Category: Programming
MAX Day One Keynote - Full Coverage
Posted on Oct 01, 2007
For someone who has only attended ColdFusion-specific conferences, it is hard to describe the scale of MAX. I am sitting here waiting for the opening keynote staring at three giant screens with music blasting to a standing-room-only audience of thousands. Finally, the giant screens begin playing an opening montage with Ray Camden, Laura Arguello, Ben Forta and many others speaking about the theme of engagement.
Adobe AIR WebKit Doesn't Support Client-side XSLT?
Posted on Aug 31, 2007
I got on a weird mission today for no specific reason (ok, I had something in mind but since it may not be possible I won't go into details). What I wanted to know was whether I could do an XSL Transform within Adobe AIR either through ActionScript 3, JavaScript or otherwise. After a little research, it appears that AS3 doesn't support XSLT directly. In addition, WebKit has added an XSLT JavaScript API but it seems to be new and, to be honest, I couldn't locate anything showing how to implement it.
After those two paths were blocked, I found an excellent beginners tutorial on client-side XSLT simply by loading the XML with the defined XSL template in the browser. The example they gave worked nicely in IE7, Firefox and even Safari on Windows. Seeing as Safari and AIR both use WebKit, I thought this might work in AIR. To my dismay, it did not. Here's what I did...
Using REMatch versus REReplace in ColdFusion 8
Posted on Aug 08, 2007
A new function in ColdFusion 8 that I hadn't seen discussed yet is REMatch (and obviously the related REMatchNoCase). Well, today I was writing an application where I needed to strip all but alphanumeric characters from a string. Looking through the regular expression reference (my favorite is RegExLib) you will see that "\w" will return only alphanumeric characters. Except that prior to ColdFusion 8, there was only REFind, which will return the start and end positions of matches but clearly won't work in this case, and REReplace, which would work if I wanted to replace the alphanumeric characters. What I really wanted was all the matching characters returned, and this is where REMatch comes in.
What the Heck is a Gateway Anyway?
Posted on Jul 18, 2007
So, as I mentioned on my Pownce account, I am working on a curriculum for teaching some basic object-oriented development in ColdFusion as well as introducing frameworks like Mach ii, ColdSpring and Transfer. I have outlined the basics of what is an object and the data access object (DAO) pattern so far, and then I hit the commonly used (including by me) "gateway" component. Now with most patterns in ColdFusion object-oriented development you can find a direct correlation in common J2EE design patterns. However, in this case, though I am not an expert on J2EE design patterns, the typical ColdFusion gateway seems to bear little resemblance to relevant design patterns in Java. So, the question becomes, what is the "gateway" in ColdFusion?
Cringely and the Future of Adobe
Posted on Jul 11, 2007
A friend sent me a link to another insightful article by Robert Cringely that I had missed about the future of Adobe and Flash. It represents a very interesting perspective not unlike ones I have seen before but with some differentiating insights into the how and why Flash's ubiquity can play a key role in Adobe's efforts to reinvent itself (as he puts it). The article is worth a read for sure, and I just wanted to jot down some thoughts and summarize a few points for my own (and hopefully your) benefit, in the end relating this back to our position as ColdFusion developers a bit.