With the new year fast approaching my mind turns to what's coming up in the next year.

Centaur
Centaur is slated to be released in 2009 as ColdFusion 9. I'm confident it will be. ORM and the IDE will be the most talked about features. Although ORM is talked about, it will be slow to move in to the mainstream of CF development. Considering the time it took to get CFC's to be widely adopted, I think ORM will be what's hot in 2010 but bleeding edge in 2009.

The IDE will be a big seller, and I mean seller. I think the IDE will be a for purchase and stand-alone product. I think there will be a lot of people developing on Bolt and Centaur for production ColdFusion 8 applications for some time to come.

ColdFusion Development
Apple will continue to gain market share among CF developers. Ubuntu boxes will also proliferate as Vista users with regrets can't justify new hardware purchases but tire of Vista's drawbacks.

Web Development in General
Rails and Merb joining together will cause the Ruby development community to get a major boost. The meme that "rails is cool, but not ready for enterprise" will really get challenged.

Technology in General
There will be an increase in problems due to companies putting off equipment upgrades in an attempt to cut costs. I think companies will continue to push more hardware outsourcing regardless if they experience a cost-cutting driven failure or not.

That's all I have for now, if I think of more I'll add...

One of questions I always get when talking about code reviews, formal or otherwise, is "What do you think about automatic code review software like CodeCop or varScoper?"

First off I'll say, I love and use varScoper. Second, I like the idea of CodeCop, but I've never been good enough at writing regular expressions to craft my own rules well enough to use it. Those points being said, as great as these tools are, they do not even come close to eliminating the need for formal code reviews.

Automatic testers are great at finding small discreet known issues:

• Did you var scope every variable in ever function?
• Did you make sure not to use relative url's in cfschedule?
• Did you use cfqueryparam on all of your user input driven queries?

But they can't figure out bigger picture issues like:

• Is this function named "computeCosine" actually returning the sine?
• Is there sufficient validation occurring on form posts before they are being processed?
• Is this function doing something that a built in function could be doing better?

In addition to the hard to compute issues above, there are the unknowns. Until someone discovered there was an issue with using relative url's in cfschedule there was no rule written in the code review tool. It takes human eyes to discover these issues, either during a review, or during bug fixing. Only after they are discovered can they be codified.

To put more succinctly and in a metaphorical manner:

Automatic code review tools are spell checkers. Formal code reviewers are editors. Spell checkers and even grammar checkers don't prevent you from writing perfectly spelled and constructed crap. You need an editor to prevent that. Just as code review tools don't prevent you from writing crap code that adheres to all of their rules.

So use automatic tools before a formal code review, just like you spell check an email before you send it out. But don't rely on an automatic tool as your last line of oversight.

We started using Unfuddle.com to be our Subversion, bug tracking, and project management solution a few months back. As time has gone on I've become to rely on it heavily. Nothing illustrates that quite as much as the feeling you get when it isn't accessible anymore.

You see my business office changed their credit card info. They gave me access to their new card and a typed its numbers into Unfuddle.com's automatic biller. When I did that, I must have transposed a few numbers. Yesterday was the day that automatic billing takes place. We were charged, the charge failed, and as such due to a bug in their system our quota was lowered to its free level (200MB) instead of our actual quota (10GB.) Once you go over quota, they lock down your account to prevent subsequent commits and updates. I'm sure they do this to prevent runaway processes from going over quota and causing problems. It also has the effect of bringing everything to a grinding halt.

I fixed the credit card, and got confirmation from the system that I had entered it correctly this time. But still no commits.

I sent in a support email, as that is their only means of support contact. But my boss started circling asking when he would be able to commit again. He started talking faster, and faster, which made it clear that he was getting agitated by the possibility of problems publishing his application for an important demo this morning.

So I started searching through previous correspondence with support to see if they had a phone number in their signature. Lo and behold, one support technician had his mobile phone in his signature. At this point I'm torn: I don't want to bother this guy on his mobile; but I didn't want my boss to become John Moschitta. Finally after looking up the area code and finding out the guy was in Hawaii, I decided that if he got to be a cool web 2.0 programmer and live in Hawaii then I was going to not feel too bad about calling him on his mobile.

He was extremely cool about being bothered (he was in fact not in the office that day). But I explained the situation, and told I would accept being shunted to another support person (as he was out of the office,) but he would have none of it and within literally 3 minutes of talking to him, we were happily unfuddling again. He also said he would look into the bug that caused us to not have the customary 2 week compliance period.

I'm already a pretty pleased customer but this turned me into a passionate customer. That's the sort of competent, fast response you wish your vendors would give every time.

In short, Unfuddle.com rocks.

I've had a reoccurring problem, and I'm blogging it for my memory's sake.

The other day, I had an issue where a folder of mine was not being checked into Subversion via the Subversive plugin for Eclipse. The folder had an exclamation mark and refused to be committed. I couldn't find any reference to what the exclamation mark meant. SVN cleanup didn't work. On a lark, I started looking though the svn metadata in the .svn folder and saw that the metadata was pointing to the wrong repository. It then hit me what had happened.

I had started this project from scratch, but was grabbing files from other projects. I only grabbed only one folder, the folder containing the error handling templates; I just copied the folder via Eclipse from the original version controlled project to my new one. When you do this Eclipse copies not just the visible files but also the .svn metadata. Because of this when I went to commit Subversion could not reconcile that folder to the proper location and through errors.

• To fix this:
  • delete the .svn subfolder in the folder in question and any subfolders
  • Then check in the folder again it should prompt you to add the files to the repository
• To prevent this:
  • Don't copy version controlled folders between projects in Eclipse
  • Create a mirrored folder structure
  • Copy files into new folder structure
• A better way to prevent this:
  • Encapsulate and consolidate your code such that you don't create the need to copy files between projects

Hope this helps someone else out there.