Viewing by month: September 2007
Look for me at MAX!
Posted on Sep 27, 2007
Well this day is nearing an end and I will be heading off for Chicago tomorrow to attend MAX which begins on Monday. I am leaving early to go visit a number of close friends in Whitewater, Wisconsin, where we lived for four years before coming to Boston. I will be getting to Chicago on Sunday evening and will be staying at the Hyatt Regency Chicago. Feel free to stop me and say hello. If you don't know what I look like, here's a picture.
Again, I would like to send out special thanks to those people who put me as a referral and made this trip possible, and thanks to Adobe who actually supplied the ticket. See you there!
Anatomy of a Framework - Mach-II - Part 2 - The Request Process
Posted on Sep 27, 2007
In our first entry in this series where we are looking under the covers of various ColdFusion frameworks, we examined what happened when Mach-II first starts up. The application startup process handled a lot of the heavy lifting for the framework, and therefore our examination of the request process becomes fairly straightforward.
Effectively, the application startup process parsed all relevant XML configuration files and created collections of events and commands that can be called and processed. These are, obviously, just component method calls on your Mach-II specific CFCs (i.e. the listeners, plugins and filters). Thus, the request process, in simplistic terms, is just a matter of parsing the event information and stringing these calls together. The entire request process in Mach-II 1.5 (currently in beta) is kicked off within the onRequest() method of Application.cfc which calls handleRequest() machII.mach-ii.cfc. Let's take a closer look.
Sortable Table ColdFusion Custom Tag with jQuery UI
Posted on Sep 25, 2007
A while back I created a sortable tables custom tag using the WebFX sortable table JavaScript. While this worked pretty well, there were limitations to the sorting and limitations to my tag itself. For no particularly good reason (well other than all the good things I have heard about jQuery), I decided to rebuild this using the new JQuery UI. I am happy to say that, with a little work (and some helpful advice from Todd Sharp), the new custom tag (actually tags) is ready and offers some new and improved features over the old. There are still some limitations I am working on, but I am making the initial release available. You can download the zip attached to this post...so let's look at how it works.
ColdFusion Open-Source Update - September 24, 2007
Posted on Sep 24, 2007
Fairly busy week, with four new projects and four updates. This week I am getting ready to go to MAX thanks to some generous help from community members who put me as a referral, Adobe for giving me the ticket and my employer for sponsoring the remainder of the trip. I am really exited about the trip as it will provide ample opportunity for beer...I mean...learning. Feel free to say hello if you see me stumbling down the hall doing Marvin the Martian impressions.
Google Adds Presentations to Google Docs
Posted on Sep 18, 2007
As reported by TechCrunch, Google has just launched a presentation building addition to Google Docs, thereby completing its "suite" of office products.
As with all the other types of Google Docs, the UI and feature-set for presentations is pretty basic, but in my initial tests, it seems to handle most everything that I would use Powerpoint for. In fact, I had already been using the online presentation software Zoho Show for my rare presentation and it seems to match that in features. It even supports uploading of Powerpoint files and did a relatively good job converting one I already had. There are also about 20 themes currently available for styling your presentation.
Unless you are a power user of any of Microsoft Office's suite of products, you may very well get everything you need out of Google Docs at this point. Personally, it is all I am using.