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: ColdFusion BlogThe Week in ColdFusion: 13-19 Feb: Hidden gems
The Software and Information Industry Association have announced the Codie Awards finalists for 2008 - and ColdFusion 8 is listed in the Best Web Services Solution category. The winners are revealed in May.
One for the Mac users: the built-in rich text editor in ColdFusion 8 uses FCKEditor - but at the time when CF8 was released, Safari was not supported by FCKEDitor. According to Ben Forta, the next CF updater, which is due out “shortly”, and includes support for Leopard and 64-bit Windows, will include an updated library which adds support for the WebKit rendering engine.
Charlie Arehart has done a round-up of all the ColdFusion podcasts - including those that started and have since disappeared. In fact, there’s more that have fallen by the wayside than are currently producing new episodes! Charlie has also has his chapter from CFWACK posted online in PDF format, on Using the CF8 Debugger.
Onto some technical stuff - Rupesh Kumar, from the ColdFusion engineering team, has posted code showing how to read meta data from swf files using ColdFusion (via Java). Handy for dynamically embedding Flash files - particularly to get the correct dimensions, as Rupesh points out. Anuj Gakhar has found another hidden …
The Week in ColdFusion: 6-12 Feb: Spreading the ColdFusion love
Fresh blogging blood: Adam Lehaman, previously Adobe’s “ColdFusion Specialist”, is now a full time ColdFusion Evangelist - and he’s also relaunched his blog, Adrocknaphobia. I had the pleasure of seeing Adam present during the CFCAMP event in Perth late last year, so I can tell you he’s really good at what he does. Also on the Adobe front, Kristen Schofield, ColdFusion marketing manager, is looking for ColdFusion case studies, so if you’ve done something cool, this could be your opportunity to tell the world about it.
Older podcasts from CFUnited, posted in January, somehow ended up in my feed this week, but it was a good reminder - there is some great content tucked away there. See the full list on the CFUnited site.
Ajax integration is proving to be one of the most talked-about features in ColdFusion 8, sparking lots of interest in JavaScript frameworks and particularly ExtJS. Justin Carter has released an alpha version of ColdExt, an ExtJS-based tag library for ColdFusion, to RIAForge. Justin has also posted some information about where he sees the project heading next.
And then for some code: Ben Nadel and Ray Camden have started an image manipulation project on RIAForge - ImageUtils.cfc - which …
The Week in ColdFusion: 30 Jan-5 Feb: a bit of everything
With January gone, the year is really starting to swing into gear, and ColdFusion blogs are busier than ever.
In the coding department, Steve Nelson continues his series on using the Google Calendar API with Google Calendar API - Creating a new Calendar with ColdFusion and Google Calendar API: Using ColdFusion to get a list of Calendars. With a Google calendar integration job on the horizon I’m looking forward to more of Steve’s articles in this area. Anuj Gakhar shows just how easily the Java underbelly of ColdFusion can be inspected with CFQuery and the underlying Java Objects, and Rick Osborne has launched a series of tutorials (currently numbering four) on generating scalable, stretchy, and smart graphics with ColdFusion without using CFIMAGE and in fact not requiring ColdFusion 8 at all. Ben Nadel is taking on the famous Matt’s Script Archive form handling script with a ColdFusion version (and has an amusing story about a client who insists they are switching to PERL).
If you’re after development best practices, Terrence Ryan has written an article on How to convince yourself to Unit Test. Need encouragement? Check it out!
For the last three weeks I’ve made some comment about how the "busy" the open …
The Week in ColdFusion: 23-29 Jan: Putting CF developers on the map
Want to know where all the ColdFusion developers are? CFMaps is a Yahoo! Maps mashup that allows ColdFusion developers to place themselves on the map, color-coded according to their level of experience. Right now, most registrations are in North America - so if you’re a CF guy or gal, why not add yourself to the map? There’s definitely a lot more of us than are currently registered - and I know for a fact there’s more than one ColdFusion developer in New Zealand!
Registration has opened for the WebManiacs conference, to be held in Washington DC in May. Speakers include ColdFusion Jedi Master Raymond Camden, Dave Watts, Doug Hughes, Jochem van Dieten and Joe Rinehart amongst many, many others. The CFUnited conference - also held in Washington DC, but in June - continues their podcast series with an interview with Kevin Roche on the Fusebox framework. So how about a conference that’s not in the US and not in DC? Scotch on the Rocks will be held in June in Edinburgh, and tickets are now available.
Also on podcasts, The Digital Media Dude interviewed CF guru Ben Forta as part of the “Meet the Experts” podcast series. Ben covers his background, why …
The week in ColdFusion: 16-22 Jan 08: exam time!
So what does the blogosphere have for hard-working ColdFusion developers this week?
Firstly, open source projects have been busy. More information about the upcoming version 5 of the FarCry CMS – “FarCry Fortress” – has been released, and it will now have a variety of deployment options which will mean that it can run more easily on shared hosting accounts, which has long been a bone of contention for many developers. Full details on the Daemonite blog: FarCry: Shared Hosting Made Easy.
On the frameworks front, Steve Nelson – one of the original developers of Fusebox – has written a “one year on” look at his simple CFC-based MVC framework. Apparently it hasn’t changed much, which makes perfect sense when you consider that it was meant to be super simple! Steve even goes so far as to explain how it works in one paragraph (and the final version is pretty short): Steve’s MVC Framework a year later.
Lots of developers are interested in the Ext JS Ajax framework, especially since Ext 1.0 is what does the heavy lifting behind the built in Ajax tags in CF8. Justin Carter has started on an Ext JS tag library for forms, and made some screenshots …
The week in ColdFusion: 9–15 Jan 08: Survey Mania
Big news this week: Obviously well into planning mode for ColdFusion 9, Adobe is seeking end user feedback through a series of surveys. From Adobe “Director of Engineering” Damon Cooper’s blog, there’s firstly the ColdFusion IDE survey:
The Adobe ColdFusion team would like to understand more about how you develop CFML code, what tools you currently use, what features you look for, use and would like in a IDE.
Next, there’s two surveys that ask what you think the ColdFusion team should focus on for ColdFusion 9 (codenamed “Centaur”): the Adobe ColdFusion Features Survey and the Adobe ColdFusion Platform and Vendor Support Survey.
On the ColdFusion frameworks front, things were busy in the Model-Glue world with new releases of Model-Glue 2.0 for ColdFusion and for Model-Glue for Flex.
Still on frameworks, Instalment 6.2 of Adrian Moreno’s Mach II Primer was released: Processing Data with Beans and DAOs using Event Filters. You can follow the Mach-II primer from the beginning with Moving From Procedural to Object Oriented Programming with Mach-II for ColdFusion. Adrian’s primers are a in-depth but still easy to follow - a really good read if you’re new to object-oriented ColdFusion, …
ColdFusion Technical Journals, Past and Present
The latest issue of Fusion Authority Quarterly Update (FAQU), the only print journal on ColdFusion, is now available from Fusion Authority.
First, a bit of background. Once upon a time, there was a ColdFusion magazine, The ColdFusion Developer’s Journal (CFDJ). Produced as part of a stable of technical journals by publishing company Sys-Con Media, it was a glossy affair, packed with advertisements, and included articles by many of the world’s best ColdFusion authors.
The publishing world is cut-throat. Over time, advertising started to take over the content, and nowhere was this more apparent than the accompanying web site, which became overrun with popups, intrusive flash ads which covered the articles and auto-playing video commercials. The quality of the print magazine started to decrease, and allegations of Sys-Con using blog material without permission started to rile developers.
At some point, Adobe decided it no longer wanted to support Sys-Con by purchasing ads in CFDJ, given it had lost a lot of community support. Sys-Con inked a deal with Microsoft instead, and decided to discontinue CFDJ in favour of a publication on Silverlight. Which was all fine - no one would have missed it much - until they decided to announce the new …
Friendly URLs
So I hope everyone in the US has survived the Daylight Savings Time crisis of 2007! I don’t know about you but i didn’t even feel it :)
I was browsing the forums recently, as i typically do when I’m looking for a topic to blog on, and I came across a post by forumposters entitled “Clean and descriptive url’s”. In this post forumposters asks:
“What have you fellow CF developers done to make your URLs look better? I’d like to see many examples and options if you would all be so kind to share”
I thought this was a good topic for me since I have a good bit of experience both historically and recently with this very issue.
For the longest time search engines would treat URLS with query strings aka dynamic URLs, everything after the question mark (?) in the URL, differently. Mostly pages which had these query strings would be ranked lower than a page which didn’t. So if you had the URL:
http://www.example.com/books/index.cfm?category=coldfusion&author=forta
it would rank lower in search results versus a URL formatted like so:
http://www.example.com/books/coldfusion/forta/
So it’s been a pretty big tasks for developers to try and get their URLs to be “clean”, meaning they wanted to remove …
Events Past and Future: Adobe Max North America and CFCAMP Australia
Most ColdFusion programmers have heard of Ben Forta -the leading CF “guru” since the Allaire days. The author of no less than six editions of the definitive “ColdFusion Web Application Programming Kit” books, affectionately known as CFWACK or “the bible” around many a CF shop’s office, Ben travels the world as Adobe’s Senior Technical Evangelist speaking and writing about ColdFusion. Having just got back from the Adobe MAX Europe conference (held in Spain), he’s next headed to Adobe Max Japan, then to Australia for a series of events on ColdFusion 8, Flex and AIR in late November. Called CFCAMP, the Australian events will be part formal presentation and part unconference, barcamp-style, so if you’re down under they should be worth getting along to - registration is now open.
Before Europe, MAX kicked off in Chicago at the end of October. Kai Koenig, New Zealand-based developer, blogger, trainer and director of Ventego Creative, was there and was kind enough to answer some of my questions about the event.
Kay: Attending Adobe MAX 2007 must have been pretty exciting. Have you been to MAX in previous years, and if so was it any different under the Adobe banner?
Kai: Yes, the first major (at that …
ColdFusion: worth the cost!
Judging by many of the comments on my previous post, the licensing cost of ColdFusion is a major issue for many people, given the many free and open source alternatives. This is not a new concern - developers have been asking “is it worth paying for?” for as long as ColdFusion has been around. Fellow SitePoint blogger Eric Jones wrote an article way back in June 2004 and addressed this very issue (among others) in Making the Case for ColdFusion. Fast forward to 2008, and it seems that people are still asking.
But first, just how much does ColdFusion actually cost?
A Standard Edition license - designed for delivering multiple applications or sites on a single server - will cost, on average, US $1,299. Up the other end of the scale, an Enterprise Edition license - for multiple servers or plugging into existing J2EE installations - can be purchased for US $7,499. The Enterprise Edition has some extra features not found in the Standard Edition that are mostly of interest, as the name suggests, to developers working in an enterprise-level environment, as well as an expanded range of supported platforms and databases.
An important item to note is that a …
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