After finding about the Open Calais service from Thompson Reuters I was pretty excited. I've created a custom tag that sends data to the service which in turn returns the resulting semantic data.

The tag is pretty easy to use. Just surround the text you want to parse with the <cf_calais>  tags and off you go. The default variable returned is cfcalais. You can override this by setting the "name" attribute.

Download the tag and code here: http://github.com/jonDowdle/cfCalais

I hope you find this tag useful and let's make Coldfusion an integral part of building Web 3.0!

Good news, it's an easy fix. You'll soon have a nice high-resolution icon for both your dock icons and Eclipse.app.

1. Save the Coldfusion PNG from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ColdFusion_icon.png) to your hard drive
2. Convert the PNG from step 1 to an ICNS and save back to your hard drive. (I used iConvert http://iconverticons.com/)
3. Open /Applications/eclipse (or wherever you installed Eclipse)
4. Right click on Eclipse, select Show Package Contents
5. Go to Contents > Resources
6. [Optional] Rename Eclipse.icns to Eclipse_old.icns
7. Copy Eclipse.icns from step 1 into the Resources folder
8. Launch Eclipse
9. Enjoy.

You should then see something like this:

The basic usage is pretty similar to another oh-so familiar tag:

<cf_yql>
Select * from flickr.photos.recent
</cf_yql>

<cfloop query="cfyql">
 <!---Format of the static urls to flickr images--->
 <cfoutput>
   <img src="http://farm#farm#.static.flickr.com/#server#/#id#_#secret#_s_d.jpg" />
 </cfoutput>
</cfloop>

Creates...

As you can see, the format is pretty similar to cfquery. The table name "flickr.photos.recent" is table supported by the YQL (for a full listing of available tables see the footnotes).

Here is another example using an RSS feed:

<cf_yql format="query">
select * from rss where url='http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/topstories'
limit 5
</cf_yql>

<cfloop query="cfyql">
 <li>
 <cfoutput><a href="#link#">#title# &mdash; #Source# &mdash; #pubdate#</a>
 <div>#description#</div>
 </cfoutput>
 </li>
</cfloop>
</ul>

Creates...

In the future, I'd like to take this further by using YQL's newly added 'execute' functionality.

The project is hosted on github. Feel free to fork me or download the code here.

Edit: Yes, I know this looks like Ray Camden's cf_yql example (http://www.coldfusionjedi.com/index.cfm/2009/9/10/Yahoo-Query-Language) posted earlier today (9/10/09). I had written this post originally on 8/28 and just never got around to publishing it. Ray just lit a fire under my arse by posting his, so thanks Ray!

Select pKey, dataCol
From myTable
Where length(dataCol) != char_length(dataCol)

To my surprise this query didn't work. After mulling it over in my mind, I tried a few debugging statements such as:

Select pKey,
  dataCol,
  length(dataCol),
  char_length(dataCol)
From myTable

That only reaffirmed that all return values of the char_length() were equal to the length() results.

Then it hit me, I (or rather the database) was using the latin1 character set. So I quickly cast the data into utf8 and it worked! Below is the resulting query.

Select pKey, dataCol
From myTable
Where length( cast(dataCol using utf8) ) !=
        char_length( cast(dataCol using utf8) )

You can subscribe to or view the feed bundle here: CF Feed Bundle

For a little Saturday fun, I set out to transform Coldfusion code using XSLT. It didn't take long before I ran into some issues.

The first problem I ran into was that most Coldfusion code doesn't have a root element (not to mention it isn't well formed XML in any sense).  You might be thinking "Well CFCs have a root node" and you'd be right. So I tried to transform a really simple CFC and I was somewhat successful.

The only caveat is that the use of a few almost all tags won't work. For example, <cfreturn foo /> isn't proper XML and Saxon complains. So at this point, this is pretty much a worthless exercise (see note above). Either way I ended up with something that did work (in the functional sense, not the useful sense). See the code below if you're interested in what the XSLT looks like.

XSLT Coldfusion

Very Simple CFC

Transformed Output

Around mid-November, I applied for a job after seeing a post on Sam Farmer's blog. Long story short, one phone interview, one trip to D.C. and four months later, I formally accepted a position with the Interfolio team. I've now officially started in my new position and thought a blog post was deserving.

As far as time lines, I will be working from home for the rest of May and we're moving during the first week of June. We're both excited for the great opportunities that this move presents to us.

Also, I'd like to say thank you to the team that I left at Mojo Interactive. If you're looking for a Coldfusion job in the Orlando area, send me your resume and I'll pass it to the right person at Mojo Interactive.

• Interfolio
  
• Mojo Interactive

4/9 (Thursday) 6:30pm  Battle of Web Frameworks at Slingapours (map)

4/10 (Friday) 5pm Photowalking starts at CoLab Orlando (map)

4/17 (Friday) 8-11am Likemind Orlando at Drunken Monkey Coffee Bar (map)

4/18 (Saturday)9am-6pm BarCamp Orlando at Wall St Plaza (map)

4/18 (Saturday) Music After BarCamp at Wall St Plaza (map)

4/20 (Monday) 6-9pm Florida Creatives at Crooked Bayou (map)

4/22 (Wednesday) 6pm Forrester's Orlando Tweetup at Big River Grille & Brewing (map)

4/24 (Friday) 12-1pm SCRUM Lunch and Learn at CoLab Orlando (map)

4/30 (Thursday) 6-11pm Orlando Tweetup II at TBD

I hope to see you at one/all of these events. Have a geeky April!

I can't take credit for most of this list but I couldn't find it online either. Originally, the list made its way to me in an email from Gregg Pollack to the BarCamp Orlando mailing list.