Public and Private meaningless in v2 components

When you start working with the v2 core classes, one of the first thing you’ll notice is that nothing is declared as public or private, everything is just defaulted to public. This alone degrades much of the value of OOP and encapsulation and the new static typed compiler in Flash MX 2004 as it relates to v2 components. Well, today I found another problem.

Most of the functions have comments attached to them. Many of these have a comment that says “@private” which seems to indicate the function is private. So, even if the compiler can’t know which functions are intended as public and private, we can find out and program responsibly.

However, some functions marked as private are actually used as public. For example, StylesManager.isColorStyle() is commented as private but is used within UIObject.getStyle().

So how do we know which are really supposed to be public and which are really supposed to be private? We need to read all of the v2 code and cross-reference every function and that will at least tell us how MM uses them. Of course, Flash MX 2006 might be out by the time you’re done figuring it all out…

Getting ready for MAX 2003

MAX will be held next week and Sam and I will be there. Sam has attended DevCon in the past but for me this will be the first. We will be exhibiting our B-Line Charting components so if you want to say hi stop by our booth. We will also be blogging from the event with any free time we can find.

Also, keep up to date with MAX using MAXBloggers which will include our entries and entries from several other weblogs.

ColdFusion Hosting woes

Even though we run nine servers ourselves at various client sites, we also have some small applications spread across four different hosting providers from projects over the years, all on shared hosts. Anyways, we had problems today with two of the hosts.

MediaTemple is sending out letters to anyone who inquires about ColdFusion hosting stating that they no longer support ColdFusion (we saw the letter in a mailing list). So we called to inquire about it and they clarified that they’re no longer accepting any new clients for ColdFusion support but for now they’re still supporting current customers. That doesn’t give us any kind of warm fuzzy fealing about the future so it seems time to drop MediaTemple.

Hostcentric a few days ago decided to move our account to a different server. We have a few really old apps on one of their CF5 servers and these are apps we know have issues with CFMX but the clients don’t want to upgrade. However, Hostcentric moved them to a new server with ColdFusion MX. The kicker, they didn’t tell anybody. They just moved the apps, which we knew wouldn’t work, so now they’re down. These are in-production apps so we’re in the process of migrating these apps on our own dime today to get them back up ASAP. We’ll be dropping Hostcentric as soon as possible.

I’m hoping we move these to our dedicated servers. I’m not sure why we’re using shared hosts ’cause we have had issues with them and when we add up all our different shared host sites, it’s about as much as what we’d pay for a decent dedicated server. We have some sites on HostMySite.com and we’ve been happy with them and have heard lots of good reports.

(knocks on wood)