So why am I blogging about it? Because POLITICO is powered by ColdFusion. We flatten our CF to HTML for content distribution and our dynamic sites are all CF. So congrats to my colleagues at POLITICO for delivering another great example of the power CF in a high volume enterprise!

Some of you are probably wondering why in the world I am blogging about Steve Jobs, since I typically blog about ColdFusion. It’s because what I do has been influenced greatly by Steve Jobs. I used to read the Apple Fanboy Credo and laugh at those ridiculous Apple Fanboys. Now I read it thinking to each point, “yep that makes sense” in a playful sort of way. I am a ColdFusion developer. And while mostly the ColdFusion instances I deal with would please the man from Redmond instead of the one from Cupertino, my development environment is an Apple MacBook Pro. Yes, I am still forced to use a Windows VM (which Windows 7 isn’t all that bad since they have been borrowing from Apple since the early days). But I digress as I watch some video podcasts tonight on my hotel TV that is connected to my iPad 2, all the while answering texts on my iOS 5 device (an iPhone 4).

Even companies that have were not directly started by Apple, were built or indirectly effected as a result of decisions Steve made. I can’t help but think that Netflix would not have just completely changed their business model had the iPod not launched 10 years ago this November. Hear me out, before the iPod only music geeks had digital music. After the iPod, all media types have now gone digital. This transition to digital was consumer friendly largely because of what Apple had accomplished in cooperation with (or arm twisting) the entertainment industry. Therefore, streaming bits can flow through the Internet made possible because of the foundation Steve Jobs laid. Mobile devices, like the iPhone and iPad, have been a large contributor in making digital media become a more important medium than print. For instance, we now have large “internet only” video networks, such as Revision3, TWIT, ESPN3, and more! Newspapers who were once huge in print are finding new life on the web and on mobile. The company which I work, POLITICO.com is a predominately online political news destination. Sure we have a print newspaper too, but it reaches the DC area where our website and mobile apps reach the world. These successes are largely because Steve Jobs made the web accessible to everyone on the go.

Indeed, there were mobile web sites before Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. But that is almost like saying there was global transportation before the airplane. Just as the airplane cut weeks of travel down to several hours, Steve Jobs turned a largely “mobile is text links” situation into a “rich media experience.” The Internet would be a government project still if it were not for the personal computer which Steve Jobs and co-founder Steve Wozniak brought to market. Perhaps a PC would have come to market, but would it be like it is now? Without Steve Jobs, there is no Pixar. Without Steve, you still may be buying your music at a store on CD. Who knows what life would have been like without Steve. And who knows what technology we could have had sooner, if Steve did not have to leave us so soon. Thankfully, his legacy will continue to live on at Apple. However now, we must say goodbye to possible the greatest CEO of our generation. Goodbye, Steve … your vision for the technology we have in our lives has inspired us all.

Steve Jobs
1955-2011

Photo By: Matthew Yohe

I have heard from reliable sources that the history of Day 2 keynotes was that pre-Adobe they used to be more serious like they were this year. Now since Adobe is big enough, they wanted to release developer related news on Day 2 as they used to. Indeed they had developer news, just none for the ColdFusion community. In fact, I tweeted what a failure it was to see a myriad of developer product icons on the screen but not one CF product icon. No acknowledgement of CF at a developer keynote, even in a graphic, is a missed opportunity to at least say … “CF Community … stay tuned.”

Indeed, there will be news of features coming in ColdFusion Zeus. As they become public, you will see Ray Camden blog about them. As I can write about them, I will also do so. But I write this post to reassure all of those in the CF community, there will be a larger emphasis of CF at MAX next year. Why do I think that? Because CF Zeus will be part of next year’s release cycle and thus MAX will naturally emphasize it then. So even if Adobe doesn’t say it I will … “stay tuned.”

UPDATE:
Go check out some of the features Ray Camden has already started blogging about: http://www.coldfusionjedi.com/index.cfm/2011/10/4/My-MAX-Preso–the-future-of-ColdFusion.

With other major company keynotes, you expect the CEO of the company to present info about upcoming product releases. Not so with Adobe. The main keynote was Adobe’s CTO (chief technology officer) Kevin Lynch which is completely appropriate for a software company. Now my discussion of the keynote may not be as verbose as others, because frankly I am not a design guy which is where the focus of these products lie. However, I did find some of this ridiculously cool so I did want to highlight.

The big announcement from Adobe on the first day was Adobe Creative Cloud.

Adobe Creative Cloud
The Creative Cloud is broken down into three areas: Creative Services, Creative Community, and Creative Applications. Each user gets 20GB of storage to use.

Creative Services
This represents a number of services, some existing like Business Catalyst and some new like Typekit which Adobe announced today they acquired. Typekit is an interesting company, as a web service they make tons of fonts available to use on one’s website as a web font. No need to make the font into an image like we had to in the past. Truly a cool service. They have a free option for super small sites, but most will have to pay based on their page views per month. A fun example of the font potential is: http://lostworldsfairs.com/atlantis/

Creative Community
Not much here, other than the cloud allows you to share with other people more easily.

Creative Applications
Other than the traditional desktop apps, now Adobe will focus a lot of attention on touch devices. Some of the cooler apps in include Photoshop Touch and Proto (a wireframe tool).
Photoshop Touch got lots of wows in the audience because of its the 3D layer effect. Very cool.

This new Creative Cloud includes all of the creative desktop apps you’ve come to know and love plus all of these touch apps. Beta coming in November to Android as well as pricing information.

I also fully expect more information about CF10 to be announced. Although there has already been some good tidbits about CF 10 released at previous conferences, MAX is Adobe’s official conference and as such we can expect a bigger “show and tell.”

I will be attending MAX this year and am looking forward to many great topics. For a list of the topics I am most looking forward to, scroll down to the bottom of this page. Also, you may want to plan to follow this blog during the conference because as long as bandwidth cooperates I plan on posting as much information as I can. This will include information in the keynotes, but also perhaps something will also catch my eye in the classes. In addition to MAX, I will be staying in the Los Angeles area for a few days afterward to take in some of the sights with my family. So needless to say, I am looking forward to MAX for a multitude of reasons!

Conference topics I am looking forward to:

To register you need your Adobe.com membership login and password. http://adobe.com/go/cfdeveloperweek 

Tuesday, September 13, 2011
1:00PM – 2:00PM US/Eastern
Improve Your ColdFusion Code Through Unit Testing

4:00PM – 5:00PM US/Eastern
Using ColdFusion Frameworks for Application Development

7:00PM – 8:00PM US/Eastern
Understanding and Using the ColdFusion Server Monitor

Wednesday, September 14, 2011
1:00PM – 2:00PM US/Eastern
ColdFusion Builder: The Professional IDE to Boost Your Productivity

4:00PM – 5:00PM US/Eastern
Expand Functionality with ColdFusion Builder Extensions

Thursday, September 15, 2011
1:00PM – 2:00PM US/Eastern
Developing Your First Application Using ColdFusion 9 and ORM

2:30PM – 3:30PM US/Eastern
Speed Up Your Apps with Caching in ColdFusion

4:00PM – 5:00PM US/Eastern
ColdFusion and Mobile – Browser-Based Applications Made Easy

7:00PM – 8:00PM US/Eastern
Become ColdFusion Empowered in Under an Hour

Friday, September 16, 2011
1:00PM – 2:00PM US/Eastern
Accessing ColdFusion Services From Flex Applications

2:30PM – 3:30PM US/Eastern
Securing your ColdFusion Applications

4:00PM – 5:00PM US/Eastern
Make Your Site Searchable with Solr

7:00PM – 8:00PM US/Eastern
Bringing ColdFusion to Java SpringMVC

So, being part of a news company (POLITICO, WJLA, TBD) all of our developers are on “emergency” standby, so that we can still deliver news in case of server issues. Needless to say, I won’t be whipping up Hurricane Irene related ColdFusion code examples for this event. Plus, I have stuff to secure outside!

I did remember an interesting post from another hurricane prone developer, in which he wrote a cool tracker for his hurricane tracking needs (or fun). Although this post is specific to his hurricane, it could be easily modified for the hurricane of your choice. Check out Ray Camden’s Hurricane Gustav tracker code from almost exactly 3 years ago (Thursday, August 28, 2008).

For those of you with me from the Carolinas up throughout the east coast, hunker down and be safe. If you are supposed to evacuate, do so! Had my stepmom not worked for the local hospital during Hurricane Andrew we would have promptly evacuated. There are no hurricane parties worth your life. Ok, that’s the end of my Public Service Announcement. I will likely tweet (@askBenore) our experience and when we are finally on the other side of the storm.

In my previous posts on the ValidateThis series, I introduced you to ValidateThis and its Rules (PART I) and then I showed you how you might overcome issues with multiple objects (PART II). Today’s post is an extension of those other posts. In the last post I left you wondering why I had a function in my combined object called user.cfc. Below, I am displaying function once again.

user.cfc – function isUniqueUsername.

  function isUniqueUsername(){
    var codeCheck = ormExecuteQuery("FROM users WHERE username='#username#'");
    var isResult = arraylen(codeCheck) == 0 ? 1 : 0;
    return isResult;
  }

ValidateThis allows for various rule types, but the “custom” rule is probably the most advanced – because you get to create your own rules. Now the predefined rule types are exhaustive, but there are times where you can’t complete your validations with just predefined rules. In my previous posts, I was dealing with a simple user form. This form contains elements like name, username, password, email, and more. But what if I want some data integrity on the username field? In other words, I don’t want two of the same username. After all … one askBenore user is enough. This is precisely where custom rules come in handy.

Here just a snippet of my username rule in JSON format.

  {"NAME":"username","DESC":"Username","RULES":
    [
      {
        "TYPE":"required"
      },
      {
        "TYPE":"regex",
        "FAILUREMESSAGE":"The Username can only contain alpha characters.",
        "PARAMS":
        [
          {"NAME":"regex","VALUE":"^[A-z]+$"}
        ]
      },
      {
        "TYPE":"custom",
        "CONDITION":"Add_Or_EditNotCurrentUsername",
        "FAILUREMESSAGE":"The Username already exists, please try another.",
        "PARAMS":
        [
          {"NAME":"methodName","VALUE":"isUniqueUsername"}
        ]
      }
    ]
  }

As you can see I have 3 rules defined for username. First, the username is required. That rule is simple enough as it checks to see whether or not data is entered in the username field. Second, I am using a regex rule to make sure the username is only alpha characters (you know … letters). I don’t want there to be a “askBenore2″. Third, is my custom rule. The custom rule needs to call a method within the object you pass. As you can see above you declare the object’s method in the param “methodName”. So if you are passing over a form scope to ValidateThis, that simply will not do. The ValidateThis documentation on custom rules is a bit sketchy on the second param type called “remoteURL”, so I am not going to discuss it.

The custom rule works pretty simply. The method must exist in the object you are passing over. My function, isUniqueUsername, becomes a method when the user.cfc is called as an object. Since the object also contains the username value, there is nothing I have to pass as username is already part of the object. Now I use a little ORM HQL to query the database for other usernames with the one provided in form.username. If the ORM HQL returns 0 records I view that as a true or 1+ records as a false. ValidateThis does the rest. Typically you will return a boleen statement.

Finally, I also have a CONDITION that is placed on the custom rule. Conditions can be placed on any of the rule types. If the condition is met, then the rule is used to check the form. If the condition is not met, the rule is skipped. In this case, my condition is called “Add_Or_EditNotCurrentUsername”. My naming convention is not important, but I like things to be easy to read for future developers. So in this case my condition reads like: it can either be an “add” form OR an “edit” form as long as the username you are preposing is not the current username. It would be silly to check for the existence of the current username, because it will indeed exist. So on an edit form, we only want to check the database for the existence of a username if the username is changing. The condition is written before your OBJECTPROPERTIES element and in JSON would look like this:

"CONDITIONS":
  [
    {
      "NAME":"Add_Or_EditNotCurrentUsername",
      "SERVERTEST":"(NOT isDefined('cmsUserId')) OR (isDefined('cmsUserId') AND oldUsername IS NOT username )"
    }
  ]

Custom rules and conditional based rules are just another easy, yet powerful part of the ValidateThis toolset. Special thanks to Bob Silverberg and his team for developing such a great framework.

What works:

• ColdFusion 9 and 9.0.1 single server instance fresh install on OS X Lion
• ColdFusion Administrator on single server instance (after reboot)
• ColdFusion 9 (not 9.0.1) multi server instances fresh install on OS X Lion (not recommended because 9.0.1 dies)

What doesn’t work:

• ColdFusion 9.0.1 multi server install on OS X Lion (known issue)
• Many ColdFusion 9 installs that ran before the Lion upgrade fail after the Lion upgrade (OS X document root issue)

As Rupesh Kumar has commented on an official Adobe blog, the ColdFusion engineering team is looking in to the issue (comment here). However, many other comments around this issue on various sites are vocalizing frustration with Adobe. They wanted Adobe to support the new release of OS X Lion the day it was released. First let me just say, the problem is not as bad as it first seemed. As many of the bloggers point out, they got CF9 working on OS X Lion. The commenters of those blogs seemed to be more frustrated with Adobe’s silence or lack of release day support rather than being frustrated with whether or not CF works on OS X Lion. Rest assured, you CAN get ColdFusion 9.0.1 running on OS X Lion.

After listening to and talking with some of the ColdFusion engineers at RIACON 2011, I understand why support for a new OS is difficult on release day. First, it is a matter of many priorities. Adobe has to order these priorities. We demand new versions of CF. We demand bug releases of current code issues. We demand support for paid installs. So, other considerations are important but perhaps they put them lower on the priority list. I know I would. As a developer on a team, sometimes higher priorities trump what I want.

Secondly, they have a lot to test when releasing the ColdFusion server software. When we develop code for the interent, we have to worry about 4 or so browsers. ColdFusion engineers have to worry about multiple operating systems: Microsoft Windows, Sun Solaris, Linux, IBM AIX, and Mac OS, multiple J2EE systems: WebSphere, WebLogic, Oracle App Server, JRun, JBoss, and Tomcat, and multiple web servers: IIS, Apache, and Sun.

So, again if you need CF on OS X Lion now … it is possible to get it running. And if you need multiple server instances, Adobe is looking at it so stick with Snow Leopard for a short while.

Here is a list of other blogs takping on the technical part of this issue:

• August 5 - Evelin Varghese posting on Adobe.com blog: Where is DocumentRoot of Apache in Mac Lion?
• July 31 – Rob Sherman’s CFDad blog: ColdFusion 9.01 & Lion OSX Problems & Solutions
• July 22 – Kevin Frickle’s Sargas blog: Coldfusion spinning after upgrading to Lion (osx 10.7) 
• July 20 – Rob Barthle’s Rob’s Ramblings blog: CF9 on OS X Lion anyone? (update: it works) 
• July 20 - Wil Genovese’s Trunkful <CF_GEMS> blog: ColdFusion 9 on OS X Lion
• July 20 – Adobe.com Forums: CF9 on OS X Lion?

]]> http://www.askBenore.com/2011/08/13/coldfusion-9-and-os-x-lion/feed/ 0 http://www.askBenore.com/2011/08/13/coldfusion-9-and-os-x-lion/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/askBenore/~3/i6VJQEwBCTU/ http://www.askBenore.com/2011/08/12/validatethis-and-multiple-objects/#comments Fri, 12 Aug 2011 22:49:32 +0000 Kevin http://www.askBenore.com/?p=50 This is PART TWO in my ValidateThis Series.

So I ran into an issue with ValidateThis that took a little elbow grease to solve. Now, this may not be the most elegant solution but it works. If you have a better solution feel free to put it in the comments. The problem? I have a form that is going to be handled by two separate ORM objects. For example, I have a user form that has all the demographic user information including username and password but it also has a “group” selector. The user information gets saved to the user ORM object, whereas that group selector saves the corresponding user id and group id to a group/user lookup table handled by another ORM object.

In ValidateThis, you send a single object (or even the form field itself) to the validate function and it evaluates that object based on rules you set up. For an example of the rules, see my previous post titled: Validation Made Easy: ValidateThis. The problem is I could not send only the user object to be validated, because I also wanted rules based on the group selector. So I needed an object that contained items from both the user object and the group user object. So I created a CFC in my validation directory for just this purpose. Below is sample code used to illustrate my issue, it however is not my exact code base.

Consider this user.cfc.

component accessors="true" {
  property name="name" type="string";
  property name="username" type="string";
  property name="passwordChange" type="string";
  property name="passwordChange2" type="string";
  property name="email" type="string";
  property name="active" type="numeric";
  property name="groups" type="string";

  function isUniqueUsername(){
    var codeCheck = ormExecuteQuery("FROM users WHERE username='#username#'");
    var isResult = arraylen(codeCheck) == 0 ? 1 : 0;
    return isResult;
  }
}

I created the user.cfc to allow me to set information from both objects into this new object. The “property” syntax allows me to use getters and setters when calling this object. Below, I call this new object my “formValidator” object.

  var formValidator = new validations.user() ;
  formValidator.setCmsGroupCode( form.groups );
  formValidator.setActive( form.active );
  formValidator.setUserName( form.username );
  formValidator.setName( form.name );
  formValidator.setEmail( form.email );
  formValidator.setPasswordChange( form.passwordChange );
  formValidator.setPasswordChange2( form.passwordChange2 );

Now that I have called the new formValidator object, I can pass this object to ValidateThis. This solves my multiple objects dilemma. I can now right rules for all of the forms fields and still have separate objects for ORM.

Some of you may wonder why I even bothered, since I could just send the form scope over to ValidateThis. In my new user.cfc, you will notice a function called isUniqueUsername. This function must exist in my object as a method. Why? For that you will have to wait until PART III in my ValidateThis series.

]]> http://www.askBenore.com/2011/08/12/validatethis-and-multiple-objects/feed/ 0 http://www.askBenore.com/2011/08/12/validatethis-and-multiple-objects/