Viewing by month: March 2006
Firefox 2 Alpha 1 is Available
Posted on Mar 22, 2006
To download, go to: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/bonecho/releases/2.0a1.html. The details from the site state:
Bon Echo Alpha 1 is a developer preview release of our next generation Firefox browser and it is being made available for testing purposes only. Bon Echo Alpha 1 is intended for web application developers and our testing community. Current users of Mozilla Firefox 1.x should not use Bon Echo Alpha 1.
Got the CFEclipse RDS Plugin Working!
Posted on Mar 21, 2006
Initially I had some trouble locating the download (and the instructions on the wiki didn't actually install the plugin (and I already had the most recent CFEclipse version). Finally Ray Camden directed me to actually click to download the Flex 2 Builder 2 and then look for the "Download ColdFusion Extensions to Flex Builder 2.0 (ZIP, 1.8 MB)" link. (not the most obvious place to me, so thanks Ray). After downloading the zip, and placing the four plugin folders in my plugins directory, I loaded up Eclipse and there in my preferences was the RDS configuration. The setup here is fairly straightforward, and I was able to get an RDS connection to our development server at Hasbro working in no time. I opened the RDS dataview view and saw my database tables. Right click on a table and you can run the query viewer to test queries against your database, or run the ColdFusion wizards to auto-generate CFC's based upon your database table (your bean and your DAO, with several different options). These features are extremely useful even if you are not using Flex. The RDS fileview is pretty straghtforward, so no need to expand on that. Basically, this is really, really sweet, and IMHO was the missing link in CFEclipse (now if I could only find a decent CSS plugin...anyone?)
Migrating Legacy Apps to OO (CFObjective Session Summary)
Posted on Mar 20, 2006
Matt Woodward gave this session. He defined a legacy application as one that has been in service over several years and/or one that doesn't work on CF7 (i.e. it is potentially in need of a compatibility update at the very least). Matt emphasized the need to balance business needs with our "geek desires." By this he meant that, as developers, we are constantly drawn to using the "latest and greatest," and in the ColdFusion world right now that means building applications using frameworks and an object-oriented approach. However, what makes great code sense (and sounds interesting and cool), may not make much business sense (i.e. if it ain't broke...). Along these lines, Matt laid out some reasons to migrate.
Objects and Persistence (CFObjective Session Summary)
Posted on Mar 20, 2006
Sean Corfield gave this presentation which covered the ways in which objects can be persisted (with a friendly reminder that the application scope is not a persistent scope because it does not persist when the machine is turned off and back on). Sean emphasized that when moving to an object-oriented architecture for your applications, it can be confusing to try to determine a strategy for translating objects to a relational database (rdbms). On a personal note, I have to completely agree that this is what has (and continues sometimes) to cause me the most difficulty (see my previous post on this topic exactly).
Introduction to Subversion (CFObjective Session Summary)
Posted on Mar 18, 2006
For my prior CFObjective summeries, go here, here and here.
Simeon Bateman gave high-level overview of using Subversion for version control. One of the key points he emphasized was that Subversion was not a source control system, but rather it is version control for managing trees of files (any type of file can be versioned). Personally, I have heard this mentioned before and it can be sometimes unclear to me. I think what Simeon and others mean by this is that Subversion is totally agnostic to the types of files it versions. The Subversion book refers to systems that are designed for source control specifically as it relates to software development as having "software configuration management (SCM)", and the point is, Subversion does not have that. The rest of the discussion generally spoke of Subversion and some of the ways it differed from CVS.