n42 Designs

FarCry LESS Plugin

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 11:26:00 -0400

Today I released a plugin for FarCry that will automatically compile your LESS files into CSS. No more need to compile on your development machine before you push to production, and no more need to punish your users by compiling on the client side with Less.js. While those solutions are perfectly acceptable, this plugin will let you simply code in LESS, then let FarCry do the work of serving compiled, minified CSS to your users. The plugin uses a similar syntax to FarCry's built in skin:loadCSS tag so it should be instantly familiar. Be sure to read the installation instructions to avoid a couple of potential "gotchas". Check it out on Github, and let me know if its useful for you, or if you would like to see any additional features.

FarCry Solr Pro

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 17:30:00 -0400

Jeff Coughin and I just launched a new FarCry plugin to enhance the search capabilities of your FarCry website. Check out his announcement or the plugin website for more information.

Github Gist renderer for BlogCFC

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 14:47:00 -0400

I created a quick renderer for Github Gists for use within BlogCFC entries. You can see it in action right here. If interested just grab the code from the gist below and save it to /org/camden/blog/render/gist.cfc. You can then use to include the gist in your entry. If you want to constrain the height you can use CSS like:


.gist .gist-file .gist-data {
max-height: 250px;
}

Here is an example of what the output looks like, using the Gist I created to hold the code for the renderer. Feel free to grab it for your own BlogCFC install.

FarCry Slider Formtool

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 21:37:00 -0400

I posted this on the farcry-dev mailing list but thought I would post it here as well to help future googlers in need.

I have created a slider formtool for a client and thought it could be useful to others in the community. You can find the source for it here: https://gist.github.com/1230366

To use, simply download the CFC, and place it in your projects /farcry/projects/projectname/packages/formtools directory. Once there, you specify the metadata in your custom types as you would use any other formtool.

The formtool is an extension of the numeric formtool found in core, so you can use any of the features found from that formtool in the slider (ftPrefix, ftSuffix, etc).

The slider formtool adds 4 new metadata options. ftMin, ftMax, ftStep, and ftOrientation. Min and Max are the lowest and highest values allowed for the field. ftStep is the increment factor the slider will use. If you specify one, each slide of the slider will move the value by 1, if you specify 0.5, it will increment it by 0.5 (1, 1.5, 2, etc). ftOrientation can be either "horizontal" or "vertical" and it will orient the slider either horizontally or vertically.

Your users can either type a value into the text box or use the slider to select a value.

This uses the jQuery UI Slider widget (http://jqueryui.com/demos/slider/) so you can use it with FarCry 6+ since core ships with jQuery UI built in.

If you find it useful, missing a feature, broken, etc please let me know. Consider it released under a "do whatever you want with it" license.

FarCry YouTube Plugin

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 17:22:00 -0400

One of our clients asked for better integration of their YouTube hosted videos on their FarCry website. They had been linking to the youtube.com URLs directly, leading traffic away from their website. Obviously, they would have preferred to keep those visitors on their site and engaged. As some other clients have also expressed a desire to display YouTube videos on their sites, I decided to build the functionality as a FarCry plugin. This would allow me to move this feature set to any FarCry site. At its foundation, the plugin works via two custom types and a scheduled task. The scheduled task runs and uses the YouTube API to grab the playlists and videos on the specified account (configurable via a FarCry config). If it finds those objects already in FarCry, it updates them with the latest data from YouTube, if its new, it adds it to the FarCry database. Any items found in FarCry that aren't returned by the API are deleted. The plugin gives you the ability to reorder the videos on a playlist via the FarCry webtop. All data is managed on the YouTube side. I may consider adding the ability to completely manage the videos and playlists on the webtop, but that will greatly increase the complexity of the plugin, and I don't see a great benefit to doing so. To me, it makes more sense to go straight to the source to upload new videos, manage your videos, etc rather than try to stuff all that functionality into a FarCry form. No need to reinvent the wheel, in my opinion. The plugin also includes two rules. One lists videos based on selected playlists or videos, the other displays an embedded video. To interact with the YouTube API, I made use of Raymond Camden's awesome YouTube CFC. I am happy to say that I have also posted this code on Github for the entire community to use. Give it a try! If you have any ideas for improvement please open a ticket, or better yet, fork the project and send me a pull request. You can find the project on RIAForge and Github.

How I Got Started in ColdFusion

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 09:06:00 -0400

Steve Bryant suggested that Aug 1, 2011 be "How I Got Started in ColdFusion" day. I think that is a great idea, and would like to share my story.I always had a love for gadgets and machines, which naturally led to a love for computers. I wrote my first program, Tic Tac Toe, in Basic on my family's IBM PC Jr when I was in 7th grade or so. When I went off to college, I decided early on that Computer Science would be my major. At this point, I had already been building websites for a few years while in high school. First, I would toy around with HTML on sites like Geocities and Angelfire, creating webpages for myself and family members. I used all the sweet tags like <blink /> and <marquee />, they were awesome! :) Around 1998 or so, a volunteer at my church gave me an opportunity to assist him with maintaining the church's website. It was mostly static HTML, with some bits of, GASP, PHP mixed in. This was my first taste of server side web development. That said, most of what I helped out with, was the weekly posting of newsletters and schedules to their respective pages. Rather than simply manually convert the text from the newsletters and schedules into HTML each week, which would take a while given all the formatting that needed to be done, we had a Perl script that would parse the text and add the required HTML formatting such as lists, paragraphs, headings, etc. It was a really neat script, and my first look at regular expressions. I developed a healthy respect for the power of Perl and its string manipulation libraries. I continued to work on the church's website, eventually on my own as the current "webmaster" moved on to some other projects. I continued learning, mostly PHP, and applied those self taught skills to the site, expanding it in small ways. This continued until about 2002 when I was mid-way through college. At that point, I was well along with my college studies, having taken courses in basic programming, c/c++, visual basic, database development, networking, etc; the standard CS curriculum. I spent two summers interning at ING in Hartford, CT, first in the DBA group, and next in the project and process management group. I created a PHP application that allowed the DBAs to view current status information for all of the production databases, and another application to manage the metadata for those databases for the project managers to use. This gave me some great experience and real world use. When I returned to school, I then took a course called "Web Development II", a follow up to a basic introductory course on HTML and the structure of web pages. This course was to introduce server side, and dynamic web development. I didn't think much of it at the time, figuring I would be a C++ or Java programmer, or maybe a DBA when I graduated. I loved web development, but never really considered it would be my career. I didn't think I would be that lucky. So by now you are probably wondering, but how the heck did you start using ColdFusion??! You're right! All this rambling and I haven't even reached that yet! Fear not, here it comes :) When we started "Web Development II", my professor gave us an option. We could scrap the "scheduled", boring lesson plans for the course which would give us a slight introduction to dynamic web development, but not give us any in depth experience, or we could explore the technology that he used, ColdFusion, and build our own full applications in the short time the course would run. My first reaction to this was, OH NO! I had heard of ColdFusion, but only the bad things. You know the ones. "Its Dead!" "Its Old!" "It doesn't scale!" "Its not a real programming language!" I was leaning toward sticking with the course's scheduled curriculum, but I didn't want to rock the boat. I figured that I had been doing this already for a while, and I didn't need in depth anyways, I just wanted the credits. :) The class decided to try ColdFusion, and get the most out of the course they could. I am glad that decision was made! From the start, I fell in love with ColdFusion. It made all the hardest things so easy! In PHP I would have to manually connect to the database, setting up that connection with each page, then pass the SQL in as a string, run 2 or 3 methods just to execute the query and return each row as iterated. I thought this was OK. Then CF introduced me to the magical <cfquery /> tag! I thought to myself, "I have been doing it this way all this time, when THIS is available!??" My professor could tell right away that I was into it. Since I had been doing web development for a while, I would pick up the easier things faster, and had more time on my hands in class. Toward the end of the class, for our final project, we would break up into teams and build a functional application from scratch. It would be a basic CRUD app to manage a database. Now, I had never been a great fan of "teams" in school. Mostly because I would end up doing all of the work. It always seemed to me, that no one took the work seriously, and I would have to make up the slack. I didn't want to do the team project, fearing that would again happen, and someone else would get to slide by while I did the heavy lifting. My professor sensed this, and came to me after class and told me that he had a different final project in mind for me. He wanted me to work on a project of his, that he was working on for a client. This was great! A real world project! This would be a great learning experience. So we talked about what I would build, how it would work, etc and I set to work building it. Once it was complete, he reviewed it, and we had some back and forth tweaking some things. It was a really great experience for me to have, and really prepared me for my future endeavors. After this experience, I decided I wanted to do web development professionally. I got a job in the Academic Services Center at my school, building their intranet website, including an application that allowed students to look up a professor's schedule, and find out where they would be at a given time. This was a classic ASP application. Trust me, I wished for the sweet relief of ColdFusion each day I worked there! It was a great experience though. As graduation approached, I started looking for web development jobs. I didn't specifically look for ColdFusion, after all, I needed a job and wasn't going to be picky! I interviewed at a few different places, even got an offer for a web development job. I wasn't exactly thrilled with the work I would be doing though, so I kept looking. Eventually I stumbled upon a web development position, close to my parents home (central CT), and, would you believe it, they used ColdFusion! I was excited. It sounded great, it was exactly what I wanted to do. It was an association management firm that provided services for a variety of clients so I wouldn't be stuck working on the same things over and over again. I interviewed and got the job and right after graduation I started working full time. Eventually I worked my way up the ladder to Senior Web Developer, and I was the lead developer and system architect for all our web projects in a team of three. I learned more and more about ColdFusion, and development in general, over the years there, and it really prepared me for where I am today. Today, I have my own development company, n42 Designs, and I work full time for a consulting firm here in CT, that provides IT services, primarily for clients in the healthcare industry.

FarCry Poll Plugin

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 11:20:00 -0400

I have released a plugin I have had for a while. I'm not sure why I never got around to releasing it. Its a very simple FarCry plugin that gives you the ability to create a one question poll and display it on the site. It uses a couple content types and a rule. To install, copy the files to /farcry/plugins/spcPoll and add "spcPoll" to your "this.plugins" setting in your FarCry constructor. Deploy the content types in the COAPI manager and restart the application. You can now create a question, assign answers to it, and deploy that question using the "Poll: Display Poll" rule. You can grab the code on Binpress or Github. Its also attached to this entry via the download link below. Let me know what you think!

A FarCry plugin for Hoth: ColdFusion Exception Tracking

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 15:04:00 -0400

Just a quick note to mention that I have released a FarCry plugin for the Hoth exception tracking framework. If you are interested take a look at the code on GitHub and let me know what you think. I have also included a zip file of the code attached to this entry.

SVN, Apache, and mod_caucho, oh my

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:01:00 -0400

I recently set up a new Viviotech VPS and ran into an issue that was easy to fix once I realized what was happening, but difficult to debug. I set up Railo running on the Resin server using Apache as a front end with mod_caucho. In my httpd.conf file I had the following lines:


LoadModule caucho_module /usr/lib/httpd/modules/mod_caucho.so
ResinConfigServer localhost 6800
CauchoConfigCacheDirectory /tmp
CauchoStatus yes

This causes Resin to handle all requests from apache. The resin configuration files tell resin which URLs to handle. I also had an SVN server set up so I had a configuration file in /etc/httpd/conf.d/ to set up subversion. All my SVN repositories are under the location /svn. So reading SVN repositories worked fine, but I kept getting "path not found" errors when committing new files. After debugging this for quite a while using Fiddler, and other means, I finally realized that Resin was actually handling the PUT http request and, finding no file, returned a 404. So to fix this, and simply have Apache handle any request to /svn/ I modifed my httpd.conf file as follows:


LoadModule caucho_module /usr/lib/httpd/modules/mod_caucho.so

ResinConfigServer localhost 6800
CauchoConfigCacheDirectory /tmp
CauchoStatus yes

then restarted Apache. Now apache handles any requests to /svn/* and Resin handles all other requests. Hopefully this helps future Googlers in need.

Filtering a CFGrid

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 09:23:00 -0400

So you want to filter a CFGrid huh? ColdFusion makes this easy!

First you need a CFC method that will return the query used to populate the grid. This method should take the cfgrid parameters and the value you want to filter on.

data.cfc:








>











select * from q

where name like 


order by #arguments.sortcolumn# #arguments.sortdir#

You can see here that I am just hard coding the query in, you would replace this with your cfquery call to your database or a call to your service layer, etc. Once you have your query results, you want to use the queryConvertForGrid method to format the result to a value that CFGrid can work with.

You then need a cfgrid! The trick here is how to get the grid to refresh as the user types a value in the filter box. ColdFusion Ajax UI tools have bind expressions that let us bind one control to another, and to react to events.

index.cfm:

You can see my bind expression in the cf grid. It will call the getData method of my data.cfc and pass in the value from the "filter" input box whenever the key is released. ColdFusion provides other events you can react to as well, check the docs for details.

So now if you run index.cfm you will see a simple form with a text input and a grid. the grid will load when the page is run (bindonload="true") and as you type in the text box, the results are filtered.

EDIT: removed the example link as I have moved this blog to Railo

ValidatorCFC Update

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 11:56:00 -0400

Just a quick note, thanks again to Aaron Greenlee I have some small modifications to ValidatorCFC. The modifications allow you to return a struct where the key is the name of the field in your object, and the value is true/false indicating if it passed validation. This is useful if you prefer more control when showing informative messages to the user. The zip file is attached to this entry as well as at RIAForge.

Adobe releases hotfix for FCKEditor issue

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 15:02:00 -0400

Adobe has released a hotfix for the FCKeditor issue. You can find it here. Take notice that it says to first stop the CF service and then access the CF administrator. This is impossible. Simple open the administrator first and apply the hot fix on the system info screen. Also, Mac (linux too??) users should know that if you unzip the cfide.zip file to the cfide folder it will replace the folder not merge the files like on windows. You will be left without a working CFIDE folder. You should manually merge the files.

Quick Note

Thu, 28 May 2009 10:35:00 -0400

Just a quick note to say that the zip file on RiaForge for ValidatorCFC (http://validatorcfc.riaforge.org/) was incorrect. Thanks to Bill D (http://brainbox.tv) for the head's up. I also attached it to this post. Use the download link below.

Follow me on Twitter

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 14:48:00 -0400

http://twitter.com/nickel4242

Update to ValidatorCFC

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 09:53:00 -0400

I released a new version of ValidatorCFC. Aaron Greenlee (http://www.aarongreenlee.com) sent me some changes. With his changes, you can now specify which properties you want validated. So even if in your object you say that last name and first name are required, if you pass in only the last name property, only that field will be validated. There is more info within the CFC itself, and in the test files in the zip. You can download the zip file using the download link on this entry, or from RIAForge.