Entries tagged "software"

There have been releases of the software on Sorcerer's Isle, mostly to update URLs and fix the lack of documentation in the download packages.

The reason for the URL changes is the migration of repositories from GitHub onto my own server, details of which will follow this quick summary of the releases.

If you want more details on the releases, read the full version of this post, but in summary...

• Lucee on Jetty is now at v0.7 and both Jetty 9.4.44 and Jetty 10.0.7 have been bundled with Lucee 5.3.8

• cfPassphrase had been sitting on rc0.2 for longer than necessary and was promoted to v0.2 - there are no code changes - no need to update current projects.

• QueryParam Scanner v0.8 has been formally merged/released - again, no code changes from rc0.8, just another case of life getting in the way at the time when this should have otherwise happened.

• cfRegex v0.1.003 has been re-released as v0.3 to keep versioning consistent amongst projects, and actually has its own repository now, along with simplified packages and documentation.

• Scatter v0.1.1 does nothing more than add documentation and update the repository URL, so again nothing to update for existing projects.

Why

So that's the quick overview, but why? The primary reason for all of these releases was to change their repository URLs, from https://github.com/boughtonp/[reponame] to https://code.sorcerersisle.com/[reponame].

This is not a total move away from GitHub - it is still used for issue tracking (for the time being), and I'll most likely still push code there when full releases are made - but it will only be a secondary source/mirror.

The motivation for doing this is to reduce dependency on centralised proprietary services, and removing the unwanted requirement to have JavaScript enabled.

This move would have happened a great deal sooner, but when I looked into the various Git repository browsers available, I found a lot of bloated software with features I neither needed nor wanted, hundreds of megabytes of code and dependencies, no ability to meaningfully change how it looks, and so on.

Long story short: irritated by how everything sucked, whilst also looking for a decent project to extend my Python skills, I created a lightweight and themeable Git repository browser.

GitFrit

GitFrit is capable of running on CentOS 7, only needing Python 3.6 (or newer) and Git 2.24 (or newer). The source code is currently ~0.5MB (half of that is the included templating library, which I'd like to streamline).

GitFrit is tiny in comparison to almost everything else available - even git-web with ~0.3MB of source is only slightly smaller, and that has its markup intertwined with Perl, preventing it from being themeable.

GitFrit is not quite ready for release yet - I took shortcuts to get it up onto Sorcerer's Isle sooner, and those now need to be cleaned up into configuration options, all of which needs to be documented, plus there's a couple more features I'd like it to have first.

When those changes (and thus a release) will happen is uncertain - I need to shift focus back onto other priorities, and unless there's significant interest in GitFrit, it may take me a while to get back to it and spend the time to make it publicly available.

If you are interested, do send me an email so I can let you know when it's ready.

Scatter is a JavaScript library for randomly arranging HTML elements within a containing element. It is deliberately lightweight, easy to integrate, and without dependencies.

The initial script was written to provide a scattered polaroid effect for an in-page gallery, as a reaction to the complexity found in a couple of existing libraries - both of those other libraries expected JSON files containing the image URLs, which was parsed and iterated through to generate specific markup, and neither of the libraries could be easily modified to take the simpler and more flexible approach of being pointed at existing markup.

Thus, the script that evolved into Scatter was created, with a focus on providing an easy-to-integrate and configurable scattering effect with a clean core script - i.e. following the philosophy of doing one thing well, and also making it easy for others to understand (and extend if needed).

Scatter does not convert JSON to HTML for you - that's a distinct task from randomly arranging HTML elements - but it will work whether your HTML is static or dynamic, and it does not limit you to images styled as polaroids.

The versatility is demonstrated within the Scatter documentation, where a handful of examples show how it can be used to achieve vastly different effects.

Scatter does not require any external libraries, it's a single ~12KB file (~3KB compressed) and will run in any browser released in the past five years (earlier browsers will work with appropriate polyfills, available either from MDN or backwards compatibility libraries).

If you find any issues, or you have a need that Scatter almost-but-not-quite meets, feel free to either raise an issue or get in touch directly to discuss further.

Lucee on Jetty bundles the Jetty server with the Lucee CFML engine, cleanly configured using the home/base functionality in Jetty 9, and extensively documented.

The main aim is to provide a Lucee package that is a simple unzip-and-run to get started, whilst providing a fully functional and capable web server, and also making it clear how everything works to allow it to be adapted as needed.

This first release is v0.5 because I don't consider it sufficiently complete yet - it all works fine, but doesn't yet contain everything I feel it should - for example, HTTPS has not been configured and documented, and whilst Jetty itself does support HTTPS and there's nothing stopping anyone consulting the Jetty docs and setting it up, this project is about reducing that work.

So for development use it's fine, if you don't need HTTPS or are willing to configure it yourself, go ahead - otherwise I hope to get what I consider a complete v1.0 ready as soon as time permits, but didn't want to delay releasing what I've done so far.

Downloads are available from the Lucee on Jetty project page; there's a documentation wiki at GitHub, and the template for building bundles in the GitHub repo .

As ever, I welcome any feedback or questions you might have - please use the issue tracker.

Lucee is the best CFML engine.

Nine years ago I began a blog article with a similar claim, and set out to explain why Railo was at that time the best CFML engine. Well the simplest proof of Lucee taking the crown is that Lucee is a fork of Railo by its original creator, Michael Offner.

The thing that made Railo great and that Lucee will be taking further is in being a CFML engine written for developers. That is to say, with features added through developers saying "I need feature X to do my job better" - and specifically not via vague ideas decided on by product managers getting feedback from non-technical clients who say "we need to do mobile" and then having a bunch of disconnected non-programmers come up with a horrendously buggy and useless mess called cfclient. Eugh!

Good programmers already know what tools they need to achieve certain tasks, and if those tools don't exist or aren't good enough, they need the ability to create/improve them - that is what Micha gave us with Railo, and Lucee promises to take this further - to make it even easier for the developer community to adapt it to their needs.

Bering a fork, Lucee continues the versioning from Railo, launching tonight with Lucee 4.5 available already, and an excellent Lucee 5 just around the corner.

Why Not Railo?

Many will be wondering why fork Railo, instead of working on what was there, and the best way to answer that is simply to refer to what Brad Wood has already written on the Railo mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/railo/B_1S3WzVPXY/hlIeZDE1u98J

To re-iterate the key points: this is the original Railo developer, taking the Railo source code, and refreshing the project. Don't mistake for division what is actually an inclusive evolution, and importantly: a sign of exciting things to come!

Lucee 5

With the next release, Lucee will bring incredible flexibility to CFML and JVM developers through a couple of key technologies.

OSGi is a modular platform for the JVM which allows only the necessary libraries to be loaded. So if, for example, you don't use Hibernate, it doesn't get included and wont add any overhead. Railo was already lightweight, and Lucee with OSGi will take this even further.

JSR223 or "Scripting for the Java Platform" is a standard for embedding different languages on the JVM, and what this means is being able to use Lucee to write CFML in far more places than before. A good example is Ant build scripts - doing certain things with Ant can be awkward and convoluted and Lucee 5 will allow embedding CFML which makes those same tasks trivial.

Together these bring some great opportunies, and this is only the beginning...

More Info

I've tried to avoid simply parrotting what others have already written, so to get further details on Lucee's launch and future you should definitely check out Mark Drew's blog post, Adam Cameron's blog post, the thread started by Igal on the Railo list, and of course the official Lucee website: lucee.org.

The release candidate for the next version of QueryParam Scanner is available on GitHub.

So what's changed?

Well it now runs on FW/1 rather than Fusebox, and the UI has a new theme - the previous gold/beige is gone, and in its place is a theme based on a "new" logo which I've actually had sitting around for several years. There's CSS used that will require a modern browser - FF4 and IE9 both work, but no guarantees for anything older.

Functionality-wise there's a couple of fixes: an error is now thrown when a directory doesn't exist (previous behaviour was to return 0 matches in 0 files), and the IDs returned in data structures are now content-based hashes (previously they were ever-changing UUIDs). Oh, and the IDs are now displayed with the HTML results, in preparation for future functionality that'll potentially use them.

A new experimental (i.e. buggy) feature has been added to seperate the query code into SELECT/FROM/WHERE/etc parts, when returning data structures. This may help with post-processing the data, but has known flaws so use with care. (The existing ORDER BY functionality has also been marked as experimental to similarly indicate that it's not perfect.)

There's a minor change in that relative paths are officially not supported - the UI always stated absolute paths or mappings were required, but there was ugly code in place to try and make relative paths work too - that code has been removed. If you used relative paths before, you need to resolve them before passing to qpscanner.

In summary:

Changed:  Switched to FW/1 and removed unnecessary files.
Changed:  New logo and front-end UI.
Removed:  Dropped unofficial relative path support.
Added:    Experimental ability to separate query code into segments
Fixed:    IDs now use content-based SHA hashes, not random UUIDs.
Fixed:    Throw error when path does not exist, instead of zero results.
Supports: ColdFusion 9/10 and Railo 3.3/4.0/4.1

That's it for now. There are several new features planned to make qpscanner faster, more flexible and more useful, but you'll have to wait for a future release for those.

As ever, if you have any feedback, feature requests, or find any bugs, then please go ahead and get in touch via the GitHub issue tracker.