Like JSLint? Try JSHint!

JSHint is a new fork of JSLint.
To quote them:
“JSHint is a fork of Douglas Crockford’s JSLint that is designed to be more flexible than the original. Our goal is to make a tool that helps you to find errors in your JavaScript code and to enforce your favorite coding style. We realize that people use different styles and conventions, and we want our tool to adjust to them. JSHint will never enforce one particular convention. JSHint is developed and supported by the JavaScript developer community and we welcome feedback from everybody who cares about the language.”
We’re definitely going to start working on auditing and enforcing JS code through a mechanism like JSHint.

Git Deployer in ColdFusion – Need Help!

We have settled really well on Git, and have branches for all developers and each environment, like I described earlier.
However, what we don’t have is an easy way to deploy a git branch, or simply execute a git pull command remotely. I don’t want to do it using SSH and Git BASH, which seems to be what Google turns up.
I looked to see if I could whip up a home grown ColdFusion based solution. I looked at Git.cfc, however it lack any teeth. You can execute a “git pull” command, but the code doesn’t have any mechanism to load git keys, so the code errors out. I also looked at the jGit JAR file, and interfacing with that, but there is no documentation – only a link to forums.
Has anyone built anything that you found useful, or if you use Git, how do you effectively issue an update command for example, to a dev or QA server?

Lessons Learned: Moving from Verity to Solr (Part 7)

In our Verity days, we used a UDF called VerityClean (still available at CFLib), that did a lot of grunt work of cleaning keywords for Verity. In fact, if you read the description of the UDF, it says: “strips all invalid characters and word combinations from a search strign
to prevent verity from crashing.” Awesome, right?
Well, in moving to Solr, there was no equivalent. Solr can be very picky, it rocks when you have a UDF that:

• Replaces comma with OR
• Strips double spaces
• Strips bad characters
• Cleans up sequences of space characters
• Uppercases Solr terms like AND, OR, etc.

I just submitted SolrClean and a sister UDF uCaseWordsForSolr to CFLib. Enjoy!

UPDATE: The submissions to CFLib were never approved or simply disappeared. I’ll bring it to GitHub.

UPDATE 2: The submissions are now available on CFLib. I am preparing a separate post on them.

Breaking Radio Silence

These past 4 months have been quite arduous.
We launched a whole new upgrade to our ColdFusion-based SaaS product that included a new UX/UI re-do (10 month project!), moving from Verity to Solr (6 months!), and so much more.
After many restless night, numerous 60-hour weeks, I’m back. Will be posting more shortly!