Raymond Camden's ColdFusion Blog

Model-Glue Documentation Updates

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 10:13:00 -0500

I just twittered this, but wanted to ensure everyone knew. Dan Wilson just blogged about two big updates to the core Model-Glue documentation. First is a new Quick Start. Second is an online training guide that picks up right after the Quick Start ends. Check it out!

Two Oh Oh Nine

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 08:38:00 -0500

Please note what follows is an especially personal, especially rambling, look back at 2009. I don't think this blog entry will be useful to anyone but me, so be warned before reading any further! As 2009 comes to a close, I have to say that it was a "pretty good" year. Not great, but not horrible either. As I hear more and more people on Twitter say that 2009 wasn't so hot but they are hopeful for 2010, I have to say that isn't the case for me. 2009 had it's bad spots for sure, but overall, I'm pretty satisfied. On the work front, I began the year at Broadchoice, working hard on Workspace, an AIR/Flex/Groovy/Hibernate/Spring project. Things ended at Broadchoice in April, and not in a great way, but before then I had the opportunity to learn a heck of a lot. Thats much more invaluable then any one job. One of my resolutions for the year had been to become an "intermediate Flex" developer, and while that is somewhat of a vague term, I think I'm finally there. After Broadchoice came to an end, I did a lot of contracting (and thank you to those of you who hooked me up). I began doing consulting for FirstComp after CFUNITED. For those who don't know, that's the company Jason Delmore ended up after Adobe. I'm happy to say that as of Monday of this week, I'm now a full time, "real" employee of FirstComp. While I never hurt for work (not looking forward to the tax bill this year), I"m happy to have a stable full time gig with one company. There are a lot of really nice, smart folks at FirstComp. Before meeting them I had no idea how big their ColdFusion implementation was and how much they had invested in it for their business. I also got to meet ImageTrend. They do consulting with FirstComp as well and are probably the largest ColdFusion shop you have never heard of. Lots of a smart guys (and gals!) there and I hope they get more exposure. They deserve it! One resolution I did not mention was in regards to speaking. I felt like I had gotten into a "presentation rut" in 2008 and earlier, giving the same presentation over and over again. I decided that in 2009 I'd do my best to give all new, all fresh presentations. (I made an exception for the Online Meetup, where I was able to give presentations for free that I had earlier given at conferences.) This was a great decision. I gave new presentations on ORM, ColdSpring, Model-Glue, charting, and other topics. It was stressful, but fun. I'm going to try to keep it up for 2010 as well. I've submitted a topic to on FW/1 to cfObjective. If I'm not chosen to speak (not holding my breath this year), then I'll give it to the online meetup. I'm no FW/1 expert, but I plan to use it a lot more in 2010. While Model-Glue continues to be my favorite framework, FW/1 is damn skippy and comes in a close second for me. In a similar vein, I've fallen behind in my Flex skills recently. I want to spend some time researching Swiz. What better way to learn it then to force myself to present on it? I used Swiz back at Broadchoice, and it really helped me with what I considered to be my biggest issue with Flex - complexity. This was the year I finally embraced Twitter. I'm still not exactly sure how useful it is - but not everything has to have a vital purpose, does it? And I'll be brutally honest, 2000+ followers does wonders for my already overblown ego. And while I'm on the topic of ego, it was very humbling to take home multiple community awards from CFUNITED this year. It's nice to see the community grow and expand. I'm adding new blogs to ColdFusion Bloggers every week. I hope more people decide to share their knowledge and experience in 2010. I know it's scary - but at the end of the day - we can all learn from one another. This was also the year I pretty much stopped using Spry. I've taken the jQuery koolaid and am quite addicted. While I recommend jQuery to everyone with ears, I still have a lot of respect for Spry. It was my gateway drug to Ajax in general and is still, in my opinion, the best framework for non-technical folks or people who want a gentler introduction to Ajax development. Oh, and Adobe released another ColdFusion. And it kicked ass. I'm still shocked at how fast ColdFusion 9 runs, and ORM has redefined application development for me. I've said in the past that ColdFusion is so RAD I could probably do more with version 4 then a PHP dev could do with their latest version. While I still think that (warning, I may be biased), I can't imagine going back to any earlier version of ColdFusion. That - to me - is how radically improved version 9 is. It's truly a high point in the history of the product. And yea, I'm biased as hell (hope to get my ColdFusion tattoo sometime soon), but that's what I think. On a negative side, I discovered one aspect of my personality that I'm not happy about. I'm negative. I don't know if I come off as negative on the blog, or Twitter, and it may have just been temporary, but when things got bad at Broadchoice, I got unhappy (nothing wrong with that) and I don't think I handled it very well. Ok, I'll admit it - I think I handled it like crap. I think when things get rough, I can get into a mood that is just hard to shake off. I'm really happy I recognized that. I won't kid myself into thinking that I'll stop being so negative, but at least knowing I do gives me perspective. It's something I'm going to watch out for in the future. So I'll wrap this now. I'm probably going to do a post tomorrow as well with more specific resolutions, it just depends on how crazy things get tonight. I want to say one last, very important thing.

Thank You

I want to thank everyone who reads this blog. I want to thank everyone who comes to my presentations. Thank you for your feedback. Thank you for your participation. I love code. I love talking about code. And without you guys, I'd be talking to myself, which is only slightly more weird for me than normal. I hope you guys stick around for 2010. I'd lie and say there will be less OT posts, less Star Wars jokes, and less rants, but, well, I think everyone here knows better.

Best of CF9: Application.cfc Script Template

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 12:49:00 -0500

Note from the Editor, AKA Ray: Well obviously the contest is taking a bit longer to review than I thought. Sorry folks! But so far the entries have been great and I'm happy we have too many entries versus not enough! Anyway, this is, most likely, the last review for 2009. They will continue in 2010. This review was written by Todd Sharp. [More]

Looking for router/hub advice

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 14:28:00 -0500

After switching providers yesterday, I noticed that my net access was mysteriously dying every 4-5 hours. I hit up the status page on my router and see that everything looks fine. I can do a DHCP Release/Renew and immediately get a good response, but I still can't do anything on the Internet. Unplugging the router fixes it every time. Is it a bad router? If so - it seems like a bit of a coincidence that it died the same day I switched providers. However - I'd be less likely to blame the hardware if a simple restart didn't fix it each and every time. The router in question is a Linksys BEFSR41. The firmware hasn't bee updated since 2004, which is probably around when I picked up the device. I'm tempted to just swing by Office Depot and pick up a new Linksys model. If it works again for 5 years I'd consider that a fine investment for 40-50 bucks. p.s. And may I say for the 100th time how much I hate dealing with hardware and networking?

Best of CF9: Hyrule

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 22:20:00 -0500

Today's Best of ColdFusion 9 entry is Hyrule from Dan Vega. This entry is - to me - a slight break in the rules. It is an existing project and not something created brand new for the contest. I don't think I was specific in that regards and since the code is ColdFusion 9 specific and therefore pretty much new, I'm letting it slide here. Plus it has a Zelda-based name and therefore it must be cool. [More]

Changes to an existing ORM entity are automatically persisted.

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 13:43:00 -0500

I'm tempted to say "See Title" and end the blog entry here, but that probably wouldn't be helpful. ;) So I ran into something unexpected today. After talking it over with Brian Kotek it makes more sense to me, but what I'm about to explain certainly was behavior I did not expect. I was doing some testing with ORM entities today, specifically one with a One-To-Many relationship. During my testing I ran a few set operations but I never persisted my changes. In my mind I was simply testing methods and didn't really care to persist the change. However - I noticed that after I reloaded the page, the changes I made were being persisted. I had thought that to persist changes you always needed to use entitySave. However, that appears to not be the case. If you run setX on an entity, Hibernate assumes you mean to persist that change. It just feels wrong to me that this happens automatically. In my mental model, it's like opening a Word document. I may modify the title and print it, but I don't expect my changes to persist unless I explicitly click the Save button. Brian shared with this URL over at the help documentation. It talks a bit about ORM session management. Now I'm already aware of how Hibernate handles sessions. What I didn't expect was that an update to a persistent component would be automatically persisted. However, from the doc page I think it is quite clear from the second item (2. all entity updates) that this would indeed be the case. In my example I was just writing a test script, but Brian pointed out that one place this tends to trip people up quite a bit is in edit handlers. You take in some form input, run your SETs, and then you may conditionally entitySave based on error checking. However, even without the entitySave there is a chance your changes will be persisted anyway. So... maybe I'm alone in this. Ben Nadel mentioned to me that this behavior (save existing entities automatically) was what he expected. Did other people know this?

CFMAP and Centering

Sun, 27 Dec 2009 18:34:00 -0500

For a while now I've had two line items in my "To write about" notebook. They concerned figuring out how to use CFMAP (and Google Maps in general) to center the map on an address. Out of the box you have an immediate address that acts as the center, but I wanted to see how the center could be changed post map load. My first attempt was to figure out a way to center the map on an marker. I began with an extremely simple script: [More]

Two great ColdFusion Builder tips

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 09:25:00 -0500

Nice to see I'm not the only one around today. Typically I try to share links on Twitter, not here, but as I just saw two really, really good ColdFusion Builder tips, I thought I'd share them here. The first is: Filtered Project Views in ColdFusion Builder by John Whish. He talks about how you can use working sets to separate projects instead of workspaces. This is something I've done for a while as I find the workingspace change to be a bit slow. The second is: Sharing your CFEclipse / ColdFusion Builder Snippets across multiple installs by Marc Esher. This is an awesome tip and a great use of the free Dropbox service. As a beta tester for CF Builder I've had to update my snippets a lot. No more! (Well, technically I'll need to edit the preference.)

UDF to crop and highlight a block of text

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 15:43:00 -0500

Here is a little UDF I worked on this morning. I've had code like this in BlogCFC for a while, but I needed it in a UDF for my Picard project so I just whipped it out. The basic idea is: You have a block of text of arbitrary text.
You had searched for something and that something is probably in the text. (I say probably because the search may have matched on another part of the content in question, like the title.)
You want to highlight the match in the content.
You also want to crop the content to X characters long, and if a match was found, center the X characters around the first match.
Make sense? So given a block of text, like the lyrics to Lady Gaga's "Poker Face" (don't ask), I can find/highlight the word poker like so:


#highlightAndCrop(text,"poker",250,"")#

Where text is a variable containing the lyrics, poker is the word to highlight, 250 is the size of the result (which is a bit fuzzy, will explain why in a bit), and the final argument is the "wrap" to use around the result. Here is what the UDF will return:

... oh, oh, ohhhh, oh-oh-e-oh-oh-oh,
I'll get him hot, show him what I've got

Can't read my,
Can't read my
No he can't read my poker face
(she's got me like nobody)
Can't read my
Can't read my
No he can't read my poker face
(she's got me like nobody)

P-p-p...

So you get the basic idea. Here is the UDF (as it stands now, but there are parts of it I'd like to improve):



	
	
	
	

	

	
	", "", "all"))>

	
	
		
	
	

	
	
		
	
	

	
	
		
			
		
			
		
		
			
		
	
		
	

	
	",arguments.wrap)>

For the most part this should make sense. I attempt to find the term within the string and use that as a base to create an excerpt. I handle cases where the match isn't found and I also handle cases where the total string is smaller than the crop. Note that the wrap HTML you include will have an impact on the total length of the string, but that shouldn't matter. The main part I don't like is the wrap portion. It only supports one set of tags. I may split this into two arguments, a beginWrap and endWrap. For now though it suits my purposes. p.s. This UDF is ColdFusion 9 only because of the var statements intermingled within the UDF. To use this in earlier versions, simply move the var statements to the beginning of the UDF.

Tip: cfsavecontent and cfinclude within script based CFCs

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 21:29:00 -0500

Ok, so I know that I've said (many times) that including layout in a CFC is generally a bad idea. I still think it is. But like most rules there are always exceptions. Normally this wouldn't be a big deal, but HTML and JavaScript within a script based component is - well - it's ugly. Here is an example:


case "textbox": {
	return s & '';
}

This simple example works, but more complex HTML gets messier. I could have switched the component over to tags. It's not like that would be the end of the world! But then I remember - you can use savecontent within script based cfcs. So instead of the inline HTML you see above, I now use:


case "event date": {
	savecontent variable="s" {
		include "render/eventdate.cfm";
	}
	return s;
}

Woot. I wish I had remembered this when I began the project, but I'm guessing I'll be getting used to ColdFusion 9 syntax until right around the release of ColdFusion 10.

12 Days of Christmas - Yahoo Style - 2009

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 10:22:00 -0500

Two years ago I whipped up a quick blog entry demonstrating how to make use of the CFYahoo ColdFusion library to retrieve images related to the 12 Days of Christmas. I was thinking of this entry and thought it would be nice to repost the code and use more current results. So nothing new here, nothing serious, just something a bit cute (imho). The code: [More]

Best of CF9: easyImages

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 17:35:00 -0500

Today's Best of ColdFusion 9 contest entry is easyImages by Simon Romanski. It was judged by Francisco Paulino-Tofinha. This entry also has a rather large download. Therefore I recommend folks use the URL set up by Simon: http://www.simonit.com/easyImages I have to admit - I was a bit confused by this application. It didn't seem real clear to me what it actually was supposed to do. There is a README file, and videos, but even with them I was confused at first. After playing around a bit though it finally began to dawn on me what Simon had created. While the application is rather simple, and was buggy for me (I'll explain what I had to tweak), I think he has the start of something really freaking cool here. Let me explain. [More]

RIAForge Update - SVN Files/Changelists

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 14:15:00 -0500

This weekend I worked on restoring and updating some functionality to RIAForge. RIAForge used to support the ability to browse SVN repositories via the site. It allowed you to browse the repo, view files, and examine the history. This was removed for a few reasons. Today I've restored the functionality and added the ability to view changelists as well. So for example: Top level SVN repo for FW/1
Code view for /trunk/Application.cfc
History for Application.cfc
Changelists for FW/1
Details for revision 94
This will work hand in hand with the SVN post-commit support I've got coming this week as well. As always, if you find a bug, please be sure to report it. Thanks go to Rob Gonda's for his original SVN work and Sean Corfield for help in testing.

Looking for help with a bad query

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 07:29:00 -0500

Did you know I have the smartest readers in the world? I'm not just saying that. You guys are truly intelligent. And beautiful too. Did I say that? All of my readers are intelligent and strikingly beautiful as well. I'm not just saying that because I really want some help with a query. Honest. Ok, maybe I am. Let me give some background here. I've noticed for a while now that when I post a comment to my blog, the code takes a good 4-5 seconds to respond. Normal page requests run much quicker. However - when a comment is posted I clear the cache for the "Recent Comments" list you see below. I extracted the SQL for it and ran it within MySQL's Query Browser and confirmed - it was a dog. For the lift of me I can't figure out why. The query simply asks for the last 5 comments. It joins against the entries table to get the entry title as well. Here is the SQL. The value next to date_add is dynamic as is the blog in the where clause. That value is set with a cfqueryparam.


select  e.id as entryID,
e.title,
c.id,
c.entryidfk,
c.name,
c.comment,
date_add(c.posted, interval -1 hour) as posted
from tblblogcomments c
inner join tblblogentries e on c.entryidfk = e.id
where	 blog = 'Default'
order by c.posted desc
limit 5

The issue seems to be the join. If I just get the last 5 comments it runs instantly. However, from what little SQL skills I have, a join like this shouldn't be so slow. I've got an index on comment.id and comment.entryidfk. Entry has an index on it's ID and the blog column. Here is the result of the EXPLAIN: Unfortunately nothing really here makes sense to me. This seems to only be an issue with a BlogCFC install with a lot of data as I don't see it on my test version. If folks are bored and want to recreate this locally, just download BlogCFC and fill it with some random data. (I'd be willing to give folks an export, but I'd need to prune out the email addresses from my commenters.) If worse comes to worse, I'm going to mod my own copy to get just the comment data and follow it up with a loop to get the entry data.

Coffee talk about Avatar

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 20:17:00 -0500

I just got back from seeing Avatar, the latest film from James Cameron. I won't call this a review - just a smattering of thoughts - but I'd love to hear what others thought. Let's keep it spoiler free though. Overall, I thought it was a good film, a strong film, but not quite great. It tried real hard, but in the end, the story was lacking enough for me to keep it from being great. Technologically, the film is perfect. Seriously - this film has set the bar for special effects, and probably will be the film by which others are judged. The Na'vi looked realistic enough for to be 100% believable. You didn't have any of the "Dead on the Inside" type feeling you get from other movies with computer generated characters (I'm looking at you, Polar Express). The 3D was also well done. You had none of the "in your eye" type shots to remind you of the 3D, and in fact, except for a few scenes, I pretty much forgot that there was any 3D at all. There was one scene with insects though that - I swear - almost made me raise my hand to bat them away. This is how 3D should be done. So from a special effects angle, the movie gets an A+. Shoot, higher than that. I really think it was perfect in that regards. It's the story that... I don't know. It just didn't rock my world. It wasn't a bad story. Not at all. In fact, when I realized that the movie had lasted over two hours I was truly surprised. The movie never dragged or got boring. Some of the mysticism did get a bit corny at times, but I could live with that. No - what I didn't like was how... simple the story was. It seems like something we've seen many times before. Big bad corporation, evil military forces, face off against a technologically inferior but more spiritually aware native force. It just felt... easy. Too simple. I mean, there was one offhand remark by Jake (the main character) where he mentions that there is no more green on Earth, that it is dead. If the corporation were mining something that Earthlings desperately needed to survive as a race, well, at least we'd have some complexity, some deepness to the story. I did enjoy the story. Really. And I can see buying it (I bet it will be stellar in Blu-Ray), but I wish that some of the subtlety and innovation that was brought to the special effects had been put to work to the story as well. Ok, so that's my non-review. One last note. I love ship and vehicle design in Sci-Fi movies. The first shot of the film - the long range ship that beings Jake to Pandora, was incredible. It had a classic 60s feel to the design. Very unique. Oh, and one last last note. Did folks catch the anti-Bush/anti-Iraq war one-liner in there? Ugh. While I may agree with the politics, it had the subtlety of a brick to the side of that head.