The Week in ColdFusion: 2-8 April: updater overload
Obviously the big news this week was that the first ColdFusion updater, 8.0.1, was released – and was subsequently re-announced by seemingly every blog in MXNA and Fullasagoog! In between all the announcements were some posts exploring the new features:
- Ray Camden shows how it’s now easier to add PDF watermarks
- Brian Rinaldi and Barney Boisvert debate the best way to create dummy recordsets
- John Beynon discusses EULA changes, which will be of particular interest to those interested in virtualisation, and Vince Bonfanti of New Atlanta responds with the differences between ColdFusion and BloueDragon’s licensing models
- Adobe’s Manjukiran Pacchhipulusu writes about taking advantage of the new 64-bit support
Fortunately, I also managed to find some more material NOT related to the update. There’s new features at Fusion Authority, home of the print journal FAQU. The first of a number of CFUnited video interviews has been posted, where Paul Vernon interviews New Atlanta’s Vince Bonfanti about – guess what! – BlueDragon open source. And I attempt to highlight some of the best CF-Talk mailing list threads from the previous week in my new ColdFusion-Talk Roundup #1.
Short and sweet code cuts:
- Seth Duffey shows how to work with multi-page TIFF images in ColdFusion 8
- Michael Sharman shows how to dynamically flush a cached web service in CF 7 (and Raymond Camden points out in the comments that there’s now a supported method for doing the same thing in CF8)
- Todd Sharp explores a new way to create screen captures in Converting HTML to an image with CF/Java – at the moment the method is dependent on CF 8 but Todd says he hopes to remove that requirement
- Charlie Arehart talks about potential solutions to prevent CFMAIL from being flagged as spam
Autosuggest is Ajax topic of the week: Based on a question asked on the CF-Talk mailing list about allowing multiple auto-suggest items per field, Dominic Watson posted a solution that solves the problem and more, and then turned it into a custom tag and released it on RIAForge: Better Autosuggest. Original poster Steve Good also posted an alternative solution using JQuery.
Advancing the CFGRID cause: Brian Love demonstrates how to dynamically set a CFWINDOW title from a CFGRID – a handy tip for those CFGRID-driven CRUD interfaces. Angela Buraglia reveals some CSS to enable word wrap in HTML/Ajax CFGRID – although this CF-Talk mailing list thread suggests that Angela’s code may need to be modified slightly to work with IE. And Todd Sharp has created a calendar date picker widget for editable CFGRIDs. Sweet!
SitePoint have published a beginner’s tutorial on BlueDragon, Enter the Dragon: Develop ColdFusion Apps for Free. If you’re interested in trying out alternative CFML engines, there’s also Railo – Gert Franz runs through how to configure Railo with IIS6. On the other hand, if you’re looking for heavy duty Adobe CF, Gary Gilbert let us know that web host Intermedia.net have announced they are offering ColdFusion 8 Enterprise hosting plans. He has a look at their plans compared to hostmysite. Or if you’re going large scale self-hosted, Mike Brunt has kicked off a series of articles on clustering ColdFusion with HA – Clustering ColdFusion Part 1 – Installing CF. Mike intends to follow up with posts on hardware and software setup.
Other randoms this time around include:
- Sean Corfield posted links to the ColdFusion Weekly podcast’s public calendar of upcoming interviews and topics, which you can subscribe to in a number of different formats
- Bobby Hartfield, developer of CF4em, a new forum package for ColdFusion, is looking for people to help test drive the features before he releases it for beta testing
- If you’re an Eclipse user, you might be interested in Mylyn, a “Task-Focused Interface for Eclipse” according to the official web site – Mike Henke raves about it, and links to some resources (and there’s lots more similar material on Mike’s blog, so check it out if you’re an Eclipse, Subversion or ANT user)
Finally, from the “I didn’t realise that was even there” files, Nick Tong pointed out to me this week that his site cfFrameWorks is not only where he keeps his blog, but also a compendium of ColdFusion frameworks with a description and links for each one and a separate framework news feed. Nice resource Nick! My interview with Geoff Bowers on the FarCry CMS/Framework went live last week, and I hope to have more framework developer interviews coming soon.
That’s it for this week. If you have a ColdFusion tip for me, email me (kay at smoljak dot com), leave a comment or tag your links with for:kay.smoljak in del.icio.us. Operators are standing by to receive your link!
