Viewing by month: February 2006
Open-Source Review - AjaxCFC
Posted on Feb 25, 2006
Today I updated the ColdFusion Open-Source List to use AJAX on the filter by category. While this isn't the most spectacular use of AJAX, it was surprisingly easy to implement using the built-in functions of Rob Gonda's AjaxCFC. Put it this way, I spent all of an hour-and-a-half learning how to use AjaxCFC and implementing this feature, and a good chunk of that time was spent reminding myself of some DOM basics. This being my first foray into anything AJAX, I'd say that ain't bad.
Confirmed for CFObjective AND CFUnited
Posted on Feb 21, 2006
After spending my entire career never making any of the ColdFusion/Allaire/Macromedia conferences, I am already confirmed to be attending BOTH CFObjective (March 11 & 12) AND CFUnited (June 28-30). Looking forward to putting some faces with the names.
Open-Source List RSS Feed Added
Posted on Feb 20, 2006
Just a quick note to mention that I have already gone ahead and added the RSS feed to the ColdFusion Open-Source List. You can access it by going to http://www.remotesynthesis.com/cfopensourcelist/rss.cfm. Thanks to Ray Camden, as I borrowed liberally from the RSS code in his BlogCFC. Currently I have it set to output the most recent ten entries. You can actually subscribe to just a category if you choose by appending the categoryID (though this is useful only in a few categories). Let me know if this works well as I am open to suggestions on improving it.
Open-Source Project List Relaunched
Posted on Feb 20, 2006
The original ColdFusion Open-Source Project List got alot of attention and continues to get alot of traffic. However, there were problems with it: 1) it was a pain to maintain (especially since - this is the good news - I seem to be adding new projects on a regular basis) 2) the URL was clunky.
Because of this, I built a new version that runs on Reactor (I documented the development here). This version is essentially the same as the old, but has a cleaner URL. It also adds license information (where I could reasonably determine that) and categories. Determining categories proved to be a bit of a pain, and I am open to any better suggestions.
This isn't a finished application yet. Some of the things I would like to see added first are: 1) A seperate RSS feed just for the list that will show newly added projects 2) the ability to keyword search the list. Any other suggestions?
In case you missed the URL above it is http://www.remotesynthesis.com/cfopensourcelist. You can also access it via the "cf open source list" item in my site navigation.
As a side note, I will no longer be maintaining the older list, so please update your bookmarks.
Getting Started with Reactor
Posted on Feb 17, 2006
As I have blogged earlier, I recently got the chance to begin revisiting using Reactor as part of my application "infrastructure". Doug Hughes has done a great job of building Reactor into a powerful tool to handle all the tedium of creating your component beans, DAOs and Gateways (and Transfer Objects). This is fantastic in and of itself, but, as I have discussed, you could easily create a code generator to do this yourself (not on the fly I suppose, but it still is a major time saver). I want to cover some of the more powerful features of Reactor (and some of the basics) from the perspective of a beginner (and a nOOb).