I’ve been working on a sizable project at work that uses NIO under the hood, but luckily I’m using a 3rd party library which provides the network connectivity for me. It seems that NIO is very hard to implement correctly, but if you can, the performance advantages are definitely worth the effort. I’m only a few days away from starting to do some load testing on my work, so I’ll be interested in seeing the performance improvement over the section of code I’m replacing which uses standard IO (not to mention the various synchronization and thread consumption problems I’ll be fixing).

Being able to quickly handle a large number of concurrent connections is definitely a requirement for today’s AJAX applications, and it’s good to see an NIO based connector from someone other than Jetty.

Surprisingly enough out of over almost 4 years of writing (600+ posts) on this site, about half of them were not software related. So of course that means I’ll have to spend hours going though this site as well to delete non-programming related posts. Good times. Look for some fairly dramatic changes coming to this site as well in the upcoming weeks.

I haven’t much touched the car since I bought it other than typical old car maintenance items (for the most part, I like doing all of my own work), so I’ll be kind of interested to see the comments it generates on it’s current state. Sometimes I want to leave it alone, other times I’m ready to do a few minor things to it.

For a little more about Autoblog, as far as I know it’s one of the most popular blogs about cars out there (each entry seems to generate tons of comments) and most gearheads who are also interweb nerds seem to read it. As for me, I’ve loved cars as long as I can remember and have owned at least two at a time for the past 8 years or so.

Sorry for the spam on the ColdFusion feed, but I had to share.

This makes me happy; it’s just in time for my “I’m not working the rest of the year” vacation so I can finally write up some documentation for CFAkismet, provide a zipped download of it, and finally give it the 1.0 stamp between the other 900 things I have planned during my time off.

Personally I don’t know if I’ll be working on anything in 1.6 anytime soon as 1.5 is still the current standard for non-J2EE Java, but I wouldn’t be surprised to be using it in production by next Summer or so. Although I still think “wtf” about them including Derby as part of the standard release.

Of the things that should be in there from Apache rather than Derby would be most everything which is currently in Apache Commons as it seems like pretty much every Java project needs a good 4-5 Apache Commons libraries.

Now I’m sure all of my Java RSS feeds will be populated with Sun employees talking about how cool NetBeans and Java 6 is, which of course only further motivates me to stick with Eclipse and Java 5.

We’ve talked about how CF translates into Java many times over the past couple of years and some of the inherent performance problems with weak typing (at some point it still has to be converted back to static typing– this is a basic theoretical problem that any dynamically typed language has). I showed my co-worker (and primarily Java programmer) Rod the “what is wrong with the ColdFusion compiler” post, and he has a very well written response to how ColdFusion translates its own dynamically typed tag based syntax down to statically typed Java code. Of course the high level Computer Science answer would just be “it translates CFML to Java using a parser generator then recompiles it, duh”, but instead he goes into the details of the implementation of the parser generator as to how it types the dynamic variables at the Java level. He doesn’t really ever do any ColdFusion, so be easy on him in the comments if you have a bone to pick on the CF side.

A related thing to note that he doesn’t cover is how much faster it is to instantiate objects in cfscript rather than CFML on a percentage basis. Just some food for thought. I can do a follow-up post on this in particular topic if anyone is interested.

I cover a slightly similar topic to this in an upcoming CFDJ article, so stay tuned.

As for myself, I seem to end-up in a lot of old Kerouac haunts for whatever reason.

I’ve owned other personal domains for quite some time and plan on putting up something a little more personal for friends and so forth looking to keep up with me (using one of said domains). If all goes as planned, look for something new from me on this front before the end of the year.