Yesterday I posted an example of highlight/fadeout effects done with jQuery. It wasn't necessarily that exciting, but it's not something I've done before so it was fun to build. Fellow evangelist (and my boss, so yeah, his comments get special attention) Kevin Hoyt commented that what I had achieved would be possible with CSS and transitions.
As a gentle reminder, don't forget the excellent resource that is the Adobe Cookbook, including over 200 ColdFusion Cookbook entries. Looks like it has been a while since content was added, so take this as a gentle push to yall to consider adding something.
Thanks for this goes to Paul Irish. For a while now I've been trying to find a way to search for a value across multiple files that are loaded in a browser request. But every time I used the Search field in Chrome Dev tools, it would only search the current file. I'm talking about the highlighted search field below:
Yes - I know - my MSPaint skills suck. ;) As I said, that only searches the current file. If there are a bunch of JavaScript files in one request, you're screwed unless you feel like manually switching from one to another.
But it turns out there's another search form you can open with ctrl-shift-f (cmd-opt-f on OSX):
Not only will it search across all files (not just JavaScript), it supports case sensitivity and regex based searches as well.
Anyway - thanks again to Paul for sharing the tip and I hope it helps others.
Validating forms with JavaScript has been possible since the very beginning of time... or at least the introduction of LiveScript (the original name before the marketing drones got ahold of it). While it's not particular new or as exciting as Canvas based games, JavaScript form validation is one of the best uses of the language (imo) and something that can dramatically improve your user's experience. I recently had a reader ask how to do JavaScript form validation so I thought it might be nice to write up a simple tutorial. This is not meant to cover every possible way, of course, and will be a very manual approach (no frameworks or plugins!) to the problem. As always, I welcome folks comments and suggestions below.
I've done a few projects now that make use of PhoneGap's database support. Like most things in PhoneGap, it just plain works. But I've encountered a few things I thought could be done a bit easier, so I've built a simple utility class for my future projects. I thought I'd share it with folks and see if it would be useful for others.
The title says it all. The latest issue of Adobe's Inspire Magazine is out. There's lots of good content with the only low point being my own article (grin) on PhoneGap: Combining your web skills with PhoneGap to build mobile apps. Probably nothing new for folks who read my blog entries here.
I'm a bit late to blog on this, almost three months late, but folks may want to check out Ryan Anklam's ColdFusion Koans. What are ColdFusion Koans? (Stealing this from his site...)
The ColdFusion Koans project is intended to teach ColdFusion syntax, techniques, structure, and tips and tricks through unit tests. Even if you are a seasoned ColdFusion developer the Koans can be a fun exercise to keep your skills sharpened. The Koans concept is nothing new, in fact, the Ruby Koans project is quite mature. Recently other languages, such as JavaScript, have also implement the technique.
Having recently taken a look at the Ruby Koans, I can attest to it being an extremely interesting way to learn a language.
I also encourage folks to take a look at this blog post from Grant Copley: (EDIT: Shoot, looks like his blog is down. Well, give it time and hopefully it will come back up.) How I Almost Ditched ColdFusion After 12 Years, Why I Wised Up, and What I'm Doing About It. It's a fascinating blog entry about a long-time CF developer who got frustrated, gave up on CF, and then came back.
Nerudo asked me:
I am looking to start out in Mobile App dev. I was wondering what is your setup or what set-up would you advise I get. By setup I mean "test devices, and develeopment tools."
Here is my list - and I'd love to know what my readers would add/change/modify.
This question came in to me via Stefan Richter yesterday on Twitter and I thought I'd use the blog to answer in a bit more detail. He asked:
liking jqm so far but have yet to figure out how to keep my business logic separate from markup using cf for backend)
PhoneGap allows you to take simple HTML and create a mobile application. While we may be used to the idea of having HTML to build out our sites, you have to change your thinking a bit when it comes to a PhoneGap application. Your HTML is running within a wrapper on the device itself. That means any logic built in ColdFusion (or any server side language) is not going to be available to you... directly.
Whereas in the past you could have a simple detail page that queried the database based on a URL parameter, your PhoneGap app is - in ways - like running a HTML file downloaded from the Internet.
This does not mean you can't have dynamic PhoneGap apps. You can. But on the "app side", anything dynamic is going to have to be built in JavaScript. You can certainly build out your business logic using JavaScript.
So that means we give up on building web sites with dynamic technologies like ColdFusion, right? Not at all. If your application is entirely self contained, then you can build it out completely with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. But if your application needs to share data with others, if it needs business logic that access a central database, then you still need a central server.
A PhoneGap application, using JavaScript, can make XHR requests to a server. As an example, I'm working on a mobile app now for a web site. The web site already has a lot of business logic built. I exposed this using a CFC that I can easily call from the PhoneGap app. The mobile app uses JavaScript for requesting and presenting the data. The central server handles things like authentication and returning the appropriate information based on your request.
If this does not make sense, please post a comment!
I'm a fan of "cookbook" style books as it gives you a chance to see how folks solve problems in a particular language. A typical "intro" book will teach you the syntax, but normally doesn't provide a lot of real world examples. Cookbooks present an opportunity to demonstrate how problems can be solved and don't waste time on explaining syntax or other things that you assume the reader already knows. That's why I was pretty excited to be given a preview copy of "Web Development Recipes", an excellent collection of cookbook style articles covering an amazing range of topics. Written by Brian P. Hogan, Chris Warren, Mike Weber, Chris Johnson, and Aaron Godin, this Progamatic Bookshelf offering is currently available in beta form as a PDF for 22 or PDF+physical book (once released) for 44.
In general, the book covers "web development", which as we know can mean a lot of things. Topics include CSS, JavaScript, charting, mobile, workflow, and server side issues. Topics are divided into the following groups of recipes:
I really enjoyed the heck out of this. I'm really wishing I could attend a conference that had as broad a reach as this. I've spent so many years buried in ColdFusion code in the server that the front end feels new and exciting to me again. "Web Development Recipes" not only introduced me to new stuff but got me even more excited about development.