nil desperandum - Web Development

I'm speaking at Scotch on the Rocks!

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:03:00 -0700

Today the Scotch on the Rocks Speakers list was release by Andy Allan and his motley crew . [More]

AJAX Longpolling with ColdFusion and BlazeDS - Subtopics and building a messaging app

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 01:56:00 -0700

I'm sorry to say that I've been putting this post off. Why? Well to be honest I've been struggling with getting my head around how to actually use longpolling. Its all very well understanding the mechanics, but how can you use it effectively. Part of the problem I've been having is the nature of sending messages and filtering them with BlazeDS. What I keep forgetting is that long poll messaging is "fire and forget". You don't send a message and expect an immediate response. You send a message and a response might be broadcast to all event listeners with a specific filter. If you want a request and response, call a webservice or a make an ajax request. Don't use long polling and event gateways. [More]

Blog Roundup 30 April 2010

Sat, 01 May 2010 00:13:00 -0700

I'm rubbish! I really am... I promise and I promise to keep on top of Blog Round-ups, but I never seem to quite manage it. I would really like to keep writing this round-ups ever week, but its quite an effort. Can I persuade anyone to co-author these posts with me? Leave me a comment. Drop me an email. Shout me on Twitter. Anyway, on with the round-up. [More]

APR and IRR Calculator Component - Code Review please

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 12:11:00 -0700

Ten days ago I post my first project to RIAForge. Its a pretty simple project as it only consists of one CFC and I would appreciate some feed back on the code. Hence the request for a code review. This CFC is based on research and work that I did to be able to create a finance calculator for a client and works quite nicely. I'm also pleased to see that at the time of writing this post my project has already been viewed 700 times and downloaded 23 times. I hope you're finding it useful. The CFC is, as the title of this blog post suggests an APR and IRR calculator and you can download it from RIAForge here : http://aprcfc.riaforge.org/. [More]

AJAX Longpolling with ColdFusion and BlazeDS - Getting set up

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 21:31:00 -0700

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. [More]

ColdFusion Podcasts Roundup

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 22:15:00 -0700

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.

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Blog Round up 20 September 2009

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:49:00 -0700

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.

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Blog Roundup September 11th 2009

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 13:40:00 -0700

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.

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Twitter marketing. Should you? Shouldn't you?

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 06:50:00 -0700

I mentioned on Twitter that I did a crash course in using Twitter for some of my colleagues. They needed to know how it could be used for networking and marketing. I was asked what my thoughts on marketing using Twitter were. I said I would write something up and get it posted.

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What am I reading?

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:30:00 -0700

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.

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Eclipse, Mylyn and Trac 0.11

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:16:00 -0700

My first post for ages! Sorry about that....

Something quite exciting, that I've had a crack at fixing myself, but the combination of my poor java and python skills has prevented me from completing this adequately. However, the combined skills of the trac developers and the development team for Mylyn and the Mylyn Trac connector have managed to combine to finally provide the highly awaited Mylyn, Eclipse and custom Trac workflow integration!

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Web 2.0 - Meeting the challenge

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 21:50:00 -0700

I few weeks back I wrote an aritcle for the bdaily bulletin on Web 2.0. I ended up writing a little too much and it ended up as a two parter. Here now are the two parts back to one article.

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Running ie6 in ie7 compatibility mode

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 16:57:00 -0700

This was an April Fools Day post. Please don't try this at home!!! Please do enjoy the link to Hugs for Monsters. ;)

Yesterday I was doing a bunch of testing of a site that went live in the afternoon. Most of that testing involved making sure that there were no faux pas in the CSS that broke the display in Internet Explorer 6.

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Web 2.0 Articles in the bdaily

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 06:10:00 -0700

One of the many blogs, newsletters and electronic publications that I read is a Newcastle-based business daily newsletter called the bdaily.

The bdaily publishes selected business news from the north east of england to recipients locally as well as globally.

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Manually creating JRun Server instances.

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 01:12:00 -0700

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 :

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