JohnBs personal blog

A question arose in the Adobe ColdFusion forums as to whether or not CF8 supported named attributes (dbvarname) with CFPROCPARAM. There’s been a little confusion regarding using named parameters since CF5 supported them, CF6 dropped them, CF7 didn’t include them but then hotfix 7.0.2 added support for them which was then updated 1 day later with support removed.

CF8, now using JDBC 3.0 had initial support for dbvarname in early betas but then was removed in the final release. However, you still see occasional suggestions that dbvarname may be still support, indeed - if you’ve seen any of Charlie Areharts CF8 Hidden Gems presentation he has it listed and the odd code sample that pop up in the ether eludes to it being supported so i thought I’d try it out for my self…

So, i took a really simple SP call and started playing with it;








and then modified it to use dbvarname attributes as per samples floating around…









sure enough it worked - but that’s not a real test since the procparams are still in the same order as the SP parameters - sure enough, changing them around caused the SP call to break!

So in conclusion it appears that named parameters with stored procedure calls on CF8 IS NOT SUPPORTED!

So after the disappoint of not being able to get a Chumby i was slightly cheered up by Google Apps adding IMAP to my account….small things eh?

Two years, two years I’ve been waiting to get my hands on a Chumby - i’ve made sure i was on the Insiders list to make sure I could get one as soon as possible. Reports have been cropping up that people have been receiving their invite emails to purchase one and then this morning when I checked my email I got the email!!! Wooohoo, immediately off to the store, added 1 to my cart and went to checkout….imagine my disappointment when i saw this;

Bah…..please, please Chumby Industries sort it out!

not long now and the Tiger will be changing into a Leopard.

A question for any other iPod Touch users, does your ‘25 Most Played’ playlist contain what you’d expect on your iPod Touch (1.1.1)? When i look at it in iTunes it’s correct, when i look on my Touch via iTunes devices it’s correct but on the iPod it’s completely different. I even tried deleting the smart playlist and creating it again using a different name but it doesn’t contain what i’d expect at all! Any one experiencing something similar?

I just realised I haven’t posted my final entry/notes fro the FOWA conference a couple of weekes ago yet. I’ve got some good juciy notes from the Steve Souders performance workshop so I’ll aim to get them up as soon as I can.

Look what the post man just delivered

After all conferences have normally finished, at 7:30pm a live recording of Diggnation was scheduled. I’ve never seen Diggnation before, let alone all the ‘kids’ wearing Diggnation tshirts but the auditorium was packed - several thousand people probably coming to see the recording of the show. Granted, I’ll probably subscribe because it was pretty funny but i couldn’t believe it. People were up out of their seats when it started - like a music concert! Unbelievable!

Out of sync but this session needed a posting of it’s own - a quick 35 minute session by Steve Souders (Chief Performance Yahoo!) from Yahoo about YSlow. Funnily enough I was catching up with the ColdFusion Weekly PodCast 2.26 on my commute into town on the very subject.

We’ve all seen YSlow I’m sure so don’t need to go into much detail but the short story is that our webserver performance may only account for around 5% of the total time of their ‘visit’ with other external factors coming into account - their tool YSlow highlights such things. He ran through the 14 rules/guidelines published by Yahoo - one of note was to move script files to the bottom of the page as they’d block other stuff running - don’t they need to be in the head? He also spoke about a big in Firebug on the NET tab that shows asset load responses. In a new version of YSlow (out Friday apparently) it will have a option in the options menu to patch Firebug so that the NET panel does not include locally cached objects. If you inspect a page with Firebug it will show all the objects irrespective of if they’ve come out of cache - whilst Live Headers will show the request was never made. This apparently has caused some confusion and something that Yahoo will be addressing in their next YSlow release.

And yes, even in this session someone asked what a CDN is. I’m attending a 4 hour workshop by Steve on Friday so will have much more detailed notes after that session.

Matt Mullenweg - The Architecture behind Wordpress.com

So Matt was talking about WordPress.com and how it’s become the defacto hosted blogging solution in a relatively short space of time and how they’ve structured stuff. He spoke about what he calls Matts Mini Cluster using 7 servers for load balancing, db, web servers with various Open Source tools, Pound, Wackamole and Spread for load balancing, MemCache, Apache (he said well configured) Litespeed and MySql. With MySql they’re actually using in excess of 4000 databases for their hosted solutions, geographically dispersed (all in Texas :)) in Master/Slave configurations - I need to look into this more but i guess it’s to boost performance for SQL Read/Write operations.

Heidi Pollock - Taking your Application Mobile

Now this was great - and far easier that I though it would be. Heidi has worked for Yahoo, she worked on the FIFA World Cup 06 website so know’s a thing or too and i took a heap of notes. She started by saying that people are only ever going to use your mobile app because 1. they’re bored or 2. they need to. She basically said it was a minefield when it comes to developing for the mobile web. There are in excess of 3000 phones most of which have varying browsers (some built by companies who have no idea of what makes a browser) which even differ on the same phone across providers. In the end it comes down to catering for a browser of 176px wide and 10k payloads - anything bigger can cause problems. She asked for a show of hands of WML coders (few) and said that it was best to go for the xhtml-mobile 1.0 doctype, not the 1.2 type. Tags to use are div, span, p, br, b, small, form, input, select, option, textarea, table, tr, td, img, style, class. She said avoid Lists and Select boxes (and gave the example of a drop down of countries and scrolling through 200+ countries is just not going to happen. CSS is usable but again there’s a limited range of selectors etc but even suggested as going as far as reducing element names/ids down to 1 char (if possible) to keep the file sizes small.

John Resig - Cross Platform UI

Nothing like what i expected, the guy works for Mozilla and created JQuery. But rather than talking about that talked about Javascript and Firefox. Firefox 3 is going to be supporting Js v1.8 and FF 4 will be v2 Js. He spoke of the integration of Tamarin (the Adobe JS VM donated to Mozilla) into various projects (known as the Three Monkies) along with some very interesting sounding projects for taking sites off line - Google Gears was mentioned along with Mozilla and WHATWG projects. A Question at the end of the session as to the cross paths perhaps of Adobe/Mozilla here and John answered along the lines of that Mozilla stuff will be for everyone on the web whilst AIR is purely Adobe