Erik has thrown together a protocol for hooking up gamers with each other at the MAX 05 conference. Go check it out, and if you see anyone with one of these badges while you're there, whip out your Nintendo DS or PSP and get some sweet gaming on!

I know, it has been forever since I last posted, but this can't go ignored:

I finally took the plunge and downloaded Eclipse, and installed the cfeclipse plugin.

From what I've seen so far, the code highlighting and code completion is comprehensive. What I will miss (unless I just don't know something about how Eclipse and the plugin work) is context sensitive help. I loved being able to just click on a tag, hit F1, and be shown Macromedia's reference on the tag.

Right after installing the plugin, I tried editing an existing CFML file. Eclipse simply displayed "ERROR" in the code view of the file. When creating a new file within a project, the code highlighting worked just fine. I then created a new project, pointed its root folder to the root of the web application I'm currently working on, and it pulled each file into the new project, all editable.

I'm not sure if I'll like having to set up projects just to be able to edit code, but it's not such a bad thing to do from a best practices approach in the first place.

Brian LeRoux makes an observation about ColdFusion CFCs that I think is important: CFCs in ColdFusion shouldn't be thought of as a way to make CFML 100% object oriented. As far as I know, Macromedia never intended CFCs to make CFML perfect OO. That's what the Java support is for. If you want to incorporate true OOP into your CFML apps, CFCs will make a poor substitute for Java classes.

But on the other hand, with CFCs, you can get really close to OOP, and because you're using CFCs in CFML, a langauge designed around the statelessness of the web, why bother pulling in a lot of the complexity of true OOP?

Brian uses the saying in his article "When all you have is a hammer everything starts to look like a nail." I don't think the saying works here. In fact, I don't think it supports any idea at all. Is Brian suggesting that ColdFusion is a hammer, or that CFCs are? Does he use the quote to suggest that because a lot of people like to use CFCs as if they're OOP that something bad is going to happen because of that? I don't get it.

I gotta say, I'm a bit dissappointed in an article Kay Smoljak recently wrote for Macromedia's DevCenter talking about using the Fusebox framework to develop ColdFusion applications. While the document is short and sweet, it misses a lot of the good reasons to use Fusebox, and also leaves out some important technical details, like Exit FuseActions (XFAs). If I were a beginner considering using Fusebox, I'm not sure I'd be amped by the article.

I think what I'd like to do is pick apart Kay's article. I know, it's not entirely fair to Kay. I know the pressure of writing an article for Macromedia, and I can't ask that she write the perfect article, but I think some points of clarification could actually help support someone learning Fusebox. I'll try to go in order, quoting Kay, adding my own thoughts and probably end with some overly long summary about why I use it and like using it. Keep in mind that everything Kay talks about, as well as myself, is Fusebox 3.0 related. Fusebox 4.0 is getting off to a slow start, but Fusebox 3.0 is by far used on a much wider basis.

Continue reading "Thoughts on Fusebox"

I found a bug in CFMX 6.1 this afternoon.

Apparently, when doing a Query of Query against a query created using the QueryNew() function, CFMX guesses what the datatype is for each column based on the data in the first row.

So if your Query of Queries sees an integer in the first column of the first row, and then sees a string in the first column of the second row, CFMX will throw an error that says it cannot convert the datatype to another datatype.

A quick work around is to add strings to the first row when using QueryNew(), then handling it later, but that really sucks.

Macromedia really needs to get on the ball with this one, because I use QueryNew() quite often, and I'm know I'm not alone.

Dreamweaver MX 2004 Demystified is an excellent resource for web developers who use DWMX 2004, but probably shouldn't be your first choice if you're looking to make full use of the tool with ColdFusion. The writing is fresh and easy to read, written in a conversational tone that makes reading and understanding topics easy. The book is chock full of useful screenshots with clear labels, showing exactly what the text is talking about. There are plenty of useful tables and illustrations, making the overall quality of the book stand out.

As a ColdFusion developer, however, the book seriously falls short. To be fair, the book isn't intended to be a Coldfusion reference, but there are some serious flaws in the chapter on integration with ColdFusion that could have been avoided if the author and technical editors actually knew ColdFusion. Rather than talk about how to write ColdFusion code, the chapter should have been written with a focus purely on integration with a ColdFusion server. Instead I felt like it tried to fill space by explaining things about ColdFusion that quite frankly were completely incorrect. I'm not as experienced with other web application models like PHP and ASP, but I also felt as if I was rereading documentation, rather than learning something new. I felt as if those chapters were book thickeners, and would have given the book 5 stars had those chapters been more useful.

I was pleased to find a chapter on integrating DWMX 2004 with version control systems - a topic that has been fresh on my mind lately as I consider using Dreamweaver MX 2004 100% of the time.

In short, the book is worth having for any serious web developer. I'm pretty confident that when I run into a problem with DWMX 2004, I'll be able to find an answer in Dreamweaver MX 2004 Demystified.

If you are at all interested in my experience at the Macromedia MAX 2003 Conference this year, you can read about it from the special page I will be updating at http://www.ekosm.com/projects/max2003/. I will also be photo blogging along with other's at Community Vision (created by Christian Cantrell). If you see me at MAX please say "Hi", but don't ask me to eat cinnamon.

CreateUUID actually adds time to the clock on Windows boxes? Zoiks!

Figured out a quick and elegant way of capturing the results of a CFEXECUTE call. Simply wrap the CFEXECUTE with CFSAVECONTENT, like so:


<cfsavecontent variable="myVar">
   <cfexecute ...>
</cfsavecontent>


Normally, you'd have to save the results to a text file using CFEXECUTE, and then use CFFILE to read the results. A lot of overhead there. Without saving the text file, CFEXECUTE dumps the output to the screen, but there's no way of using that data unless it's in a variable, which is what CFSAVECONTENT does for you.

A while back (July) I got an email from Macromedia advertising "Live ColdFusion Online Seminars". Given my extremely effecient email habits, I just got around to reading it a couple of days ago. The "seminars" are presented via Macromedia Breeze and look terrific on a broadband connection. The On Demand Seminar Library is not too deep yet, but it has great potenial. The seminars are located here