The Byte Stops Here

As part of our upgrade to CF9, we started doing regression testing on our local boxes. My co-worker Joseph Lamoree found and blogged about a flaw he found in CF9 that brought our app to a halt. Serious, no joke.

Here is the issue in some detail. If you want to take a look at a MXUnit Test Case, then head over to Joseph's blog on Posterous for more details as well.

I have two files, local.cfm and local.cfc.

Local.cfm has the following:

Local.cfc has the following:

When running this on CF8, I get the following output:

When running this on CF9, I get the following output:

First off, CF9 is killing firstName and lastName. It seems when setting local to a Struct return from a function to start off, those values are quickly killed.

Why is this a big issue? Well, in frameworks like Mach II, you can start with:

What we see is that we have to do a structAppend, appending local to the values we want from the function...  

Seems to me that any cfset local = is being ignored more or less. That is why:

If you dump this, it behaves like the 2nd line never happened. It shows the value for local.x. But this way, any function call to set values to local also get ignored. I think if the programming ignored the structNew(), but "appended" values from other functions instead of ignoring, this would everyone happy.

Joel Spolsky writes an excellent article/blog entry called "Capstone projects and time management". Its about a topic I'm very passionate about, and that is the teaching of Computer Science or Computer Information Systems at universities.Great read.

Read more @ http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/10/26.html.

Fascinating article. Read more @ http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_story/0,3566,568576,00.html.

I've been reading my logs more thoroughly for the past few data and I see a lot of bad traffic. Couple that with CFFormProtect, which tends to block SPAM posts dozens of times per day. Most of the traffic is coming from China unfortunately.

Now looking at my Google Analytics, I do think there is some legitimate traffic from China. For my work, on the other hand, we blocked ALL traffic from China, since we don't do business there and see no need for traffic from there.

However, as a blogger, what do I do? What can I do to conserve server resources without kicking out what may be legitimate readers? What have you done? Any thoughts or advice would be appreciated.