Viewing by month: July 2006
MacBook Woes
Posted on Jul 19, 2006
So, a couple weeks ago I purchased a new Intel-based MacBook, and while it is a great piece of hardware and OSX is very cool, I am getting increasingly frustrated trying to set it up as a machine I can use for development (some of my initial woes made it into the recent ColdFusion Weekly podcast). My hope was to use Parallels to host my ColdFusion install on IIS (because this replicates most of my hosting environments at the moment), but to develop within OSX using CFEclipse. I feel as if I am 90% there and I can see the finish line, but recently I have been running in place. I figured perhaps someone out there has successfully done a similar setup and can share their secrets (Sean?). Keep in mind if anything I mention sounds idiotic that I am new to Mac and have also never been particularly good at networking.
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ColdBox - What Do You Want to Know?
Posted on Jul 18, 2006
Luis Majano's ColdBox is the newest ColdFusion MVC Framework and many of you may be asking what makes it different? Well, Luis is asking you to post your questions on his blog. I already posted mine. This is a good lead in to my next Objects and Frameworks post which will cover choosing the right framework; I hope to post it soon.
Objects and Frameworks - the Big Resource List
Posted on Jul 18, 2006
Before getting to the list of resources I want to make a quick point. You can easily get bogged down focusing on reading everything about object and frameworks - as in it is easy to teach yourself into inaction. As I have discussed in both my prior posts (the "No Excuses" post, Getting Started), the most dramatic step that you can take is to just get started and (at the risk of sounding like a broken record) don't be afraid to get it wrong. Remember, there is no "Rosetta Stone", so no resource on this list offers a definitive answer but each one can help in the process. That being said, there are more resources out there for ColdFusion programmers interested in learning the concepts than I am capable of listing here. This is a list of resources that I am familiar with (and thanks to Peter Farrell for some good suggestions as well)...feel free to add some of your own in the comments section.
ColdFusion Open-Source Update - July 17
Posted on Jul 17, 2006
This week Raymond Camden slowed down the pace of his project releases by only releasing four project updates - the most significant being some interesting enhancements to BlogCFC in version 5.1. In the non-Camden projects: Kurt Wiersma released the proof of concept for CFHibernate that had a number of us excited at CFUnited; Peter Farrell got us up-to-date on the progress of Mach II upcoming maintenance release; and Luis Majano continued to refine his entry into the world of ColdFusion frameworks with some improvements and bug fixes to the ColdBox beta release.
Objects and Frameworks - Getting Started
Posted on Jul 14, 2006
So you read my last blog post and perhaps you are saying to yourself, "ok, I'll give the whole objects and frameworks thing a shot." Maybe you know enough to know that you will need to start creating components modeled as beans, DAO's and Gateways. This seems like a lot of extra work compared to my 1 request 1 template coding (or maybe 1 template a 1 cfc with my queries). Suddenly you remember a project called Reactor that took care of most of that drudgery for you...oh, and you read many articles recently about a new version of Model-Glue (Unity) that used Reactor (and ColdSpring) to generate your list and form pages for you using scaffolding. Perhaps, you have even watched Joe Rhinehart's blog in 9 minutes presentation. This won't be so hard after all right? My advice to you would be to slow down.