development

Licensing My Code

I occasionally get questions about licensing my code for inclusion in other projects.  I thought I'd make a blanket statement that all my code can be assumed under the Apache 2 license unless otherwise indicated.  For where it's not explicit, just drop me a line if you need formal licensing, and I'd be happy to [...]

CFUNITED Day One

As is typically the case, CFUNITED has a pair of themes.  There's the conference theme, which, as always, is helping CF coders become more empowered by learning about new things (OO, using CFCs, learning frameworks, etc.), and then there's the "backtheme".  This year it's all don't use only CF.  Adobe's integrating Hibernate into CF9, Railo [...]

Comparators in CF with Groovy

I don't know about anyone else, but wanting to create little ad hoc Java classes in my CF apps in a common occurrence for me.  With my CF Groovy project, it's both possible and very easy.  No Java, no compiling, no classloading hacks.
Here's a simple example.  I'm going to create an array of structs and [...]

Use ColdFusion? Use Java.

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 [...]

Prototype and jQuery

Since I discovered it a few years ago, I've been a big Prototype fan.  It's simple, and gets the job done with a minimum of fuss.  It's not without warts, of course.  I still occasionally forget to put 'new' in front of Ajax.Request, and some of the Ruby-like methods share their lineage's arcane naming.  When [...]

FlexChart Updates

The past month or so has seen quite a few improvements and bug fixes to FlexChart, though I haven't blogged about any of them.  Most notably, there was a weird NPE that manifested itself when loading a Pie chart via FlashVars.  For some unknown reason, Flex/Flash didn't give any indication the error was occurring, it just silently [...]

Data Mining With Weka

I've a large application that has a as a major component rank-based prioritization of assets. Users rank the assets on a one-to-five scale, and then that rank data is used to select other assets of interest for the user. If you've seen Amazon's "Recommended for you" or Netflix's recommended titles, you get the [...]

Build-Time Aggregation of JS/CSS Assets

Ben Nadel posted about compiling multiple linked files (JS/CSS) into a single file this morning, and he does it at runtime. I commented about doing it at build-time instead, and a couple people were wondering more, so here's a brief explaination.
The first part is a properties file (which can be read by both Ant [...]

S3 is Sweet (One App Down)

This weekend I ported my big filesystem-based app to S3, and it went like a dream. It's a image-management application, with all the actual images stored on disk. In addition to the standard import/edit/delete, the app provides automatic on-the-fly thumbnail generation, along with primitive editing capabilities (crop, resize, rotate, etc.). With images [...]

Dummy Queries in ColdFusion 8.0.1

Brian Rinaldi posted on his blog about dummy queries in CF 8.0.1, and it struck me as a weird solution. So here's a drop-in replacement, that I think works in a more reasonable fashion, and doesn't have any dependency on an existing DSN.
<cffunction name="dummyQuery2″ access="public" output="false" returntype="query">
<cfargument name="queryData" type="struct" required="true" />
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