If I recall correctly CFML is a typeless language. I mean we can really all agree that Coldfusion is typeless right?

Ok now that we have that out of the way lets talk about Adobe's implementation of serializejson(). Serializejson is simply trying to be too damn smart for its own good.

Listen I don't want you to frig with my data, I want you to take my structured data, be it query, structure, or array, or whatever, and simply convert that structure into its JSON equivalent. Don't try to parse my dates, numbers or what not, or even try to. Just take what I give you and simply covert the data from one structure to the other mmmkay?

Since when is 9999999999999999E+10 equal to 9.999999999999999E25. Ok mathematically they are, but did I ask you to be smart and do math? NO, I don't think I did!

Either provide me with enough options that I can influence how numbers and dates are handled or do what Railo does and output everything as strings.

/rant off

The title says it all. Adobe's re-entry into the ColdFusion IDE market is official. Although I think most of the developers here at work still use Homesite as their preferred IDE. It's definitely going to be hard if not impossible to get the old die hard Homesite uses to switch.

I will probably give CF Builder another try to see if it's improved over Beta versions and at the price of 299 (bundled with Flash builder standard) it is a pretty sweet deal.

First try, and then maybe buy

In my previous on the CFSharepoint tag and SharePoint Views we retrieved the meta-data columns for the specified view.

Now that we have the columns of the view we can build a CAML query to restrict what is returned when we get all the items of the list.

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I just wanted to give a quick update about the XML issue I discovered in Adobe Coldfusion a couple of days ago.

According to Adobe the issue has been fixed in ColdFusion 9.0.1 ,Beta 1, Build 271170.

In the mean time I will have to use the xmlSearch() function when working with XML documents that may contain underscores.

Thanks for fixing this issue Adobe, now when is 9.0.1 going to be available?

While working with an XML document the other day I noticed some "interesting" behavior when trying to access a XML Element that started with an underscore. The XML document is valid, parsed correctly and also displayed correctly when dumping the XML Document out.

This issue only showed itself when trying to access the XML Element using dot notation.

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In my last post on the CFSharepoint tag and Sharepoint ViewCollections we retrieved a list of the views associated to the specified list.

Allowing the user to select a list provides us the ability to restrict, to some degree, the meta-data that will be returned for a list item. There is a lot of meta-data available and while restricting the meta-data to just the view fields may actually be a little too restrictive. One column baseName contains the filename, if this is not a column in the view fields you will end up without an easily "digestible" file name. Specifically you will need to parse the file name out from the ows_FileRef column. The FileRef column contains a relative path to the file including filename with extension.

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In my last post on the CFSharepoint tag and ListCollections we connected to a Microsoft Sharepoint server and using the ListCollection action of the CFSharepoint tag we retrieved a collection of all the lists available to the user.

In Sharepoint each list can have multiple views associated with it that show different meta-data for the list items. If you plan on integrating Sharepoint it is a good idea to provide the user the ability to choose the meta-data they want to view. In order to do this you need to allow them to choose the view.

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ColdFusion 9 saw the release of quite a bit of new functionality none so little blogged about as the new cfsharepoint tag. Not all surprising really since in order to use the cfsharepoint tag you need to have a Microsoft Sharepoint server at your disposal. Another reason it's probably not so often blogged about is that Sharepoint integration is going to be typically going on behind the scenes, integration projects with corporate Intranets and perhaps not really all that interesting for the masses.

Never the less I have decided to start a small series of blog posts on some of the different things you can do with the cfsharepoint tag. I will only be concentrating on document lists as that is where, in my opinion, most of the integration is going to be centered around.

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This little bug comes courtesy of my boss at Contens. It appears that the function PreserveSingleQuotes() in Coldfusion 9 is unable to handle the results of a function that returns a string.

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Rounded corners seem to be the next "big" thing for web designers, every damn box or image has to have a rounded corner. The problem is of course if you are using a content management system you can't possibly expect the users to first add rounded corners to the image before uploading it.

Thankfully there are a few different solutions, you could buy Image Effects, you could use ImageDrawRoundRect() function as shown by Gareth, or use a Java solution as shown on cfSearching.

If you want to do more than just rounded corners with your images it may well be worth forking out the $50 bucks for the Image Effects component from Foundeo.

CF8 ImageDrawRoundRect()

I tested the method by Gareth and found that the quality of the image even after setting the image quality to 100% produced image aberrations in the corners of the produced jpg image.

Java, but PNG Only

I also tested the Java method by leigh at cfSearching and was impressed with the quality of the image, the only problem was that it only worked with png images and I needed it to work with JPG.

Java, JPG Rounded Corners

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Beta 3 of Adobe ColdFusion Builder is now available for download from Adobe Labs. This version of the Builder addresses some performance issues as well as added some additional features.

I really hope that the optimizations and performance improvements are true as the previous version I simply un-installed after a couple of days.

The new features and list of known issues can be found in the release notes on the Adobe labs site.

I just received an email from Adobe indicating that the list to array bug that I reported this month has been fixed and will be in updater 1.

Happy Coding...

Quite some time ago CONTENS made the decision to have our products work on both Coldfusion and Railo thereby providing our customers with an option. This does tend to increase our testing times but we feel it is important to give our customers the option. As most, if not all, of you know Coldfusion 9 was recently released. The customers we have that are on Coldfusion 9 naturally want to take advantage of the new features and improvements that have been announced in CF.

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I had a good time at SOTR, a couple of us went from work. Got to see Kevin and Andy again along with Serge, Terry, and Darren Pywell, we even had a presentation in German from Sven Ramuschkat on CF and AIR. All in all the presentations were good and informative.

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When I first heard that "some" of the shipped ColdFusion 9 DVD's contained in reality ColdFusion 8 I thought it was a joke. Sadly it's not a joke but the truth, someone made a "booboo" when putting the DVD together.

Check out Adam Lehmans blog post for further details.

Not one to be left behind in announcing what everyone else is bound to announce. Coldfusion 9 has been released!

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There are a lot of blog posts already out there in the Coldfusion "blogosphere" here is my addition to the already great resources. I've decided to start this series of blog posts from the very first steps and go from there.

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Just a quick note that the CFBuilder team started blogging yesterday. They have also released an update to the ORM CFC Generator.

Happy Coding...

A public beta is now available for both CFbuilder, the new CFML IDE, and Coldfusion 9, on the Adobe Labs website.

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You don't have much time now to plan your flights, hotels and sessions for cfobjective. Unless you have been living under a rock you already know that its taking place between May 14th, and 16th at the Hyatt Regency in Minneapolis.

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Got a question in my email box from Chris asking the following:

Hi Gary, First, thank you for creating the RSS Feed tutorial. It was very helpful. Second, sorry to bother you, but I need to append a URL variable to the link. I could do this when inserting an article into the database (i.e. '#Request.url#?article=#Variables.uuid#') but as I need to insert the UUID anyway, it's just plain clunky. Do you know if there is a method or better way to do this?

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This is a war between Titans; a victory that no single battle can determine. Skirmishes, gorilla tactics, battles of wits, and talking smack are a part of this war, and sometimes it even gets downright nasty!

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The Munich CFUG will be attending this years CeBIT thanks to the Coldfusion CMS Company CONTENS and Adobe.

If you are going to CeBIT stop in at the stand and say HI. If you don't yet have tickets and would like to go Contens is offering free tickets (while supplies last).

In an effort to reduce unnecessary running process on my machine I decided to turn the IIS process into a manual start-up process, same with Coldfusion, Railo etc. So today I had a bit of time to do a little testing and wanted to test the difference between Railo and Coldfusion's CFFEED.

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I got an email from a reader yesterday asking about CFCHART and my JFREE custom tags:

Hi - i noticed your blog entry from earlier this year about work you were doing on a CF custom tag interface to JFREE, and was wondering how that work was coming along. I'm looking at try to do charting beyond what CFCHART is capable of, and this looked like a nice alternative. thanks!

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I recently received word that there aren't many tickets left for the Coldfusion Camp in Munich. If you were thinking of attending then now would be a good idea to register before it sells out!

See you there!

Back in October I posted an entry mentioning that BlogCFC works with Railo 3.0. As it turns out it doesn't work 100%, or I should say the code highlighting part written by Jason Delmore doesn't work.

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In my previous post we started installing Railo on the CentOS Linux distribution. As most of us know installing applications on a Linux system sometimes requires more than one step. This installation is just that type.

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This may well not be a "Gotcha" at all and a simple settings issue in the administrator but I haven't been able to find the "switch" but here it is anyway. Hopefully someone from Railo will be able to correct me if I am wrong.

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In a previous post I alluded to how I learn by doing and generally go about it the "hard way". What I learn while sometimes being frustrating tends to settle in my brain and stay longer than if it was a piece of cake. It also allows me to then share with you what I learned and hopefully make life a little bit easier for you. Not everyone likes to do things the hard way.

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Coldfusion Camp will be launching within the next couple of days. Currently there is just a place holder.

Watch this space for more to come.

Happy Coding...

Yesterday I received a copy of John Farrar's first published book ColdFusion 8 Developer Tutorial. I haven't made it too far into the book yet because I want to review the book for it's entire contents not just the parts that may interest me.

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This just in from Christoph Schmitz of the Munich CFUG

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I found an article on CIO.com titled "Developers Rank Best Application Servers: ColdFusion, Apache Geronimo Top List"

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One of our clients an electronic entertainment company provides movie trailers on their site. They also want to provide their partners with a simple EMBED tag for a flash player similar to what youtube does with it videos. Naturally they want to be able to track how often the movie clip or trailer is viewed on their partners sites by using google analytics, or as yet to be determined tracking methods.

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Yesterday I spent a bit of time setting up my home machine with Apache, Railo and Resin (I have my PC at work similarly set up but hadn't set up my home machine yet). I have to say that I really like the set-up and by following a few tips by Gert Franz I think I have a pretty good set up that I can move into a production server environment.

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It seems to me that if you want to drive traffic to your website (and you happen to be a moron) the best way to do it is to post a Top 10 dead (or dying) Computer Skills post.

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I've been playing around a bit with the Railo 3 beta and have been so far impressed with the performance and features, and the fact that I can run the express version from my USB stick.

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Last night at the Munich CFUG meeting I had the opportunity to meet Gert Franz and Michi Streit from Railo on the last leg of their Whirl Wind Railo World Tour.

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While the cover charge at A Wee Dram of Scotch will only get you two of those things being in the UK I would probably go for the Scotch and Beer, leaving the Bourbon for another day.

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So you are thinking of getting certified and have looked around for Ben Forta's study guide prep book and have only found the Coldfusion MX version, further searches have not uncoverd any hint of a version for 8.

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In the last few days there have been a rash of attacks seemly targeted at Coldfusion. More specifically older Coldfusion applications/sites that do not make use of parameterized queries

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There are a lot of articles around about coldfusion components; doing a Google search for the term "coldfusion components" brought back just over 160,000 results, that's an awful lot of information to

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This isn't about how to write queries, or stored procedures. It's also not about relational databases function or how to properly index. It is about being kind to your database and more efficiently communicating with it.

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It seems to me that this year is the Year of open source CF CMS's. Ben Forta recently made us aware of ColdBricks open source CF CMS, and now I have stumbled upon Sava CMS. I think it's a great sign to see all of these open source CFM projects coming out, especially in the crowded CMS market.

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Just a quick note about my Capitalizing Peoples Names post yesterday. I forgot to change the extension of the enclosure to something other than .cfm.

I updated the enclosure and also further optimized my function. You should now be able to download the function.

Happy Coding...

While doing a code review at work I stumbled accross a horrible piece of code that was written in a hurry, The developer did the best he could at the time with the time that he had available to him to complete the task. He never really had time to think it though so just continued to throw worse code after bad until the problem was eventually solved.

The Problem

There has to be a better way to do what he was doing and so when I got home from work today I decided to actually look at the problem in the context of the system we have.

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I have been doing some code review lately and am seeing quite a few cases that look something like this:

You have a structure with some information in it and you are looping over the structure and adding the data from the structure into the database. No bid deal right?

Well you probably won't be surprised to find out that having a loop around the cfquery tag forces the Coldfusion server to execute that query N number of times, where N is the size of your array.

So what can you do?

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After writing my post yesterday about Coldfusion being removed from the TIOBE Index I decided to send an email to TIOBE to question their decision and ask them how they justified their actions on clearly inaccurate information.

This morning I received an email from TIOBE inviting me to check out an addition to their FAQ.

# Q: Who is Richard Bremner? (Bonus question only for this month, especially for the ColdFusion community)

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I learned today in this post by Ben Forta that TIOBE has declassified ColdFusion as a programming language, meaning that Coldfusion (who recently improved it's rankings to place in the top 20) has been completely removed from it's index including historical references.

According to a news flash on their website:

Richard Bremner pointed out that ColdFusion is not a programming language. It is a framework comparable to JSP and ASP. As a consequence, ColdFusion has been removed from the TIOBE list. All its history has been deleted, which means that the history of the index has changed a bit as well.

As Ben Forta said: "I have no idea of who Richard Bremner is, or who made him the authority on the subject, but ... he's either mistaken, ignorant, or some combination thereof."

I agree with Ben on this one for sure. I understand removing ASP and JSP as they are "parts" of VB and Java respectively and are not in and of themselves programming languages.

I can only assume at Mr. Bremner reasoning in saying that because CFML compiles into Java bytecode it is not a distinct programming language.

But by that reasoning of course all "programming languages" are merely frameworks built on top of the Binary language.

Every once in a while this comes back to bite me when working with Ajax and creating the JSON return data by "hand". Just last week I had a strange problem with a lazy loading Ajax tree; one of the nodes stopped loading the children.

I check what my cfc was returning and it looked OK on the surface. On closer inspection I noticed that a user added quotes where I didn't expect them to be, which leads to another issue with users and that is: always expect the unexpected!

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I noticed a post earlier today about the upcoming Model-Glue 3 framework. I have to be honest I took a look at the framework I think at version 1 and at that time was using a self "rolled" framework that suited my needs. Prior to that I experimented a bit with Fusebox back in 2000 (I didn't inhale honest) but never went much further than experimentation.

Since moving to Germany last year I was plunged into the deep end of Fusebox 5 and while I sometimes find the framework a bit "heavy" it's working rather well for us. Then I watched the sneak peak video and

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A vulnerability that allowed Flex 2 to access public and remote methods through the Flex 2 remoting regardless of security settings has been fixed. Normally only remote methods should be accessible through the remoting gateway if remoting is specified in the remoting-config.xml file.

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Yesterday, April 3rd 2008, Adobe released a Coldfusion Updater bringing the Coldfusion 8 to version 8.01.

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Intermedia.net announced today that they have started offering Coldfusion 8 Enterprise hosting plans. The plans start at 39.99 USD and go up to 99.95 USD per month.

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In a surprise announcement Adobe announced today that they will be placing Coldfusion on an Open Source road-map similar to that of Adobe Flex.

"This is in no way Adobe's response to BlueDragon placing their competing product on the path to open source," Ms. Schofield Coldfusions' Product Manager explained, "we just felt that a free open source Coldfusion would have a much greater market penetration than previously estimated."

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I am currently working on a business process management and monitoring project at work using Inubit IS and Coldfusion.

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I got a chance to play around a little bit this evening with ColdEXT. If you don't know what it is, it is a really good custom tag library that for a fair portion of the EXTJS library that is pretty easy to use.

It looks like Justin Carter spent a fair amount of time working on this custom tag library. He has a few examples packed into the zip file as well as on his blog but as of yet is lacking any extensive how-to guides (but most of you shouldn't have too much time figuring it out if you have had any exposure at all to EXT).

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I am attending the first Munich CFUG meeting of 2008 on Wednesday 12 March at 18:00. The company I work for has graciously donated space to hold the meeting.

The focus will be on Flex/AIR with CF as the natural choice for the backend. Christoph Schmitz has promised some Adobe sponsored give-aways, and I have promised to present a "proof of concept" AIR Application written in HTML/Ajax that connects to a backend system written in Coldfusion.

I haven't quite decided yet if I should attempt to give the presentation in German or stick to what I know best, English. The good thing is of course that the Germans us 90% English IT terminology so I should be good-to-go in that regard should I decide to give it a try in German.

I hope this CFUG meeting will be the start of something somewhat regular where we can get together and exchange ideas. Actually now that I think of it this will be my first ever CFUG meeting.

"Hi, My name is Gary and I am a CF Junky"

Happy Coding...

I have uploaded the project files for CFC Spry Rating to RIAForge for your enjoyment.

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Ben Forta posted a 'planned' feature to be added in the upcoming CF8 updater that should complete the circle in the ability to implicitly create arrays and structures by allowing us to nest the creation (like you can in several other languages out there).

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The release of Spry 1.6.1 didn't ensure the continued support for Adobe AIR but also came with a new widget called the ratings widget.

A little Ajax widget with some potential to be entirely over-used at least by me. As with most Spry widgets its ridiculously easy to use and setup. But not wanting to stop there I decided to create a custom component that would make it even easier oh and hook into a database to save the results (mySql only at this point).

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Brian Rinaldi has a pretty good article up on site point titled "Coldfusion 8: Believe The Hype".

While CF8 does indeed have huge speed improvements over earlier versions it's important to note that if you have developed using many of the frameworks you may actually experience a degradation in performance because of the sheer number of .class files that get generated.

As explained previously in an article by Mark Mandel the problem is in the Java 1.6 class loader and how it loads the classes into memory.

At server start up Coldfusion starts loading the generated .class files into server memory until the cache is full. Because of the class loader bottle neck this results in increased server startup times.

Mark further explains that in a Production environment where there are a huge number of .class files its entirely possible to experience unexpected and hard to reproduce performance hits as Coldfusion swaps out in-memory class files.

In order to fully appreciate CF8's speed and avoid the Java 1.6 bottleneck you will need to downgrade to 1.5 or wait until Sun publishes the fix.

Happy Friday...

[Editorial Note: Thanks Julian Halliwell for pointing out my mistaken use of createObject as the bottleneck instead of the Java class loader.]

A new version of the Jfree Chart custom tag is up on riaforge.

Added MX7 support which resulted in requiring a cacheDirectory to write the charts. Without the cfimage tag I had to create the ability to manage the images "manually" so added cacheDirectory and maxCacheSize attributes which does the management for you.

If someone out there still have a MX6 server where they can drop in the JFree jars into the CF class path and test it for me that would be great, also would be interested to see if it runs on Railo.

Happy Charting...

I finally managed to get around and upload Version 1 of my JFree Chart custom tag onto riaforge.

I typically use the import statement when using custom tags in the below examples I have imported the custom tag line so:

Here are a few screen shots and some example code

Bar Chart

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My Feedburner Management API project is now available on Riaforge. If you find any bugs or have any feature requests please let me know!

Happy Coding...

I mentioned a while back about my efforts to integrate the free and open-source Java based JFree chart engine. Thanks to a tip from Paul H over at SustainableGIS the last hurdle with the nested Double class is behind me and I could concentrate on actually getting the charts to work.

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I read a post on the Adobe forums by Spike H asking:

I have written a utility component (test1 below) and want to keep track of what external functions call the functions within my component. Other programmers create a component (e.g. test2 below) that extends my utility component and then their functions call my functions. I want to record metric data to determine how much use my functions are getting and from where. I've used the getMetaData() function inside my functions, but that only gives me the name of the component that extends my component (in this case test2), not the specific function that called my function (in this case functionAtest2).

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If you haven't heard of JFree charts you should really take a look at what it can do. It's a completely free charting engine written entirely in Java by David Gilbert (no relation, at least none that I know of), and has a heck of a lot of charting options.

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I stumbled upon a nice little article over at infoQ about how the ExtJS Ecosystem Continues to Expand. The article targets how new server side tools for ExtJs are sprouting up for ruby-on-rails, Java and of course Coldfusion.

The article also specificaly mentions the efforts by Dan Vega and Justin Carter to tie into the 2.0 version of ExtJs (Coldfusion officially only supports version 1.0).

It's good to see both Ext and Coldfusion getting a bit more exposure.

Happy Coding...

I've been looking for a example of using a HTMl rich text editor in a customer site to provide the ability for wysiwyg style editing of content items.

Basically the page would be displayed as a user would see it, they would then click (or double click) on the content item in question which would then be replaced with either a text box or rich text editor where appropriate. Much like flickr does with the image title and description but also with the rich text capabilities. A lot of commercial content management systems provide this type of functionality already but I haven't been able to find an example that I could easily rip off duplicate.

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Found a really great article by CFSearching on Text Wrapping with Images and ColdFusion 8.

The author uses the help of two Java classes LineBreakMeasurer and AttributedCharacterIterator (along with some other Java classes) to help measure how many lines of text will be needed in order to fit the text onto an image of a specific size.

Really worth a read!

Happy Coding...

On Monday I wrote up quick CFC that wrapped the functionality of the Feedburner Management API. I wasn't quite happy with the amount of work required to add the services and parameters so I added a helper function which makes the process a heck of a lot easier.

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A couple more survey's on Coldfusion have been posted and await your responses. These surveys will be used to gauge which features of CF8 are being used as well as help shape the future development of Coldfusion 9 aka Centaur.

The first survey is asking ColdFusion 8 Features Used and the second survey is about Coldfusion Platform and Vendors.

So go on and have your say!

Nate posted on the CF-talk e-mail list today about managing feeds on Feedburner. If you read Ray Camdens blog you would have seen his post about how you can return stats from Feeburner on a feed. Ray also provided a Feedburner.cfc to wrap the API.

But what if you wanted to actually manage your feeds?

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Sean Corfield put together, on friday a rather lengthy article based upon a frequent topic in the Coldfusion Community ("What should Adobe do to make ColdFusion more popular?").

We've all heard and perhaps even said a few of the arguments that Sean addresses in a well thought out "Devils advocate" approach.

Well worth the read if you haven't done so yet.

Just before Christmas I took a course "Building Analytical Solutions with Pentaho" (If you haven't heard of Pentaho it's an open source Business Intelligence Suite). Of particular importance to the clients of the company I work for are the ETL and Reporting tools.

While I was a little disappointed in the class itself the suite of tools are quite impressive, what makes it even more interesting is the fact that it's opens source and free (They do have a variety of support options available).

Yesterday I started an integration exercise. Since the entire Pentaho suite is built with Java the question is how easy/difficult will it be to integrate the reporting engine into an existing Coldfusion Application, specifically the self service reporting.

This is going to prove to be an interesting learning experience for sure

Ben Forta and Ray Camden have already posted about this survey but I will add my own "bump".

Go ahead and have your voice heard by taking the survey on IDE for Coldfusion

I've been on vacation and have enjoyed spending time away from everything programming related (as best I can, which by the way isn't very good), but Monday is back-to-work day for me, but I thought I would get back into it a bit early.

On my iGoogle home page I have a quote of the day widget and I kind of like it but it only displays 3 quotes and it's pretty much static the whole day through. I thought I would create a quote of the day using spry and CF. I could have just pointed spry at the RSS feed but the website specifically asks not to hit it more than once every two hours.

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I read an article by Sam Farmer the other day where he talked about a little project called Short URL. I thought the use of the onMissingTemplate method in the Application.cfc to catch the non-existing template and do a lookup for the longer URL to be quite interesting. But I want search engine safe (SES) urls that also carry a meaning.

For example the URL: http://www.garyrgilbert.com/tutorials/coldfusion/advanced/rss.cfm Here I have a page named rss in the category of coldfusion and subcategory of advanced. A real URL that goes to a real page in the real directory structure. But we could easily fake this URL by using the onMissingTemplate method as well. In essence we could create our own mod rewrite.

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When I first heard about LiveCycle Data services and that it has the ability to page large datasets I though cool how do I make it do it?

The idea here is to use Coldfusion as the Assembler. I already had a working sample using LiveCycle with CF on the back-end and Flex on the front-end all I needed to do was add more data to the Contacts.mdb file and then turn paging on. At least everything I read so far indicated that I wouldn't need to do anything special in my fill method in order for paging to work.

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Todd Sharp announced the opening of voting for this years CFeMmy's. The categories for this years CFeMmys in no particular order are:

• Best Aggregator
• Best Blog
• Best Reference Web Site (Site that teaches or provides documentation)
• Best Community Site (Site that provides info or resources to developers)
• Best OS Project (Built in CF)
• Best Commercial App (Built in CF)
• Best CF Host
• Best Newcomer (CF Blog that started in 2007)

I also noticed that I happen to have been nominated for the category "Best Newcomer (CF Blog that started in 2007)".

Thanks to whomever nominated me :).

Now that the voting is open please head over to the voting booths and vote for me!

Happy Coding...

I have been playing around with EXTJS for a while now and have, at the same time, been hearing quite a bit about JQuery but haven't really looked at it.

It seems to have a rather large and vibrant community and a heck of a lot of plugins available. One plugin that caught my eye, specifically because I recently pointed out a post about the Google Charting API, is a charting plugin for JQuery called

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Sean Corfield posted an article Java 6 and ColdFusion 8 on December 5th that I feel deserves a "bump", along with this post over at Compound Theory.

As the articles state there seems to be a bug in Java 1.6 that causes Coldfusion application start-up times to suffer horribly. Apparently the bug is only in Java 1.6 and affects the class loader. This won't affect your overall application performance (once the application is fully loaded) but when start your application up you will have some serious time delays.

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As mentioned on Kristen Schofield's Blog today there is a Review by Macworld on CF8.

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A few people have already commented on the blog by Jason at CFInsider titled Things ColdFusion is not... and... Why ColdFusion isn't free.... I think a lot of us take for granted a lot of what Coldfusion has to offer and concentrate a little too much on the price tag.

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Kristen Schofield announced yesterday on her blog that Coldfusion has entered Beta for version that will support 64 bit and the new Mac Operating System Leopard.

if you are a Mac head and a CF developer and want to join the beta program just send an email to pr_admin@adobe.com

A reader asked me yesterday about filtering a CFGrid using a CFSelect. I am quite happy to say that it is dead easy to do using the new CF8 tags. You can also bind your CFGrid to more than one control you just need to handle it with your cffunction.

Take the following grid for example. The grid is bound to a tree control as well as another control. The tree control sends the directory to the geFiles function to return a list of files.

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Both Ray and Ben posted that Coldfusion 8 Hotfix 2 is now available for download, which is great, but what I find interesting is that if you simply go to adobe and look under Updates and then select Coldfusion you are directed to an updaters page but won't find any mention of Hotfix 2, only Hotfix 1. Once on the updates page you can then click on Coldfusion in breadcrumb which will take you to the actual Coldfusion Support home.

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Someone posted to the CF-Talk list that they were having an issue with session management. If the user clicked the logout button/link they were logged out successfully but if they just closed the browser and then tried log in again

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I've been seeing quite a few posts by Ray Camden in the last little while about spry and I decided that I would jump on Rays bandwagon and check out the not-so-new new pre-release version as well.

The first thing I figured I would try since it's so commonly used are linked combo boxes.

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As a, sort of, justification for sending me to Max in Barcelona I have been asked to give a presentation on some of the things that I learned, heard about or otherwise experienced (minus the huge amounts of alcohol I consumed).

The four things that immediately came to mind are: CF8, AIR, Flex 3 and LCDS. Each one of these subjects really deserves their own presentation but I need to fit as much info into as little time as possible and still manage to ignite a fire under certain peoples butts and get them excited about this stuff

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Just got an email from the Adobe Share group. It looks like they are rolling out and update this afternoon (PST).

They are making some needed improvements to the function that creates the PDF preview as it seemed to produce quite a few errors. With this release they are

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I received an email a while back from Mathew asking for help connecting to a SFTP server with CFFTP. He had tried the code that I provided in my post but it didn't work for him.

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I just found out that Ben Forta and Tim Buntel will be in Beoblingen on October 23rd following the European Max.

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On the cf-talk list today Paul Hastings posted a problem he was having with the CFIMAGE tag. Essentially the problem comes down to the imageGetEXIFMetaData function throwing an error when trying to read the EXIF Meta data.

I also had a similar problem back in August and wrote about it in a blog entry. While I was able to find a work-around for why I was getting the first error.

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Yesterday Ray Camden posted a question in the comments section of one of this posts asking if a developer should be worried about the speed difference between a cfswitch and cfif/cfelseif code block.

That kind of struck me as an odd question. In my mind developers should always be worried about the speed of what it is they are programming, and at the same time should make choices about what parts of the language are more suitable or efficient for the current problem than the other. Just because a cfswitch tag is generally faster doesn't mean that we should use it in all cases instead of cfif. We also need to know when it should be used over the other.

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Yesterday I blogged briefly about what I thought was a problem with our JVM version for JRun and the daylight savings change.

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I have been trying most of the day today (currently 15:51 GMT + 1) to get to Adobe.com's CF support page to find the resolution to the MX 6.1 time problem.

Time problem? What time problem?

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An old colleague of mine sent me an IM last week. They were having problems with a migration script that they were running and couldn't quite figure out why it wasn't working.

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