Viewing by month: April 2010
ColdFusion Open-Source Update - April 30, 2010
Posted on Apr 30, 2010
Five new projects and five updates ones in ColdFusion open source this past week. Sorry this post is late but, while others were at cf.Objective(), I spent all of last week enjoying the sun and warmth at Disney World. Sure, there's less ColdFusion goodness in the Magic Kingdom, but there's more mouse. Nonetheless , I spoke to Jared and he plans on correcting that oversight next year.
Continue Reading →The Adobe Developer Community Needs to Reach Out
Posted on Apr 20, 2010
This is a topic I have been giving a lot of thought to lately, even before and unrelated to the continuing Apple versus Adobe saga. Its been my sense, especially lately, that the Adobe Developer Community is a very introverted community and this trait continues to hurt how we are viewed within the developer community as a whole (for what its worth, I am speaking about ColdFusion, Flex and Flash developers since these are the areas with which I have experience though admittedly less within Flash specifically). This post is my attempt to open a discussion on that topic and suggest some ideas on how to change it.
Continue Reading →Getting Started with ColdFusion 9 ORM in ColdFusion Builder
Posted on Apr 20, 2010
My latest article for the Adobe Edge journal was just released. It covers the basics of starting a new ColdFusion ORM project using some of the features within the recently released ColdFusion Builder. The article walks through setting up your project in Builder to installing extensions, specifically I use Terrence Ryan's Appatacular extension which should be released soon (but is available in his article on the Developer Connection). Much of the ORM code is generated using this tool but I also show how you can manually manage ORM and allow it to make the necessary changes to your schema for you. If you are new to either ORM or ColdFusion Builder (or are just curious about Apptacular), this should be a worthwhile tutorial for you.
On another note, if you are interested in learning Flex and using Flash Builder, you can also catch me and a number of other great developers interviewed by Julie Campagna in the featured video on the Edge. The video covers ways to get started learning Flex and discusses a number of great resources available to you.
Article: Object relational mapping in ColdFusion 9 and ColdFusion Builder
Video: Getting Started with Flex
Continue Reading →ColdFusion Open Source Update - April 19, 2010
Posted on Apr 19, 2010
Six updated projects this week (no new ones) in ColdFusion open source. This week is cf.Objective() and I expect that as always this event will have some amazing content. Unfortunately, for the second year in a row, I am unable to attend (though, not too unfortunate this year as I will be with the family at Disney for spring break). I'm looking forward to catching up on many of the sessions via various blogs. Here's this week's update which covers the past week and half.
Continue Reading →Dumb ColdFusion ORM Mistakes Vol. 2 - computed properties
Posted on Apr 14, 2010
ColdFusion ORM has a powerful feature that allows you to include properties in your object that contain computed data using a formula. For example, the application I am currently working on has Poll objects that contain Answers (as in the response options) and responses (i.e. the user submitted vote). In this scenario, you may want to allow that when you retrieve a Poll object it has knowledge of how many votes have been cast for that poll. In addition, you would likely want each Answer to have knowledge of how many times it has been voted for. In doing so it would be very easy to render the poll results. In this scenario, your Poll would have a computed property for your Poll called totalVotesCast and your Answer object may similarly contain a computed property for responseCount (the names aren't important here...so don't focus on it). This is actually very easy to do using ORM computed properties, with one gotcha that caught me.
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