ColdFusion Combined Feed

iFlash and Cram – Study Aids for Mac

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 00:29:39 -0800

An important part of studying something is review and testing [citation needed]. Ok, well at least that’s what I find when I am trying to learn something new. I was lucky enough to get some free copies of software that are meant to aid with studying: iFlash and Cram. I thought I’d [...]

SJ Suite User Group meets on Tuesday

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 23:00:01 -0800

If you're in the Bay Area on Tuesday, you might want to check out this gathering at Adobe HQ:

We will have a short but info-packed ColdFusion demo by Sid Maestre, manager of the Bay Area ColdFusion User Group. Then our panel experts will each show you some cool tricks for each of the Creative Suite Design Premium apps. We will take your questions and comments after the presentation.

So many of you have responded "yes" to attending, so we have moved to a larger meeting room - "Park". Remember: parking is free in the Adobe garage. Jot down Sarah Fiedor's name, as she is our Adobe contact. Let the Security Guard know you are there for the CS user group meeting.

More info is on the group meeting page.

Quick Demo of Chromium OS

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 22:28:59 -0800

I had a quick play with the new Google OS yesterday – Chromium OS. I made a movie out of it so if you are curious what it looks like / how it works, you can get a quick glimpse wouldn’t having to mess about with virtual machines and what not. Here is the quick [...]

OT: Unicode ?

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 20:35:57 -0800

While visiting the unicode.org site, I came across this unexpected title from 1992. (Yes, it really is about unicode).Kiss Your ASCII Goodbye (John Dvorak, PC Magazine/1992)

14 Days of ColdFusion 9 Caching: Day 12 - Removing All Items in Cache

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 19:56:04 -0800

Yesterday I showed examples loading up template and object cache with sample data and viewing the sample data with a series of <cfdump> statements. Today, I want to take this concept a bit further and show you how to remove all items stored in both template and object cache. [More]

Framework One

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 17:22:02 -0800

Back in July Sean Corfield released a new framework: Framework One, or FW/1. Sean has a nice blog entry talking about why he created it. The basic gist is that Sean was looking to create something simpler and more direct than the frameworks in use in our community today. I've been a fan of Model-Glue for a long time. I've played with other frameworks, ColdBox most recently, but I've never been as satisfied or as happy as I am when I use Model-Glue. This holiday week I thought I'd check out FW/1, and while I don't think it will replace Model-Glue as my framework of choice, I was very impressed by it and had a lot of fun building a sample application with it. Compared to Model-Glue, which uses XML to define it's behavior and settings, FW/1 is entirely conventions based. That's just a fancy way of saying that you do little to no configuration at all. You can rely on the framework's conventions to do a heck of a lot of work for you. At a practical level that means FW/1 is fast, damn fast. I had issues with these conventions at first - mainly just wrapping my head around them - but once I got into the groove it was amazing how quickly I could move. Each request will automatically run controller methods, service methods, and views that match. This means that a controller method that just chains off to a service method doesn't need to be written. Basically - any code that tied a getX call to a getX controller method to a getX service method will be unnecessary. I've whipped up a quick demo. It makes use of ColdFusion 9 and ORM and must be tied to an existing BlogCFC database. It contains a grand total of 2 pages - a blog entry listing and an entry page. It also allows you to add comments. You can download it below, but please remember that I wrote this as an opportunity to play with FW/1 and it shouldn't be considered best practice. So remember what I said about not having to write unnecessary code? The code to handle viewing a blog entry consists only of a service method, entry:


public function entry(string id) { writeLog(file='fw1',text='yes I ran services.blog.entry()'); return EntityLoadByPk("blogentry", arguments.id);
}

This method exists in a CFC called blog under my services folder. By convention, FW/1 will run blog.entry when I request blog.entry in the URL. I don't need to write a controller method at all. Nor do I need to define what the view is. FW/1 will automatically run views/blog/entry.cfm for me. Anyway - download FW/1, check out their examples and mine, and see what you think. At the end of the day, the best framework is the one that works best for you, and while I still think Model-Glue is the best for me, FW/1 is impressive and I'd urge folks to check it out. p.s. Note that FW/1 has ColdSpring integration, another framework I recommend folks check out. p.s.s. So hey, what's the deal with this code in my controller:

I originally wanted to build the blog.default method in my service. I didn't like using "default" as a name since the real action was to list, but I was going to get over it. However - in a script based CFC, default is a reserved word. So, this gave me a good excuse to use a 'proper' name for the method in the service. I still wanted default as, well, my default action, so I used the controller method here to simply act as proxy. On reflection, I'd probably change the FW/1 setting for "defaultItem" to specify "list" instead.

Six Months Old, How time flies

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 04:36:16 -0800

Just a little over four months ago now we "rescued" a little Labrador/German Shepard from the Animal Shelter and gave him a place in our home and hearts. [More]

Using Git with CFML

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 09:32:05 -0800

Today I was writing a little app that helps me keep up with my Todo list, since I wanted to have a web interface for some reporting into my tasks. The issue is that my todo list is just a text file (and before you go saying there are various apps, I am happy with my text file ok? for various reasons which are not part of this post), so I built a nice web interface to it, but the problem is that since I can modify it, and whilst I was developing it I wanted a way to back this file up. I mean, whi

CFJS - Server side Javascript available for playing

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 09:30:32 -0800

The first alpha server-side Javascript plugin is now available for playing with. Still much to do, but the first release gives a view of where we are heading and the possibilities of where we can go.Leave CommentRelated Entries:Server side Javascript with CFMLCFML Documentation core to Open BlueDragonJava 5 dies - mourning a revolutionA Simple Java class for Amazon SimpleSQSA Simple Java class for Amazon SimpleDBAdobe is killing the CFML languagePart 1 of my java.sun.com interviewElastic Bamboo

CFWheels 1.0 is out!

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 09:30:14 -0800

A very promising framework modeled on Ruby on Rails has finally hit Version 1.0. Find out more @ http://cfwheels.org/.

Reminder: CFUnited 2010 Speaker Selection

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 09:30:06 -0800

Just a reminder that speaker selection for CFUnited 2010 started and that if you have a CFML topic that you think should be discussed and you're want to try your hand at presenting, you should submit your here ( http://callforspeakers.cfconf.org/ ). If there's any interest in presenting Railo related topics (ehcache caching, clustering, etc), by all means, let us know so we can assist you. If you haven't been to cfunited before, I highly recommend it. I went to the 2009 conference (Thanks again

Release notes Railo 3.1.2

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 09:30:06 -0800

We are very proud to present the next minor release of Railo labeled 3.1.2 which you can easily install by following the usual update procedure as described here. Updating Railo. What is new in this version? [More]

Getting Ant Build Updates Via Growl

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 09:28:51 -0800

I have a few build scripts that take some time to run and I hate staring at the Eclipse console to see how things are progressing.Â I've heard of Growl before and today decided to see if I could make this work to popup notices during my build. Growl is originally for the Mac but there [...]

Greg Wilson Explains ChessJam

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 09:28:49 -0800

A few weeks ago I mentioned ChessJam, a Flex/AIR/ColdFusion/LCDS app built by Greg Wilson and some of his pals. Greg has since posted technical details on how the app works. (He actually posted this last week, but I missed it while on the road).

Flex Builder For Linux Alpha 5 Release

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 09:28:49 -0800

The current alpha of Flex Builder for Linux has a hard-coded expiration date of December 1st, 2009. To enable Linux users to continue using Flex Builder past that date, the Flex team has announced an update (no features changes, just the expiration e...

Check Out The Avatar AIR App

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 09:28:49 -0800

MAX 2009 attendees were treated to a sneak preview of Avatar (which is due in theaters worldwide on December 18th, 2009). And now the Avatar AIR desktop application is available for you to download! CNET calls the app a must-see, and I agree!

Ext JS 3.0 Cookbook

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 09:28:26 -0800

I just recieved a review copy of Jorge Ramon's book Ext JS 3.0 Cookbook from Packt Publishing. I will be posting a detailsed review in a couple of weeks. I spent about 20 minutes so far just browsing the book and I really like the way the book is laid out. The book is full of "recipes" each recipe starts with the result, then a guide on how to do it yourself and then an explanation of what it is you are doing. I find this type of book very good because it concentrates on providing

ColdFusion 8: Blowfish Encryption (Something smells fishy .. and it is not the algorithm)

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 09:27:58 -0800

A while back I saw a thread on the adobe forums about an issue with Blowfish encryption. The issue being the results from ColdFusion's encrypt function seemed to differ from other languages. Hardly uncommon given the "delicate" nature of encryption. What grabbed my attention was that the results from ColdFusion and Java were also different. Not what I would have expected.Take the simple example below. It sure seems like the same text and key are used for both CF and Java encryption. Yet the

OT: JAI Resources?

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 09:27:58 -0800

Does anyone know of any good resources (online, books, etcetera) on JAI? Frankly the sun docs leave a lot to be desired. If anyone can recommend a good book on the topic it would be greatly appreciated.

SOT: Heads or Tails? (Windows Resource Kit - Tail.exe Gotcha)

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 09:27:58 -0800

So I was comparing two windows implementations of tail, and came across something unexpected. While I was checking one of my tests, I noticed the results contained less lines than I requested. The base files definitely contained more than enough lines. So I knew that was not problem. After digging deeper, I discovered the lines returned were not even from the end of the file! They were from the middle.Well, come to find out the file I was testing contained some funky characters. One of them bein

403 Forbidden Error on SharePoint Images (Images Broken, Won't Load)

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 09:27:41 -0800

Some terms for indexing purposes: SharePoint broken images, SharePoint images won't load, SharePoint red X images. Well, when I ran into this issue I searched like crazy for a solution and came up empty. I don't want that to happen to the next person who runs into the issue so hence this blog post. Here's the scenario: I did a new installation of SharePoint Server 2007 on Windows Server 2008 R2. Incidentally, this process itself was a major pain in the butt, but I finally got it done--only

The Elusive Thomas At Action Canyon

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 09:27:28 -0800

If you have a son who is an absolute Thomas the Tank Engine fanatic, then you no doubt have fallen prey to their clever (or blatant!) advertising of the apparently amazing toy set "Thomas at Action Canyon". Problem is, it is impossible to find right now! (unless you want to pay upwards of 200 bucks on eBay or Amazon) My wife went so far as to start posting some want-ads on craigslist. Luckily for us, some good samaratin grandmother shared this little tidbit of info with us. PayPal has a sho

Url Rewriting on Google App Engine

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 09:27:28 -0800

Lately I have been digging in to application development for the Google App Engine running Open BlueDragon.  I encountered a need to rewrite and filter some URL's.  The software:  UrlRewriteFilter  (go get it here)  I used the Beta 3.2 version. The Installation: (borrowed in part from tuckey.org's instructions) Move the urlrewrite.xml to the /war/WEB-INF directory. Move the urlrewrite-3.2.0.jar to the /war/WEB-INF/lib directory. Add the following to your /wa

A Better way to serve files from the Google App Engine Virtual File System

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 09:27:28 -0800

The other day I posted an example of how one might access images, for example, from your Google App's virtual file system.  While it was sufficient, I wasn't really happy with how the URL's looked and how missing files were managed.  Right as I was writing this post to detail how I had rewritten the url to manage accessing VFS files, Vince posted this to the openBD mailing list...rendering my solution obsolete!  Quoted from the mailing list: My apologies for taking so lo

Amazon.comâ??s Black Friday Deals Available Now

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 08:26:04 -0800

Every year Amazon.com has some incredible deals on some of their merchandise. This year, they’ve started even earlier to get you in the holiday shopping spirit by starting to offer their deals TODAY. They’ve said that all of their deals are limited in quantity but will line up new items after they sell out throughout the [...]

Giving Heroku a Try

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 08:25:33 -0800

If you haven’t heard of Heroku, you’re not alone. Heroku is a cloud host for Ruby on Rails driven sites that is relatively new on the scene. They’ve been in private mode for nearly a year, but recently their growth has skyrocketed. This growth is based on a few core features of their platform which [...]

How do _you_ Flex?

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 08:24:32 -0800

The Adobe Learning Resource team has posted a very brief survey on how ColdFusion developers are using Flex. This is the same team at Adobe that writes all the great ColdFusion documentation, including the awesome ColdFusion Developers Guide (PDF). If you would spare 5 minutes of your time to answer some questions, it could lead to better resources and documentation for ColdFusion developers when Flex 4 is released! You can take the Creating data-driven application in Flash Builder 4 survey her

Web developers vs "real developers"

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 08:23:15 -0800

There are millions of people in the world, building applications that will be used by many more millions of customers, who don't have computer science degrees and do not program in Java or C/C++. Shocking, I know, but I'm told it's true. They use C...

Open Source Hazards: This is Why You Always Change Default Values in CMS Content Management Systems

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 16:35:27 -0800

I receive the following email notice several times per week indicating some hacker's robotic effort to brute force attempt to crack the admin password for the site's Moodle installation. Here is a list of failed login attempts at http://www.site.com/moodle since you were last notified(Sunday, 22 November 2009, 10:15 PM) Friday, 27 November 2009, 12:38 PM, IP: 91.213.121.24, User: admin Friday, 27 November 2009, 12:38 PM, IP: 91.213.121.24, User:......

An Asynchronous AOP Advice Example

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 16:34:07 -0800

Over the past year, I have dabbled more and more with leveraging AOP in my applications,primarily for logging and caching. Recently, I needed to analyze a system for performance and determined that for some operations, there were several points where third party integrations are managed. These points slowed the request lifecyle dramatically and were targeted to be re-written using cfthread. I love a good refactoring challenge as much as the next guy, but I also love a good abstraction. Thus, the AsynchronousAroundAdvice was born. When would you use an Asynchronous Advice? Any void method where you want to "set it

Search CFWheels Documentation

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 14:31:18 -0800

CFWheels has excellent documentation. Well organized, sufficiently detailed, well presented. One that that is missing at the moment, and is on the list of things to-do for the CFWheels team, is to add a search feature to the docs. Till the time that feature is implemented, I created a Google custom search for CFWheels docs. I just find that after one has understood the basics and has started building an application, there is a need to be able to quickly search for information rather than go through listing of topics to figure out where can one find a piece of

CFWheels - Rediscovering beauty in CF Code

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 13:23:55 -0800

I haven't been blogging much of late. Lots of travelling and work kept me away. During this time, however, I have somehow managed to find time to play with CFWheels. And I must say it has been a pleasure working with it. I've dabbled with Ruby on Rails and Grails in the past and have always lamnted about the fact that the frameworks in CF do not posess the same beauty and elgance. Well, CFWheels changes all that. If you ask me, I'd say that all CF developers should at least try it out to once to see all that

14 Days of ColdFusion 9 Caching: Day 11 - Reporting On All Items in Cache

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 10:42:34 -0800

For today's post-holiday caching entry I want to look at code that shows how to report information (metadata) on all items stored in cache. This includes both template cache and object cache. And since it's a holiday and I have some turkey and dressing to get to, let's jump right in. Here's the example code: [More]

Happy Thanksgiving!

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 10:35:34 -0800

Happy Thanksgiving! The partners of Community MX would like to wish all of our readers a safe and joyous Thanksgiving! So that our partners can enjoy the holiday with their families and friends, we will not be releasing new content Thursday or Friday. Don't despair, we will be back on Monday with two fresh new pieces of content. :-) Enjoy your holiday, and we'll see you on Monday! ...

Is Your ColdFusion Support a Real Turkey?

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 09:37:31 -0800

Are you getting half baked help solving complex server problems? Is your global service provider a little off? Sure, maybe its a lot off. Webapper wants your feedbag feedback about what's important to you. Take this survey to let us know what y...

A First Look at MightyMock

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 08:40:16 -0800

MightyMock is a mock framework to help you unit test your applications. I'm using it with MXunit, but you should be able to use it with any Unit Testing framework. So why do you need it?

MXUnit 1.0.8 Released

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 08:35:44 -0800

Los Hombres at MXUnit.org are proud to announce a new smokin' release. Aside from some minor bug fixes, including improvements to the Ant task, and Open Blue Dragon compatibilities (Thanks to Peter Farrell!), we have some sweet features that will make your testing more productive and even downright fun! Ok, that was a stretch ... but check it out anyway... http://mxunit.org/download.cfm Eclipse Plugin: New data comparison feature. Highlight a failed test and click the little 'book'-looking button in the middle part of the plugin view. It'll pop up a compare dialog and you can use the "next change" and "previous

Looking for (mainly) non-American testers for RIAForge

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 06:29:40 -0800

A few months back Mark Mandel wrote me about an odd issue he was having with RIAForge. Every time he tried to visit the site he got an empty page. Not a ColdFusion error, but an empty page. I wasn't aware of any possible thing it could be, so I wasn't able to do anything. A few weeks back I got another email from a user who was in a similar situation. This user was also outside America (although in Switzerland, a bit far away from Australia) so I began to think it may be some kind of network security system at the host level. I checked with the host - but they said nothing like that was in place. To make things even more interesting - it isn't just a RIAForge issue. Any CFM file on the box (CFInsider is there as well as the ColdFusion Portal) is blocked for Mark. Yet a non-CFM file loads! So the question is - why would CFM files be blocked for a very small minority of users? Any clues? I'm tempted to go ahead and update to ColdFusion 9 today just to see what happens.

14 Days of ColdFusion 9 Caching: Day 9 - Dependent Caching

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 04:50:01 -0800

Dependent Caching is a new feature in ColdFusion 9 that I immediately thought would be really useful. But when it came time to create an actual example for my BFusion talk back in October I was at a loss. I talked with my team at Dealerskins hoping they'd have some good ideas and while we all came up with a few none were fantastic. As MAX 2009 approached I continued to struggle with concepts I thought were doable but just weren't "real world" enough. I wound up creating an example based on a fictional order processing system. This still isn't good enough in my mind, but it works and should be fine for an example in a blog post. With that said, Rob has come up with a better example so I encourage folks to read through his post on this topic as well. But don't leave just yet! Read through this post first. [More]

14 Days of ColdFusion 9 Caching: Day 10 - Session-Specific Caching

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 04:50:00 -0800

First off, Happy Thanksgiving to my fellow Americans!! I hope each of you have an awesome day; I know I will. Today's caching example will be a little shorter than my previous examples but hey, it's a holiday. ColdFusion 9 doesn't have built in session-based caching when it comes to the template or object cache. But, we've had shared scopes such as Server, Application, and Session for as long as I can remember. Using shared scopes in CF applications are pretty much a de facto standard as they're central to building applications that maintain state and store data across minutes, hours, days, or more. Now, consider how Ehcache in ColdFusion 9 works. By default there's one cache region defined in the ehcache.xml file. Within this region of cache exist the template and object cache. Each Application on your ColdFusion server will have a shared template and object cache. This is nice as it allows you to build cache keys inside of one application that won't collide with cache keys in another. But sometimes you want even more granular storage of cached data than this. You might want to associate a cached item with a specific user and have the code work with any number of users visiting your site. A shopping cart is a common example of this type of behavior. In order for a session-based shopping cart to work you'd need to ensure sessions were enabled in your application. To do this, create a simple Application.cfc file that looks like the following.

The code here is run-of-the-mill app.cfc with an onSessionStart function that, as you might guess, fires each time a new session is started. Inside the onSessionStart function I've added code that creates a unique identifier (UUID) for every user. Sure each session already has a urltoken that represents the same sort of identifier, but managing the ID with code like this is more flexible. For instance, you could update the onSessionStart function to retrieve userID's from a database and use those as unique identifiers instead of UUIDs. Now considering the following code snippet that could be part of a shopping cart system.


  
  
 Session specific cache value:

You probably wouldn't see code like this placed in a single template in a normal application. You'd likely have an add orders template or service objects responsible for managing orders. Anyhow, the first line of code creates a variable we'll use as the key for our session specific shopping cart cache. This is made up of an identifier specific to the type of thing we are storing in cache (shopping cart) followed by the session UUID created in the onSessionStart function of Application.cfc. Next, we retrieve the shopping cart from object cache. If the shopping cart with our session specific name doesn't exist the cacheGet() function will return null. This allows us to use the new isNull() function in ColdFusion 9 to determine what to do next. Normally, you'd add items to a shopping cart when the user requested you to do so. Here, we simulate a shopping cart by adding two items whenever the cart is null. The pillow item and the blanket are both augmented with 4 characters from a UUID so we can be sure our example works when we test it. Next, I use the cachePut() function to store the users shopping cart contents in object cache with the session specific key. Last, I use the <cfdump> tag to display the contents of the user shopping cart. The first time this page runs the value of the shopping cart is set in the <cfset> statement. All subsequent refreshes - as long as the session hasn't expired - retrieve the cart contents from cache using the cacheGet() function. The code inside the <cfif> never executes in this case. Here's the output from running this template in Safari. And here's the output seen in Firefox a few seconds later. Since I'm running two different browsers, two different sessions are fired up with two separate unique session identifiers and ultimately two different shopping carts stored in cache. When it comes to shopping carts and other session rich applications, there's nothing really new here. We're just utilizing Ehcache instead of shared scopes by themselves. This is pretty significant though. Sessions and other shared scopes certainly have a defined timespan based on settings in Application.cfc or, if you're kicking it old school, Application.cfm. But, the session scope and application scope "stay alive" as long as your application is getting hit or the user is active in the application. That's all well and good but it isn't as flexible as caching. With caching you can make use of the timespan attribute as well as the idletime attribute to manage the life of the cache. Not to mention you can leverage cache metadata to examine cache hits and misses and determine what in your application is working well and what isn't. You always want to minimize cache misses and maximize cache hits, but unless you wrote your own code to do this with sessions and applications it just wasn't possible out of the box. That to me is another win for caching in ColdFusion 9. Click here to download the code mentioned in this post.

Complex Charting in ColdFusion with WebCharts

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 23:50:04 -0800

I did a session a couple of weeks back at RIAUnleashed in Boston and one of the topics I covered was about leveraging more of the WebCharts3D charting capabilities using Java. The point of it was to illustrate how easy it can be to reach down one level into the underlying technologies used in ColdFusion, all you need to know is where they are. WebCharts3D is the underlying charting engine built into ColdFusion. The GreenPoint site has more information about the technology here. You may not know this, but ColdFusion comes with a client application for designing WebCharts3d Projects. All you need to do is go to run C:\ColdFusion\charting\webcharts.bat (change as appropriate for your operating system). They have also made a WebCharts Eclipse Plug-in freely available if you are interested in that. Running these will give you a chart type chooser that will look something like this: Select your type and you will get a great utility to help you design your chart that will look a bit like this: Once you have your chart designed, this utility has tabs for getting back the format of the XML needed "style" the chart, the XML needed to populate the chart, and even the java code needed to make it work for a jsp and even how to make it work in an applet, Swing, or SWT app. The jsp code needs a couple tweaks to make it work for CF. The Style file that was generated for you will look like:

The data file will look like:

And then the code to execute this in ColdFusion will look like:



 
webCharts3DServer = createObject("java","com.gp.api.jsp.MxServerComponent").getDefaultInstance(GetPageContext().getServletContext());
myChart = webCharts3DServer.newImageSpec();
myChart.width = 320 ;
myChart.height= 300 ;
myChart.type = "PNG" ;
myChart.loadStyles(expandpath('./webchartStyle.xml'));
myChart.model= fileread(expandpath('./webchartModel.xml')); writeoutput(webCharts3DServer.getImageTag(myChart,"/CFIDE/GraphData.cfm?graphCache=wc50&graphID="));

Do that and you get a sexy new chart! Stock full of rollover states and all the polish you care to put on it. :) This probably looks more complicated than it is. From a developer perspective, use a tool to design any chart type you want from the WebCharts charting set (and there are many!), and then figure out how to populate some XML. Add 7 lines of CF code (with only one of them actually creating a java object), and you're done!!! Now you can create Bubble, Ring, Scatter, Gantt, Gauge, Radar, Polar, Star, Stock, Histogram, Regression, and Doughnut Charts, and you can create Maps and even Heatmaps. The charting world is your oyster! Easy peasy. Happy charting! Jason

Happy Thanksgiving From Ben Nadel

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 23:06:31 -0800

Happy Thanksgiving from Ben Nadel and www.bennadel.com.             ... Read More »

ColdFusion Survey

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 11:20:04 -0800

Here at Webapper, we’re working on a little somethin’ somethin’ that we think will be a big help to the ColdFusion community. And, though we’re as egomaniacal as the next bunch of engineers, we’d nonetheless never try something new without asking for feedback. So, we’re conducting a survey of ColdFusion users. It has to do [...]

So you wanna learn Regex? - Part 6

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 23:46:06 -0800

Welcome to So You Wanna Learn Regex? Part 6. OK, I know I said part 5 would be the last part in the series, but I just had to work this one out and wanted to share. Remember, If you want more tutorials about regex, especially more advanced ones than the mickey mouse onces here, go bug Ben. He knows more about this than I ever will and I hear he has a blog... In our last exercise, we looked at cleaning up some data scripts. In this exercise, we are going to reformat a configuration f

Extending ColdFusion Builder

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 13:30:00 -0800

Integrate your CFC projects with ease using ColdFusion Builder extensions.

Quick Tip - Treating a ColdFusion Query like a Structure

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 11:05:27 -0800

I've mentioned this before, but as it came across today on my forums, I thought it wouldn't hurt to write up a quick example. ColdFusion queries are pretty easy to work with. You have multiple options for looping over them and can easily address the data when using a cfoutput: [More]

ColdFusion Open-Source Update - November 25, 2009

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 10:50:07 -0800

One new release and two updates this week in ColdFusion open source. This week was mostly about the 1.0 release of ColdFusion on Wheels and a bunch of announcements and tutorials. Hopefully everyone stateside will enjoy their Thanksgiving holiday but, more importantly, will grab some serious bargains on Black Friday.

New Releases and Updates

New Project: Instant Code Review Extension
Instant Code Review ColdFusion Builder Extension
Terry Ryan wrote another ColdFusion Builder extension. This one will send highlighted code via instant messenger to a person on your code list and insert their response as a comment in the code. He states its more a fun prototype than useful but it does have a "cool" factor.

CFGroovy2
I Had a Doubt (About CFGroovy2 and Ehcache)
Barney Boisvert has decided to remove the Ehcache integration in CFGroovy2 and made some other minor enhancements.

ColdFusion on Wheels
Wheels 1.0: We're Production Ready
ColdFusion on Wheels, the full-stack Ruby on Rails inspired framework, has officially hit 1.0.

Announcements

ColdBox
Welcome to ForgeBox!
Luis Majano posts this new hosted repository for anything ColdBox or CodexWiki related.

Assembla migration complete
All the ColdBox platform projects have been moved over to the new Assembla repositories.

Coldfusion on Wheels
CFWheels added to CFML Framework Skeletons ? Eclipse Plugin
Robert Burns adds the ColdFusion on Wheels framework skeleton to his Eclipse plugin.

Mach-II
Mach-II Runs on Google App Engine with Open BlueDragon
Matt Woodward posts that Peter Farrell made a change to 1.8 that not only improves performance but also allows you to run Mach-II on GAE with OpenBD.

Mango Blog
Scribe 1.2
Adam Tuttle updates his Mango plugin for blog subscriptions.

Model-Glue
MG 3.2 Feature Sneak Peak - Input Sanitization
Dan Wilson gives a sneak peak at integration with Porticullis, John Mason's security project for XSS, SQL injection and more.

Mura CMS
Meld URL Interceptor ... the plugin
Grant Shepert created this Mura plugin for URL rewriting.

Tutorials, Presentations and Reviews

ColdBox
Enhancing coldbox - adding core Environment Safe logic without touching the core
Craig Benner shows how he added an environment specific interceptor to capture emails sent in his test environment.

Being Thread Safe in Coldbox/Coldfusion
Craig Benner posts about making your legacy code thread safe for use in an MVC framework like ColdBox.

ColdFusion on Wheels
Installing CFWheels 1.0
Akbarsait covers the three steps to installing ColdFusion on Wheels.

Fusebox
Blog, FuseBox, Surname, Houston, and Podcasts
John Bliss covers, in part, the reaction of Fusebox users to reports of its "death"

On Hal Helms, Ruby on Rails and the Death of ColdFusion and Fusebox
Sean Corfield covers a variety of topics here but touches on the death proclamations surrounding Fusebox. He makes a very good point that open source projects don't die in a manner of speaking and especially ones as widely used as Fusebox.

Hyrule
Hyrule Constraints
Dan Vega discusses what constraints are and how they are used within his validation framework.

Getting started with Hyrule validation framework
Dan Vega posts this beginner's guide to his new validation framework for ColdFusion 9.

Mach-II
This Week in Mach-II: Loggers and Modules
Peter Farrell lists the posts of the prior week about Mach-II.

Implementing a Custom Logger in Mach-II, Part 3
Mike Rogers completes his three part tutorial on making a custom logger to communicate with IRC.

Mach-II Modules and ColdSpring
Brian Klaas offers this tutorial on using the ColdSpring property in Mach-II for integrating the ColdSpring framework.

Transfer
Using Transfer?s new EHCache
Brian Ghidinelli posts about configuring and using this new caching feature (available in a Subversion branch) which was created with time purchased through a "bounty" offered up by the community.

Transfer ORM
Getting to know Transfer ORM
Shane Zehnder offers some tips for those people looking to get started using Transfer ORM.

Quick TailView Tip

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 06:37:39 -0800

As I mentioned a few days ago, I'm a huge fan of using CFLOG for debugging. To go along with that I make heavy use of TailView in ColdFusion Builder. TailView "monitors" a log file. Every time the file is updated it will automatically show the new lines. This is much easier than using the log viewer built into the ColdFusion Administrator. One of the cooler features of TailView, and something that may not be obvious, is that you can apply filters based on search criteria. This can make certain log lines stick out more than others. Here is a quick video demonstration.

Top 5 Reasons Why Twitter Is Jumping The Shark

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 13:30:21 -0800

I was an early adopter of Twitter. "How early?", you ask? Early enough to get DanWilson as my Twitter handle. Trust me, that is pretty darned early. I used Twitter at first to keep up with the swarm at conferences. Many impromptu meetings, dinners, deals were organized over Twitter. When a particular conference ended, I'd turn off twitter notifications. Who needs the mobile going off every time someone posts "I'm waiting at a stop light" or "I like cashmere socks"... I'm sure you'll a

14 Days of ColdFusion 9 Caching: Day 8 - Cache Hits and Cache Misses

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 07:22:34 -0800

I've done well to get each of these caching blog posts written the night before they were "due" and have them scheduled for an 8:00am release. Not today. Last night I was incredibly tired and decided to wait until today to get this one out. Here it is after 9:00pm and I'm just now getting to it. Oh well, fasten your seatbelt folks because here we go! [More]