Posts About Programming

Script-based controllers and models, tag-based views

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

I’m looking forward to playing around with ColdFusion 9 when I get some more time here in a month or so. One of the areas that interests me in particular is the ability to write full CFCs in CFScript syntax.

Read on for what I feel is the perfect blend of CFML features used in the different layers of the ColdFusion on Wheels framework:

  • Controllers in script syntax
  • Models in script syntax
  • Views in tag syntax

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Wheels is only a hammer

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

My posting this is a seriously delayed reaction. But I must admit that I was using Wheels as a hammer and trying to treat a problem like a nail when I wrote about creating a Wheels partial for setting form focus.

Read on to see where I went wrong.

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Aggregating RSS feeds with Delicious, Yahoo! Pipes, FeedBurner, and CFML

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009

Over the weekend, I created a couple simple feed aggregators on the ColdFusion on Wheels Community page. I saved major time by using a mashup of Delicious, Yahoo! Pipes, FeedBurner, and the <cffeed> tag in CFML. This was far easier than creating my own feed aggregator by hand.

If you’ve been curious about any of these tools, I highly recommend reading this post.

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ColdFusion on Rails is almost here

Thursday, September 17th, 2009

We released ColdFusion on Wheels 0.9.4 on Tuesday. This project has been a dream come true. Although we’re still in beta, there is quite a bit of momentum, and I imagine that people will take a closer look at it after we go 1.0.

Read on for more of my thoughts of where we’ve gone—and where we’re going.

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Follow me on Twitter

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

I’ve always thought Twitter a glorious waste of time. But I recently found out that much of the CFML community hangs out there.

So here’s my new Twitter handle: @cf_chrispeters.

I must admit that joining Twitter with the goal of connecting with other CFers makes it a much more rewarding experience. I’ve learned a few things already just from links that others have been posting. If you use ColdFusion, Railo, or OpenBD, then you should give it a shot.

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XHTML 2/HTML 5 comic

Thursday, August 27th, 2009

If you haven’t seen it yet, Smashing Magazine posted a comic called Misunderstanding Markup: XHTML 2/HTML 5. I’ve been wondering what’s been going on with the standards and what it’ll ultimately mean for me. And a comic addresses my questions and laziness quite nicely. I win!

At risk of infringing copyright, I’ll rape and paste it below.

HTML Comic

Read on for the rest of the comic. This isn’t the whole thing.

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Wheels + jQuery partial for setting form focus

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

You’ve seen it before: you get to a login screen, and the cursor automatically jumps to the username box so you can just start typing. It’s very convenient.

But developers seem to screw this up regularly. I’ve seen it implemented so poorly that it becomes highly unusable and opens potential security problems.

I’ll take some time to show you how I implemented this in jQuery and then encapsulated it for reuse within a partial in ColdFusion on Wheels.

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Improving the tutorial: using the same view for multiple actions in ColdFusion on Wheels

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

I’ll fulfill my promise by giving another example of how I would improve the Hello Database tutorial for ColdFusion on Wheels.

This time, I’ll talk about how we could factor out view logic so that the profile form can be used for both the add and edit actions. With all of this MVC goodness, we should be able to do some refactoring easily, shouldn’t we?

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My first usage of jQuery

Tuesday, August 18th, 2009

jQuery: write less, do more

Finally forcing myself to learn a much-needed skill, I took a dive into learning jQuery. I used jQuery to improve some JavaScript code that I had written a couple months ago.

Read on to see the original code and how much cleaner jQuery made it.

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Improving the tutorial: Object- and query-driven partials in ColdFusion on Wheels

Friday, August 14th, 2009

I mention in the ColdFusion on Wheels Hello Database tutorial that there are some things that could be factored out to make the code leaner. One thing that I would do is use a query-driven partial to factor out a loop that displays all users in the database.

Read on for code examples and an explanation.

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