commands directly from the blue command prompt in the Console view of the Firefox Firebug plugin, like so:

I like this technique because it lets me write any jQuery code I want (selectors don't usually give me problems, it's the DOM traversing that sometimes trips me up), and I can use it on any of my pages that use the jQuery library without adding extra code to the page.

But what if you're trying to troubleshoot a jQuery command in a browser other than Firefox (for some reason)?  Well, I did a bit of tinkering and came up with a bookmarklet that does something similar.  If you're not familiar with bookmarklets, they are bookmarks you can add to your browser's bookmark collection that run JavaScript code instead of opening up a different web page.

The bookmarklet I created adds a <div> at the top of the page with a text input and three buttons.  Any jQuery command entered into the text box will be executed on the page and then recorded below the text box for reference.  Here's a screenshot of it in action in Opera:

It works in Opera, Safari, and Chrome:  I couldn't get it to work in IE 7 (surprise, surprise).

To use it, all you have to do is go into whatever browser you want to use it with and create a bookmark that has the following code in place of a normal bookmark URL:

javascript:var%20d=%20document.createElement("div");d.style.width="100%;";d.style.border="1px%20solid%20#ccc";d.style.margin="5px%200px;";d.style.padding="7px";d.id="jqtD";var%20t=%20document.createElement("input");t.type="text";t.id="jqtT";t.size="80";var%20b=%20document.createElement("input");b.type=%20"button";b.id="jqtB";b.value="Execute";var%20c=%20document.createElement("input");c.type="button";c.id="jqtC";c.value="Clear";var%20s=%20document.createElement("input");s.type="button";s.id="jqtS";s.value="Close";var%20bd=document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0];%20b.appendChild(d);var%20frst=%20bd.firstChild;bd.insertBefore(d,frst);d.appendChild(t);d.appendChild(b);d.appendChild(c);d.appendChild(s);jqtEvts();function%20jqtEvts()%20{$("#jqtB").click(function()%20{var%20tst=%20$(this).prev().val();eval(tst);$("#jqtD").append("<br%20/>"+tst);});$("#jqtC").click(function()%20{$(this).siblings("input[type='text']").val("");});
$("#jqtS").click(function()%20{$("#jqtD").remove();});}

...Just make sure to remove any spaces or line breaks that may have been introduced during the copy and paste process.

Last year I wrote a ColdFusion application that included a page where an editor could take a list of short news abstracts and manipulate them (reorder them, place them in categories, add divider lines, create anchor links to highlighted stories, etc.) using a number of jQuery-powered JavaScript functions. It gives them a lot of control over the final layout, and they're pretty happy about it.

However, there have been occasions when this layout tool doesn't work at all. Why? Unclosed HTML tags in the abstract data.

The page they use to enter the news abstracts is comprised of several plain HTML text fields, a set of category checkboxes and two WYSIWYG textarea boxes (powered by JavaScript) for the abstract itself. I gave them the WYSIWYG boxes because I knew they would want to be able to do some basic HTML formatting on the abstract text (boldface, italics, etc.), and the WYSIWYG editors do produce solid, clean HTML.

What they do that gets them in trouble is they enter HTML tags (usually for italics) into the title form field, which is a normal HTML text field. Every once in awhile, they forget the closing tag or maybe just an angle bracket...the abstract itself saves correctly but when they get to the layout tool, that unclosed HTML tag messes up the entire DOM structure the layout tool is programmed to manipulate, rendering it non-functional.

They've now learned that when the header text of the various layout tools appears in italics, that usually means they've got an unclosed italics tag that needs fixing. It's easy enough to fix once they figure out which news item is responsible.

So a word of warning: if your JavaScript functions are designed to act upon HTML code that you yourself don't have complete control over (or the ability to make sure the HTML is clean and proper), consider the possibility that your JavaScript may end up breaking due to the content.

One of my clients contacted me yesterday to tell me that there was a problem with reading their RSS feed in Safari (and only in Safari).

Over the next hour or so, I learned quite a bit about how the current version of Safari (3.2.1 as of this writing) handles RSS:

• By default, Safari is configured to open up your default e-mail client to handle/read RSS feeds, resulting in a lot of head-scratching by your truly when I tried to navigate to the feed and ended up with a "Compose New Message" window in Thunderbird. While a lot of people do prefer the RSS-reading capabilities of their mail client over what the browser does with feeds, make that decision for the user is a questionable call on Apple's part, and some sort of alert/notice that this was the deal would have been nice.

• A lot of browsers these days will apply a style to the RSS feed XML (probably using some sort of built-in XSL, I'm guessing) prior to display so that it's more human-readable and the hyperlinks for each news item are clickable. But you can still view the raw XML using the "View Source" option of the browser. Safari, on the other hand, transforms the feed into an HTML file with JavaScript, leaving no trace of the original XML. Again, another somewhat presumptuous decision by Apple to buck convention in order to enhance the user experience.

...Those two issues are annoyances rather than bugs. The problem affecting my client's RSS feed, however, is a bug in regards to how Safari is transforming the RSS data before displaying it to the user.

Each news item in an RSS feed can contain a number of elements/nodes, two of which are the <link> and <guid> elements. The <link> element is meant to contain the URL where the reader can access the full text of the item. The <guid> element contains a string that uniquely identifies that RSS feed item within the feed (like a primary key in a database).

If the <guid> element contains the "isPermaLink" attribute and that attribute value is set to "true", then that indicates that the <guid> element also contains a URL (a permanent one) to the full text of the item (one that might be different from the URL in the <link> element), and an RSS client could legitimately used the URL in the <guid> as the link to the story instead.

What I discovered, though, was that Safari was creating the hyperlink for each news item by combining the value of the <link> element in the <channel> node of the RSS feed with the value of the <guid> element of each item (which was simply a unique numeric value), even though the <guid> elements did NOT contain the "isPermaLink" parameter. So instead of using the value of the <link> element of each item as per the RSS specs, Safari ended up creating non-existent URLs.

The solution, of course, was simple: I just put the URL for each news item in the <guid> element as well as the <link> element. Point is, I shouldn't have had to.

Once I applied the solution, I did some searching to find out if this is a known problem that was being worked on. I found one mention of it in a generic tech support forum post published in 2008, so it looks like the problem has existed for awhile but hasn't gotten much attention (probably because most people read RSS feeds through actual RSS clients). I used Safari's built-in bug report mechanism to report it to Apple, but I don't hold out much hope for that having an impact.

Still, I thought it worth a post, on the off-chance this information might help someone else.