I often need connect to APIs. These APIs often have usage limitations. Specifically, they have rate limits. That is to say limits on the rate (frequency) with which you can use their APIs.
This means that any code that calls an API needs to know what do in the event that it is at risk of violating that Rate Limit - ideally before (and instead of) doing so.
Like a lot of developers, I we make a lot of external API calls. One thing that can come up when dealing with outside vendors is that sometimes the API connections don't work as expected. On those ocassions, the vender will ask us exactly what data we sent them.
I always want to know the answer.
I looked at
I recently covered MRECache and now I'd like to briefly cover a custom tag that is built around it.
At its heart, cf_MrECache just wraps up a block of text (HTML or whatever) that you want to cache and caches it just like cfcache, except that is uses MRECache under the hood. Of course, if that were all that it did then it would hardly be worth making in the first place.
A few (ok, ten) years ago, I needed to generically pluralize English words in ColdFusion. Also, I wanted to be able to reverse that out ("singularize" as it were). This should be a really easy problem: If it ends with an "s" then add "es"; If it ends with a "y" then ditch the "y"; Otherwise just add "s". It turns out, though, that English is delightfully complicated.
So, Pluralizer.
I created it ten years ago, and I've used a fair number of times since. It isn't complicated enough that I've needed to update it much in that time.
I avoided dealing seriously with caching for more of my programming career than I like to admit. Perhaps the old saw that "There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things." (Phil Karlton) held me back.
Beyond that, though, I think I always had a sense that I didn't like the approaches that I found.
A few years ago, however, one of my clients started looking ahead to a major increase in traffic along with an increase in complexity. So, I needed to look into caching.
Often I want to respond to events in a component, but I don't want it to need to know anything about the component that is taking action on it. This is often when I am using a generic component on my site.
The Observer pattern is perfect for this.
I didn't find an existing Observer implementation in ColdFusion that I loved and I wanted to try my hand at it, so I created Observer.cfc.
I wrote earlier about my Beany component for handling Beans (especially immutable ones) easily. I thought this time I'd just cover a few extra little features that I've added to it to make it a bit easier to use.
Despite not being a big fan of Beans generally, I do find that there are situations in which they are useful. One of those is as configuration objects to pass in to a component. I can add the data in one packaged set.
In reading about Clojure recently, one of the big advantages of Clojure is immutable variables. I wouldn't want immutable variables in ColdFusion all of the time, but it would be really nice sometimes.
OK. I am finally going to bite the bullet and start using Git. This has been on my to do list for a white, but I haven't found the time. So, instead of finding the time I am just going to move open source projects that are currently on subversion over to github.
My plan is that I will then learn Git by necessity. We'll see how that works. It is a little scary to just jump in like this, but I have yet to just "dip my toes in the water" so this seems the best way.
That being said, if anyone has any suggestions for best ways to learn Git as I go or tools I can use to make this easier, I am eager to hear about them.
I have a Git repository set up for the com.sebtools package and for my Neptune framework already. More coming very soon.
Here's to jumping in with both feet! I'll try to blog about my progress.
One thing that I run into frequently in my programming life is the desire to schedule events. I like CFSCHEDULE, but by iteself it has a few limitations that I don't like. It is a bit limited in the intervals available and I have to have an HTTP page set up for it.
What I want is the ability to schedule a CFC method to be run directly from that CFC. Fortunately, Scheduler.cfc allows me to do just that. Scheduler.cfc itself still requires a scheduled task to run it. Scheduler.cfc also has the ability to report data about the scheduled tasks that it has run, but (as it is just a CFC) it doesn't have a UI to report that data.
The Scheduler program solves both of those. It is essentially a wrapper for Scheduler.cfc. When the program is installed (copying it to a folder after installing Neptune), it automatically creates a "/schedule.cfm" and creates a ColdFusion scheduled task to execute it every 15 minutes (you can, of course change that). It also creates a page that reports all of the scheduled tasks running on the system as well as how long they execute (in seconds) on average, as well as the ability to see details of every time that they have run.
This information can be invaluable if you are trouble-shooting a scheduled task.
