nil desperandum - Blog Round Up

ColdFusion Blog Roundup - 7th December 2010

Tue, 07 Dec 2010 16:47:00 -0700

I'm not entirely sure why, but I've had a sudden urge to write a blog round up! So here we go :I'd be very surprised if you haven't heard of Matt Gifford's OO Programming in ColdFusion book Having written the book Matt is now looking at a User Group tour or workshop tour as well. In order to better understand everyone's requirements he's asking if people interesting in attending a session could complete a very brief survey. If you'd like to know a little more about the book take a look John Whish's review Another conference to add to your calendar for 2011, other than wonderful, the glorious, the magnificent Scotch on the Rocks 2011, is the Open CF Summit in Feburary held in Texas. Speaker already confirmed are Sean Corfield, Chris Chalk from Google, Kurt Wiersma, Alan Williamson and Matt Woodward. Currently not attending, but would like to attend is the lead developer of CFEclipse. Unfortunately, its not in his or his employer's budget, so the CFEclipse team have started a whip round to see if they can get Denny to the conference. If you're a user and abuse of CFEclipse, why not help Denny out. Ray Camden always has some interesting little gotcha's on his blog and this Quick Test - CFScript UDF is no different, pointing out a change in the way arguments in UDFs have changed from CF5-8 to CF9. Another neat little tidbit is this one from Andy Jarrett, with a little bit of jQuery for finding all the empty form fields. Recently the chaps at AW2.0 added a neat feature to Open Bluedragon in the form of that can directly embed a third party language. At the moment this is currently only in the form of java, but I believe there are plans for other languages, possibly including server-side javascript. Alan Williamson recently put this new feature to good use to create a wrapper for accessing MongoDB. A similar project for other versions of CFML Server is Marc Esher's CFMongoDB on RIAForge. The ColdFusion Meetup has got another great speaker and topic lined up in the form of Carl Meyer talking on JVM Configuration and CF. This is something that I seem to end up tinkering with quite frequently, so its a topic that I am particularly looking forward to. John Whish has just posted an article on caching views but not layouts in ColdBox and is definitely one I've book marked to read later. There are a whole host of other posts, but these are the ones that particularly peaked my interest. I hope you find them useful too.

Blog Roundup 7 May 2010

Fri, 07 May 2010 15:41:00 -0700

I'm on fire!! A blog round-up two weeks in a row!! I read and pick the entries for the blog round in Google Reader. There are currently 101 subscriptions listed there, but I'm always happy to add more if someone would like me to consider their blog posts for inclusion in these sporadic updates. You can see the 101 already added listed on my blog roll page. Lets crack on with the round-up.This blog, along with lots of other ColdFusion developer's blogs are run on Ray Camden's BlogCFC. Ray has recently set up a Google group for BlogCFC and is discussing plans for v6 of BlogCFC on there among other things. Its hoped that the Google Group will provide a much more accessible way for BlogCFC user to ask questions and provide feedback. Talking of Ray; One of his "Ask a Jedi" questions was "When do you catch errors?". For once Ray didn't actually have a good answer and is throwing it out there for other folks to discuss, so have a read and add your thoughts. Jason Dean has written a couple of very interesting post of Cryptography that are well worth a read. I got far too sucked in to trying to work out one of the encryption challenges. Thanks for that Jason! ;oP A couple of database related articles caught my eye this week. The first is Charlie Arehart's post about updated jdbc type 5 drivers These are the commercial version of the drivers available in ColdFusion Server, but Charlie does point out the potential benefits as well as some useful resources for performance tuning. The second database post is one by Barney Boisvert on embracing HQL and SQL. To be honest I'm still trying to get my head around using hibernate, so some of it was a bit "eh?" to me, but definitely and interesting read. Ben Forta notes that Adobe is running a developer week next week (w/c 10th May 2010)
For those of in the EMEA Adobe EMEA will be running a series of e-seminars called Build an app in a week beginning Monday 7th June 2010. I've already given some folks a bit of hassle over the fact that these seminars are building apps, but yet don't use one of Adobe's core server technologies, namely ColdFusion. Hopefully, we'll see an update to the schedule with the inclusion of a ColdFusion seminar. Jason Delmore has a short post on Serializing/Deserializing in ColdFusion 9. This is converting complex data into a string representation of the object. It is kind of a pain in CF8, but two CF9 functions make this very easy to manage. Have a read. Jason also posts the CF8 solution for managing this functionality in ColdFusion 8. Last but not least John Whish has posted an article on Unit Testing ORM with Coldbox3 and MXUnit. ColdBox3 is a framework I'm currently working with, unit testing with MXUnit is something that I need to do much more of and it did occur to me "how the hell do you unit test ORM?". Its helped answer a couple of question for me.

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.Who says there are no ColdFusion jobs?! Ricardo Parente's ColdFusion Developer Network posts several jobs a day from across the globe everyday, so I'm not going to post them all here. Check them out for yourself. Ricardo also post the jobs to his twitter account http://twitter.com/cfdevelopers. If you're from the UK, while you're on Twitter you should probably add http://twitter.com/aqualimeblue. Amber seems to always be looking for ColdFusion developers from the UK and around the globe to fill ColdFusion positions. If you hadn't noticed Adobe's Creative Suite 5 is now available as Marcos Placona points out on his newly refurbished blog with his Adobe CS5 Cracked post. If I didn't know better I'd think Marcos was trying for a Reachie Award at Scotch on the Rocks at the end of the month. ;) While I'm mentioning Scotch on the Rocks, Andy Allan is asking for help with a survey for SOTR2011! John Whish has an interesting little post on Why Shared Hosting is Bad. I've always known that it was possible to pick up data from other applications, but you forget how easy it is to abuse that and that you need to protect your clients and your applications. I really haven't been paying attention... I never noticed that ColdSpring 2.0 is in development and has a home on SourceForge. I didn't even realise that Mark Mandel was leading the development! Pass by value and pass by reference can often catch developers out; Here's a sneaky one using ArraySet that one of Ray Camden's readers brought to him thinking it might be a bug. There's a new ColdFusion podcast kicking about. CFBrew is brought to you by a team of developers in an organisation talking about their experiences in development. The second episode deals with starting developing in an Agile environment and using scrums. As this is something that we are just starting to try out I'm very interested to hear how they get on and the problems they encounter and how they solve them. A couple of other small post from Ray to finish up this round up. Ray dropped a very short blog post on new features in ColdFusion 9.0.1 Terry Ryan mentioned at cf.Objective. He also mentions a cookie bug in ColdFusion 9 that needs voting up to get fixed. Ooo I nearly forgot!! Pete Freitag has updated HackMyCF to detect a vulnerability in BlazeDS. This is a vulnerability that affects ColdFusion versions 7 through 9, so definitely worth making sure you are patched up. Using John Mason's Merlin Manager or cfUpdater project can help you make sure that your ColdFusion instances are correctly patched. And that concludes 3 hours of reading and writing to bring you this round-up. I hope you find it useful.

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.

Before I say anything about any of the podcasts, I should say I am enjoying all of the podcasts, but they all suffer from one or more people being a little quiet. I listen on my HTC Magic using aCast on the metro to work. Often I have the headset and handset volumes up to full volume and my fingers on my ears to be able to hear everything that is being said (noisy bloody metro). I suspect the problem is number of microphones and their position.

Ok. So lets just list the podcasts and their authors:

CFConversation - Brian Meloche and guests
CFhour() - Dave Ferguson and Micheal Sean Becker
RIAPodcast - Doug Knudson and John Mason
TWiCF - Brian Carr, Micky Dionisio and Mike Chandler

And now for a few remarks.

CFConversation is the oldest of the podcasts. Brian always has interesting guests, topics and discussions. It can be a bit technical and sometimes prone to wandering off topic, but excellent guests everytime.

CFHour() is the most lighthearted and personal of the podcasts. There's always something that Doug comes out with that makes me chuckle.My favourite remarks to date are his highly inappropriate, but extremely funny about Michael's wife and the 2am decorating. Of course, the guys do also have some great animated discusions on ColdFusion and web development.

RIAPodcast, only up to episode 6, was the new boy on the block. Until the last couple, as with all new podcasts, it was a little dry. Adobe's Josh Adams has been involved in the last couple of discussions, while still very technical (not a bad thing), RIAPodcast seem to be steadily becoming more relaxed.

This Week in ColdFusion - I was just adding Paul Kukiel's blog to my Google Reader and spotted his most recent post on TWiCF. It's so new I haven't listened to it yet. I have to say, while I understand why they're talking about their own product (a safe start), it does feel a little nepotistic and icky, especially as CFHour() only just did a show on Quicksilver. The only other thing to say at the minute is that the other podcasts put out shows in the region of 1 hour in ~24mb. TWiCF is a 54MB file. I'm sure practice will get this file size down.

I am listening to another podcast. Its not a ColdFusion, but a general web development podcast, Boag World. Based out of Leeds in Yorkshire the guys put a good show with some interesting topics and interviews, most recently Opera's Molly Holzschlag on Web Standards. Definitely worth a listen.

I big thank you to all involved in all the podcasts above for the broadcasts they create and the great information they provide on ColdFusion and related technologies.

I hope you've found this information useful and the broadcasters aren't too offended by my comments. ;)

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.

Its Really Really REALLY important that you read this post by Mark Kruger on Script Injection Attacks. You should also read Ray Camden's "How Galleon was Hacked" post.
Read, inwardly digest and then go away and make sure that none of your applications are vunerable to this form of attack and that you've applied updated to all your third party applications to be sure that they are patched against. It can affect anyone (This link may give you a malware warning, but the site is now clean and clear) and everyone.

Congratulations to Liz Frederick who has joined Adobe Developer Relations team as Community Manager. Liz previously worked for Stellr and Teratech and was key in the organisation of CFUnited in the US and Europe.

While I'm tangentially mentioning conferences, Scotch on the Road European tour is rapidly running out of tickets. Last tweet I saw from Andy said that there was only one ticket left for Amsterdam. Tickets are Free and Terrence Ryan and Adam Lehman will be in attendance! Can you afford not to go? ;)

If you're going to be at the Amsterdam session, would you be interested in 2 days of ColdBox Training?
Kev McCabe also asks what would you like to see at Scotch on the Rocks 2010. Help the guys out to make SOTR the conference that you want it to be.

I mentioned previously a post by Ray Camden on Web Charts Editor. While doing some research on ColdBox Ray came across the editor as a plugin for Eclipse, which is pretty cool. Check it out....

I haven't had time to read them all, but there's been a flurry of CF9 ORM/Hibernate posts this last week or so. Looks like great minds and all that.. ;)
Anyway, here's a quick list of those posts.

Some thoughts on ColdFusion 9 ORM and Persistent CFCs - Ray Camden
A New Series: Hibernate & ColdFusion 9
Hibernate & ColdFusion 9 - What is ORM?

ColdFusion 9 ORM on Tomcat Gotcha
Jeff Chastain at Alagad
CF9 ORM - Experimenting with type vs ormtype - Bob Silverberg
Introspecting Application.cfc (how do I know if ORM is enabled?)
ColdFusion 9 ORM: Data Mapper versus Active Record
Terrence Ryan

On the subject of ORM Tom de Manincor has released an update to TransferSync to allow synchronising between multiple instances on the same server.

To close up this round-up, I mentioned last time that I've upgraded to MangoBlog 1.4, but didn't mention that verision 1.4 has only recently been updated. Here's a post by Marcos Placona of the new features and some important notes for Railo users.

With this new skin and the new version of MangoBlog, plus a recent outting to FOWD in glasgow I've started trying to use microformats on my links. I'm not sure they really do that much or are that meaningful, but I want to have a play around with them to see what the deal is. Feel free to tell me to stop it if the outcome is unwanted. Next I need to go take some photos around Newcastle and get these header images more relevant to me.

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.

Here we go! Rapid round up for September blog posts that have dropped into my Google Reader.

Probably the most important blog posts that you should already are these two FYIs from Ray Camden on the ColdFusion 8.0.1 Cumulative Hot Fix.

Bob Silverberg has posted this interesting entry on dynamically passing nulla function values to . This is particularly handy with ColdFusion 9 ORM functionality, but its handy for dynamically call getters and setters methods on "beans" in general.

Doug Boude (rhymes with loud) has written a useful 3 part series on setting up Railo on Window 2008 and IIS7(if you really must)

I've decided not to repost any of the PHP vs ColdFusion, but this release timeline from Jacob Munson was pretty interesting, so this will be my only deviation from my "rule".

I always always forget about the Chart Editor that comes with ColdFusion when it comes to making cfcharts pretty. Here's an example of styling up up a chart using the editor by Ray Camden.

More and more of my code is OO based, but I was originally educated as a procedural developer so it was interesting to read these two posts one from Ray Camden and one from Doug Boude on "Falling behind" or changing from procedural to OO development practices.

There's been a couple of "ColdFusion power" posts in the last 11 days that were quite interesting : The first being the relaunch of ColdFusion 9 powered Adobe TV as noted by Dan Vega and this post by Dave Konopka on ColdFusion powered desktop gagdets. Adobe TV is looking pretty good - I need to get some time to take a proper look at the content - and Dave's post is a good intro into how you can use ColdFusion to power your desktop application using ColdFusion to generate XML.

Last post to mention is Brian Rinaldi's post "Follow CF and Flex bloggers with one click" If you're looking for ColdFusion or Flex developers on Twitter, then this is a good place to start.

Well that about all for the minute. I've no doubt I've missed loads out that others may find interesting, but these were the highlights that I picked out from the beginning of September.

If you'd like to be added to the 100+ blogs I already follow or there's someone you think I should be reading, then please do drop me a comment, send me a message on twitter or drop me an email.

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.

A few months ago, in an attempt to try to get back into the habit of scanning, if not reading, blog posts, I set up a twitter account and twitter feed from a folder in my google reader account. If you're interested its http://twitter.com/nilBlog, but it didn't work very well.

So now I'm taking another look at making sure I do read more and letting others read what I read as well.

The first stage of this is the new page that you'll find on my blog "What am I reading?". This page displays the latest 20 blog posts from a folder in my Google Reader account. Its the same feed as is used to populate my blog feed twitter account and is just an amalgamation of all the blogs that I would normally use to create a blog round-up. Some feeds are just too noisy (betanews.com) and some you don't really care about (LFG).

This was pretty simple to set up - add a custom page template to Mango Blog, add a cffeed call and output entries from the generated query using the layout from the home page (do you want the code??) - but it also gave me a bit of an insight into the Google Reader API and some of the fun things I could potentially do.

The next stage is to sort out the twittter feed to nilBlog. Currently it uses TwitterFeed to push entries from the RSS feed to the twitter account. This kinda works, but because of the volume of traffic on the RSS feed I need something a little more proactive, so its time to write something myself. There are 4 or 5 coldfusion/twitter connectors on RIAForge at the minute, but because I know AndyJ I think I'll be going with TwitterCFC. I'll let you know how it goes....

It should be noted I am not building an agregator. I don't want to replicate the likes of CFBlogger. I will not be accepting suggestions or submissions of blogs to add to my list. This is purely for my own gratification and if anyone finds it useful, then great!

Blog Round up 19 Feb 2009

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 05:32:00 -0700

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!

Recently added to the roll call are :

cfsearching, recommended to me by Ray Camden when we were talking about his post on reading office documents with CF. Leigh from cfsearching helped Ray solve the problems using POI and reduce the code quite dramatically.

Jon Dowdle, who I picked up when I saw a post on formatting SQL come through on Twitter. Jon needs to get some new blog software that has a working RSS feed ;) like Adam Bertram did when he moved his blog, i_am_a_geek to BlogCFC.

Making my 100th blog subscription is Ricardo Parente, who came to my attention again via Twitter with a post entitled Knowing ColdFusion. This article and 101 subscription Pablo Varando's article controversially titled "ColdFusion is Dead" make for some really interesting reading. While you're at it have a look at John Beynon's "<enter product name here> is dead" post for a giggle. ;)

Last but not least I noticed that UK ColdFusion developer Duncan Cummings has been blogging, so his blog makes 102 subscriptions. ;)

I've already mentioned a few interesting reads so far, but here, finally, is the round-up.

ColdFusion Conference Stuff
Andy and Kev have been busy sorting out a new Scotch on the Rocks site and making tickets available to purchase. Tickets are priced from £49 to £129 for 1 to 3 events with your lunch included in the price. Bargain at twice the price I say ;) especially with the likes of Sean Corfield giving a presentation on cloud computing among others such as Peter Bell, Mark Drew and Serge Jesper from Adobe. With events being held in London, Manchester and Edinburgh, do you really have any excuse??
In CFUnited news, Brian Rinaldi has blogged that he'll be presenting on the Flex framework Mate at CFUnited this year.
If you happen to be way-way-way down south, you'll be interested to know that cf.Objective is coming to Melbourne Australia later this year.

Techie Stuff
There's just too much stuff across a variety of overlapping topics for me to categorise them as I did in my last post (teach me to leave it so long again!) so this next section is going to be a bit of a stream of conciousness.

Ray Camden has been playing with jQuery a lot recently and has a stack of interesting posts too numerous to list them all, but they cover topics from form validation to setting client variables using AJAX. Go take a look at the ColdFusion Jedi having fun with jQuery.

I've noticed that there's been a number of posts on Grails and Groovy recently. Dan Vega has posted one on Getting started with Grails. Doug Hughes has post a getting started with groovy etc. with Coldfusion and one on Building a Groovy/CFML project. You should, of course, read everything that the Broadchoice folks have posted on the Argument Collection.

If you're wondering whats going on with ColdFusion, Adam Lehman has become the new CF and Bolt Product Manager (oi Adam! Where's my invite to the Bolt testing program? ;)) and Jake Munson does some CF9 reading between the lines. Speaking of Bolt, Adam "leaked" a photo of Bolt and some CF9 code via twitter a little while back. Terrence Ryan has been busy blogging all sorts of ColdFusion posts. If you happen to be coming to my blog via Trac/Mylyn posts and happen to wonder what this CF lark is or you need some help justifying why you should be using ColdFusion, you should definitely make Terrence's blog required reading. Its nice to see Tim Buntel return to blogging with a post on the ColdFusion and the future of Flex.

There's been a couple of CF document updates, but the one that caught my attention the most is one on Troubleshooting ColdFusion or JRun hangs or freezes. You should use this entry with Mike Brunt's posts on the Alagad website.

Well I'm running out of train time - there are 29 entries left in Google Reader that I really should add, but I think its time I put this post out there and add those post to my next round-up (hopefully a bit quicker than this last one)

Enjoy...

Blog Round up 3 Feb 2009

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 06:08:00 -0700

Errrmmm... Happy New Year! :D Sorry for not keeping up with my blog round-ups.

I've been looking at my HUGE back log of blog entries and thinking I should do a round-up and then being too daunted by the task. So finally last week I decided to go back to the 26th of January and only read those blog entries and round-up from there and then mark everything as read!

Now that have a sensible number of blog entries in Google Reader I'm finally starting to read them again, so here goes nothing!! ;)

New Blog in Google Reader

Not sure how Terry Ryan wasn't already in my blog list, but it came to my attention when I noticed various tweets about Terry being in his first staff meeting at Adobe as an Evangelist. Congrats to Terry on his appointment. I hope his passion to see ColdFusion in Higher Education reaches us here in the UK.

ColdFusion Conference Stuff

Close to home Andy and Kev have been busy promoting Scotch on the Road (if you missed the news, there won't be a Scotch on the Rocks this year!) and asking would you attend SotR in Manchester, announcing the Edinburgh venue and the ticket price! Its been a busy few days for SotR. ;)

If you want to learn a bit more about a small percentage of what ColdFusion can help you develop from your desk, I noticed that a bit further back than the 26th Kristen Scofield announcing ColdFusion eSeminars. At this point you will have missed most of the live performances, but Kristen provides a link to view the recordings.

On other conference new Andy Allan, Peter Bell and Bob Silverberg announced that they would be speaking at cfObjective and Sean Corfield notes that cfObjective have posted the schedule for their May conference.

HTML, CSS and Design

All of the blogs I read tend to be from ColdFusion developers of all flavours, but every one of us has a variety of tasks that we undertake on a daily basis, so they also post articles on these aspects as well.

Dan Wilson posted an interesting article on compressing your CSS to speed up your website.

Semantic HTML seems to have come up in my work day conversations a few times over the last couple of months, so this article on Semantics in HTML5 on alistapart was of interest to me, as well as Beta New's post on the beta release of semantic search engine Sagoon. Personally, the jury is out on Sagoon at the moment.... Perhaps I'm just too used to google...

Ray Camden has posting a couple of interesting articles on jQuery and ColdFusion.

Its alway interesting to read articles on how to do things better and alistapart always seems to deliver - Here's a nice article on advanced javascript debugging.

ColdFusion Techie Stuff

On to the ColdFusion posts I found interesting.

Andy Allan posted an article on bypassing the web server configuration tool. Its something I seem to do all the time, other than to generate the appropriate mod file Apache, but its nice to have a good write up to remind yourself of what to do.

Its stuff I've seen previously in the past, but you never remember and can never seem to find again. Mark Kruger has been writing up all his problems and resolutions whilst using cfhttp. Here are those posts.

Kevin Roche has written a couple of articles on using onMissingMethod() to generate generate getters/setters for an object based on the cfproperty tag. This is actually something that farcry has been doing for a long long time now, but its always interesting to see how new(ish) CF features are being used to implement fun tricks like this.

There's also been a flurry of blog post on how to install the various ColdFusion engines on a variety of environments.

Sean Corfield has posted an article for Railo/CF/BD on Jrun. Matt Woodward and Dave Shuck have posted articles on using Tomcat as the underlying java server. These articles should help you to install any of these java application on to most java servers. (I wish I could find the blog post that reminded its readers that ColdFusion is a Java application!)

Application Updates

A few application updates for you :

Mark Mandel has released an update to ColdDoc

Nathan Mische notes briefly that ColdFire is now listed on the Firebug extensions page

Matt Woodward has posted that Open BlueDragon 1.0.1 has been released.

Podcasts

Not exactly a podcast but Brian Rinaldi and Peter Bell have been continuing their CFArguments. The latest ones being Hibernate or HiberNOT (ColdFusion and ORM) and http://www.remotesynthesis.com/post.cfm/cfargument-state-of-the-fusion.

Kev McCabe has posted the latest in the CFDoc podcasts from the UKCFUG. Andy Allan talks about conferences and Gert Franz talks about Railo.

Other

A couple of other bits and pieces of worth noting:

Kevin Roche posted that his colleague Roger Panton has started a London Adobe Business User Group. Speakers at the first meeting on the 11th will be Claude Englebert from Adobe EMEA, David McLean of PJ Media and Roger himself.

Sargeway has highlighted the online Flash Media Server user group. Given some of the work I've been involved in recently I've just joined myself and now I need to have a read through the various discussions.

A blast from the past dropped into my email from Joost the other - the cartoon TrapDoor. There are 10 episodes on Joost for you to watch. It really is as good as I remember it being!

Blog Round up 5 Nov 2008 - The Software release edition

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 05:18:48 -0700

The marathon blog round-up! 390 blog entries to have a read through!
A lesson in never leave a job you should be doing today/tonight until tomorrow!

I'm never going to be able to go through all those posts in one sitting so I'm going to start with the batch of software releases that have been going on the last few weeks.

So lets dive in!

Matt Woodward notes that Open Office 3.0, which I mentioned previously in my round posts, has been released.

Nathan Mische has updated ColdFire on RIAForge fixing a few bugs and an extension for a problem with json. I'd love to know how he comes up with his version numbers. :)

Ray Camden released version 1.5 of SpoolMail with a couple of feature enhancements. If you don't know what SpoolMail is - its handy for when you're developing email feature in application and need to see what is going into the mail queue without them actually have to be sent to real people.

Ted Patrick announced the release of Flash Player 10 and gives a quick overview of the new features. Matt Woodward notes that the Linux edition of FP10 was actually released at the same time, which is a rare event!

Transfer 1.1 Final was release by Mark Mandel. If you're stuck with a pre v1 copy of Transfer you really must get updated to the 1.1 version. The performance enhancements are superb, along with the addition of new features such as cache monitoring and object proxies and the stack of bug fixes makes this release a must. If you're on the transfer list you may have noticed me making a bit of a tit of myself, but finally something has clicked and I've spent the last few days having the most fun doing development than I have in a while. Don't get me wrong. I enjoy writing CFML, but its always nice to do something that is different to your usual routine and makes you feel all warm inside. ;oD I should probably note here that Mark Mandel has done a CFConversation with Brian Meloche.

Are you an open source developer? Do you work with databases? Then you might be interested in Aqua Data Studio 7. Todd Sharp notes that they offer free licences to open source developers.

The chaps at Broadchoice have been busy releasing and updating their very cool looking AIR application "Workspace". I really should sign up for a beta account. I wonder if it comes with free "more hours in the day". ;)

Ray Camden must be making use of those "more hours in the day", because in his relentless application development he's released an update to Lighthouse Pro along with everything else he working on.

Adobe have released a hotfix for ColdFusion 7 and 8 that adds multipart support to cfhttp to support changes with the Google and YouTube APIs.

Well I think thats about all the software releases I can find. My blog entry count is down to 318 and my head is swimming. Time to get some sleep. Please let my son sleep the night through so I get more than 4 hours sleep!

Tomorrow night - "Blog Round up 5 Nov 2008 - In other news". ;)

Blog Roundup 12 October 2008

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 20:22:45 -0700

I keep forgetting what the number of my next round up is, so I've decided I need to change the title. Hopefully it'll be generally more useful that #1 to n. It also means I can let my Friday lunchtime deadline slide a bit. I'm on the train coming back from Edinburgh and Andy Allan's stag do! Before you ask - typically, I made it up to Edinburgh, I had a couple of drinks and some food, but then had to cry off because I was suffering from a 24hour stomach bug. But I'm told lots of beer and fun was had.

First of all I added a new blog, Bob Silverberg, to my Google Reader this week. I saw a post by Bob on the CFCDev group regarding Object Oriented Validation that interested me given that I validation is one of those things you always have to do but gets in the way of doing the fun stuff. Bob's created a framework agnostic validation framework that will flexibly generate validation code for your data objects. Take a look - he explains it better than I can in a few words and there are also CS/Transfer examples available.

Ray Camden released an update to Sounding on RIAForge this week. Apparently its just a bug fix release with some user submitted UI improvements. Wish I'd spent the time to install Soundings for a survey recently, rather than use the free survey monkey account.

If you like a good book for learning tech from, then Ted Patrick is plugging Alaric Cole's new Flex Book - Learning Flex 3. Flash Player 10 is in the works, so Ted also has a post reminding us all to update our flash player detection.

Andrew Shorten has announce free one day flex training courses in London and the UK speakers for Max Europe

Kev McCabe has posted that Fusion Debug has released a beta update in their labs section for version 2.0.2.

While we're on the subject of editors, its nice to see that I'm not completely insane when it comes to setting up my development environment and that Scott Stroz from Alagad has an almost identical set up to me.

Legacy code is always a nightmare, and I'm sure most of us have left some classy snippets lying around, but it looks like Todd Sharp's friend has got their work cut out for them with stuff like this. Todd did show me some other gems.... It doesn't get any better! Along similar lines, John Whish asks "Refactoring - good or bad?" It all kinda rings a bell with me at the minute as I'm rewriting some code I wrote ages and ages ago, because I need to add some features and discovering that its just not that easy to do without the rewrite. If only I could wave a magic wand and replace all this dodgy old FB2 code with shiney new ModelGlue code.

A couple things that I've picked up off of BetaNews this last week that might be of interest. First is IBM's Bluehouse web collaboration service has entered a free public beta phase. Imagine Basecamp, but more. The other item that grabbed my attention was the review of Open Office 3RC4. I quite like OO, but I struggle with the transition between MS Office and OO. Perhaps its time to give it another look.

Well thats about all for this week, apart from noting that time flies when you're having fun. I've been writing ColdFusion applications since 1996, search engines have gone and been replaced in that time and A List Apart has been around for 10 years.

Blog Round #5

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 21:57:42 -0700

This week I wrote the round-up in ScribeFire and posted up to Mango Blog. Only flaw in the plan is I have to remember to manually add an excerpt to the top of the round-up and double check the categories. (I just noticed that ScribeFire/MangoBlog some how dropped some of my selected categories)

This weeks round-up has ended up with 3 distinct threads, Source Control and all that goodness, ColdFusion frameworks and Open Bluedragon updates.

So lets crack on...

Subversion Branching Preso Online
Sean Corfield has posted his SVN Branching presentation from A Wee Dram. I didn't make it down for the one day event and would have liked to have seen this presentation, but having read through Sean's presentation it looks like I work with svn the same way as Sean anyway! Alway nice to know you aren't completely insane! ;)

While I'm adding an svn related link - here's another Terry Ryan has created an unfuddlecfc to help with backing up their svn hosting at unfuddle.com

Also, if you're hosting your own SVN/Trac installations and you're using TOCMacro on your trac environment you need to upgrade this plugin. Take a look here for why : Trac sporadic hang solved

Well this round-up seems to be taking a bit of a source control and ticketing theme to it, so here's another related post! Ray Camden has released a much updated Lighthouse Pro 2.5

Moving on from source control and bug tracking - Congrats to Mark Mandel for his first post on Adobe Devnet with his An Introduction to ColdFusion frameworks article. Even if you know what CF frameworks are out there, this provides a neat summary of the general features and design patterns behind each of them, as well as helping provide a clear distinction between MVC frameworks, dependancy injection and data persistence.

For more information on frameworks, while Sean Corfield was over in the UK for A Wee Dram he also gave a "Design Patterns" presentation at the Devon CFUG and Tom Chiverton will be presenting on ColdSpring for the ColdFusion Meetup Group on the 16th of October.
It would seem that my round up this week has some very definite threads! The next blog post of interest is also on ColdSpring! Scott Stroz has a interesting post on using Coldspring Interceptors with Remote Proxies.

Moving away from frameworks, Matt Woodward has posted a couple of updates on what has been going on with Open Bluedragon. Lots going on with Open BlueDragon and Digging Deeper into the Java Underpinnings of Open Bluedragon

And finally, to end on a humours note - take a look at a slice of life at Alagad and Andy Jarrett's Friday Joke.

Blog Roundup #4

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 22:47:25 -0700

Hmmm 250 blog entries in google reader! Whoops! Time I caught up with my reading and posted a round up!

So here goes!

ColdSpring 1.2 released along with a shiny new website
http://www.coldspringframework.org/

Web Inventor launches new World Web Foundation
Sir Tim Berners-Lee's initiative to bring the web to the 80% of the worlds populous who don't have access to it.

Peter Bell - Introducing "the CFArgument" with Brian Rinaldi
Their first cfargument is "The iterating Business Object". Something I've been meaning to find out more about of late, but never had an opportunity. This CFArgument helped me understand IBOs better.

Peter and Brian's second cfarguments is : DAOs are a waste of Time

CFEclipse Dictionary Generator released.
Daemonite, the developers of Farcry CMS, have released a dictionary generator that will parse a directory of components and tags and then create an XML file that you can use with CFEclipse projects. Looks to be very handy and shortly I'll be running it against some of the internal libraries here at work.

While on the topic of CFEclipse dictionaries - Andrew Mercer has been tinkering with the CF8 dictionary - fixing a few problems that have been around for a while.

ColdFire Update Released
If you're already running Firebug in Firefox - coldfire is a hand add on for debuggerising your ColdFusion applications.

ColdFusion Evangalism Kit
Ever find yourself need to sell ColdFusion to a client or even to your boss and colleagues? Then you'll probably find the Evangalism Kit that Kristen Schofield has posted handy. Containing C-Level Exec quote, Key stats, Recent awards, product roadmaps, measured results of CF Usage and much, it should give you more than enough measured ammo to support ColdFusion and counter the "its a dying language" and "can't scale" 'arguments' against it.

Ben Forta notes that AIR 1.1 is now available for Linux

Mark Drew, having taken over the Reactor Project from Doug Hughs comments on the Future of Reactor.

Jeff Chastain (Alagad) - What is a DSL?
What is a Domain Specific Language!?! Another one of those questions that I've been asking myself answered.

Adobe announced CS4 back on the 23rd of September with a release date some time at the end of October.

Terrance Ryan - Squidhead Still Swimming
Terry announced that Squidhead is getting some additional assistance in the shape of Nathan Mische and Dave Konopka. If you don't know what Squidhead does, its basically a DAO and scaffold generator for MS SQL Server databases. Not something that I have a great deal of use for as we use MySQL, but all the same a neat project and pleased to see it get some more resource.

On the 25th, Andy Allan and Kev McCabe hosted A Wee Dram down in London. Here are some of the write ups from this one day conference.

Sean Corfield - A Wee Dram of ColdFusion
Mark Drew - Live from A Wee Dram of Scotch
Sean Corfield - A Wee Keynote << hints about CF9 can be found here
Sean Corfield - A Wee Dram of Scotch part 2
Peter Bell - A good Wee Dram
Peter Bell - RAD OO Presentation

Well there are a stack more blog posts to go through from this week, but I'll save them for the end of the week...

Oh yeah... I bought Star Wars The Force Unleashed for the Wii at the weekend! Its lots and lots of fun :D

Blog Roundup #3

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 21:21:25 -0700

A bit later than usual..... I've been busy at work this week (not that I get any peace at other times) and haven't really read through my stack of blogs this week, so this may be a brief round up.

Most importantly... ahem.... Me! ;)

getDirectoryFromMapping
I had an issue with ExpandPath() and this is how I solved it. Incidently, it would seem I'm not the only one to notice this problem. Andy Allan mentioned to me that he'd blogged a similar issue with application based mappings and expandPath() (Sorry Andy couldn't find the entry).
TinyMCE Plugin for Mango Blog
I done created a plugin for Mango Blog that helps with managing tinyMCE. Its probably rubbish...

Having used Andy Allan's name in vain, I should probably point out that A Wee Dram is now fully booked and they will throw food at you if you turn up without a ticket.

John Whish has a post from last Friday on using Subqueries for performance gains.

Sean Corfield posts on Broadchoice's Argument Collection an article on Hibernate and Inheritance. I must admit I've only starred it and not read it properly yet.

Marcos Placona has posted a couple ColdFusion Related Links on his blog. I particularly liked the PHP link. ;)

Charlie Arehart has posted his 12 page review of FusionReactor 3 from FACQ on his blog. Its a very good introduction to FR. The blog entry also provides reasons as to why you should use FR with CF8 Ent as well.

Sean Corfield notes that Gert has announced Railo 3.0 This is a FREE version of Railo. The Open Source version comes at version 3.1.

Ray Camden has released an update to BlogCFC that includes a few bug fixes including one critical bug and he is also showing his love for CF9! (That sounds worse than it really is!)

Matt Woodward has posted his Architecting for Multiple UIs presentation on his blog. Well worth a watch this one.

I haven't been on twitter much this week, but I usually do have Twhirl open. Andy Jarrett has posted on how to find other ColdFusion twitterers.

Did I mention this before? Paul Marcotte has posted a series of blog entries on his foray into Test Driven Development.

Andrew Shorten has posted his 10 AIR applications you can't live without. There's some neat applications in there; Some that I already use and some I've not seen before.

I'm sure there's other stuff, but these are the one that have caught my attention.

Lastly, I've reduced the strength of my comments captcha back down to the one I had on my blogcfc version and you can now also subscribe to category specific rss feeds. You always could subscribe to category specific feeds, only this MB skin didn't have the rss links visible.

Have a good weekend!

Blog Roundup #2

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 17:30:07 -0700

Round 2 of my blog round up.... I was worried at the beginning of the week that I wouldn't find enough blogs to manage to keep this up for a second week, given that I covered an entire month in my first round up! However, my fears have been unfounded! There's been a plethora of posts to round up!

Ok this is a set of blog posts that were interesting to me for a couple of reasons. Its a neat little javascript calculator and there's some interesting CSS/layout discussions here. It all started from reading Mark Ireland's post, that was shared by AndyJ on Google Reader, Jonny Shaw's JS Calculator post and last, but not least, Peter Broughton's discussions on CSS layout beyond table, beyond divs.

A Wee Dram of Scotch : Registration Now Open
Say it all really... Registration available for the surprise 1 day event in London.

JQuery Replacements for CFGrid, CFWindow and CFToolTip

ColdFusion 8 Now Available to Students and Educators for free
This is a world-wide offer. What with the other free ColdFusion Servers, there's now absolutely no reason now why Universities and Colleges can't start teaching CFML to its students or students using ColdFusion to create applications for their project work.

Two new Adobe Community Experts in the UK
Congratulation to Andy Allan and Kev McCabe who are now Adobe Community Experts

New browser Google Chrome Launched
I'm impressed. The speed of rendering is immense. The built in developer tools are very neat for a first pass. The home page needs a little help to make it easier to customise. Flash and Shockwave work out of the box, but you need to install Java 6u10 for java applets to work (not really a problem). I look forward to seeing more from Chrome and intend to use it as much as possible. Take a look here for more info on Chrome and the comic! Side note: I installed it on XP last night - I don't like it on XP... Great on vista... Not so pleasant on XP... :|

Announcing CF411.com: your place to find the 411 on things related to CF
Charlie Arehart has rebranded his the resource section of his site, so that its easier for folks to find. Lots of good CF resources in there for everyone.

John Whish jQuery Site Easter Egg
If you like Guitar Hero and have better reaction than a dead squid....