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web2.0, ajax, coldfusion, web 2.0, jsmx, ajaxcfc, javascript, web development

ajaxCFC proved to be troublesome for me. I fought it for two weeks, trying to rid of an error message indicating an invalid response from the server. I never did figure out why it didn’t work. Documentation is somewhat sparse. I’m sure there are some online support groups out there, but why should I have to look so hard?

JSMX was a lot simpler to use. It only contains one JavaScript file, engine.js, that you plop into your site’s file tree. So far, I’ve only really needed one function in order to get running, and it is pretty intuitive.


http("GET", "test.cfc?method=dosomething", my_callback, params);


That’s it. I got everything up and running in one evening, as opposed to fighting ajaxCFC for two weeks. No need to worry about your CFC extending anything. You return any needed data back to JavaScript using the <cfwddx> tag or a number of other XML methods. If you need to hook into a server side system other than ColdFusion, you are set to go without needing to find another AJAX library.

There are no real bells and whistles with JSMX, but I am sure the other more DHTML-heavy libraries out there could assist when needed. I’m looking forward to trying some of the others out, particularly Adobe’s Spry, when I am required to.

The short

Don’t sign up for hosting from Unlimited Hosting, AKA Bug Software. If you want excellent uptime and existent customer service, go elsewhere.

Why I switched to another hosting company

When your client gives you the requirement of low-priced hosting, you’re going to get hit-or-miss. At the time I signed up, I got my client CFMX 6.1 hosting for $8 a month. Unfortunately, we got what we paid for.

A couple years later, the company upgraded their 6.1 servers to version 7. “Cool!” most would respond. “Not so cool,” was my response because they did it without any warning. It turns out that our web site didn’t break directly because of the transition. The web site broke because the hosting company didn’t bring over the mappings to the new install. When I asked them to fix it, they seemed surprised that I wanted it done right away. (C’mon guys!)

A few weeks ago, a blank index.html ended up on my client’s web site, which took precedence over my index.cfm. I emailed Unlimited Hosting and asked them to fix it. (This was before I realized the blank file was placed there.) No response. I called to have it resolved. No answer. I left a voicemail (which is unacceptable to have to do with a hosting company, period!). No response.

I signed my client up for a different hosting account with Host My Site, whom I highly recommend. I called to have the Unlimited Hosting account canceled. Left a voicemail. No response. I emailed them to have the account canceled. No answer. My client still got charged for the month. I had to go into Paypal and manually cancel the subscription.

This is awful customer service. Unfortunately, posting an entry on my blog is all I can do. All I can hope for is that someone Googles “unlimited hosting” and runs across this entry. Please let me know via comment if you run across this entry and I save your ass.

hosting, coldfusion

Before we get into my criticisms, let me describe the product I will be discussing. DocDepot is a solution built to organize and archive documents. The government obviously has tons of documents to organize, and putting these documents into digital format is definitely a good way to make them maintainable and attainable. I will not claim that document management is an easy problem to solve or else I’d be selling such a product myself! But I will claim that it would be more effective to build a comparable, relevant solution in-house than to buy DocDepot.

The biggest issue I had with this product was the search piece, probably the most important part of the whole DocDepot software package. The sales reps spent so much time bragging up the full text search feature, and I didn’t see anything special about it. DocDepot runs on ColdFusion MX and uses the Verity search engine, which is bundled with and integrated into ColdFusion MX. I was immediately interested in how ISPA used Verity for this feature, and I am glad I asked some questions about it. For those of you who don’t know much about ColdFusion and Verity, it is ridiculously easy to use and develop search systems with. This is true at least at a basic level. Buy a couple Ben Forta books, ask a few questions about it on CF-TALK, and you’re solid.

Unfortunately, ISPA did not use any of the advanced features of Verity that would make it worth purchasing their product. I could see how their demo could wow an audience of those unfamiliar with search technology, especially those unfamiliar with ColdFusion and Verity. But those wanting to put more power into their search system with Information Architecture concepts like preferred terms, variant terms, and related terms are out of luck. DocDepot does not have any kind of mechanism for building vocabularies, and it is closed-source, so an in-house developer could not go in and tweak this functionality into the product. Verity allows for Boolean searching, perfect for these vocabulary-related IA concepts, of the which could be dynamically built with some simple database queries and CFML. Out of the box, DocDepot knows nothing about Boolean searching outside of forcing the user to write their own Boolean searches.

For those of you saying, “Huh?” let me give you an example. A lot of documents the government produces mention addresses. Many street addresses contain the word “road,” “Rd,” or “Rd.” I believe that their demo search involved searching for an address that contains the word “road.” If it didn’t, I asked them to search for an address with the word “Road.” Then I asked the people running the demo to search for a variant of the word “road,” like “Rd.” The search brought up entirely different results! There is no way in the real world that we could ask those producing documents to use preferred terms for everything. Imagine all the frustrated users trying to search for documents. The only way around this would be for the users to know to run searches that look something like this:

123 Someplace (Road OR Rd OR Rd.)

Those of you who are grounded in reality know that people expect search to be like Google. If a company like ISPA wants to claim to produce a product with an excellent search feature, then they need to do the work to produce an excellent search feature.

I will also quickly mention that if you purchase DocDepot and want any kind of custom workflows built into the system, you must hire ISPA staff to come in and build the software for you. After you’ve invested in a license of ColdFusion and the pricey DocDepot software, you then need to hand more money over to ISPA to make the software applicable to your end users’ workflows. Ouch!

So my solution? Gather some ColdFusion developers together, hand them a few books on Information Architecture (imagine that!), and have them learn every inner working of the Verity spider, ColdFusion Administrator indexing service, <cfsearch> tag, <cfindex> tag, <cfdirectory> tag, <cffile> tag, etc. And have them leave the source unencrypted and well documented. Or find a better product that will not punish your users.

FCKEditor is an open source WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) XHTML editor that runs in a multitude of Web browsers—Internet Explorer 5.5+, Firefox 1.0+, Mozilla 1.3+ and Netscape 7+ . The main developers of FCKEditor have recently raised money to help them start developing a release that will run in Safari, so we should expect that capability in the near future.

Most importantly, this editor creates the illusion to users that they are using Microsoft Word right within your Web application. You don’t need to teach users how to write <strong> and <em> tags in order for them to bold and italicize text. No need to teach them the <br /> tag, let alone trying to explain the purpose of the space and slash at the end of the tag. If you choose to configure it as such, FCKEditor will even let users insert pictures and tables into their content as well.

The Good

The editor is very feature-rich. It leverages a spell checker, file browser, file uploader, and more, all for free. I’ve purchased similar solutions in the past (ActivEdit comes to mind) that cost $100+ per site license (encrypted source!) that do not offer as many features, nor as much stability.

Out of the box, FCKEditor is ready to be easily deployed on servers running ColdFusion, PHP, ASP.NET, Java, and Perl, as well as a JavaScript-invoked engine for those without a server side application engine running.

Because FCKEditor is open source, any gearhead can go into the source code and manipulate it however they please. There are also many customizable features like skinning, creating feature templates, and creating CSS style definitions.

FCKEditor also generates valid XHTML, which many other WYSIWYG editors fail to do.

So far, I’ve leveraged this tool in PHP and ColdFusion MX with few headaches.

The Not So Good

Like most open source projects, documentation for FCKEditor is limited to a poorly-written wiki and forums filled with some very confused people. If you want customization outside of what the product offers out of the box, you’ll need to do some digging. It took me a couple nights to figure out how to change the available feature set to the “Basic” set without going and editing a mess of JavaScript files. I’d recommend digging around in the example files to see how to leverage the different features available.

Of course, it is worth mentioned that FCKEditor is not intended to be used on: public applications that get served to users on the Internet. It’s great for password-protected administrative applications and Intranets. But you can’t go tell the Internet (the world) to only use Firefox or newer versions of Internet Explorer on your Web application. It is much easier to tell that to a handful of people who will be using the news editor to update press releases on the Web site though.

One downside of the built-in spell checker is that it requires the user to download a plug-in. Bummer.

Lastly, a tool like this can only be as good as the client it runs on. There is still no guarantee that the user will be running one of the browsers required. And if the user has JavaScript turned off, there is no hope.

Since I’ve mentioned the client side, I would love to see a Flash-based WYSIWYG editor. CF_PIM has a first attempt at a ColdFusion MX 7-generated Flash form rich text editor, but it is lacking in a lot of features and is very kludgy when it comes to using the features that are present. Still kind of cool either way.