The Week in ColdFusion: 16-22 April: Community best practices

Welcome to the 15th “Week in ColdFusion” wrap-up! I hope that I’m saving people time, or at least pointing out some handy posts you might have missed. If you have any feedback, please leave a comment. Too long? Too short? Not enough of X? Too much Y? I’d love to hear it!

Best Practices

Onto the posts: Peter Bell has started a series of articles on Unit Testing and Test Driven Development (TDD). He’s kicked the set off with Why Test? and followed up with Books on Unit Testing and Test Driven Development and then an article on Getting Test Infected – pairing up with another developer to pick the unit testing habit up from them. Food for thought if you’re curious about Unit testing or TDD.

Speaking of deep thinking, Barney Boisvert has posted on how far the ColdFusion community has come in the past few years, with ColdSpring, ORM solutions like Reactor and Transfer, and frameworks like Fusebox, Mach-ii and Model-Glue now so widely adopted. If you’re using these tools, learning them or even just thinking about these topics, Barney would like you to congratulate yourself!

Community

The first round of results from Jim Priest’s CFML IDE survey are in. Check out what the ColdFusion community is looking for in an IDE. If you’re interested in what the wider web development community is favouring, the results of a survey done by O’Reilly’s Inside RIA is also available.

Charlie Arehart reminds us of the UGTV (User Group TV) section of his site: a listing of recorded ColdFusion presentations. There’s lots of gems in there! Charlie has also had some of his “Tipical Charlie” columns from the Fusion Authority Quarterly Update journal published online in PDF format.

It’s official: Raymond Camden is a code diva. He lists the tell-tale signs – are you one too?

My CF-Talk mailing list roundup for this week covers discussions on Flash CFFORM binding, error handlers in a clustered environment, refreshing cached web services, creating an Excel spreadsheet, the difference between CFSCRIPT “for” loops and CFLOOP, and preventing cross-site scripting.

Open Source

The Open BlueDragon Steering Committee interviews continue with Adam Haskell, Mark Drew, Alan Williamson and Matt Woodward.

Brain Rinaldi rounds up the open source releases for the week – only one new project but a few updates, including version 1.0 of Mango Blog (taking the project officially out of beta).

Code, code and more code

Lots of image manipulation this week!

• ImageUtils, the CF8 image manipulation library, has had some nice TIFF functionality added
• Brian Love has posted about how to get JPEG resolution from EXIF metadata
• Seth Duffey shares a technique for rotating digital photographs in CF8 using EXIF orientation information
• Raymond Camden’s updated YouTube CFC has been officially released and he helps out one of his readers needing to extend the autocomplete functionality in CF8
• Scott Bennett has made his Google Maps API custom tag available and shows how to position a CFWindow from the centre of the viewport

That’s all for this week! Email me tips (kay at smoljak dot com), leave a comment or tag links for:kay.smoljak in del.icio.us. Keep rocking the code!