PROGRAMMINGWeb applications make great use of the model view controller (MVC) pattern to build complex usage patterns. The web lends itself really well to the model-view-controller framework because of it’s tiered architecture and views can be easily presented through HTML. Microsoft is pushing the model-view-controller framework in ASP.NET and Java programmers have used the abstraction to great effect. Most platforms and languages have a frameworks that implement the model-view-controller in addition to many other features. ColdFusion is no different.
By Taylor Gillespie
December 01, 2010
PROGRAMMINGEven the most optimistic ColdFusion guru has to admit that the glory days of the CF market are long gone. ColdFusion is no longer in high demand and is often off the radar when developers and analysts are constructing new systems. However, further integration and use by Adobe’s suite of platforms and applications are a critical and strong lifeline for the aging server side programming language. So my question: is pursuing a ColdFusion career worthwhile?
By Michael Marr
November 17, 2010
PROGRAMMINGAdobe MAX is always impressive. It offers unparalleled networking, fascinating exhibit hall booths and, for the last few years, excellent unconference sessions – all accessible on a $200 exhibits only pass. The general sessions are always well-rehearsed and theatrical, the sneak peeks interesting (with a cool special guest). This year was definitely enhanced by the swag: everyone got a Motorola Droid 2 and a Logitech Revue Google TV box – and a free eBook from O’Reilly! Several people got Blackberry Torch phones too. Sponsors and exhibitors went nuts this year with giveaways (VMware gave away a couple of iPod Touch devices and many booths had iPad raffles).
By Sean Corfield
November 05, 2010
PROGRAMMINGFuseTalk, a provider of discussion forums, and blogging tools, has announced it will release FuseTalk 4.0 software in January, that will run on the Adobe ColdFusion 9 platform.
By Mike Sachoff
November 03, 2010
PROGRAMMINGEven though ColdFusion does not always generate the latest hype and the CFUnited conference is no more, rest assured that ColdFusion is not dead. Adobe will not ignore its back-end server engine and let that key component lay fallow. While Adobe’s push for client-facing Rich Internet Applications will always be in the forefront, the communication channel that provides the data for the application is vitally important.
By Taylor Gillespie
October 20, 2010
PROGRAMMINGBlame Twitter! I was a technical reviewer for the ColdFusion 8 version of this book and, looking back, I failed to blog about it – I just tweeted it. My bad. Then the ColdFusion 9 version appeared and again, I just tweeted about it.
By Sean Corfield
August 24, 2010
PROGRAMMINGMichael Smith has blogged his thoughts about the state of the CF union survey results. As might be expected from Michael, it’s a bit of a “warm fuzzy” reading of the results and a couple of commenters there cautioned against reading too much into the results given the very small number of respondents (compared to the known size of the CF user base).
I’ve been watching the survey results with interest so I figured it was time to post my thoughts.
By Sean Corfield
February 23, 2010
PROGRAMMINGSince I spent quite a bit of time wrestling with this over the last week, I figured this blog post may help others. First off, a caveat: I’m running the latest version of ColdBox 3.0.0 from SVN which is “almost” Beta 4 and the details of error handling have changed a little over the last few Betas (for the better).
ColdBox provides a number of ways to handle different types of errors. I’ll cover the following options:
- onMissingAction
- onInvalidEvent
- ExceptionHandler
- onException
- MissingTemplateHandler
By Sean Corfield
February 09, 2010
PROGRAMMINGOne of the new features in Adobe’s ColdFusion 9 release that has excited a lot of developers is the broad range of enhancements to CFML’s “other” language: CFSCRIPT.
In the past, I’ve been very disparaging about CFSCRIPT and I’ve gone so far as to say in several public – and private – forums that I felt CFSCRIPT should be deprecated and no further effort spent on it. It was always a bit half-baked with weird restrictions and lots of important features missing. It was annoying to use, because you often had to switch back to CFML’s tags to get things done. With increased use of CFCs, the restrictions in CFSCRIPT made it even more painful to use because you could not specify function arguments easily in CFSCRIPT – no types, no defaults – and you couldn’t express a function’s access or return type.
By Sean Corfield
January 25, 2010
PROGRAMMINGThis cropped up on the TDD mailing list and it made me smile so I wanted to share it along with some commentary. A fairly common request from folks in the CF community is for “static” methods (and data members) to be added to CFML. Folks look at Java, think it’s a cool concept, and want it in CFML as well. I generally pop up and say it’s a bad idea and that Java only has static because it doesn’t have any concept of a global application scope (which CFML does, of course).
Anyway, someone posted a code fragment on the TDD mailing list, asking how to test one class in isolation that has methods that explicitly depend on static methods of another class. When you have dependencies, the typical approach in testing is to mock the dependencies so that you test the “unit” in isolation. Dependencies on static methods (and static data members) are pretty much impossible to mock without resorting to some sort of “cheating” (preprocessing the source or manipulating the compiled binary).
By Sean Corfield
January 12, 2010
