We released a performance brief on ColdFusion 9.
There’s a lot to love here, check it out: http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/pdfs/cf9_performancebrief_ue.pdf
I’m doing an eSeminar on Flash Builder and ColdFusion 9 on Wednesday February 24th at 11:00AM -12:00PM PST (2:00PM – 3:00PM EST.)
I’m going to show off the features that the ColdFusion team have added to make ColdFusion work easier with Flex as well as the features in Flash Builder that make working with ColdFusion ridiculously easy.
You have to register in advance so head on over to the Online Events page and register.
Evidently we rolled out the first cumulative hotfix for ColdFusion 9 on Friday. Feel free to download it here:
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/825/cpsid_82536.html
Note there are already a few things to look out for.
One of the cooler features of ColdFusion Builder’s extension tooling is the ability to create extensions that are driven with HTML/JS/CSS instead of with the default XML options. I think this has a few advantages:
This is pretty easy to enable. Normally you would have code like this in your handler to communicate back to the IDE:
<cfheader name="Content-Type" value="text/xml">
<response status="success" showresponse="true">
<ide >
<dialog width="600" height="400" />
<body>
<![CDATA[
Some Response
]]>
</body>
</ide>
</response>
Instead you pass a URL parameter to the ide tag in your extension handler:
<cfheader name="Content-Type" value="text/xml">
<cfoutput>
<response showresponse="true">
<ide url="http://localhost/extension/handler.cfm?configPath=#configPath#" >
<dialog width="655" height="600" />
</ide>
</response>
</cfoutput>
As you can see it can even handle URL variables.
Now, where I ran into trouble with this was with the URL itself. Basically you can’t be sure of the URL when dealing with extensions. It could be localhost, but it just as easily could be on a remote server. So I was all clever and wrote some code to handle this:
<cfset baseURL = "http://" & cgi.server_name />
<cfset messagesPath = getDirectoryFromPath(cgi.script_name) & "/messages.cfm" />
<cfset messagesOptions = "?type=notanapplication" />
<cfset messagesURL = baseURL & messagesPath & messagesOptions >
You see, this will give me the correct URL to use to pass information to a template named “messages.cfm” that sits in the same folder as my handler. I use CGI variables to grab the server information. Then I use getDirectoryFromPath to make sure that I get the real relative path of the folder that the extension is sitting in (as opposed to assuming that it lives in the webroot). This works great.
Except I got reports of one of my extensions not working at all for some people. Look at that code again… There’s another big assumption there. The assumption is that the extension is being called over the default http port, which for many ColdFusion developers it isn’t. So the correct version of this code goes:
<cfset baseURL = "http://" & cgi.server_name & ":" & cgi.server_port />
<cfset messagesPath = getDirectoryFromPath(cgi.script_name) & "/messages.cfm" />
<cfset messagesOptions = "?type=notanapplication" />
<cfset messagesURL = baseURL & messagesPath & messagesOptions >
Doing this you can be sure that you hit the right URL regardless of:
Happy extension building.
I know I’ve been quiet of late. But I’ve been working.
You see a few weeks ago I had this checklist up on the site:
See those AdventureWorks database items? They nearly killed me and made me want to stop work on Apptacular. AdventureWorks is like a cruel Double Dare obstacle course for code generation:
I came through, and now I can give you this list:
So that’s where I am. A few of you asked if you could get your hands on Apptacular and I would be happy to distribute it to individuals. I’m not ready for general availability yet though.
And as a final note, I thought I would share this feature with you: Apptacular can model CRUD for image fields in your database.
Apptacular ColdFusion Builder Extension – Working with Images from Terry Ryan on Vimeo.
There’s a security issue with ColdFusion 9 related to Solr collections. If you are using Solr collections this is a must.
http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb10-04.html
You may have seen my previous posts about Apptacular. I’m getting pretty far along in it, and I wanted to figure out how many lines of code I had written, you know, for my only curiosity’s sake. There’s no easy way of doing this, but I figured that this was the perfect excuse to build another extension.
So basically I wrote an extension that will count every nonblank line in every file in a targeted folder. It then groups those line counts by folder, extension, and then just all files.
This extension isn’t going to change anyone’s life. But it’s a great example of the fact that ColdFusion Builder extensions remove barriers to entry for this sort of thing. If I had to drop to Java to extend this in Eclipse I would have never done it – too much work for too little reward. But with ColdFusion Builder extensions in ColdFusion there’s very little cost to indulging in this sort of experiment:
Feel free to use it, and improve on it: BuilderStats at RIAForge.
My old colleagues at the Wharton School of Business in Philadelphia are hiring for a ColdFusion and Flex developer position.
I have probably said this before but Wharton is an incredible place to work. It promises better than decent pay, interesting work, brilliant co-workers, and incredible benefits.
A few people have asked: When will Apptacular be released?
Short answer: I don’t know.
Long answer: I have a plan. Read on.
Before I release Apptacular, I want to make sure that it’s solid. Right now it works with the database I have but I know it will fall down when it hits a “real” database. The fix for that problem is to run it against demo databases that come with various RDBMSs. I’m targeting sakila for MySQL and AdventureWorks for MSSQL.
Also the source is somewhat hard to follow. There is no documentation. Most people won’t give a project a second look unless the documentation can at least get them started. Most potential contributors won’t even try to jump in unless the source is manageable.
So to those ends I have sort of a checklist to go through before I release the extension and code:
So I’ll keep you all up to date on where it is. If you want to test it ahead of time, and are willing to deal with bugs, then drop me a line in the comments.
I just cannot get enough of making videos for Apptacular it seems. This latest one is about unit tests, specifically MXUnit tests. I need to test if Apptacular is creating applications properly. I wrote up some traditional unit tests for my code, but I really need to test the code that Apptacular makes. So I got it to generate unit tests that help me determine if the applications that Apptacular creates actually work. However, in the process I have to wire up a few things that make it really easy for you to get started writing unit tests in your applications. So it’s a win-win.
The generator does some smart things like wiring up ORM tests that test across many-to-one relationships. (I haven’t figured out how to do one-to-many or many-to-many yet.) Anyway, check out the video.
Apptacular ColdFusion Builder Extension – Unit Test from Terry Ryan on Vimeo.
tpryan.blog 