In 30: Yahoo Pipes in ColdFusion

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 21:51:23 GMT

I like to spend some time writing proof of concept (POC) code. If such an experiment works I will often use it in an application and write it properly. Like many I have been impressed with the Yahoo Pipes. At a basic level Yahoo Pipes puts together two or more RSS feeds. Here I'll show how to do the backend in CF.

Ok first I made a pipe for myself of Ben Forta and Ray Camden's blog feeds which you can see here.

So, CF 7 does not handle RSS feeds natively but fortunately Ray Camden (does the man ever sleep? :)) has written a RSS.cfc that will read and write feeds. So with that downloaded I created an array of feeds.

[codeshare apr72e6a]

Next lets create an object of RSS and then loop over that array and put the results of the feed in an array.

[codeshare apr8ec33]

So now we have an array with a query of feeds but we really want to make one query. Time to step up Query-of-Queries! And the UNION operator. Though one limitation is that Q-o-Q's need to refer to a query that does not have a dot in it. D'oh. However, the code below will get around that by setting a variable to the array with the query. Not fully sustainable but this is a POC.

[codeshare apr816a3]

Not the qry1.[date] notation to get around reserved words in Query-of-Queries.

Now a little outputting:

[codeshare aprac2b4]

And the concept has been proved!

Full code:

[codeshare apr4fbac]

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...

RSS feed for InstantSpot site Sam Farmer's Blog

In 30: Yahoo Pipes in ColdFusion

The First Post