tools

jQuery's Autocomplete's Undocumented source Option

Yesterday I replaced an instance of my ComboBox widget with a jQuery Autocomplete.  A sad day it was.  However, I saved a JS file and a few K of download, so it was worth it.  Unfortunately, it's missing a fairly important bit of functionality: the ability to order the list of options.
If you're doing an [...]

Eclipse and JUnit

I started building a little Java app this evenings.  First time I've done Java SE work in a long time, and it's kind of nice.  Not sure why I picked Java instead of Groovy, but whatever.  Probably the same reason people go home for the holidays.
In any case, being the good developer I am, after [...]

Joe on ORM

Joe Rinehart made a very good post about the state of "ORM" in CFML.  Namely, that there isn't any.  There are several abstract persistence frameworks for CFCs, but no real ORM solutions.
Like Joe, I've been using Hibernate/Groovy to back a lot of CFML applications of late and it's wonderful.  Certainly not without some downsides, but [...]

Sleepy Groovy

I just finished whipping up a quick little expense tracking app for Heather and me, and I'm again amazed at how wonderful the development experience is with FB3Lite, ColdSpring, and CFGroovy (Groovy and Hibernate for CFML).  When I was finished with the core functionality, I couldn't figure out where the app was.  There were my [...]

The FlexChart Manifesto

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 [...]

FlexChart 2.0

I've released FlexChart 2.0 today.  Binary download is available here: flexchart_2-0-r4392.zip.  The demo app is still available, of course.  Backwards compatibility is not quite 100%, as I'll explain below, but the non-compatibilities only affect certain classes of charts, and they're the complex ones.  For simple stuff it should be drop-and-go.
There are no real outward changes [...]

Chrome and Google Spreadsheets

I use Google Spreadsheets for a few things (and other doc types for a few others), but I usually do hard-core editing in Excel.  Export from the web, edit in Excel (or more likely Calc), reimport into Docs.  Hardly elegant, but when I'm going to be cranking a workbook for two or three hours it's [...]

More FlexChart Stuff

I've made another minor enhancement to FlexChart, this time around grouped legends.  Previously, if you mixed grouped series and ungrouped series (e.g. a stacked column chart with a line series overlaid), the legend would be all kinds of wonky for the line series.  I've fixed that so it'll now render in a reasonable way.
As always, [...]

FlexChart Update

Been a long while since I've made any updates to FlexChart, and this is only a minor one, but it's potentially important.  Since it's designed to be used in JavaScript applications, data tips and click events are all processed by JavaScript (not ActionScript).  When I'd created the data tip callbacks, I'd neglected to considered the [...]

CF Groovy Preso

Last night I talked at the PDX RIA group about using Groovy to extend CFML applications and better leverage some of the benefits that Java has to offer (in addition to the benefits Groovy itself brings).  Unfortunately we had some technical difficulties, but the presentation was recorded on Connect, and can be accessed at http://experts.na3.acrobat.com/p71343823/.  [...]