Brian Swartzfager's Blog - ColdFusion

My Encounter With a ColdFusion Detractor (Part 2)

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 07:15:00 -0400

For those readers who didn't see my previous post regarding my conversation with Glen, Glen is a technical trainer who treated me to the usual "ColdFusion is dying" mantra we normally hear from other programmers. The big question I had after that first encounter was why, as a trainer rather than a programmer, he had developed that opinion about ColdFusion. So when I ran into him again at the gym the other day, I asked him about that. Turns out his belief that ColdFusion is dying is based on the job market for ColdFusion jobs. He told me he works/interacts with a dozen recruiting firms in the Washington D.C. area, firms looking to fill positions for government contractors like Lockheed, and that the number of ColdFusion positions compared to the number of positions programming in Java or Ruby is just so small. He added that a lot of the ColdFusion positions that did exist were senior positions where candidates were expected to know how create web services, work with Java, write object-oriented code, etc., making it hard for up-and-coming ColdFusion developers to find work. I also found out that most of his training work involves training/teaching programmers OO-based languages over several weeks, so his perspective on programming trends isn't all that different from an actual programmer. Glen (who doesn't mind talking) went on to give me the standard advice given to modern-day programmers (the importance of having multiple programming language skill sets, the need to have a new job lined up before leaving your current one, etc.) before we parted company once again. My thoughts? I don't doubt there are more jobs out there for languages like PHP, Ruby, and Java just as Glen said, but whenever I go out on websites to look for ColdFusion jobs, they're out there, and while many of them are senior-level positions, there are a few junior-level jobs to be had. Actually getting hired, however, made take some effort, as Michael Dinowitz noted in his recent blog post, "Are There Really ColdFusion Jobs?" In the end, Glen's position on ColdFusion is nothing original: lack of marketshare is at the heart of every "ColdFusion is dying" argument we hear. But marketshare is only one metric, and it shouldn't be the main consideration when choosing a programming language. The main consideration should be "does this technology allow me to build the web application I want?" And when that question is directed at ColdFusion, the answer is almost always "Yes."

My Encounter With a ColdFusion Detractor

Wed, 20 May 2009 07:27:00 -0400

Yesterday I ran into an old colleague at the gym (we'll call him Glen). Glen conducts training sessions on technical topics. Glen asked me if I knew if anyone at the university was using Ruby on Rails. I told him that I didn't think so. He then told me that he was giving Ruby on Rails training at John Hopkins University because they were looking to reduce their use of Java. I responded by saying that I thought Hopkins also used ColdFusion for certain things. I expected him to either simply agree with my observation, or perhaps offer an explanation about why Hopkins was looking at RoR verses expanding their use of ColdFusion. I was not expecting him to respond with the standard FUD about ColdFusion: it's dying, people are moving away from it, etc. He even went so far as to refer to it as the "COBOL of web programming languages." I countered with the numbers announced at cfObjective(), that the number of ColdFusion developers had increased dramatically over the past year. That elicited a "well..." and then another assertion that ColdFusion use was decreasing in the federal government as well (there are a lot of government-oriented CF jobs here in the D.C. area). There wasn't much else to say or do at that point. I couldn't hold him up from where he was going and I had somewhere else to be as well. So I shook my head, laughed at his prediction of ColdFusion's demise, and basically said "Yeah, we'll see about that." My immediate feeling after the conversation was more amusement that annoyance. Year after year, we hear the annual proclamation that "ColdFusion is dead," yet the proclaimers never seem to realize that if they keep saying it year after year, ColdFusion obviously must be still around. And more often than not, they have no hard numbers to support the idea that CF use is waning, just statistic-free assertions. Now that I'm several hours removed from the conversation, I find myself more curious about why Glen even had an opinion on ColdFusion in the first place. I don't know him all that well, but he's always struck me as a fairly rational person and not someone who's looking to make and win an argument, yet he immediately began disparaging ColdFusion the moment I mentioned it. What or who lead him to having this opinion about CF? I may have to ask him that the next time I run into him.

Do We Need A Better Way To Survey the CFML Community?

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 07:48:00 -0400

I just finished reading Issac Dealey's recent blog post (worth reading, by the way) where he shares some of the results from a survey he conducted regarding framework preferences back in September. In the post, he mentioned how difficult it seems to be to get folks to participate in these kinds of surveys, and it reminded me that someone else in the community was recently pleading with folks to take their survey (unfortunately, I forget who, but I did take it). And I wonder what kind of a response Hal Helms is getting with his ColdFusion Web Developer Survey. So it got me thinking: is surveying the community/getting feedback from the community a problem in need of a solution? Are these surveys being neglected because people don't see the point or don't have the time? Or is the low response rate more the result of a lack of publicity or poor technical implementation of the survey itself? Any thoughts?

Idea: Give Adobe Bolt Collaboration Features

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:12:00 -0400

In my last blog post, I suggested that Adobe include a list of CFML community resources in the upcoming Bolt IDE in order to promote the community to isolated developers who might otherwise be unaware of all the resources out there. After thinking about it a bit more, it occurred to me that maybe Bolt could take it one step further. Instead of simply using Bolt to point developers to the community, have Bolt bring the community to the developer. Build in an RSS viewer that displays the latest ColdFusion posts from Adobe Feeds. Put in a communicator tool so the developer can converse with other CFML programmers via IM or Twitter. Let the developer screen-share their code with other developers both inside and outside of their organization. Integrate geolocation into Bolt and show the developer a list of other Bolt users (and maybe Adobe user groups) that are nearby. Instead of using e-mail and message boards to communicate with CFML developers, Adobe could broadcast any news announcements to all of the Bolt installs, and Bolt users could submit questions to Adobe and other users via discussion forums displayed in a window of the IDE that gets refreshed automatically. I'll admit, it's a pretty pie-in-the-sky idea. Given that Adobe only has a finite amount of time and resources, I would certainly not want Adobe to leave out any traditional IDE features, the things that allow developers to code quickly and efficiently, in order to take the time to add all of the things I just suggested. But if they did have a little extra time, I think adding even one or two simple collaboration/informational features would certainly enhance the product, and perhaps set a trend for other IDEs to follow.

Sneak Announcements at MAX: Server-side ActionScript and Durango

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 07:37:00 -0400

I was a little surprised this morning to find little or no mention of the announcements made at the Sneak Peek session at MAX last evening on any of the ColdFusion blogs aggregated by Adobe Feeds. Either I'm missing something or everyone had too much fun at the after-session party last night. :) I don't really have any of the details about the announcements, since I was only half-paying attention to the live blogging from the event and the Twitter stream, but two items stood out for me. One was the announcement that server-side ActionScript is in the works. For those who don't know, ActionScript is the language of Flex, which is a client-side technology. Someone on Twitter said that the announcement meant that you could run ActionScript on the ColdFusion server, so that you could code certain things in ActionScript rather than CFML, but I don't know if that's really the case or not (I'm sure that will be clarified within the next few days). The second announcement that caught my attention was about Durango. To quote the Durango web page on Adobe Labs (it's already available for download): "Durango is a framework that allows developers to build Adobe AIR applications that can be customized by end-users." Basically, it sounds like a means of allowing user-created mashups in an AIR application. Giving end-users the ability to make their own mashups seems to be a trend in the industry lately. It remains to be seen whether users will make use of that kind of power and flexibility. Anyway, I expect folks who are actually at MAX will blog about these items and provide some more details, but I figured I put these items out there so people know what to look out for in upcoming posts from the community.

New Adobe Social Network: groups.adobe.com

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 15:03:00 -0400

One of the later announcements in the MAX Day 2 keynote was the launch of http://groups.adobe.com. At first I thought it was simply a directory of all of the Adobe usergroups around the world, but it's more than that. In addition to giving each user group a blog and a place to list upcoming events, individuals can sign up and create a profile. Once you've established a profile, you can then associate yourself with one or more user groups, event groups, and other individuals within the community. As far as I can tell, it's not quite as fully-featured as the ColdFusion Community social networking site, but it's cool that Adobe has decided to put this out there as a means of encouraging networking and collaboration. I've already set up a bare-bones profile there (username: bcswartz). Not sure what I'm going to do with it or how much I'm going to use it, but I'm there.

Adobe MAX Day 2 Keynote In Progress. News So Far: New CF IDE (Bolt)

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:31:00 -0400

The MAX Day 2 keynote address is still in progress. So far, the biggest news so far regarding ColdFusion is the announcement of Bolt, a ColdFusion IDE based on Eclipse to be released at or around the same time as ColdFusion 9. Sounds promising. You can sign up to participate in pre-release testing of Bolt on Adobe Labs at http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Bolt Not much else about ColdFusion so far: I'm trying to keep apprised by watching Twitter and the live blogging being done by two Adobe evangelists at http://www.webkitchen.be/2008/11/18/max-san-francisco-keynote-day-2-liveblog/ Unfortunately, I am at work, so I can't entirely devote my full attention to what's going on. :)

CF411 and ColdFusion for Educational Use (Oh, And That New Browser...)

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:20:00 -0400

Blogging bullet-point style tonight:

Charlie Arehart's new CF411 site has a MASSIVE amount of links to tools and resources for CFML and web development. Stop what you're doing right now, go to the page, and store it somewhere (your bookmarks, Delicious, wherever).
The announcement that ColdFusion 8 Enterprise is now available for free for educational use (in other words, for learning purposes) was made on Monday. You can find out more at https://freeriatools.adobe.com/coldfusion/

While I'm glad the announcement is out, I just wish it had been promoted better. There's still nothing about it up on the Adobe home page or even on Adobe's ColdFusion product page. Why not?
Last (and least...), Google surprised everyone this week with their new Chrome web browser. It got so much attention that everyone stopped talking about the iPhone, which is admittedly pretty impressive.

Like everyone else, I've played with it. Here's my take on it (yep, more bullet-points):
- It runs pretty well.
- It does seem to run JavaScript more quickly than other browsers.
- It has a few nice innovative features.
- It can be quirky at times and it has some flaws (but it is a beta).
- It has promise, but it doesn't provide any new functionality that I find particularly useful to me.
- FireFox will remain my browser at work and at home.

CFConversations Podcast #13: the Hal Helms Interview

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 12:43:00 -0400

For those folks who aren't regularly following the CFConversations podcast, the latest episode is an interview with Hal Helms. I conducted the interview, but for the most part I stayed out of the way and let Hal do his thing, which is to speak thoughtfully and eloquently about ColdFusion, OO, and application development.

Latest roundtable edition of the CFConversations podcast is out

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 21:14:00 -0400

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.

Rare mid-week edition of CFConversations podcast now available

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 08:20:00 -0400

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)?

CFConversations podcast #5: interview with Liz Frederick and Nafisa Sabu of TeraTech/CFUnited

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 16:54:00 -0400

Hey, folks, the first CFConversations interview podcast is now available. Check it out--you can either subscribe to the podcast via iTunes (just search for "CFConversations") or download each episode directly from the CFConversations website.

Episode 4 of CFConversations podcast:: ideas for promoting CFML

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 07:25:00 -0400

The fourth episode of the CFConversations podcast, the last of the three episodes recorded at CFUnited, was released early this morning. This episode focuses on some ideas that came out of Brian Meloche's conference session on promoting the use of CFML outside of the ColdFusion community. Check it out!

Some random post CFUnited thoughts

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 14:13:00 -0400

Now that CFUnited's over (at least for me) and I've had some time to rest and mull over things, I wanted to post a few random thoughts and opinions:

The entire L'Enfant Plaza Metro station (columns, walls, even some of the Metro railcars that passed through) was one big ad for Adobe LifeCycle. The message: LifeCycle can help the government manage and distribute PDF forms. Unusual? I don't get down into DC too often, but I'd never seen any one company take over an entire station like that before. I want to see more of this high-visibility marketing from Adobe, especially for ColdFusion.
Sean Corfield's new asynchronous event-driven framework, Edmund, looks very cool. Being able to fire off events and have them bubble up through the framework much like what you can do in Flex is a very appealing idea.
Twitter once again proved to be a useful tool. I found it a lot easy to "tweet" what was going on instead of writing it up on the blog, and thanks to Nafisa Sabu and Elliot Sprehn of TeraTech, anyone who visited the CFUnited website could read the tweets of the conference-goers who had "friended" the CFUnited Twitter account. Hopefully a few folks found my tweets to be useful.
While the proposed integration of Hibernate in ColdFusion 9 sounds neat, I think Transfer is still going to be the ORM of choice for many developers, both now and in the future, for some of the reasons Mark listed in his blog and because Transfer works/will work on a larger number of CFML platforms (CF7, CF8, and probably OpenBD and Railo).
The discussion about whether or not ColdFusion and ColdFusion development is becoming too Java-like isn't over yet. I met a developer who made the point that it seemed strange (and stupid) to him that we're trying to entice Java developers to use CFML because it makes development faster and easier while we seem to be gravitating towards adding complexity to our development process and our code.

I made the usual argument that regardless of the focus on OOP in the ColdFusion blogging community, no one was advocating removing those aspects of ColdFusion that make CFML easy to learn and use, and that even OO-style programmers will admit that there are some situations where using an OO application framework is overkill, but he wasn't entirely convinced.

It made me wonder: if Adobe does develop a teaching curriculum as part of their effort to get ColdFusion adopted in schools, will that curriculum take advantage of CFML's traditional low learning curve, or will they emphasize an OO-style of programming from the get-go?
Some promising ideas came out of Brian Meloche's session on promoting ColdFusion/CFML outside of the community. The existence/promise of OpenBD and Railo and Adobe's decision to make ColdFusion free for educational use has opened up a whole new world of possibilities. You should be hearing about these ideas soon, either via the CFConversations podcast or some other channel.
Which reminds me, you should check out the CFConversations podcast if you haven't done so already. And I would say that even if I wasn't involved with the project. :)

Going to CFUnited tomorrow

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 21:29:00 -0400

Well, CFUnited begins tomorrow, so I'll be getting up a bit earlier than usual so I can drive to the nearest Metro station and head down into D.C. The last time I attended CFUnited was back in 2005, so it'll be interesting to see if the conference has changed any in terms of atmosphere and organization since then. Certainly the venue will be different; hopefully that means the wireless network will be more robust/reliable. And this time I won't be ducking out of lunch to settle on a new house (but hey, I did make it back in time for the next round of sessions). I probably won't post any new blog entries during the conference (it takes me too darn long to come up with what I really want to say), but I might post a snippet or two about what's going on via Twitter. If you're interested in listening in on those "tweets", you can just follow me on Twitter for the next few days: my Twitter handle is bcswartz. As for any of my fellow conference-goers (if you're listening), if you don't already use Twitter, you might want to make use of it during the conference. I don't know if Twitter is going to serve as a communications channel for what's going on and where people are meeting up like it did at cf.Objective(), but I imagine if nothing else the CFUnited folks will be making use of the CFUnited Twitter account to send out notices and what not. You can either use Twitter via the Twitter website and refresh the page occasionally, or you can use a Twitter desktop app like Twhirl (built with Adobe AIR). Of course, that's all moot if we manage to overload the wireless network at the conference. :) Anyway, looking forward to seeing everyone there!

What the CFUnited folks want to know

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 20:47:00 -0400

The folks running CFUnited have invited ColdFusion bloggers to answer some questions about the conference on our own blogs. Sounds like a good excuse for an easy blog post, so here goes... "What are you looking forward to most?" While there are a few sessions I'm particularly looking forward to, what I'm looking forward to most is conversing with my fellow developers and sharing ideas. "Which speaker will most likely end up on your camera?" Hopefully none of the speakers will fall on my camera. Maybe I should just leave the camera at home; safer for everyone involved. "What do you plan to do outside conference time?" Hang out with fellow conference-goers, maybe help some of the out-of-town folks find the places they want to visit (I'm no expert on D.C., but I know where most of the notable stuff is and can find my way around). Since I'll be commuting between home and the conference each day, I probably won't be hanging around too late 'cept for Friday night. "Fill in the blank: I will mainly be around the ______ booth." The popular booth, to find out why it's so popular. I'm curious like that. "Do you have a new project you are working on and will reveal it at CFUnited? Nothing I'm working on in my personal time really constitutes as a "project," per se, so no. But if someone does want to announce and show off their project at CFUnited, I'd suggest going to the CFUnited wiki and scheduling a block of time in the Special Attendee conference room (the Lafayette room) so you have somewhere to show off your project. The schedule for that room is far from booked.

Using a Transfer decorator to get related records within the same table

Mon, 26 May 2008 21:09:00 -0400

One of the benefits of using the Transfer ORM in your application is that if you define the relationships between your tables in the Transfer XML configuration file, you can retrieve any objects related to your current object through a variety of functions. However, sometimes you need to relate records within the same table. For example, in my current project, I have a table of item records which need to be arranged in a hierarchy of unknown depth: one set of items could have two levels of hierarchy, another three levels. Each item, therefore, can have one parent item above it (identified by a parentId field in the record) in the hierarchy and any number of children below it (and all the child records have the current item's ID as their parentId value). How can you use Transfer to access these in-table relationships? One way is by using a decorator object. As the Transfer documentation explains, a decorator is a CFC file you write yourself that extends the TransferDecorator CFC that comes with Transfer. You associate your decorator with the Transfer object that represents the table in your Transfer configuration file so that when a Transfer object for a record in that table is generated, the functions you define in your decorator become part of that object. So say I define a Transfer object called "Item" in the package "example". Here is the XML in the Transfer configuration file:

The decorator to be called is the itemDecorator.cfc in the "com" directory. I want to have two new functions in the decorator, one that returns a Transfer object for the parent record, and one that returns an array of Transfer objects representing each child record. Here's the code:

In a decorator CFC that extends the TransferDecorator CFC, you can access the current item's Transfer object all of its functions via the getTransferObject() function, and you can access the main Transfer object via the getTransfer() function. So the single statement in the getMyParentItem() function in the decorator CFC is equivalent to:

The getMyChildItems() function is slightly more complicated because it needs to retrieve a recordset of child objects first, using the listByProperty() function of the main Transfer object (again, provided via the getTransfer() function within the decorator), then loop through those records, creating a Transfer object for each child record and appending it the array returned by the function. What if the item record in question is either at the top of the item hierarchy or at the bottom? If there is no parent item, the Transfer object returned by the getMyParentItem() function will have an itemId of 0 (the default value for an empty numeric primary key) and empty values for all of the other properties, so you can test for that condition. If there are no child items, the array returned by the getMyChildItems() function will simply be empty. This is only the second Transfer decorator I've ever written, so there may be a better way of going about it, but it gets the job done with just two short functions added on to existing object functions provided by Transfer. I like it when things are this easy.

Creating a hyperlink that works with or without AJAX

Fri, 23 May 2008 09:00:00 -0400

The current project I'm working on includes a display page where users can see a list of messages generated for them by the system. Each message consists of an <li> element containing the text of the message followed by a hyperlink labeled "Delete". I wanted to make it such that you could delete each message without refreshing the page, but still accommodate users who had JavaScript turned off, and without a lot of extra work. How did I do it? Like so:








Your Messages


  
  
  
    
      
      #message#

      Delete

...The only other thing you need to do is put a conditional statement in the page/event that is called by the hyperlink that looks for the presence of the additional URL variable ("js" in this case). If JavaScript is turned off, that additional variable will not be defined and the page/event will redirect the action back to the calling page once it's done deleting the message data from the database. If JavaScript is turned on, the page/event will simply delete the message data (no action redirect), and the user simply sees that message item disappear from the list.

A ColdFusion IDE feature request: tools for creating Java classes

Wed, 21 May 2008 22:00:00 -0400

One of the "themes" that I took away from cf.Objective() was the shortcomings of ColdFusion when it comes to generating a collection of objects. Most everyone agrees on the fact that there is a performance penalty when a CFC is translated into a Java class (or, usually, a series of Java classes) because ColdFusion is a dynamically typed language and Java is not, and reconciling that difference takes processing power. But not everyone agrees on what the solution to this issue should be. Some folks believe that Adobe should try to improve object generation performance even more, building on the improvements that came with ColdFusion 8. Others feel certain that ColdFusion will always pale in comparison to Java when it comes to object generation and that any enterprise-level ColdFusion application should use pure Java classes on the back end. A few folks at cf.Objective() even advocated integrating ActionScript 3 (the strongly-typed programming language behind Flex) into ColdFusion for use in building objects. Personally, I would love to see a big improvement in object performance in the next version of ColdFusion 9, but I strongly suspect that equivalent objects written in pure Java classes will still be significantly better in terms of performance despite Adobe's best efforts. If we accept that as the most likely outcome, then the issue becomes how to get ColdFusion developers without any Java background (like myself) to code objects in Java? I think one way of accomplishing that is for Adobe to create a ColdFusion IDE that provides ColdFusion developers with an easy means to create Java classes and use those Java classes for the model in their applications. It could provide a wizard similar to the CFC wizard tool in CFEclipse that either generates the .java file based on a database table or lets the developer manually define properties and methods for the class. It could also provide a means of generating the Java class files based on an XML configuration file so existing code generators could be modified to work with this IDE feature. Of course, creating the .java files is only the first step. The IDE should also be able to introspect any .java file and display all of the information a developer would need to interact with that resulting class (properties, methods, data types, etc.) If the developer needs to make changes to the class, they could either edit the .java file directly in a normal IDE editor window (with syntax checking), or via an editing dialog box that lets the developer make changes to the configuration of a method and the statements within the method without having to worry about aspects of the Java syntax involved in describing the method. The IDE would also take care of compiling the .java file to a class every time it is updated and reporting back any compilation errors. Like I said, I have no Java programming background, so maybe this idea is more than a bit of a stretch. There are also probably other issues that would need to be addressed (like how to manage the dependencies between the Java classes), but I'm betting cleverer folks than I could figure out a way to make it work. Even if the tools for creating Java classes were limited in what they could do, allowing ColdFusion developers to generate their own .java files and Java classes using familiar terms and concepts and then see the results could shorten the Java learning process. ColdFusion has a long tradition of making it easy for developers to perform certain tasks and operations. When we talk about that tradition, we tend to narrow our focus on the capabilities of the CFML language. We tend to forget that the ColdFusion server software makes our lives easy as well, letting us configure datasources, security features, and gateway processes without having to deal with those issues in our programming code. It's the entire ColdFusion package, as a whole, that makes developing in ColdFusion easier than developing in other languages. If Adobe develops a ColdFusion IDE, that IDE should also be designed--optimized, in fact--to make developing in ColdFusion easy, regardless of the developer's skill level. So I say if our OO ColdFusion developers need to be able to create their objects in Java, that IDE should help them do that.

ColdFusion Weekly Podcast 3.08: Andy Powell on Enterprise MVC with CF and Java

Sat, 17 May 2008 08:45:00 -0400

The latest version of the ColdFusion Weekly podcast was released yesterday. In this episode, Matt and Peter talk with Andy Powell about using native Java objects as the basis for your model when building your ColdFusion applications using the model-view-controller (MVC) architectural pattern. Andy gave a presentation on this topic at cf.Objective(). As always, you can get it by either subscribing to the podcast via ITunes or by downloading it from the ColdFusion Weekly web site.

A tip regarding many-to-many relationships in Transfer

Fri, 16 May 2008 07:45:00 -0400

Thought I should share this so no one else ends up learning it the hard way like I did yesterday. In Transfer, you use an XML configuration file to describe your database tables and the relationships between them. You can define three types of relationships: one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many. The many-to-many relationship is used when one table is related to another table through the use of a linking table. In the introductory Transfer example files I looked at today, the many-to-many example is an application with an Events table, a Categories table, and an Events-Categories table containing a foreign key field referring back to the Events table primary key field, and a foreign key field referring back to the Categories table primary key field. Now, when you define a one-to-many or many-to-one relationship between two tables, you describe both tables in the Transfer configuration files: they each have their own <object> XML block so Transfer objects can be created based on them. What I did not realize until today, when I looked more closely at those example Transfer files, is that you DO NOT create an <object> XML block for the linking table. The many-to-many relationship that you describe within one of other two tables' <object> block tells Transfer all it needs to know to relate the two tables. Now, if I had read the Transfer documentation more carefully, or if I had tested my Transfer configuration file either against the included schema file or with testing code as I made changes to it, I probably would have figured this out a lot faster. But because I didn't do either of those things, I was baffled by the inscrutable and inconsistent error messages returned by my application when I started working on the CRUD operations involving those tables. So in addition to the tip itself, my other piece of advice is to take your time and carefully read (and think about) the documentation when you start working with a new framework like Transfer: it may be easy to get started with, but you might miss a subtle detail or two that can get you in trouble.

Flex adoption leads to thousands of new ColdFusion developers?

Wed, 07 May 2008 07:53:00 -0400

One of the sessions I attended at cf.Objective() was Maxim Porges' presentation on developing in Flex without using a Flex framework. I visited his blog this morning because I wanted to find his e-mail address and send him a question. In doing so, I stumbled upon a post he wrote while at the conference about a conversation he had with several people following the Birds-of-a-Feather discussion between the Adobe folks and the community about the next version of ColdFusion 9. Apparently some very interesting things were revealed in that conversation, one of them being that many folks who are starting to learn Flex have also gained an interest in learning and using ColdFusion. How many? The number cited was 75,000. I'm not sure how Adobe determined that correlation between the uptake in Flex and the uptake in ColdFusion, but even if the real number is half that amount, that's still pretty impressive in my book. Other items were discussion, including a mention of Adobe's current view regarding open source and ColdFusion. I encourage folks to go read the blog entry for themselves: http://maximporges.blogspot.com/2008/05/future-of-cf-part-ii.html

Reflections on cf.Objective()

Tue, 06 May 2008 20:13:00 -0400

Like I said in my comment on his blog post, I don't think I can top Ben Nadel's description of the experience of being at cf.Objective(). Still, there are a few things I want to say for myself. First of all, a big thank-you to everyone involved in the planning and execution of the conference. You all did a remarkable job. Same goes for the speakers. I think everyone learned a lot at the conference. But what really made this conference special to me were the conversations I had outside of the presentations. I've been to CFUnited and even to MAX before, and while I learned a great deal at both, I tended to feel a bit lost, being a solo developer amongst a large crowd of folks who knew each other already or came with colleagues. cf.Objective() was different: it never took more than a minute or two to get involved in a conversation with folks from the blogosphere or even developers I knew nothing about. I always felt like I was part of what was going on. It was truly the most enjoyable conference I've ever attended. Like I alluded to in my earlier post, I'd been feeling down and negative about, well, a number of things in the weeks leading up to the conference. I feel now like I'm back on track, ready to take what I got from this experience and run with it. So stay tuned. P.S. A big thanks to Adobe for bring MXNA back to life, better than ever!

Off To cf.Objective()

Thu, 01 May 2008 08:03:00 -0400

...And not a moment too soon! I've been in a bit of a rut lately, so I'm hoping the conference and my fellow conference-goers will help re-energize my enthusiasm a bit. I doubt I'll be blogging much from the conference: I tend to write slowly and with the MXNA blog aggregator still down for the most part, I'm not sure that anyone would "hear" me anyway. So if you want to keep track of what's going on at the conference, tune in to the bloggers covered by one of the other aggregators like FullAsAGoog, Feed-Squirrel, or ColdFusionBloggers

Finish the sentence: "I know I'm in a coding zone/groove when..."

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 15:09:00 -0400

"...I correctly write a recursive algorithm involving nested arrays on the first try." What about you? When do you know you're in a coding groove such that it feels like you're coding by feel/intuition?

ColdFusion Weekly Podcast 3.07: Flex Frameworks

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:47:00 -0400

Matt and Peter discuss the various Flex application frameworks out there with several guests. As always, you can get it by either subscribing to the podcast via ITunes or by downloading it from the ColdFusion Weekly web site.

Check Out CF4em, A New CFML-Powered Forum/Message Board

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 07:59:00 -0400

Bobby Hartsfield posted a link to a test version of his ColdFusion-based message board system, CF4em, on the CF-Talk list yesterday. I just checked it out this morning. It's very similar to the high-end PHP-powered message boards and looks very promising. I encourage folks to go register on the site, try it out, and provide Bobby with feedback. Here's the URL: http://www.cf4em.com/

ColdFusion Weekly Podcast 3.06: Interview with Vince Bonfanti

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 10:53:00 -0400

Matt and Peter were able to talk to Vince Bonfanti about the recent decision to open source BlueDragon (a topic we discussed on the podcast two weeks ago). As always, you can get it by either subscribing to the podcast via ITunes or by downloading it from the ColdFusion Weekly web site.

ColdFusion Developers and Social Technologies

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 07:32:00 -0400

My manager is attending the BEA Participate conference in May (we run their portal product), and yesterday he and I sat down with a developer who was creating the portal for the conference itself. The conference portal was designed to promote social networking: attendees will be able to track the status of other attendees, see what their interests are, leave comments for them on their comment wall, and communicate with them via a Twitter channel. Everyone attending the conference is getting an iPod Touch and there will be a mobile version of the portal so folks can simply use the iPod to keep abreast of what's going on. My initial reaction was that it was a really cool idea...which is strange because I'm not really into social networking. I have a Twitter account and a Pownce account, but I never use them: who wants to hear what I'm currently doing, and when do I have the time to stop and tell them? But I could see myself using these social technologies at a specific event like a conference, where part of the fun IS being social and participating in the discussion. The trick is that you have to have enough attendees to embrace the idea in order for it to be worthwhile. My manager isn't into social networking either, so I wonder if folks at his conference are really going to use these social networking features. I can't help but wonder what would happen if we had a similar social networking portal at a big ColdFusion conference like cf.Objective() or CFUnited. Assuming the typical saturation of the wireless bandwidth wasn't a problem, would most CF developers interact with each other using these tools?

ColdFusion Weekly Podcast 3.05: Charlie Arehart cf.Objective() Sneak Peak

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 18:30:00 -0400

In this episode of the podcast, Matt and Peter talk to Charlie Arehart about the sessions he'll be presenting at the cf.Objective() conference, one on step debugging and the other on the server monitor in ColdFusion 8. As always, you can get it by either subscribing to the podcast via ITunes or by downloading it from the ColdFusion Weekly web site.

ColdFusion Weekly Podcast 3.04: BlueDragon Goes Open Source

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 22:18:00 -0400

The latest ColdFusion Weekly podcast has been released. The topic: New Atlanta's announcement that they will offer an open-source version of BlueDragon, their CFML (ColdFusion Markup Language) processing server. Just like last time, you can get it by either subscribing to the podcast via ITunes or by downloading it from the ColdFusion Weekly web site.

The Latest ColdFusion Weekly Podcast Is Out: Get It!

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 15:35:00 -0400

For those who don't know, ColdFusion Weekly is a podcast about ColdFusion and ColdFusion-related technologies hosted by Matt Woodward and Peter Farrell. It's been on a bit of a hiatus because Matt and Peter have been really busy, but it's back. You can get it by either subscribing to the podcast via ITunes or by downloading it from the ColdFusion Weekly web site. For those of you who've listened to the podcast before, the format of the show has changed a bit in that there is now a group of ColdFusion developers joining Matt and Peter in discussing topics, so now you'll be hearing more voices of the ColdFusion community (including myself from time to time). So download and (hopefully) enjoy!

Google Maps Street View Now Includes St. Paul (And The cf.Objective Hotel)

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 20:38:00 -0400

My colleague Chris, a Java developer, was making arrangements to attend this year' JA-SIG conference. As he was finishing up, he found a link to Google Maps that ended up taking him the Google Maps Street View of St. Paul. He'd never seen the Street View feature of Google Maps, so he showed it to me. It was only when I saw the view of the hotel from the street view and saw the name of the hotel did I realize that JA-SIG is being held at the same hotel as cf.Objective(), the Crowne Plaza. Even funnier, JA-SIG ends on April 30, and cf.Objective() starts on May 1st. Obviously the Crowne Plaza is the hip place to be if your technically-inclined. They even have a virtual version of the hotel in Second Life. I wonder if they'll let us hold a couple of virtual developer parties there?

BlueDragon Goes Open-Source: A Good Thing, But How Good?

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 12:51:00 -0400

Given all the other blog posts I've seen coming through my RSS feeds, this is hardly news at this point, but New Atlanta has decided to open-source their J2EE version of BlueDragon, a web application server package that runs/executes CFML (ColdFusion Markup Language, the language of ColdFusion): New Atlanta announces free open source BlueDragon edition I'm certainly happy about this development (as are many ColdFusion developers) because that means that anyone who wants to develop with ColdFusion will now have access to a robust CFML application server without having to spend money for the server software: money is no longer an excuse for avoiding ColdFusion. But whether or not this announcement will have a significant impact on the prevalence of CFML as a development language in the marketplace remains to be seen. If New Atlanta makes an effort to market BlueDragon to web hosting companies who currently don't offer any ColdFusion development packages, we might see an increase in ColdFusion adoption simply because it's available as an option for developers whose clients rely on 3rd-party web hosting. They will also have to increase awareness of BlueDragon amongst the non-ColdFusion developer community and make it clear to those developers that BlueDragon is a serious, enterprise-class alternative to Adobe's ColdFusion server. If New Atlanta does all that, perhaps we'll see that surge in ColdFusion adoption we thought would come when price was no longer an issue. But what if that surge never comes? What if price wasn't the big issue after all? Then what?

ColdFusion 8's Image Functions + jQuery= A UI For Adding Text and Color Blocks Into An Image file

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 07:30:00 -0400

One of the new features in ColdFusion 8 is the ability to manipulate images using ColdFusion tags and functions. For example, the code below (all server-side code) will take an image file on the server, overlay it with text, and create a brand new image file in temp space and display it to the browser:

A week ago, an idea popped into my head: "What if you could create a UI tool that would let a user decide what text should appear on the image and where it should appear?" I decided to try and answer that question. The result: a working proof-of-concept that lets you add text and blocks of color anywhere on a selected image using a UI tool powered by jQuery JavaScript functions. When you're done manipulating the image, you submit the data defining your changes to ColdFusion via an AJAX call, and ColdFusion creates a new image in temp space based on that data and displays it. You can save the new image down to your computer or store the data you submitted in the database so the image you made can be reproduced without permanently storing a new image file. The fact that it only took me a week to do this (no more than 25 hours) is a testament to both the power and simplicity of ColdFusion and jQuery. You can try out the proof-of-concept at: http://www.swartzfager.org/captionator Update: I updated the title as I realized that describing this as an "image captioning program" might be interpreted as simply storing captions to associate with an image, not adding the text onto/into the image.

Oracle and The CFDBINFO tag: More Tables Than I Bargained For

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 14:07:00 -0400

I was trying out the ColdFusion 8 <cfdbinfo> tag for the first time today, attempting to retrieve the names of all of the tables in a particular Oracle datasource. I used a <cfdump> to return the results, and I was startled to see a query object containing over 2,000 records. A bit more than the 35 records I was expecting. All of the unexpected entries were system tables or views. I have no idea what purpose they serve or if they're even part of the datasource per se. It's possible it's an anomaly resulting from the way our DBAs have our Oracle server configured, rather than something that will affect anyone trying to use the <cfdbinfo> tag against an Oracle database, but I thought it worth sharing. Fortunately, I should be able to use the "pattern" attribute of <cfdbinfo> to retrieve just the tables I need for my purpose.

Switching Between Sets of Tables On The Fly

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 19:25:00 -0400

Ever need to tell your ColdFusion app to run select queries against a different set of tables while you do something to the original set (like perform a batch update)? I did. Here's how I did it. [More]

CFUnited Now a Week Earlier

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 13:33:00 -0400

Yep: CFUnited will now be June 18 - June 21 at the DC Convention Center. E-mail just went out to all the attendees. Figures I'd go through the trouble of making countdown timers for the two conferences I'm attending and then have one of them go and change the date on me. :) Fortunately it's just a matter of updating the date value in the code. More importantly, I can still make it to CFUnited. Had they moved it up an additional week...that would have been a problem for me. And the fact that it's now in Washington D.C. itself means I can use the Metro for about half of the journey, cutting down on time in traffic.

ColdFusion Getting Major Attention From DZone

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 07:56:00 -0400

I think I've mentioned Dzone (www.dzone.com) in previous posts: it's a site where users submit links to articles and blog posts about web design and web software development, and these links are then voted and commented on. It's kind of like a subject-focused version of Digg. A lot of the posts tend to focus on Java or standard web technologies (JavaScript, CSS, HTML), but every now and then you see posts about Flex and AIR (and there's almost always an AIR ad somewhere on the page, evidence that the Adobe marketing team is aware of Dzone). There are even rare articles about ColdFusion. This morning I submitted my blog post about techniques for providing help instructions within web applications to Dzone. One of the submissions steps is to pick four context tags for your link, and when I looked at the tag collection I saw that ColdFusion had been added: I did a little bit of digging and found out that Dzone is planning on expanding their offerings to include a new group of websites focusing on specific technologies, including ColdFusion: Become a Zone Leader and Get Recognized I think this is a pretty exciting development and a sign that ColdFusion is finally getting some of the attention it desevers.

How to Use the Same Server-Side Code to Validate Form Data With or Without AJAX Using jQuery

Sat, 29 Dec 2007 11:45:00 -0400

In any web application, if the user submits information to be stored in a database using a form, you always want to validate that information before it's stored in the database. The majority of users have JavaScript enabled in their web browser, allowing you to use JavaScript functions to validate the data on the client-side before the submission is allowed to proceed. However, there are those rare individuals who have JavaScript turned off, so a conscientious developer will also validate the submitted data on the server side as well as a backup. The problem with this is that you end up having to maintain two sets of validation functions, which means twice the work if you have to make a change to the submission form or the validation rules themselves. In addition, if you're not experienced with JavaScript, you may find it harder to write the JavaScript validation code than similar code in your server-side programming language of choice. In an earlier blog post, I wrote about how the latest version of ColdFusion, ColdFusion 8, provides a new tag called <cfajaxproxy> that allows you to make JavaScript calls to functions contained in ColdFusion Component (CFC) files on the server, enabling you to write your validation code within CFC functions and call them for either client-side or server-side validation. But what if you're not running ColdFusion 8 yet, or you're using another web programming language (like PHP)? Here's a technique I came up with using the jQuery JavaScript library and the jQuery Form plugin that lets you write your validation and database-update code on the server-side in such a way that you can either call it via AJAX if JavaScript is enabled or run it server-side if JavaScript isn't available: [More]

If You Use ColdFusion, Join The ColdFusionCommunity Site!

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 12:34:00 -0400

I just heard about this site today: http://www.coldfusioncommunity.org Nick Tong did an excellent job with this site, and it has the potential to be a true ColdFusion social/professional networking site. If you're a ColdFusion developer, you need to at least check out the site, but I encourage you to go ahead and join.

Why ColdFusion? Built-in Functions for Creating/Interacting with PDF files

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 15:42:00 -0400

On DZone today, I saw two posts today about how to generate PDF files. One technique used a Java library called iText to create the PDF, the other looks like it uses Python. ColdFusion developers don't need to worry about choosing a library or a 3rd-party application to generate PDF files: CF comes with functions/tags for creating PDF documents out of HTML, concatenating several PDF files into a single file, and writing information to and from PDF form files. I don't currently have much need to use the PDF functions in ColdFusion, but it's nice to know they are there when I do need them.

ColdFusion 8 is Here

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 18:46:00 -0400

Adobe released the much anticipated ColdFusion 8 yesterday. Most of the new features of CF 8 were announced in various presentations and analyzed in numerous blogs, so the biggest news besides the announcement itself was the pricing of the Standard and Enterprise editions (U.S. pricing): $1,299 for Standard ($649 if upgrading), $7,499 for Enterprise ($3,750 if upgrading). I was hoping that maybe Adobe would make the Standard edition free in the hopes of drawing developers away from PHP and Java. However, Adobe has always said that they sold more copies of ColdFusion 7 than any previous release of ColdFusion, so I can certainly understand why they wouldn't want to give up that revenue: they are a business, after all. A number of ColdFusion developers were upset about the pricing, especially the pricing of the Enterprise edition. They're concerned that they'll be unable to convince their potential clients to go with ColdFusion when languages like PHP and Java are free in terms of initial cost. My hope is that Adobe will take some of the revenue generated by CF 8 sales and put that money into a solid advertising campaign, something that will bring attention to CF in the business community and in the larger Internet company. Ideally, such a campaign should include demonstrations of just how easy it is to accomplish certain tasks in CF. And they shouldn't be afraid to make comparisons between how CF lets you accomplish those tasks and how PHP or Java does those same tasks (if they even can!). I also think those demos should be publicly available on Adobe's web site, along with other marketing materials, so that these developers who are trying to convince clients to go with ColdFusion can point to these examples to make their case. Maybe Adobe can even provide some technically-savvy marketing staff whom these developers can call for help with convincing clients. One of the strengths of ColdFusion is that there is a company that is solidly behind the development and support of the product, and that strength should be leveraged to the utmost. As for attracting more developers to ColdFusion, that's more of a problem for Adobe to tackle than it is for ColdFusion developers. A strong advertising campaign will help generate interest, but Adobe may need to come up with new ways to make ColdFusion appealing to potential developers who probably feel they'd have better job security learning PHP or Java. I guess time will tell. There is one other thing I'd like to see happen...the removal of that Warhol-esque portrait of Tim Buntel on the Adobe ColdFusion product page. The fact that it's a portrait of Tim is okay; the fact that it looks like a browser image rendering error is not. Please, somebody fix that!

ColdFusion 8 Public Beta Available For Download

Wed, 30 May 2007 07:28:00 -0400

What, you want to know where you can get it? Off of Adobe Labs, of course: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/coldfusion8/

Some Notes from the D.C. Scorpio Presentation

Thu, 17 May 2007 07:27:00 -0400

(WARNING: Long post!) I was at the Scorpio presentation in Washington D.C. last night. While the presentation didn't reveal any Scorpio features that haven't been covered in blog posts from earlier presentations (like here and here), I did pick up a few more details about certain things: [More]

<cfajaxproxy>: No More Validation Duplication

Wed, 09 May 2007 10:34:00 -0400

ColdFusion 8 is going to include a huge new set of tools and features. How huge? Let's just say ColdFusion bloggers do not lack for material these days. And every few days another feature is revealed as Adobe folks tour the country with their preview demo. It was recently revealed that ColdFusion 8 would contain a new tag called <cfajaxproxy> as part of a number of tags in support of AJAX functionality. Details are vague, but apparently the idea is that this tag lets you call the functions in a ColdFusion CFC file from JavaScript via an AJAX call and return the results of the functions back to the JS function. That's a tremendously powerful tool. Most modern CF applications perform all of their business logic and database transactions through CFC functions, and now all of those algorithms can be made available via AJAX. The area where this will really help is input validation. A good web developer knows that data input by a user should be validated before submission to the server by JavaScript, but that the server should also validate the data upon submission in case JavaScript is unavailable/turned off. That used to mean maintaining two sets of validation functions: one in JS and one in ColdFusion. Not anymore. Now you can write one set of validation routines in your CFC methods and use it for both client-side and server-side validation. A single set of routines, easy-to-maintain and, because they are written in ColdFusion and not JavaScript, browser-independent. I can't wait!

UI Tool for Rearraging Items in a List

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 08:26:00 -0400

Almost all database-driven web sites have one or more web pages that display a set of related records. Most of the time, those pages automatically list the records in a particular order (alphabetically, numerically, chronologically, etc.). There are occasions, however, when administrative users want to be able to manually rearrange the order in which records or items will be displayed. For example, a news or PR site may want to change the order in which articles are displayed on the main page so that the most important or "hottest" items are at the top. Or a web-based testing site may want to rearrange the order of the questions on a test. How do you grant such a request? Well, for starters, you need to add a sorting or order field to the relevant records, something that the users can change the value of without affecting any of the "real" data in the record. That's fairly easy to do. The hard part is figuring out how to let your users manipulate those order numbers, because it's not sufficient to simple let them change each order number one at a time: what if two records end up with the same order/sorting number (like 5, for example)? Which record comes first? You need a way for the users to change the order of an item in relation to the items around it. After having faced this situation several times, I developed a user-interface tool that allows a user to rearrange the items in a list quickly and easily using JavaScript: my List Reorder tool. I'm making two versions of this tool available for download: a ColdFusion-powered version with ColdFusion code and functions for rendering the item/record list from the database, and an HTML version that developers can utilize with other server-side languages (PHP, Java, etc.). You can read more about the tool and download it either by clicking on the List Reorder Tool link in my Downloads box on the right, or by clicking on the link below: List Reorder Tool

Java.net Article About Why Java Developers Should Check Out ColdFusion

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 12:34:00 -0400

Ben Forta posted about this article on his blog: ColdFusion for JSP Developers I think it's a very well-written article addressed to those Java developers who have dismissed ColdFusion as a "lightweight" development language in the past (something of a sore point to ColdFusion folks, as you can imagine). I especially like the point he made that it doesn't have to be "either/or": you can mix ColdFusion and Java as much as you want or as much as you need to.

Yet Another Forum for CF Questions: Answers.org

Sun, 28 Jan 2007 15:11:00 -0400

I haven't blogged in quite a while, partly because I've been busy (as usual) but mostly because I haven't felt all that motivated. I'd feel guilty about it if someone was actually reading this blog. :) Thought I would write about the latest question-and-answer forum for ColdFusion questions: Answers.org (http://www.cfanswers.org). This new forum joins the two other major ColdFusion forums (CF-Talk and the Adobe ColdFusion Support Forums) as a place where ColdFusion developers of all levels can ask for help and insight from fellow developers. What's different about Answers.org is that it lets users rate the quality of the answers provided, so when there's more than one way to solve a problem the community can throw their weight behind a particular solution as a best practice. It's a good use of the "wisdom of the crowd" concept that makes up part of the Web 2.0 movement.

Catching Errors When Consuming RSS Feeds

Thu, 04 Jan 2007 09:03:00 -0400

Yesterday, Ben Forta blogged about an article by Ben Cortese on Consuming RSS Feeds with ColdFusion. The article does a great job of providing simple, straightforward code for accessing an RSS feed and displaying it to the user. However, a few more lines of code would shield the user from errors caused by the feed not being available or by the malformed content within the feed. As the article pointed out, you can retrieve the RSS feed from the remote site through the use of the tag, and then you can convert the XML in the feed to an XML object using the xmlParse function. If you enclose each of these steps within a block, you can intercept the errors and give your user a simple error message that explains there`s a problem with the feed. [More]

Presenting a User Interface Tool for Adding Members to a Set

Mon, 01 Jan 2007 15:28:00 -0400

Happy New Year! One of the reasons I started this blog was to have a place where I could share some of the tools I've developed for my various web applications. Despite a hectic holiday season and sporadic bursts of sheer laziness, I managed to put the finishing touches on one of these tools, and it's now ready to share. My Member/Set Tool is a user interface tool that lets you add member items to a set or group in any order you wish. To read about the tool, simply click on the Member/Set Tool link in the Downloads box to the right. If you like the tool and would like me to polish some other similar tools I've developed and make them available, please leave a comment to that effect so I know there's some interest: it'll help motivate me. :)

Using a Compound List to Simulate a Compound Boolean Statement

Fri, 08 Dec 2006 07:29:00 -0400

I was once asked to build an application that would use the demographic information submitted by would-be students to ensure that they were eligible to participate in certain social and cultural discussion sections. Each discussion section would have a number of enrollment rules that would not only determine which students were eligible, but would also set a limit on how many students could enroll for that discussion under that rule. For example, one of these enrollment rules would say "allow 5 students who are freshman or sophomores and were born in the U.S. and are atheists or agnostics and who grew up in a rural or suburban area to enroll in this discussion." I knew I had to find a way to handle these complex evaluations in a flexible manner without resorting to multiple layers of if/else statements. Fortunately, I figured out a way to use compound lists to evaluate a student`s eligibility. [More]

Better Late Than Never

Fri, 01 Dec 2006 17:49:00 -0400

I was surprised and amused to see the following story listed on the University of Maryland home page: Searchable Online Database of Experts Debuts I build that application for the communication/marketing folks in early 2005, and it has been available to the public for almost as long. Maybe they finally felt that they had enough experts in the database to finally give it some publicity (over 600 now).

Who Uses ColdFusion? Let`s Name Some Names...

Wed, 29 Nov 2006 22:10:00 -0400

Saw this on Ray Camden`s blog, who saw it on Steve Erat`s blog (what can I say: word gets around): World`s Top Companies Use ColdFusion MX When folks talk about enterprise-class web programming languages, they usually focus on Java or .NET, either because they are unaware of the prevalence and power of ColdFusion or because they are aware of ColdFusion and don`t want the word to get out. I`m glad that Adobe published this list to raise awareness of ColdFusion`s impact on the web application world. One site that was not on the list that I think is a good example of an enterprise-class website is the Voice of America website. Their site probably gets hundreds of thousands of hits a day from all over the world. One of the coolest things about the site is the drop-down box on the home page where you can choose to see news pages rendered in dozens of different languages (including Creole).

Web Developers and User Interfaces

Wed, 29 Nov 2006 14:46:00 -0400

Web application developers (the folks who program the functionality of the web application) are lousy user interface developers. That`s an assertion one hears a lot in the web designer and developer community, and was repeated again today in to an article entitled "This Is What Happens When You Let Developers Create UI." But in application development, as in life, there are no absolutes. I`m sure there are many web developers like me who have to handle every aspect of the development process, including the design of the UI. [More]