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Speaking at CF in NC...Come Along and Enter to Win a Flip CF Dude Camera

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 01:36:00 GMT

I am delighted to have been chosen to present at the CF in NC conference in October on the topic of "One Liners in ColdFusion". Its a topic I enjoy, one that I've blogged about and one that Joe Rinehart mentioned in his excellent keynote on day two of CFUnited.

The session line up at CF in NC conference is very exciting and if you can make it I suggest coming along. There is even a chance to win a CF Dude Flip Video Camera.

My 30onAir Video

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 03:13:00 GMT

30onAir is a rather fun site where developers explain why they love certain technologies like CF, Flex, Air, AJAX, etc. Here is my CF attempt:

How to Add a Derby Database with DerbyCFC

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 13:00:00 GMT

Two simple lines to add a Derby database with DerbyCFC:

<cfset variables.derbyCFC = createObject("component","derbyCFC").init(adminPassword)> <cfset variables.success = variables.derbyCFC.createIfNotExists(name)>

That will add a database with a datasource of the same name. The createIfNotExists function also takes in all the other potential settings for a datasource (select, insert, grant, etc). I made some small changes to the code base to make the creation possible in two lines and with this comes version 1 of DerbyCFC. I hope it proves useful for open source projects, let me know if you use it and if you have any suggestions.

It has been a fun little project to work on and interesting to delve a little more into the AdminAPI. Lots of good stuff in there.

Two Thumbs Up: Lynda Online Training

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 13:52:00 GMT

I have been learning Flex for a few months and the best resource I've found is Lynda online training. They have several Flex courses including many that focus on ColdFusion and Flex communication (and some on .NET and Java) and this has been extremely useful. I learn new topics and languages quicker from training and having the video's of all topics available at any time has been a big boost. Most video's are 3-10 minutes long which means I can pick up a new topic or part of a new topic during a moment of scheduled or unscheduled downtime.

One other huge advantage to the Lynda subscription is the sheer number of courses they offer that focus mainly on Apple and Adobe products. There are five ColdFusion courses that are very good and they complete the web development area with classes on CSS, HTML and SQL. Course's exist for many other products, for instance, at work we just bought a XServe and the Lynda training has proved invaluable in setting it up.

Overall I give the Lynda online movies two thumbs up!

Insanely Useful: Spoolmail

Tue, 27 Nov 2007 02:49:51 GMT

For years I have programmed all sorts of workarounds for sending email in development. Recently I tried Spoolmail, written by Ray Camden, and have found it to be insanely useful.

Set up is simple. First in the CF administrator set your mail server settings to a non existent mail server.

Second, as detailed in the instructions that come with spoolmail, place the folder in cfide/administrator folder and alter one file. Next time you log in to the CF administrator under Custom Extensions is a listing for Spoolmail.

Click on that and Spoolmail will list the contents of the undeliverable mail folder.

And here is a partial showing of clicking on one of the emails, in this case a multi-part email:

Learn CF, Write CF Tutorials and Win CF

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 11:05:23 GMT

Learncf.com is a new web site that aims to help people learn ColdFusion via tutorials with running demos. Everything must run on CF 8 and the tutorials, so far, mostly show off the new features of CF 8 like cfwindow, cfpresentation and .Net features.

And if you submit a tutorial before the end of the year you have a chance of winning a copy of CF 8.

I've contributed two tutorials so far on auto-saving a form and showing off some of the new file functions. I find that once I write a tutorial with explanations then I truly understand a topic. Other contributors include Ben Forta, Sean Corfield and many others. To submit a tutorial go here. The site is the brainchild of Dale Fraser, an Australian ColdFusion developer.

Would you like to code this way?

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 07:07:00 GMT

Recent blog postings by Jason Delmore, the CFInsider, on ideas for ColdFusion 9 got me thinking about how I code. Taking a look at the beautiful/hacky/cool code I produce I noticed a few things where the language could really help me. The first is I have a large chunks of cfsets and secondly control tags (classified as Flow-control tags on Livedocs) could be simplified.

I find that big chunks of cfset's really clutter up the page and take my eye away from the important part -- what is actually being set. What if there existed a hybrid between cfset and cfscript that allowed the following to happen:

<cfset variables.firstname = "Sam";  variables.lastname = "Farmer";  variables.myObject = createObject("component","weather").init();  variables.temp = variables.myObject.getTemperature("20001");>

(And, yes, I know I could use cfscript but in general I don't like using it as its not feature complete and when I did used to use it in places like above I found it hard to know when to and when not to. Just setting one variable hardly seems worth it, two variables? borderline, then there's the case where I already have two cfsets and now I want to add two more and its "is it worth converting to cfscript?", etc.)

I like the tag and attribute concept (and really how could you like ColdFusion and not?) but in examining my code I kept coming back to the idea that control tags should work differently. This would make them easier to find, quicker to code and more similar to other languages.

For instance looping over an array could use the same syntax as in Javascript:

<cfset variables.arDays = ["Monday","Tuesday","Wednesday","Thursday","Friday"]>  <cfloop variables.i in variables.arDays>  <cfoutput>#variables.i#</cfoutput> </cfloop>

Structures, files and lists could be looped over in the same way. A query could be looped over by just saying cfloop getQueryName. I think these concepts could be expanded to other tags (cfswitch immeadiately comes to mind) and would make the switch to CF easier for many folks.

Would you like the code in theses ways? I'm mainly thinking out loud so I'd love to hear your thoughts.

How Adobe Could Tie Blogs and Livedocs

Thu, 19 Jul 2007 12:03:00 GMT

There has been a lot of excellent blog posts about ColdFusion 8 by bloggers such as Ray Camden, Ben Nadel, Ben Forta, Ashwin Mathew, and many, many more, indeed Ahamed on the CF team has two blogs. Most of this content now lives, for all intents and purposes, in the the world of Google (or other search engines).

Could Adobe make this content more accessible?

Of course! Here are two new, related features to livedocs that I think would be a great addition, and not just for ColdFusion, its the same for all the great Flex, Flash and other Adobe related blogs.

Add a blog/other sources section on livedocs for each tag and function. Anyone could submit a blog entry to this section and once submitted the title and a link to the entry would show up. Other sources would include knowledge based articles and other content from the Adobe web site.
Users of livedocs could rate a blog entry as useful or flag it as not appropriate. Over time the more useful entries would rise to the top while anything flagged could be looked at by a person and deleted if needed.

I think the ColdFusion documentation is very good. The purpose of adding blog entries to livedocs would be to compliment it and create one central place that has everything related to cfquery or any other tag or function.

A Slogan for ColdFusion

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 11:26:42 GMT

With a release date for ColdFusion 8 around the corner I've been thinking about what would make a good slogan for ColdFusion. Its unclear if ColdFusion, or any Adobe product, actually has a slogan. The current ColdFusion 7 page states:

Create powerful Internet applications faster and more easily than ever before

Which is ok but is more a description (and a buzzword bingo compliant one) than a true slogan. I'm thinking in terms of "Think Different" by Apple or "Just Do It" by Nike which tell you what you can do with the product not what the product does. Personally I find myself more attracted to slogans that are empowering not descriptive.

At Adobe's booth at CFUnited they had a new slogan which I liked:

Adobe ColdFusion: 12 Years of Making Hard Things Easy

And, oddly enough, it is similar to a slogan I have been thinking of for a while:

ColdFusion 8: Making the Complicated Straightforward

Which could also be:

ColdFusion 8: Making Hard Things Easy

Mike Nimer in a presentation at FlexManiacs said he views ColdFusion as the IT bridge since it can talk to just about every platform out there. I also heard this from a few other Adobe employees who I spoke to at CFUnited and FlexManiacs So another potential slogan would be:

ColdFusion 8: The IT Bridge

Which does not work for me as a slogan. I think it has potential and could form the idea for an advertisement but is not sexy enough to be the main slogan for the product. I can't decide which I like more "Making the Complicated Straightforward" or "Making Hard Things Easy". Is it more than a matter of syllables?

What do you think?

A big thank you to the CF Community

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 10:41:58 GMT

Recently at work we completed a major re-write of our application in short time frame. There is no way we would have made it without using the following:

Mach-II -- My first time working with Mach-II and I really like it. That and its very fast. So thanks to the original authors Hal Helms and Ben Edwards along with the current stewards Matt Woodward, Peter Farell and Kurt Wiersma
Illudium P36 Code Generator -- This code generator by Brian Rinaldi creates a bean, dao, gateway and service for a database table. Better still it creates the XML needed for the ColdSpring service.xml file which brings me to.
ColdSpring -- Amazing software that "wires" together CFC's based on the concept of the Java Spring framework. Thanks to Chris Scott and Dave Ross.
POIUtility.cfc -- Written by Ben Nadel this CFC makes both the creation of and reading from Excel spreadsheets a breeze.
ColdFusion 8 (Scorpio) -- We received permission from Adobe to develop on, and release on, Scorpio (and to write about it here). The new tag and function sets are very deep and we used a lot of them in our application. In particular we do a lot of pdf manipulation and the cfpdf tag has saved us a great amount of time. Overall using CF8 has saved us about a months development time and greatly enhanced our product. Plus it is wicked fast.
CFEclipse -- Thanks to Mark Drew for making a great editor for CF as I'm sure most of you know. We also use CVS so developing on the Eclipse platform makes a great deal of sense.

Many, many thanks to all the individuals who have worked on the above projects.

Using a "scope" for var in functions

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 18:33:14 GMT

I like using a "scope" for vars and so create a structure called private at the top of most functions:

[codeshare julf2279]

Why create a structure to hold var variables?

It seems more natural with how CF works. Its always better to scope variables in CF, yet, along comes one scope var where we are not meant to? This way all my vars are prefixed with private in the same way other scopes are form, arguments, requests, etc.
No need to define all variables at the top of a function. Say I have a loop in the middle of a function, I can now do cfloop index="private.i" and know that I have not accidentally created something in the variables scope. I just find this easier than going to the top of the function and setting a new var and from experience when something is easier I am more likely to do it.

When not to do this?

If a function is simply returning a query (or using one or two var variables) there is no point in creating a structure instead do this:

[codeshare julac9ad]

Is it necessary to use the var scope?

Yes, yes, yes. For clarification read this from Ray Camden. And a testimonial of why.

Is there a performance hit with using a structure?

This came up in the comments discussion of a post on Ray Camden's blog yesterday. The answer? Not really. I did a comparison of two functions, one that set a structure called private and set one variable into it and another that just set a var variable. I then created the object and called the function 500 times. First the results and then the code:

[codeshare jul22f59]

[codeshare julb223e]

Testing is on my PowerBook G4, at work on an iMac with dual core, the times where about a tenth.

Is it necessary to use private?

Not at all, in fact there are some who strongly caution against this (see Todd Sharp's comment in this post which is also where I heard about the idea of using a structure for var). Some suggest using local, though, this is a reserved word in query-of-queries, really anything can work. You can even use var but that just seems likely to confuse anyone else who works on your code in the future.

A First Step Towards CAFE Development

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 00:31:16 GMT

CAFE development — thats my name for developing with:

ColdFusion
Air
Flex
LiveCycle Data Services Express Edition

Part of my job at work is to evaluate future technologies and to see how we may use them in the future. This week at FlexManiacs and CFUnited (which for personal reasons I can only attend for one day unfortunately) I am going to take a look at these technologies. With all of these technologies currently in beta its quite an exciting time especially with, depending on your install selections, LiveCycle Data Services Express Edition running inside of the ColdFusion server.

Today, I had four sessions with the founding partners of Tapper Nimer Associates and two others that covered CF, Flex and Apoolo. So, briefly, what did I learn?

ColdFusion and Flex talk very well to each other with automatic data type conversion and a whole bunch of configuration/code layout options that I need to investigate more. There are also some very good debug options including the ability to get all the CF debug data in Flex and, I believe, these options exceed those available to other back end languages.
Its important to do garbage collection and/or do some memory management with Flex. Not so excited about this part...
AIR applications have a unique id (in the format of com.domain.name.etc) and a version number. Only one version of an Apollo application can be installed on a computer at one time.
AIR has full File I/O access including a bunch of functions in ActionScript (and possibly in JavaScript as well but the html method of creating AIR has barely been covered).
Updating AIR applications is fairly straightforward now but a little clunky and probably will be improved before release (but certainly don't hold me to that!).
There's a lot more but I can't remember it all right now.

I'm starting to sketch together some ideas where we may want to use CAFE instead of HTML and AJAX though I really need to hear Tom Jordahl's session to get an understanding of LiveCycle Data Services Express Edition (could Adobe make that name longer?) and CF.

O'Reilly Wants a New ColdFusion Book

Thu, 24 May 2007 20:50:18 GMT

The book publisher, O'Reilly, one of the most trusted technical book publishers around, wants a book about ColdFusion. On their "So you want to write a book" page under

What Topics Are We Interested In?

they list:

Flash, Dreamweaver, ColdFusion and other Macromedia software

We're intrigued by Macromedia's "Rich Internet Application" strategy and are looking hard at some of their new software offerings.

Now, they use the term Macromedia but from reading the page they sound serious about moving into new areas and consider ColdFusion one of them.

Who is going to write this book?

Scorpio Tour Comes to Washington, DC Today for 3 Gigs

Wed, 16 May 2007 11:23:14 GMT

The Scorpio tour comes to Washington DC today for the first of 3 gigs in 24 hours. Ben Forta, Tim Buntel and Adam Wayne Lehman who have been getting rave reviews across the country will be performing at the following locations:

DCCFUG, Wednesday 16th at 6pm. Closest metro Dupont Circle. This event is open to everyone.
Carasoft Seminar, Thursday 17th at 8am. Closest metro Metro Center. You need to register for this event.
Capitol Hill User group, Thursday 17th at 1pm. I believe you have to be either a federal employee and/or work in Congress to attend this event.

If you are in the Washington, DC area do what you can to make it to one of these events!

Tip: Using the getTempDirectory Function for Temp Files Intended for Download

Thu, 19 Apr 2007 10:52:32 GMT

So one issue I ran into with Ben Nadel's POIUtility is that, in its current form, you can not return the Excel file directly to the browser but instead need to save it to disk and then return it. No big deal really and here is what I did to avoid collecting files on the server.

[codeshare apr95c94]

By using the getTempDirectory function of ColdFusion I do not need to worry about setting up a folder for these files or getting the correct path in all environments. Then I use the createUUID function to get a unique file name, I could have also used getTempFile, but I use createUUID a lot so its just a personal preference.

The cfheader call tells the browser that the new file is to be called FileName.xls and not index.cfm or whatever page I am on. I then use cfcontent to a) set the mime-type to excel, b) delete the file when the download has completed and c) to state which file to download.

Ben Nadel's POIUtility is the Coolest Open Source CF Addition This Year

Wed, 18 Apr 2007 14:57:19 GMT

In the past to create Excel documents I have used the old create as html and use a cfheader tag to fool the browser into thinking an Excel document was coming down the pipe. It works quite well. Just the other week though a requirement came through to have a spreadsheet with 20 odd worksheets. Woah I thought.

Then I looked at Ben Nadel's POIUtility. Using POIUtility, it actually took me less time to create my 20 odd worksheet Excel file than it used to create one html based Excel file. Plus it looks like a real Excel file.

Then yesterday I needed to read an Excel document. In the past this has been some complicated hack-fest of datasources, weird SQL-like syntax, worrying if the user is going to mistakenly add a space to the top row and all sorts of complications. Using POIUtility I simply asked it to read an Excel file and there in an array of worksheets with a query of the data. Yes, a query, meaning all I have to do is loop over it and deal with it just like I have done a million times. I would give examples, but, honestly, the examples Ben gives are great so check them out.

So, a huge thank you to Ben Nadel.

How to Dump Vars

Wed, 11 Apr 2007 08:48:00 GMT

CFDump is one of ColdFusion's best tags. Simply give it a variable and it will output the value no matter its type (array, structure, query, cfc, java, etc it can handle just about everything).

Often I will use it to output a scope like form or url or variables (be careful with this one though as all queries are in this scope by default). The one scope I have not been able to dump is var until yesterday when Jared Rypka-Hauer passed along a tip. To dump the var scope do this:

<cfdump var="#getPageContext().getVariableScope()#">

You may have to adjust the output attribute of your functions.

[UPDATE: 9/5/07: This only works on CF 7, click here for how to do this with ColdFusion 8]

Thoughs on LiveDocs for Scorpio

Sun, 08 Apr 2007 19:14:53 GMT

I started using ColdFusion on version 3.1 and the documentation was excellent. CF has now grown up to version 7 and the documentation, with a few small exceptions, is still excellent. The livedocs for Version 7, however, was a step backwards. The big mistake was making it a book online and not online documentation.

With Scorpio around the corner this is what I would like to see in LiveDocs:

No online book! Instead a page for each tag or function in CFML reference and the same for the other books. For two reasons; 1) it will be easier and quicker to find something and b) it will be possible to bookmark, link to or email. I've lost track of the number of times I've tried to do the latter but not been able to.
Color coded code. Every blog now has color coded code and its time for LiveDocs to do the same.
An AJAX lookup similar to CFQuickDocs. Ideally this would be in the menu bar at the top of each page.

And here is my dream list/ideas:

Screenshots of the output of code where it makes sense, I'm thinking of tags like cfdump, cfchart, cfgrid, etc.
Provide the CFML Reference in some sort of XML format. Jake Munson the creator of CFQuickDocs had to do a screen scrape of LiveDocs to get the content. If the CFML Reference was available in XML format it would also be easier to import into various editors which could only be good for CF.
Incoporate Ben Forta's IM bot on to the livedocs.adobe.com website. This would both make it easier to find tags/functions and would also show off CFML Event Gateways.

LiveDocs is both a provider of documentation for users and also a source of marketing for how straightforward and powerful a language is. LiveDocs for Scorpio should do the same.

Arguments and Vars want their own name!

Fri, 06 Apr 2007 09:58:29 GMT

As ColdFusion is scope based its possible to have a form, request and session variable with the same name. I would advise against this wherever possible as it can make debugging very confusing. Arguments and var scopes can not, however, share the same name. And when they do the (somewhat confusing) error will appear:

Cannot declare local variable userID twice.
Local variables cannot have the same names as parameters or other local variables.

The fix is rather simple simply change the name of the argument or the var!

Here is the code that gives the above error:

[codeshare aprfd213]

The First Post

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 18:59:53 GMT

The first post. I've decided to start a blog primarily because I like writing. And having been a programmer for the last 10 years I haven't written much during that time. I also realize I like writing about technical issues and have a fair amount on my mind at the moment so it seems like a good time to start a blog. Note, I did not say I was a grammatically correct writer. So, expect the odd typo and grammatically incorrect sentence from time to time. This is a blog and I'm not going to use the grammar corrector in Word before posting.

I am also intrigued by social networking so InstantSpot seemed a good spot (pun intended) to start my blog.

I aim to cover a bunch of topics, some tutorials and explanations of basic ColdFusion functionality, thoughts on the future of the web and ColdFusion, conferences, and anything else that comes up. I will mostly be focusing on ColdFusion (and will probably start using cf as an abbreviation real soon) though I do hope to post on other non-cf topics like JavaScript, MySQL and databases in general and who knows what else in the future.

I am not going to aim to publish on a regular basis and have pledged to keep this blog a purely non-work time activity. I'm busy enough there anyway. Good busy. I also don't believe blogs die. So if I have nothing good or interesting to say I will say nothing. I also don't think this will turn into a news blog with short entries and links to the latest news. There are enough of those, and, I rely on them for my tech-news as much as anywhere else. In short, if you like what you are reading I suggest using the RSS feeds or subscribing over email.

More to come...