Tales From The Trenches - Programming

Back from CFinNC!

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 14:33:00 -0700

I made it back from CFinNC, late Sunday night, extremely jet lagged, but in one piece, and very happy I made the decision to go. First, I want to thank Dan Wilson, and the rest of the folks that helped put this conference together. Not being able to attend MAX this year, I was very happy there was another ColdFusion-related conference, so soon after MAX. The fact that it was over a weekend made it much easier to schedule. As you may have read on CFCDev, Dan and I exchanged several posts about information on the conference website, what was/wasn't up to date, etc. Eventually, Dan and I took the conversation off-list (and off-email, talking more in person at the conference), and what became very clear to me is how genuinely personal he takes his work in the CF community; putting together this conference was no exception, and I think the quality of the CFinNC conference is proof of that. Everything seemed to run very smoothly -- registration was quick and painless, parking was a snap, wifi was up and accessible throughout the venue, the staff were all very courteous and happy to help. Nothing about the conference seemed out of place, or an obvious indicator that this was a newer project -- I was quite happy with how well everything was organized. Session highlights for me included: Mike Brunt -- 10 Steps To A High Performing ColdFusion Application, Clustering ColdFusion Great talk on performance testing, and all kinds of related items. Mike came with a real world demo that required not one, not two, but THREE laptops to get everything running (so it looked like it does in the real world) -- talk about putting a serious amount of effort into your lecture! My only regret is meeting Mike just minutes before I had to leave for my flight home; I was unable to say much more than "nice presentation" before I had to go. He was wearing a Beatles / Sgt Pepper shirt; I suspect we would have gotten along quite well. :) Jason Dean -- Intro to Securing CFML Applications I met Jason at cf.Objective(), and caught his other talk on security. This one is the precursor to said cf.Objective() talk. Both are worth checking out; not too much overlap, you'll learn something new at each one. And you can play the drinking game "take 2 sips every time Jason says 'validation'". :) Brian Kotek -- Intro to the Swiz Framework Nice first look at Swiz, with some notes on how it compares/contrasts to Caringorm, what Swiz is/isn't, how it can help w/ event handling, auto-wiring and tons more. For anyone new to Swiz, this was a great introduction. Andy Matthews -- jQuery & AIR: Desktop Development for the Front End Designer While in NC, I was staying with my friend Rob who is typically known as a .NET developer. Half way through this presentation, I was tempted to call Rob and have him come watch -- I'm continually impressed by AIR/JavaScript fun that can be had in projects. Andy did a great job with this; very well put together presentation. Definitely worth checking out. Joe Rinehart -- CF Inspirational Session I was not sure what to expect from the "Inspirational ColdFusion" session. Joe gave a great talk about what he's been up to for the last year-ish, how he'd moved away from CF, and how he's coming back into the fold. His presentation was hilarious, and it was one of the more comical yet compelling presentations I've ever seen. Joe missed his calling as a sitcom writer. :) Rick Root -- Using Java in ColdFusion Applications Rick gave a great introduction to using Java classes in CF. This is a topic that I often see on lists/blogs, but it's always done as the answer to some other question, so the context of said blog posts often makes it hard for people to see that "first look" at how you can dip directly into Java from ColdFusion, and utilize both to improve your applications. That's where Rick's presentation came into play; don't go if you're already doing big crazy things like writing your own Hibernate wrapper for CF7, but if you want to see just how the CF data types are tied to Java data types under the hood (and how to utilize the power of both), then Rick's talk is worth checking out. Bob Silverberg -- CF9 ORM - Part 1 and 2 Admittedly, I've been kind of dismissing the Hibernate integration in CF9 up until now. Partially because none of my clients have upgraded yet (tho 1 is talking about doing so), and partially because between Transfer and/or some homegrown things, I haven't really had a need to learn much more about it. Bob's talk was so good that I have now officially started "drinking the Kool-Aid", and want to start using CF/Hibernate whenever possible. I may very well (ahem) "borrow" content from his preso and give a similar demo for Saccfug later in the year. I would like to have seen a code sample in action, but the code presented in the slides was clear and "real world enough", that maybe that's not necessary. It was also good seeing the familiar faces that I met at cf.Objective() -- Ben Nadel, Jason Dean, and others I'm forgetting -- as well as catching up with my friend Rob who moved to NC several years ago. North Carolina is a really pretty area -- trees everywhere, decent weather (and this is coming from a spoiled California punk *g*), and EVERYone I met was extremely nice and polite all weekend. Even the grits I had for dinner were pretty good! :) Nice job, CFinNC, I hope you do it again next year. -nolan

Rob's Accessible Forms Blog Entry

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 11:40:00 -0700

Rob Huddleston (SieeraMMUG manager, Adobe MAX speaker, and all-around good guy) posted a blog entry a while ago about how to build accessible forms. It's so good, that I keep going back to it whenever I need a refresher on how something should be laid out with CSS. This is mostly for my reference, but the entry is definitely worth reading, if you need a quick refresher in how to build table-less forms: http://www.robhuddleston.com/index.cfm/2008/1/18/Should-I-use-tables-to-lay-out-my-form For those that were in attendance at the last Saccfug meeting, this is the blog entry that Seth and I were discussing. -Nolan

If Programming Languages Were Religions

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 11:33:00 -0700

I just saw this posted on Slashdot and thought it was worth sharing... If Programming Languages Were Religions No mention of ColdFusion tho. Anyone want to take a stab at which religion matches ColdFusion? Happy holidays. :) -nolan

Adobe Max schedule, finally.

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:14:00 -0700

I finally had some time to come up for air and finalize my Adobe MAX schedule today!

Here's where you can find me:

Sunday --

User Group Manager Meet-Up

Monday --

Looking Ahead to the Next Version of Flex
Developing an Enterprise Application with Adobe Flex
Advanced Tips and Tricks for Flex Builder 3
Birds-of-a-Feather Meeting

Tuesday --

Developer Best Practices with Flex
Hack-Proofing Your ColdFusion Powered Sites
Architecting ColdFusion for Scalability and High Availability
Designing Effective CSS and HTML Websites in Fireworks CS4

Wednesday --

Advanced Patterns for ColdFusion Test Automation
Debugging and Profiling with Flex Builder
Event-Driven Programming in ColdFusion
ColdFusion Powered Flex

Hopefully I'll have time to blog my thoughts on the presentations at the end of each day, though some of that depends on how many work issues will need to be addressed while down in the Bay Area.

See you there!
-nolan

Reminder -- Intermediate CFCs talk, Wednesday

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 21:23:00 -0700

Just a brief reminder that I'll be giving my "Intermediate Uses of CFCs" talk at Bacfug on Wednesday night. If you've built a "hello world" CFC, but still don't quite feel like they're more useful than plain ol' UDF libraries, then this this presentation is for you! We'll go over Beans, DAOs, Gateways, Singletons, and maybe a couple other items if time permits. You don't need to know any frameworks, nor will you need a strong understanding of object-oriented programming. Far away folks can follow along via the Connect link. More details are available at the Bacfug website. Hope to see you there! -nolan

Upcoming Presentations

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 21:05:00 -0700

Things have been really busy here at SouthOfShasta.com-land for me, hence the lack of blog posts lately. One of the things I've been busy with is preparing for some upcoming presentations. I'll be speaking at the Sacramento CFUG and at the Bay Area CFUG in the coming weeks, giving my "Introduction to CFCs" and "Intermediate Uses of CFCs" talks respectively. Here's the details...

"Introduction to ColdFusion Components 2.0^*"
(This is the same talk I gave at Bacfug in April.)

Tuesday July 8th
at Sacramento ColdFusion Users Group
6:30pm
at the Clear Capital building
1410 Rocky Ridge Road - Suite 180
Roseville, CA

(^* The "2.0" is just to differentiate this from when I gave the same talk at Saccfug several months ago. They asked for me to repeat it for new members; this time we'll have the newer code samples that I shared with the Bacfug folks.)

"Intermediate Uses of ColdFusion Components"

Wednesday July 16th
at Bay Area ColdFusion Users Group
6:30pm
at the Adobe building
601 Townsend St
San Francisco, CA 94103

Any questions, just ask! :)

-nolan

Fair-weather User Group Attendees

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:25:00 -0700

I have a request/suggestion for the various User Group Managers out there: I'd like the software raffles to be "weighted" based on participation. My reasoning for this is below, and it may come across a bit like a rant because, well, it is. :) [More]

CF9 Wishlist Addition: CFDocument type="WordDoc|RTF"

Sun, 25 May 2008 18:21:00 -0700

Dear Adobe ColdFusion Development Team, I have an addition to my "CF9 Wishlist"... Like most of us, I have to update my resume now and then. Being a coder by nature, I prefer building it in HTML. However, those pesky IT Recruiters always "need" to have it in "Word format". Despite my sending over an .html file and telling the folks "this will open just fine in Word, just click the File menu and press Open, trust me", I still get a fair amount of folks writing back, asking for a .DOC file. So I'm forced to either a) maintain 2 separate versions of my resume (.html and .doc) or b) do the "save as .DOC" conversion myself, then deal with all the margins and other auto-magic that MS Office screws up when doing said conversion (note: now that I'm on OpenOffice, it's not quite as crazy, but still more re-work than I really care to deal with). So how about we add a 'format="WordDoc"' to the cfdocument tag? I can already auto-generate .pdf and FlashPaper, which is great. And PDFs are good enough for SOME of those IT Recruiter folks, but it would really save us a lot of re-work if we could auto-genereate a Word file as well. Or maybe (for the sake of slightly more cross-platform use) do a "format='RichTextFormat'"? I'll take either .DOC or .RTF files, which ever you guys can code up first. :) Thanks, Nolan

Speaking at SierraMMUG

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 11:15:00 -0700

Hi Sacramento / Roseville area folks... On May 7th, I'll be speaking at the Sierra Multimedia Users Group, giving a sort of "high level, non-techie" introduction to ColdFusion and Dreamweaver. It will be an introduction for Dreamweaver-centric people that don't have a background in server-side programming, and I'll also provide a "high level" view at what ColdFusion does, and some of the features that make ColdFusion a great productivity tool. If you have a manager that's still on the fence about CF being a worthwhile investment, this might be a good presentation for him/her to attend. Suggestions on a snazzy title for the preso are welcome. So far I'm thinking something like "ColdFusion from 10,000 Feet" or maybe "A High-Level Look at ColdFusion and Dreamweaver"...any other suggestions? Note, due to some logistical issues, this meeting will not be webcast -- it's an in-person only meeting, however I will post any slides and source code after the preso. See you there! -nolan

Last night at BACFUG

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 11:37:00 -0700

Thanks to everyone that came out to the BACFUG meeting last night. I hope the talk I gave on "Introduction to ColdFusion Components" was helpful to those in the audience. The slides and source code have been added here, and there is a recording of the presentation at UGTV. Just like the last time I gave an introductory talk, we had a bigger percentage of new faces in the meeting. Perhaps this is a sign that we need to have more presentations that go over introductions to various topics. As an example, one attendee at last night's meeting was not familiar with the "var" scope! That's not even a topic specific to CFCs ("var" is just as useful when building regular CFfunctions), but there are still folks that haven't had to dive into the "newer" scopes in ColdFusion, and could benefit from a presentation on these topics, and last night is proof that these folks are willing to attend meetings when the topic is of interest. I'll be back at BACFUG in July to give a talk on "Intermediate Uses of CFCs" -- it goes over some common uses of CFCs that don't require using a full fledged framework, nor do they require knowing more than just a very basic understanding of CFCs and object oriented thinking. We'll go over Beans, DAOs, Gateways, and maybe a few similar items. Thanks again, especially to Sean and Luke for having me as a presenter, and for their assistance in getting the laptop/network issues squared away. :) --nolan

Speaking at Bacfug -- Intro to CFCs

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 17:02:00 -0700

Hi Bay Area CF-ers -- I'll be speaking at the Bay Area ColdFusion Users Group on April 16th, giving my talk on "Introduction to CFCs". I'm probably going to update it with some content from my "Intermediate Uses of CFCs" slide deck but essentially, the idea is, if you've never used CFCs before, and don't have an object-oriented background, then this presentation will hopefully help you get to the "next step"! There's not much info on the Bacfug page yet -- that's my fault. I need to send Sean an outline, which is still on my "todo" list for later tonight. ...and no, this is not an April Fool's joke! :) -nolan

To Framework, or Not To Framework? It depends!

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 15:31:00 -0700

I just responded to a post over on Alagad.com about using "homegrown" frameworks vs. using "regular" frameworks, and my comment quickly became a catalyst for a blog post of my own on that same topic. Frameworks are a pretty common holy war these days. The phrases "always use frameworks!", and "which framework is best?" are both seen pretty regularly on blogs, message boards, or overheard at various user group meetings. As a contractor, I don't always get to determine the requirements, or time lines, or technology stack that I have to be responsible for. And as such, I sometimes need to make difficult decisions. [More]

ColdFusion 9 Wish List

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 11:05:00 -0700

Nothing really "new" here. I've been posting my "CF9 WishList" thoughts on various other blogs, and decided I'd prefer to start compiling my list here on my own blog. The list as it stands currently... [More]

Overloaded functions in C++

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 10:06:00 -0700

My teammate and I just spent a couple hours debugging an overloaded function: We had a method foo( int num ) that was called passed a (char*): foo( (char*)"test" ); ...yet the integer version of the method was still being called, and quite happily at that! Huh!? It turned out to be the same issue noted here:

Here's the mess you're in: if Base declares a member function f(double x), and Derived declares a member function f(char c) (same name but different parameter types and/or constness), then the Base f(double x) is "hidden" rather than "overloaded" or "overridden" (even if the Base f(double x) is virtual).

Alas, my compiler doesn't like the noted "using" syntax, so I have to go about solving things the "long way" (either re-defining all the methods in my derived class, or renaming the derived methods so overloading no longer happens). I can't believe I've never run into this "feature" of C++ before! And I can't believe this is how they chose to implement things! :) It seems to me that if the method has a unique signature that's not redefined in the derived class, the compiler should happily look in the base class for that implementation. If I have foo(char) in my base class, but happen to have a redefined foo(int) in the derived class...why should it care? Assuming the data is always cast to the correct type, I fail to see why C++ requires we go through all this extra work. If anyone can offer more insight, I'm very curious as to why C++ is wired this way. --n

Delving (back) into C++

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 14:41:00 -0700

One of my main projects did a pretty big 180 last week. After demoing some functionality for a potential customer, the customer informed us that they'd prefer a command line tool over a web app (for use within various scripts and batch files they're running). So for the next few months, I'll be switching gears and diving back into C++ work. It's been a while since I've worked on anything substantial in C++. This will definitely be a challenge for me over the next few months, getting (back) up to speed on the Boost library, and various other goodies. Fortunately I have a few ColdFusion projects still in the works to help balance things out, and keep me sane. :)