Posts About Programming

Improving the tutorial (again): including partials to DRY up forms in Wheels

Saturday, August 14th, 2010

This past week, Kenneth Barrett asked a question on Twitter about how to DRY up his form code in ColdFusion on Wheels. He didn’t want to have a copy of the same form across 2 view files. This is because he is a smart guy, even as a beginner! :)

I linked Kenneth to a post that I wrote a year ago about combining 2 forms into a single view file. That approach works well for certain scenarios, but I’ve since changed my mind on my general preference for DRYing up forms.

Read on to see what exactly I’ve changed my mind on.

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Pop up PDFs in a new window with jQuery

Thursday, August 5th, 2010

I was looking for a good way to pop up all PDF links in a new window and ran across PDF links open in a new window”>Dennison Uy’s post with code.

But I did modify his code slightly. Read on for what I did and why.

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Experimenting with flashMessages() in ColdFusion on Wheels

Wednesday, August 4th, 2010

On my Labs site, I’ve written another page exploring a view helper coming up in ColdFusion on Wheels version 1.1 called flashMessages(). Read on about it if you want more details, but here’s the gist.

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Playing around with automatic validations in Wheels 1.1

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

A cool new feature coming up in ColdFusion on Wheels 1.1 is automatic validations. I wrote a page last night to play around with the new feature a little and figure out how it all works.

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Bug fixes in ColdFISH on Wheels version 0.3

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

I went to deploy my new ColdFISH on Wheels plugin on my Linux server and got a curious error. Especially if you’re using Linux, you’ll want to upgrade to ColdFISH on Wheels 0.3 ASAP.

What happened? Read on to find out.

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Structuring CFCs a little like Ruby

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

As I hit the books and learned about Ruby on Rails a couple years ago, there was one thing that I admired about how Ruby handles public and private sections of classes.

How can I take a lesson from Ruby and apply it to my CFML coding? I’m glad that you asked! Read on for more details.

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Full CFScript CFCs aren’t yet where they need to be

Saturday, April 17th, 2010

A few months ago, I blogged about my excitement about the role that full script CFCs could have in an MVC stack, particularly with ColdFusion on Wheels. In my excitement to try out the new feature, I had spent much of a Saturday manually converting all of my components into CFScript components in my portal project called Administrivia.

Unfortunately, the CFScript part of ColdFusion isn’t quite where it needs to be yet. Read on to find out why.

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404 error handling in ColdFusion on Wheels

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

This is fairly simple, but I figured that I would share my approach for 404 error pages in ColdFusion on Wheels and see if anyone has a different/better way of doing it. This example demonstrates code used on cfwheels.org.

Read on to learn more.

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A rally cry for ColdFusion

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

These are exciting times for ColdFusion. We have open source alternatives. Adobe just released their first shot at an official ColdFusion IDE, and they’ve even included Flash Builder in the package for free.

I’ve seen people comment that Adobe needs to promote and advertise ColdFusion more heavily. I think that this is a problem. While they are responsible for advertising and promotion to a degree, we must acknowledge that they’ve invested a lot into creating great tools for us to use and take some of the responsibility into our own hands.

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Does exactly what it says on the tin

Saturday, February 6th, 2010

“Does exactly what it says on the tin.”

I love it. All of our method and function names should do exactly the same.

Read on for more context and why Andy Bellenie is a genius.

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