In my last post on long polling I went through the basic set up of ColdFusion and BlazeDS before getting into too much code.
This part I want to get a basic connection and a couple of simple messages being sent and received.
I've spent some of my week this week fighting with JavaScript, BlazeDS and ColdFusion to get a working model for some ExtJS functionality that I'm currently building at work.
One of several pieces of functionality we'd like is to have is real time notifications of workflow changes. The way it was described was "we want to push alerts to the users".
I decided to have a look at how we actually addressed this "problem". We didn't really need to "push" alerts to users, so the solution was traditional polling or long polling.
I've been compiling ColdFusion applications on and off over the years for various reasons, usually on my server or another server that I have access to.
Recently I've been compiling for deployment to an external server that I've not had access. I ran into a few problems with the resulting compiled code not running on these servers while it runs perfectly locally.
To start at the beginning, I've often simply pre-compiled an application in place, so that it need not compile the templates on first access. Occasionally I've compiled for source-less deployment. Usually under those circumstances I've had access to the server, where I've simply loaded source code onto the server, compile, dropped the compile code into place and then removed the source.
To kick start my reading of blogs I've started listening to podcasts again.
I used to listen to ColdFusion Podcast and Weekly, but unfortunately they are now deceased, so I had a bit of a search and asked around on Twitter. Here's the podcasts I'm now listening to and a few thoughts.
This blog round up is somewhat later than I had intended, but for good reason. I've been waiting for a couple of blog posts to emerge into the public domain, so that I could include them in the round up. I can't impress upon you how important it is to read these posts.
Sorry..... Its been a very very long time since I posted a blog round up.
I recently moved my blog from hosting on my PC at home to extremely cheap Coldfusion 8 hosting with Hosting A to Z and I've updated to MangoBlog 1.4 with a new site theme, so I've decided its time I got my act together and started posting again.
Previously I wrote a number of weekly blog round up of the 100 or so blogs I'm subscribed to, but I've let it get all out of date and I've not been reading as much as I should.
I'm having a spot of bother with the JRun JMC (Java Management Console) at the minute.
For some reason I'm getting error messages like this :
Ack! I really should keep up with these things. I've been reading through a couple of new blogs, looking at extJS and playing with Sun's GlassFish as a possible alternate java server for ColdFusion.
Well, Gary Fenton joked that I should change my blog slogan to "I read 100 blogs so YOU don't have to!", now I actually do read 100 blogs! Well 102 to be precise! hmmm make that 103... No idea why, but Adam Lehman's blog wasn't on my list!
Ah! Finally! Launch day....
I'm proud to have been a part of the team at Enigma that put together this site for ITV SignPost BSL.
The goal of ITV Signed Stories, http://www.signedstories.com/, is to help improve the literacy of deaf children.
The site is fun, colourful and interactive for children of all ages (click the cat on the home page flash movie - that was my sole graphical suggestion ;) ), but also provides information and a place to chat (forums coming very soon) for parent, carerers and teachers.
The fun stuff in the site is each of the world under which you can find the initial set of 21 children's books (Word is they ITV will be adding at least one new book a week). Each flash world helps visitors to the site find books that interest them the most. The worlds are "Adventure", "Baby and Toddler", "Fairytales and Folktales", "Funny", "Slimy Scary" and "Families and Friendships". Books within each world are displayed by relevancy to that world. ie. In Slimy Scary, the more slimy and scary the books are rated the bigger and the closer to the middle of the book cloud they will be displayed.
Within each world there is a book tree that allow you to change the order of the books by difficulty. Clicking on the branches rearrange the books to bring the most relevant books for that difficulty level to the front.
Clicking on a book will bring up a short, signed, preview of the selected book. Clicking on the GO button will bring up a signed animated video of the selected book.
Books on the site are from authors such as Michael Rosen, the Children's Laureate, Jez Alborough, and Julia Donaldson. People in the UK will know at least a few of the people reading the books, for example Kevin Whatley and Emila Fox. The animation is created by the likes of King Rollo Films. Last, but not least, the books are signed by Natalie Pollard, Khalid Ashraf and Denise Armstrong. Mary Briggs, co-founder of Seven Stories, is also a consultant on the project.
That's quite a role call to stand up to, but Scott Tyrell, the designer on the project, has had a lot of fun and done a superb of designing and animating the various Book Theme worlds. The Book Tree and the Book Cloud presented us with some interesting technical issues, particularly with book relevancy and the book cloud, but Simon Forster and Peter Gledhill have worked tirelessly to produce a very slick interface. Mariana Stoffin has done some great work putting together a lot of the CSS and functionality in the rest of the content driven site. I've had some fun putting together some Model Glue Unity applications and remote services, with ColdSpring and Transfer-ORM, as well as some JQuery stuff. Of course, we wouldn't have got to where we did without our task master, Nicole Hardy, keeping us on track. ;)
The site's goal, as I said before, is to improve literacy of deaf children, but the books that are on there so far are so good that I've already been showing them to my 2 year old son (2 years just after Xmas! Where has the time gone!!) and he loves them. James' vocab and stringing sentences together is really starting to kick at the minute and shouts "Coming!" excitedly when he sees the swirl while a world or book video is being loaded.
Well.... I think that's enough of me gushing about the site!!! I know I'm biased, but I love it! I hope you all do too!
Please take a look and enjoy! Signed Stories : http://www.signedstories.com
Now maybe I'll get back to some blog reading and my round-ups ;)
