KnitGal Notions

Going Through ColdFusion Koans

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 04:30:49 -0600

Recently, Ryan Anklam started up a project called ColdFusion Koans. Here is the description:

The ColdFusion Koans are intended to help newcomers and veterans alike learn or fine-tune their ColdFusion programming skills. This is a community driven project so everybody is welcome to contribute new tests!

This is a fabulous idea which can only benefit the CF community, especially since so many of us have had to learn the language while "on the job" and sometimes find that their time is spent mostly on billable work, which leaves little or no room for self-improvement. The Koans exercises are simple enough that you can just keep the folder on your development environment, and set a browser window, and work through the exercise when you need a break from trying to fix that perplexing bug.

I had fun going through it. It did take a while for me to get the hang of it. But I finally figured out that the goal is to first work through one koan section, entering what you think are the right variables. Then you go back to the browser window and reload to see which passed and which failed, then go at these again until you get these passed. Try not to peek at the error info before working through the exercises. Right now, I have 73% - some of my successes surprised me because I'm just terrible at math (I have some sort of a math disability that results in math concepts not really sticking in my mind). The others I've been trying to figure out where I went wrong; some CF concepts I've not really had much experience with.

So, the next step is to go through my CF references and hopefully find the answers, and then add to the git project and send Ryan a pull notice. I encourage you all to do the same! If we all pitch in, we can come up with something like Ruby Koans.

ColdFusion

How I Got Started in ColdFusion

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 05:32:45 -0600

First of all, I would like to thank Steve Bryant for coming up with this brilliant idea. I've spent quite a few minutes reading the posts. It's really interesting as to how diverse these experiences are.

I've always been interested in computers, but more from the "all those people are using computers and I better learn what it's all about" perspective. I remember when my father bought a TRS-80 computer for me and my sister to play with. I would spend time going through magazines and typing in the programs so I could play games. In high school, I had a friend who was in the science and tech program, and I would hang out with her in the computer lab while she played Zork.

So, when I went off to college, I declared computer science as my major as that was the first thing that came to my mind that sounded appealing. Unfortunately, that's when the reality that my math skills was seriously lacking kicked in, and I switched over to journalism (resulting in a better GPA). I got an on-campus job working in the Marketing Department at the Dining Services. There, I was introduced to the wonder of desktop publishing on Macintosh Plus (I still can't quite get over the fact that we had to do page layout in PageMaker on a 9" screen).

Years later, I was in between jobs, and finding that it was increasingly more and more difficult to get a job in desktop publishing, as it was now something that everyone could do right from their office and take the printing job over to the local printer. This was at the time when the Internet was becoming more popular and everyone were setting up their own website. So, I got an HTML book, created some samples, got some freelance jobs setting up websites, and eventually got hired by a small company (which subsequently got bought out by a bigger company which then got bought out by a still larger company) that specialized in collecting and analyzing health and education data for state and federal agencies, and institutions such as HHMI. I continued to do static web page development (all those nested tables and heavy use of FONT tags to get precisely the layout that was needed).

At the time, the company had an in-house scripting language (WebInterchange, WebIC for short) that was very much like ColdFusion; the only difference was that it used "##" as the opening and closing tags. There was a need for more programmers, so they offered workshops to anyone interested in learning this scripting language. I thought this would be a good opportunity, especially as I was getting bored with HTML programming. John Theis was one of the instructors, and I subsequently joined his team. He was one of the best bosses I've ever had and I learned so much about him. I still remember his maxim about how you should always start with a good, well-thought out database as the base; without that everything would eventually fall apart. (If you're still out there, John Theis, thank you!)

The programmer in charge of developing WebIC left without handing over the master key to the source code. Despite that, we continued to use the language, but eventually we switched over to ColdFusion. My team got assigned to a project that required ColdFusion; that would have been sometime in 2000 or so. I believe we started out with ColdFusion 5 and quickly moved to CF MX; that's the version I remember most vividly.

These days, I'm more of a project manager than a developer in the business venture that I'm working on, but I'm still a big fan of ColdFusion and I'm constantly amazed by what it can do, and I continue to believe it has a great future, especially with the wonderful community at its core.

ColdFusion

A Comment on the Recent Controversy

Thu, 25 Nov 2010 06:53:00 -0600

Normally, I don't really get involved in controversies, because I don't really like getting involved in something I know little about and I'm not skilled at debating or such. But here's something I'd like you all to think about. Which part of this picture do you think is the most important?

Questions to Ask a Front-End Designer?

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 05:38:00 -0600

I've been working a project, and we've reached a point where we need to bring in a front-end designer. While I know CSS well enough to tweak it, I know when I'm out of my elements and better off handing some of the tasks over to someone who lives and breathes CSS and dabbles a bit in HTML5. I have a few ideas of the questions I'm going to ask, but what about you? What should I watch out for?

The Panic Status Board - What a Cool Idea!

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 12:52:00 -0600

While checking my RSS feeds, I came across a really interesting post at the Panic blog In it they described how they came up with a status board to keep track of their projects, the number of bugs filed and resolved, and other details. I've selected a quote from the blog listing what is on display in the status board displayed here:

The idea quickly grew beyond "Project Status", and has become a hub of all sorts of internal Panic information. What you're actually looking at is an internal-only webpage that updates frequently using AJAX which shows:

E-Mail Queue - number of messages / number of days.

Project Status - sorry for the heavy censorship - you know how it is!

Important Countdowns

Revenue - comparing yesterday to the day before, not so insightful (yet).

Live Tri-Met Bus Arrivals - when it's time to go home!

The Panic Calendar

Employee Twitter Messages

Any @Panic Twitter Messages - i.e., be nice! They go on our screen!

[From Panic Blog - The Panic Status Board]

Now, this is really clever and struck a chord, as you can see from the comments thread. If you want the code for rolling your own, well, the Panic folks haven't released it, but they give you hints, such as using CSS3, and what to get as the display screen. Not to be deterred, someone has already set up a project titled Statusarchy in an effort to roll their own version. I'm sure a ColdFusion version could be rolled as well. I'm not going to do this because I don't have an office with a budget large enough to buy this really cool display, and a team working on several projects. But I'm sure some of you will be inspired to roll your own!

Technology

Editing Perspectives in Eclipse

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 08:36:00 -0600

If you're trying out CFBuilder, and at the same time still using CFEclipse, you may have been faced with this annoying situation where everytime you open Eclipse, you'll get something like this: <<<<ColdFusionBuilder>>>>. And it keeps adding on more perspectives every time you open either CFBuilder or CFEclipse.

Don't worry . . . there is a fix, according to JeffC in the #coldfusion channel. Simply go into Preferences, General, and open the Perspectives preference. Now you can get rid of all those unwanted preferences. Thanks, JeffC!

CFBuilder

How to Access An Access Database Without Windows

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 14:05:00 -0600

There are many good tutorials out there that include a sample database for you to play with. Recently, Charles Arehart pointed out a good DevNet article about CF/lML processing by Nate Weiss. So, I went to download the pdf, and then proceeded to download the sample files. I noticed that there was an Access database included. Well. That could be an issue, being as I do not have Windows installed on this MBP, nor do I have the funds to buy it (much less obtain Access separately, if need be).

I wasn't entirely new to this situation; I had run into this in the past and was able to use an ODBC driver with the Apple Database Driver plugin in an early version of OS X. I can't recall the name of the company that created this particular driver, though. So it was off to Google for an answer to this question. Turns out, there is an answer and it's really simple.

First, you need to download RazorSQL, which is a commercial database program that can be used with RDBMs such as Access, MySQL, Oracle, and more; Windows, OS X, Linux and Solaris versions are available. There are specific directions for opening, reading and editing Access databases here. I went and downloaded the HXTT MS Access JDBC Driver. I then put the access folder into /Applications, and opened Connection Wizard, and set it up like so in this screenshot:

And voila . . . I was able to access the database just fine, thus enabling me to extract the database structure and data in order to set up a MySQL version (or if you will, Derby).

I haven't tried StelsMDB MS Access JDBC Driver, but I'm sure this would work just as well. Hope this has been of help to you!

Comma-Delimited List of CF Tags

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 09:07:00 -0600

I've been trying out snippet programs in which to save my code bits for quick reference. I came across one - jCodeCollector. It looks like a great program to use. There's a Syntax Manager which is already set up for languages such as PHP and Ruby. However, there is no manager set up for ColdFusion.

But it's not too hard to create one. So, I did that. Next step - find a list of CF tags. That was a bit of a problem such lists mostly exist on Adobe's LiveDocs in table format. All I need is a comma-delimited list. Fortunately, I have an old printout of such a list in text format. I did a google search, since I had neglected to write the URL of the original site down. The original site is no longer up. But, with further sleuthing, I was able to find basically the same list but separated only one white space. Still, it's just what I needed and it was simple enough to do a grep search for " cf" and replace with ", cf". Notice that this list does not include new CF9 tags; you'll have to add it yourself.

For future reference, here's the list:

cfNTAuthenticate, cfSearch, cfabort, cfajaximport, cfajaxproxy, cfant, cfapplet, cfapplication, cfassociate, cfcalendar, cfchart, cfchartdata, cfchartseries, cfcol, cfcollection, cfcompile, cfcontent, cfcookie, cfdatasource, cfdatasourceallowedsql, cfdatasourceconnection, cfdatasourcepooling, cfdbinfo, cfdirectory, cfdiv, cfdocument, cfdocumentitem, cfdocumentsection, cferror, cfexchangeConnection, cfexchangeContact, cfexchangeMail, cfexchangecalendar, cfexchangerilter, cfexchangetask, cfexecute, cfexit, cffeed, cffile, cfflush, cfform, cfformgroup, cfformitem, cfftp, cfgraph, cfgraphdata, cfgrid, cfgridcolumn, cfgridrow, cfgridupdate, cfheader, cfhtmlhead, cfhttp, cfhttpparam, cfimage, cfinclude, cfindex, cfinput, cfinsert, cfinvoke, cfinvokeargument, cflayout, cflayoutarea, cfldap, cflocation, cflock, cflog, cflogin, cfloginUser, cflogout, cfloop, cfmail, cfmailparam, cfmailpart, cfmenu, cfmenuitem, cfmodule, cfobject, cfobjectcache, cfoldreport, cfoutput, cfparam, cfpdf, cfpdfform, cfpdfformparam, cfpdfparam, cfpdfsubform, cfpod, cfpop, cfpresentation, cfpresentationSlide, cfpresenter, cfprint, cfprocessingdirective, cfprocparam, cfprocresult, cfquery, cfqueryparam, cfregistry, cfreport, cfreportparam, cfschedule, cfselect, cfservlet, cfservletparam, cfsetting, cfsilent, cfslider, cfsprydataset, cfstoredproc, cftable, cftextarea, cftextinput, cfthread, cfthrow, cftimer, cftooltip, cftransaction, cftree, cftreeitem, cfupdate, cfwddx, cfwindow, cfx, cfxml, cfzip, cfzipParam,

Code Generators and Dates

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 11:36:00 -0600

I've been working on an application (more about that later) and I've been using Illudium Code Generator to make CFCs for me.

I kept having issues with the Service layer and getting the error message "Bean creation exception in jobsearch.components.correspondenceService". I tried tracking it down, tweaking some configurations to match the other templates that were working. Someone in #coldfusion gave me a good debugging tip - createObject the problem components and do a dump. Once I did so, it was immediately apparent just what the problem is.

I use MySQL, and in two of the tables, I'm using a date field. Here is how Illudium Code Generator sees these fields:



For some reason, MySQL date fields do not get interpreted properly such that nothing is filled in for the type field. So, you must manually edit these fields, and also the CF_SQLTYPE fields.



Eclipse's Quirkiness
Mon, 11 Aug 2008 10:00:00 -0600
Somehow, I accidentally deleted the Eclipse folder I use most often when I was cleaning out my Eclipse installations. I tried restoring the folder from my Time Machine archive, but no, the wrong one.

Sigh . . . that meant that I would have to reinstall Eclipse. Herein lies my issue with the program - it's a real pita to install. And this time was no exception. Backtracking a bit, I had a bit of a struggle with getting Aptana to install. When I found out that Aptana 1.1.17 beta was available for use with Eclipse 3.4, I went to download it only to run into dependencies issues.

Yes, E3.4 now checks for dependencies on other plugins before it will let you install target plugins. To install Aptana, I had to follow instructions for plugging Aptana into an existing Eclipse configuration. 

See the instructions for selecting General > Capabilites and checking the Classic Update box? Yep - you guessed it . . . if you install Eclipse 3.4 right from the download site, you're not going to see that in Preferences. No - it turns out that you also have to install Eclipse SDK, a tidbit which I only found out by searching the other threads at Aptana forums after my question went unanswered by the Aptana staff in the bug tracking system and in the forum. (Shouldn't they add that interesting tidbit on the "plugging Aptana" page? - Ed.  Yes, they most definitely should!)

Okay . . . back on track now. After reinstalling Eclipse, then Aptana and CFEclipse, the next step was to install Subversive. Here again I ran into issues. SVN Kit 1.2.0 beta 4 was only available for install for use with OS X. So, I selected that and Subversive from the eclipse install site. Here I ran into yet another problem - the SVN Team Provider (Incubation), version 0.7.1.I20080612-1500 was incombatible with 1.2.0 and the install wouldn't proceed. 

So, I had to do some googling and came up with this very helpful blog post. I followed the instructions that Craig Thomas provided in #12 comments. Back on track now. What I don't understand is why the "download.eclipse.org/technology/subversive/0.7/update-site/" isn't automatically refreshed to point to the new version.

Eclipse is nice enough, but it has its quirkiness that makes life miserable for the unsuspecting.



Tinkering with CSS
Mon, 28 Jul 2008 16:15:00 -0600
Cascading style sheets are great, but these are also a royal pain to deal with. Especially when the learning curve is steep. Fortunately, there are folks who are well-versed in CSS who write articles for us neophytes. One good resource is A List Apart.

Currently I'm working on a set of dye calculators for those of us who like to dye yarn, but don't like to deal with math that it requires to determine the amounts needed. I'll also be putting up some Google Adsense on this page, to generate a bit of revenue for myself. (Why do this? -Ed. Hey . . . why not? Everybody's doing it, so might as well see if it works here.)

There's going to be two columns, the Dye Calculator in the first column and the hopeully non-intrusive Google Adsense in the second column. This article, ""Multi-Column Layouts Climb Out of the Box"" gives me just what I needed to get the layout started.


The CF Talent Is Out There - If You Take a Chance
Fri, 18 Jul 2008 08:50:00 -0600
TomdeMan, I empathize with you about finding qualified employees. It's a really tough job, especially where your business' bottom line is at stake.  

I am coming at this from the potential employee's perspective. Not all of us are fortunate enough to have employers who care enough to invest in continuing development. Yes, it may be on paper, but sometimes it's quite a struggle to get them to pay for needed training and not worth going through the hassle if there's no results. One may have to spend their own money getting needed education to remedy gaps in their knowledge - that's what I should have done, looking back. (Those of you starting out, don't rely entirely on the company to pay for tuition and training, but try to set aside a little money for that on your own.) I plan to remedy that once I get a job.

Also, some of us have a life outside work - we may be married with family, or single and trying to take care of our children. Compromises have to be made on a daily basis whether to go to the user group meeting or to go to that award ceremony at the grade school, or to spend time with one's spouse or significant other. Thank goodness for Connect presentations that are available on a 24/7 basis. Ironically, for me at least, this presents an additional barrier, since I'm deaf and the audio part is almost not accessible for me. It's very expensive to close-caption Connect presentations (quoted price is in the $300/hour range) and to date I haven't seen any CF-related presentations that are CC'ed. 

As for certification, well, for some people it may be needed. Especially here in the DC Metro area where there seem to be quite a few contracting positions. Do I have it? No. Will I get it? Yes. But it may be a while, especially in light of recent conversation about the certification process for ColdFusion 8. It may be useless in that anyone can memorize the material and not apply in the real world where there are 10 different ways to slice out AJAX solutions. But it's certainly not useless to Human Resources folk who put out the job ads and sign off on the new employee hire for a government contract that requires certified developers.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, sometimes one just has to take a chance, take a deep breath and hire that candidate who has, at best, 50% of what you need. That person may turn out to be the best employee you've ever had in the long run.



Rebuilding My Eclipse Environment
Fri, 04 Jul 2008 10:18:00 -0600
After discovering that tag insight wasn't working for me in CFEclipse 1.3.2beta, I decided to roll back to the latest stable version. 

It took several reinstalls of Eclipse Ganymede before I finally got back to how I like it set up. Eclipse is incredibly finicky in that aspect and that's the downside. If you look at plugins and features directories, you'll find tons and tons of files and subdirectories. And sometimes one little file somehow gets messed up and Eclipse has a conniption and refuses to display one of the perspectives properly. 

One handy feature that seems to be overlooked is the ability to import and export lists of update sites such as CFEclipse and Aptana. If you look at Software Updates>Manage Software, you'll see that the default lists are set only to Ganymede Sites and a bunch of links pointing to download.eclipse.org. If you anticipate that you might have to trash an eclipse directory (or really, to have a backup list just in case), you should go to Export . . ., tick off the external site links you want to preserve. This will be saved in .xml format; give it a meaningful name such as EclipseBackup.xml or something like that if you think the default Bookmarks.xml name is too generic. 

Then, should you need to reinstall Eclipse, you can simply go to Import . . ., navigate to your directory where you saved your .xml list, and select that. And bingo, your external sites are available, saving you minutes of looking for that website url and typing it in.

Next step - importing projects. Easily done. Not so easy to figure out - reconnecting SVN links. After some trial and error, and scouring Polarion's site, I finally figured it out. To save you the trouble, here's how to reconnect projects to SVN repositories:

Select a project, right-click and then select Team>Share Projects . . . Then, select SVN. In the next dialog window you should see the relevant repository location you're trying to reconnect the project to. Below, ""Use project settings"" is selected; you should be fine with this if you didn't delete .svn file from the directory. Then click on Finish; that should be all you need to do.


Obscure, Dead Languages
Fri, 27 Jun 2008 18:16:00 -0600
A long, long time ago, fresh from churning out static pages using the still brand-new HTML language, I was offered the opportunity to forage even further into programming by my former company. At the time we were using a proprietary scripting language that worked somewhat like ColdFusion, at a very basic level. In my spare time, I noodled around with it.
I hate doing math, but much of knitting relies on math (for instance, a sweater that is knit at 5 inches per inch as opposed to 6 inches per stitch, with a circumference totaling 250 stitches will result in two very different sizes, one of which, should you pick the wrong gauge, will swim on your designated recipient and will be quietly designated to the darkest corner of his closet). And so does dyeing. Say you have liquid totaling 100% with which to dye yarn. And you want to use two different colors such as magenta and turquoise to get that nice blue shade. And you want to make sure it doesn't come out too light - somehow I don't think Cousin Jim would appreciate a pastel-blue sweater.
So, I developed a web-based dye calculator using that dead, proprietary language. Here's what the code that did the calculations on the back-end looks like:
\r\n##VAR.oz.declare(##PARAM.oz##)##\r\n##VAR.gram.declare("""")##\r\n\r\n##VAR.volume.declare(##PARAM.volume##)##\r\n##VAR.percent.declare(##PARAM.percent##)##\r\n##VAR.gdp.declare("""")##\r\n\r\n##VAR.fiber.declare(##PARAM.fiber##)##\r\n##VAR.dos.declare(##PARAM.dos##)##\r\n##VAR.strength.declare(##PARAM.strength##)##\r\n##VAR.TempFibdos.declare("""")##\r\n##VAR.totsol.declare("""")##\r\n\r\n##VAR.TempColper1.declare("""")##\r\n##VAR.TempColper2.declare("""")##\r\n##VAR.colper1.declare(##PARAM.colper1##)##\r\n##VAR.colper2.declare(##PARAM.colper2##)##\r\n##VAR.stocksol.declare(##PARAM.stocksol##)##\r\n##VAR.colora.declare("""")##\r\n##VAR.colorb.declare("""")##\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n  \r\n    ##VAR.gram.assign(##FUNC.math(""*"", ##VAR.oz##, 28, 1)##)##\r\n  \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n  \r\n    ##VAR.volume.assign(##FUNC.math(""/"", ##VAR.volume##, 100, 2)##)##\r\n  \r\n  \r\n  \r\n    ##VAR.TempVar.declare(##VAR.volume##)##\r\n    ##VAR.gdp.assign(##FUNC.math(""*"", ##VAR.TempVar##, ##VAR.percent##, 1)##)##\r\n  \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n  \r\n  \r\n    ##VAR.TempFibdos.assign(##FUNC.math(""*"", ##VAR.fiber##, ##VAR.dos##, 2)##)##\r\n  \r\n  \r\n  \r\n    ##VAR.totsol.assign(##FUNC.math(""/"", ##VAR.TempFibdos##, ##VAR.strength##, 2)##)##\r\n  \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n  \r\n    ##VAR.TempColper1.assign(##FUNC.math(""/"", ##VAR.colper1##, 100, 1)##)##\r\n    ##VAR.TempColper2.assign(##FUNC.math(""/"", ##VAR.colper2##, 100, 1)##)##\r\n    ##VAR.colora.assign(##FUNC.math(""*"", ##VAR.TempColper1##, ##VAR.stocksol##, 1)##)##\r\n    ##VAR.colorb.assign(##FUNC.math(""*"", ##VAR.TempColper2##, ##VAR.stocksol##, 1)##)##\r\n  \r\n\r\nWell, as I said, this language is dead, consigned to the dustbin of Obscure Historical Facts.


Aliasing MySQL Startup
Fri, 20 Jun 2008 05:53:00 -0600
I've got MySQL installed, via binary download from MySQL.com, on my Leopard setup. Much of the time I access my databases through Terminal. It's really easy to set up an alias in your bash .profile so that all you need to do is type one word to start up MySQL, then type your password. Here's how I've set up my alias:
alias startmysql=""mysql -u name_of_user -p""Note that ""name_of_user"" should be replaced with the name of the account that you use to access MySQL. You shouldn't be using root, in any case, even on your personal laptop.