Latest roundtable edition of the CFConversations podcast is out

Posted At : August 7, 2008 9:14 PM | Posted By : Brian
Related Categories: Podcasts, ColdFusion
Earlier today, episode 11 of the CFConversations podcast, the 5th roundtable version, was released. Topics of discussion included the upcoming FREE bFusion & bFlex hands-on ColdFusion and Flex training sessions at Indiana University, the challenges of hiring developers, and lingering thoughts regarding ColdFusion 9 and CFUnited.

Early on in the podcast, two of the participants, Bob Flynn of Indiana University and Richard Goodrow of Gallaudet University, talked about the role of ColdFusion at their respective universities and the potential impact of Adobe's decision to make ColdFusion free for educational use. For the most part, they echoed some of the things I said in episode 3: that this move (while a good one) is not going to be a quick fix for the shortage of ColdFusion developers, and an official ColdFusion curriculum would greatly increase the chances of getting colleges and universities to give it a shot.

Hopefully Adobe will make the official announcement about ColdFusion in education soon. While I'm not overly optimistic about the chances of getting ColdFusion taught at my university, there are one or two academic programs that could possibly be persuaded to give it a shot, and I would prefer to have the announcement out before I try to approach them with the idea.

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My first jQuery plugin: textCounting

Posted At : July 30, 2008 7:43 AM | Posted By : Brian
Related Categories: jQuery, JavaScript
I've blogged about things I've done with jQuery before, but this is the first jQuery plugin I've developed.

My textCounting plugin lets you show users how much text they've entered into a <textarea> box and/or how much text they can still enter before reaching a set limit. The plugin can be configured to count either the number of words or number of characters entered or still available.

The plugin is designed in a way that a single call of the plugin can affect all of the <textarea>s on the same page if you follow certain element ID naming conventions. There are a number of different configuration options, and it can be used with another jQuery plugin, the Metadata plugin, to retrieve settings and data from a metadata block within the class attribute of the <textarea>s.

To see a demonstration of the plugin in action and to download the plugin, visit:

http://www.swartzfager.org/blog/jQuery/plugins/textCounting

I want to point out that one thing that the plugin does NOT do is enforce the word/character limit set for each <textarea>: you can apply a CSS class to the HTML element containing the count as a visual notice to the user that they've exceeded the limit, but it doesn't actually prevent them from continuing to type. I was originally going to provide that option, but I realized that a lot of users tend to paste content from another source in <textarea>s, especially when the content is expected to be verbose, and making the user count the words or characters in their text prior to copying it into the <textarea> defeats the purpose of providing the counter in the first place.

If any of you are interesting in writing your own jQuery plugins, I highly recommend you read Mike Alsup's blog post "A Plugin Development Pattern" on the Learning jQuery site. It was an invaluable resource and taught me a lot.

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Rare mid-week edition of CFConversations podcast now available

Posted At : July 23, 2008 8:20 AM | Posted By : Brian
Related Categories: CFML, ColdFusion, Podcasts
I've been a little lax in posting about new episodes of the CFConversations podcast (and lax in my blog postings in general), but I wanted to point out that episode #9 (the 5th interview episode) was released today.

The reason this episode is being released mid-week is because part of the interview is about the Michigan Flex Camp which will be held on July 30 and 31.

I've heard very little chatter about the podcast in the CFML blogosphere, so I'm curious: are folks listening, and do they like what they hear (content-wise)?

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