By barneyb on May 16, 2009
Last night was sort of the release of Pic of the Day (not safe for work, or my mom) into the wild. The project is a couple months shy of five years old, and while I've talked about it obliquely all over the place, I've never really publicized it directly. I'd made the assumption that [...]
Posted in personal, potd
By barneyb on April 10, 2009
Ever done functional programming? Chances are you'll say "no", but you'll probably be wrong. Javascript is a functional language, and while a lot of people use it in a procedural and/or object oriented way (\me raises hand), it's foundation is functional. Same deal with ActionScript. Used Groovy? Ruby? Python? None are functional (let [...]
Posted in development, groovy
By barneyb on October 22, 2008
The current state of web applications is a fragmented mess. HTML is still the standard approach, but dynamic data loading with Ajax and application embedding with Flash are both incredibly popular, particularly for data-heavy applications.
HTML is great because it's easy to build and well understood by user agents, but you lack drawing capabilities. SVG addressed [...]
Posted in ajax, flex, javascript, tools
By barneyb on May 8, 2008
If you use ColdFusion (or another Java-based CFML runtime), you should be using Java. There's a reason that CF uses Java under the hood: Java is incredibly powerful. Yes the interface to Java from the CF level is cumbersome and creating hybrid CF/Java applications pretty much costs you CF's RAD capabilities, but there [...]
Posted in coldfusion, development, java
By barneyb on November 21, 2007
I've been looking for a good charting mechanism for a few personal apps. CFCHART works in some cases, but I usually opt for SVG, either rendered inline (i.e. SVG and XHTML interleaved in an XML doc) or rasterized into a PNG server-side via Batik. Both solutions have their merits, but both also have a lot [...]
Posted in coldfusion, flex, tools
By barneyb on September 5, 2007
I just discovered that CF8 ships with a more complete Batik than CF7 did. Out of the box it's capable of transcoding SVG graphics to PNGs, which CF7's implementation wasn't capable of doing. With CF7 you had to move the partial Batik that came bundled and replace it with a full version to [...]
Posted in coldfusion
By barneyb on May 4, 2006
Last October I posted about using ColdFusion and Batik together to convert dynamically generated SVG content into PNGs for easier consumption. Well thanks to a little more digging and a post by Christian Cantrell, I've improved upon it further.
<cfscript>
context = getPageContext();
context.setFlushOutput(false);
response = context.getResponse().getResponse();
response.setContentType("image/png");
transcoder = [...]
Posted in coldfusion
By barneyb on October 6, 2005
I've been using SVG for custom charting stuff for several years now,and it's really nice. Only problem is that it requires an SVG plugin, and it's not very common. No big deal for admin sites, but for more public usage, that's pretty much a concept killer.
Enter Batik.
Batik is a Java SVG implementation by [...]
Posted in coldfusion
