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Hello JQuery, nice meeting you! :) Read about my first steps into the fancy world of JQuery within the Coldfusion on Wheels #Framework.

ComboFusion's posterous — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 22:30:14 GMT

It's been a long day and I can barely keep my eyes open, but I am happy of the day's outcome - I've finally started to get along with JQuery and I am sure that soon my apps will get very fancy with those cool effects!

Take a look at some fancy JQuery demonstrations:
http://www.noupe.com/jquery/50-amazing-jquery-examples-part1.html
http://docs.jquery.com/Tutorials:Live_Examples_of_jQuery

Recently I started working on web forms and form fields validation within the CF on Wheels framework and since I practically learned all the basics I needed to know about Wheels and the form validation in order to start making decent web forms, I decided it is time to finally make those forms more apealing and user friendly. I decided it is finally time to learn some AJAX.

In the proccess of discovering the basics I bumped into the great JQuery library and to the Wheels, Ajax and you tutorial. I folowed the tutorial step by step exactly as it's written, but somehow I just couldn't get the result I wanted. So I've been bugging Raul Riera begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting with my emails and at one point even himself couldn't spot the reason that the application was not working as it should. Well, today we finally found out that the only problem that was keeping us from getting the wanted result was actually the Coldfusion debug report! As Raul suggested, I disabled the debug reporting, and VOILA, the Remote form helper functions were working!

So, my first Ajax app was done and I promise to make a report about how all went wrong and how we managed to fix the problem, but for now let me just show you this screencast, where you can see how I finally broke the ice with JQuery and made some some really basic stuff.

Please, have in mind that everything I am showing you in this screencast can definitelly be done much better and by following better the Wheels framework conventions, but the example you will see might be of use to JQuery beginners such as myself. I would also like to add that everything was done in CFWheels, but I am not showing you Raul's remote form helper functions from the tutorial mentioned above. It is only me, testing JQuery basics.

I wish to all fellows JQuery beginners good luck and hopefully my contribution can help you somehow.

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I'm going to JavaOne .. woot!!

jmpj.net — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 19:30:28 GMT

As the title says, I am going to JavaOne this year. The conference runs from the 19th to the 24th of September in San Francisco and contains an amazing line up of sessions and speakers. It's going to be awesome ... I'll post details on my agenda shortly.

http://www.oracle.com/us/javaonedevelop/062264.html

Unfortunately, Google has just announce that they're pulling out because Oracle is suing them for their use of Java in the Android platform. There are/were allot of Google sessions based around Open JDK, so I'm can't help wondering if Oracle has issues with that as well. More here:

http://java.sys-con.com/node/1521057

Fun with Decentralised Version Control

Compound Theory — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 18:45:14 GMT

One thing Windows does better than Ubuntu on my Alienware M17x is allow me to use the low power mode on the laptop, which is perfect when flying.Once I had set up a simple development environment on my Windows partition, I needed a way to be able to work on my Coldfusion code, but not lose any of my source control history. This is where the power of Git became so very useful.Sinceeach Git local re...

Misleading PHP Error

Ian Winter — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 16:30:28 GMT

Having done some upgrades to my server (PHP, apache) I noticed I was getting some odd errors in the apache log and one of my PHP based sites wasn’t loading. The error in the log was: [Sun Sep 05 20:23:40 2010] [error] [client X.X.X.X] Request exceeded the limit of 10 internal redirects due to probable [...]

Railo: Dynamic host configuration

Russ "Snake" Michaels — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 15:00:54 GMT

Probably the biggest advantage with ColdFusion is the simple installer and the way it hides all the complexities of JRUN and Java from you and most of the time just works right out of the big. One of the simplicities of which is requiring you to only create a web site on the web server and it just works. With Railo it is more complex as you also need to add a host entry to the servlet container (railo, Tomcat, Jboss etc).

Thankfully with Railo this extra step can be avoided as well with a simple regular expression that effectively generates the host entry on the fly. This does however only work on Resin, so if you are using another servlet container I think you are out of luck, but I'm not expert so don't take my word for it, check the docs or ask on the relevant forums if you can use a regex in the host entry.

The following single host entry is what I am using on cfmldeveloper.com for the free hosting and simply requires that you stick to a standardised directory format for the home directory of all your sites.

This example presume all the sites are located at

d:\wwwoot\[domain name]\wwwroot

You can of course modify it for your own requirements.

The regex also strips the www from the domain name before evaluating it so that this is not used in the path name. Without this it would evaluate www.mydomain.com and mydomain.com as different paths.

        1: <host regexp="(?:www\.)?(.+)">

       2:  

       3:         <host-name>${host.regexp[1]}</host-name>

       4:         <root-directory>D:/wwwroot/${host.regexp[1]}</root-directory>

       5:         <web-app id="/" root-directory="wwwroot">

       6:                   <!-- enable/disable directory browsing -->

       7:                   <servlet servlet-name="directory" servlet-class="com.caucho.servlets.DirectoryServlet"/>

       8:         </web-app>

       9:     </host>

forceBoolean

CFLib.org — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 11:15:08 GMT

Returns a boolean 1/0 from anything, including empty strings.

cfmljure and Leiningen

Sean Corfield — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 15:45:43 GMT

Leiningen is a build tool for Clojure that handles all of your project / library dependencies and makes it easy to work in a more test-driven development style. Once you've installed Leiningen, you can start a new project, on the command line, by typing lein new myproject and it will automatically create a project folder structure with a source tree (src/) and a test tree (test/). Leiningen will download and manage all of your library dependencies transparently, just by typing lein deps. Then you can develop you tests and your code and just type lein test to run all your tests to ensure your code is working. When you're ready, you can package up your project as a JAR file, with or without the Clojure runtime, with lein jar or lein uberjar. Leiningen does a lot more, but that's the basic outline.

Because Leiningen assumes a particular directory structure, I have updated cfmljure to work more easily with Leiningen projects and I have updated the examples that come with cfmljure to be a Leiningen project, complete with unit tests so you can see how things work. I've also updated the installation instructions in the cfmljure README on github to show you how to set things up via Leiningen.

Take cfmljure for a spin and let me know if the new installation process, with Leiningen, works for you!

Learn more about Leiningen on github.

How to set up local vs. production settings for Mura CMS

Making It Up As I Go Along — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 13:30:30 GMT

In an effort to become acquainted with Mura CMS, I have been spending some time looking at the overall way the application is structured - what is included into what, where settings are stored or specified, and what the options are for modifying the default way things are done, in order to retain some of the in-house workflow concepts I have developed over the years.

One of the main aspects of my production workflow involves the easy use of both a local and live server, running from the same database. Generally, when starting a new ColdFusion project, I like to:

- Set up a local directory for the project, where i can work in the browser via a local host url
(something like http://172.16.17.5:8500/SiteName/wwwroot/ or http://localhost:8500/sitename/wwwroot )

- Set up a database on my live production server at www.GoWestHosting.com

- Create a DSN on the live server, pointing to the database

- Create a DSN on my local CF server, pointing to the same remote database

Now I can work locally and view my changes instantly without the need for FTP.

Or, as needed, I can push changes to the live site with a few clicks, and view the changes there as well (such as posting work for clients, or working with routines that require server-specific settings, launched from the site's "real" location)

My application.cfc contains both sets of DSN info, and uses a switch, based on the current cgi. server variables , to determine which DSN to run from, along with other server specific settings (such as google map key). So, wherever the site is viewed, my application 'knows' which content paths and other settings to use for each page request or query.

(So... what about MuraCMS?)

One of the first things I noticed when installing Mura locally was the way that it cached the local directory structure. So if my Mura site was installed in a subdirectory of the local site, e.g. http://localhost:8500/sitename/wwwroot/test/ , Mura would store the setting "/sitename/wwwroot/test" automatically, and prepend this path to all required assets. Wonderful. Superb. But...

Then I pushed the Mura files to the live server, uploading the works via FTP. And found I had a problem. That path was still being prepended to all assets... but didn't exist.
On the live server i was simply working from http://sitename.com/test/ , so everything was instantly broken - images, javascript, css.

Unlike my own usual practices, where all primary templates or pages live in the site root, Mura is designed to use 'root relative' paths, rather than location relative, which makes sense if content will be served from different directory levels.

So instead of simply looking in ../css/ for a css file, it wants to use the path /sitename/wwwroot/test/css

(So... how did I fix this? Get to the point already... )

Half of any solution is identifying the problem. In this case, I needed to find out "how to use two different sets of configuration variables" , and set out to find the answer.

On setup, mura creates and populates a file called 'settings.ini.cfm', which is a simple text file with variables and values stored one per line. And inside, I could see the paths were being stored as text strings. Cool. Now I know where it lives... but how to change it on the fly, and keep two different versions?

I asked my question to the very friendly, patient guys on the Mura Show , but must not have asked correctly, or clearly enough. I came away thinking the solution was to set up a domain 'alias' and somehow map a direct IP to my subfolder locally , which doesn't work since you can't put paths in the Windows hosts file... and i got into a right frustrating mess.

Deciding to take another crack at it with fresh morning-coffee eyes, I got smart and did a bit of googling. And I found this, the settings.ini reference from the Mura site: http://docs.getmura.com/index.cfm/installation-set-up/settingsinicfm-reference/

and... AHA! a classic RTFM moment.

(finally... the fix !)

wouldn't you know it, the very first line of the settings.ini.cfm file is for the "mode", (which i completely overlooked before, and the Mura team must not have thought of in reference to my seemingly vague questions. )

The default mode is 'production' and beyond the first few lines, all settings in the file are under a heading of [production]. The light started coming on right about now... they really did think of everything!

So, all I had to do was create another grouping, and change that master 'mode' setting. I simply duplicated all the lines below [production], added a new heading of [localdev] , and changed the settings to match those of my local server. (I also changed 'production' paths to match the settings of my live production server with the simpler root directory structure)

Just a few more steps - upload the changed file to the live server, and click 'reload application' in the Mura admin. Then, change my local copy of the settings.ini.cfm file to 'mode=localdev' , and click 'reload application' in my local admin as well.

This caused the local settings to be loaded for the local site, and the production settings to be loaded for the production site ... and i am back in business, working in both locations with ease!

Bearing in mind that any uploaded images will need to be manually copied with FTP, and some other things might need a little hand-holding, I am very pleased to be back in business with the freedom to work the way I am used to, with live, functioning copies of the complete site on both my local server and the live location.

The only caveat at this stage - I'll have to be careful not to upload the settings.ini.cfm file, since I still don't have an 'automatic' switch for which group of settings to use. But as long as my production version of the file says "mode=production" and my local file says "mode=localdev" , I should be good to go.

Twitters OAuth changes break HTC Peeps login

Shaun/Mccran/Blog — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 07:30:39 GMT

I've got a HTC Desire Android handset and I use the Twitter Application that ships with it, Peep. Recently it stopped logging in for me, after a quick search around online it looks like Twitter have finally made their OAuth login authentication mandatory for third party applications.

This is a good thing in itself, but it does raise the question of when a platform changes from being just 'open' to being so wide spread that it is considered as a public API. I'm not in a position to comment on why Peep wasn't updated to work with OAuth before it was released, but it does make you question who is responsible for maintaining the service levels of public API's.

If Twitter have published and promoted their API, surely it is their best interests to maintain its functionality, and ensure some level of backwards compatibility? This is a tricky point to argue, as on one hand it is very good that they are maturing their platform with new features and security, but on the other hand they do risk alienating the community they rely on by introducing new features that require third party application changes. By this I mean changes that require an update, and are not backwards compatible, rather than just not updating and missing out on any new functionality.

This is especially prominent in this instance as it affects the Twitter Application that actually ships with HTC Android handsets, so it is guaranteed to be quite widespread.

Online Clojure Documentation

Sean Corfield — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 21:45:41 GMT

ClojureDocs - Not only will this be useful if you're learning Clojure but it is an awesome example of online documentation! Easy to navigate (drill into Clojure Core and scroll down - the ToC stays visible), everything is categorized, drilling into any function shows examples and you can click to expand the actual source code of the function!

Escaping Form Values - Understanding The ColdFusion htmlEditFormat() Life Cycle

Kinky Solutions — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:30:30 GMT

When users can interact with your website by submitting content, it opens your site up to potential harm. In the worst case scenario, this might provide malicious hackers with a way to execute Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks; in the best "bad" case scenario, it might simply mess up your site's layout and lead to a poor user experience. All of these outcomes can be avoided if you understand how data output gets rendered, where it needs to be escaped, and how to escape it. When it come ... Read More »

Jason Levine

codebass — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:30:13 GMT

As CodeBass readers know, the purpose of this project is to bring music lovers together from all over the Adobe community. However, it became fairly obvious to me early on that it would also serve to expose people to platforms with which they don’t typically interact. The CodeBass team itself represents a good mix. Sure, [...]

Adobe AIR and Microphone Support

Raymond Camden's ColdFusion Blog — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:16:23 GMT

So one of the cooler features of Adobe AIR is it's ability to work with the user's microphone. I whipped up a quick sample of this feature today that demonstrates this. In this first entry we are simply going to monitor the user's audio and in the ne... [More]

Thinking in Clojure?

Sean Corfield — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 15:45:43 GMT

There's a discussion on the Clojure mailing list about how to learn to "think in Clojure" (or think in Lisp or, really, think in functional programming terms). A prominent recommendation is The Joy Of Clojure by Michael Fogus and Chris Houser, which everyone says is a great book, but here are a couple of free online books that were also recommended:

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Abelson, Sussman, and Sussman. It's the "entry-level subject in computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology" and it uses a dialect of Lisp called Scheme, not Clojure, but it provides a good grounding in both computer science and functional programming.
How to Design Programs by Felleisen, Findler, Flatt and Krishnamurthi. This is another introduction to programming / computer science style book that also uses Scheme for its examples.

Enjoy!

Quick AIR Development Trick - Send to Second Monitor

Aarrgghh!! — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 15:45:01 GMT

I've been developing and debugging an AIR app for an upcoming demo, and running into the same problem, I start debugging the app in ADL, and immediately have to move it over to my second monitor so I can see code while looking at the app.

Or I could just set the X and Y coordinates in my application manifest file. Now it launches on the second monitor every time.

Just have to remember to switch back before production.

Help Wanted: Web Application Developer and Mobile Application Developer

Team Ravenglass — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 15:01:26 GMT

Ravenglass is seeking two application developers: one Web Application Developer and one Mobile Application Developer. Will consider contract, contract-to-hire, or full-time with salary plus full benefits. Flexible commuting arrangements considered Web Application Developer Degree in Computer Science or related field required. Must have demonstrable experience with HTML, XML, AJAX, and SQL. Web application development experience in ColdFusion, JSP, ASP.NET, or PHP is also required. Mobile application development experience is a plus. Mobile Application Developer Degree in Computer Science or related field required. Must have professional mobile application development experience with iOS or Android OS. Web application development (ColdFusion, PHP, ASP.NET) and HTML5 knowledge are a strong plus. Professionalism and strong communications skills are a must. Apply with resume and cover letter to jobs@ravenglass.com.

jQuery css()

code.christophervigliotti.com — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 15:00:32 GMT

I am the process of migrating a code base from Prototype + old-school JS to jQuery (the new mayor of Awesome Town), and ran across some code that was replacing some (but not all) styles of an element. This led me to jQuery’s css() method, one of the many handy CSS-related features in jQuery.. As [...]

Tweetdeckin' the Twitter

web-rat.com — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 12:45:53 GMT

I mentioned before that I'm on Twitter. I thought I'd mention what tools I use. I use Adobe AIR desktop application called tweetdeck from tweetdeck.com (screenshot). I have 4 columns that I keep track of. First column is the main twitter timeline with all the people in it that I'm following. The 2nd column is the essentially the same as the @mentions (or in this case, @webRat) link on the twitter website. So, anyone that talks directly to me or happens to mention my username, that tweet will show up there. The 3rd column is a simple search on the world "Railo." The 4th is pretty much everything CFML related (search: coldfusion OR cfml OR cfbuilder OR "coldfusion builder" OR cf9 OR cf8 -job -jobs) - I use this column for trying to assist people with regular cfml questions or trolling for haters ripping on cfml.

Until Tweetdeck gets their Android app up to speed, I just use the 'official' twitter app for Android.

cfmljure - using Clojure from CFML

Sean Corfield — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 12:00:54 GMT

If you follow me on Twitter, you'll have seen me posting about Clojure quite a bit recently. I really like the simplicity and elegance of Clojure. I like the function programming style. I like that it's a dynamic scripting language. I like that it can also be compiled to JVM bytecode and used in any mixed-language project on the JVM.

About a month ago I helped someone get some Clojure code compiled and integrated into CFML, like any other Java-based project, but that set me thinking about being able to just use raw Clojure scripts from CFML without needing to go thru the compilation and deployment process. I asked on the Clojure mailing list how to load and run scripts from Java and that gave me what I needed to create a simple CFC wrapper that lets you write Clojure scripts and dynamically load and execute them from inside CFML.

That's how cfmljure was born on github! It's very early days for the project - I consider this an 'experimental' version - but I've created a Google mailing list for cfmljure and it's also listed on RIAForge). I don't expect it to be crazy popular (like FW/1 for example) but I expect to use it on production projects and thought it would be good to put out there for others to experiment with and provide feedback on.

Things on the roadmap include making it more Leiningen friendly (Leiningen is the de facto standard build tool for Clojure and it definitely makes life simpler) as well as figuring out how to access Clojure variables from CFML. I may even try to figure out how to pass CFCs into Clojure and have them be callable (Clojure can call Java but I'll probably go the route of a Clojure proxy function initially).

Have fun with it! Join the Google Group if you have questions / problems / suggestions!

I Won A MAX Unaward

Ben Forta — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 11:15:02 GMT

And you can too! :-)