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architecting...

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 03:47:00 GMT

Good lord. The lexical side of things is easy.

Thinking in terms of the big picture is most definitely a skill that takes work.

And trust me, not having anything approaching a CS degree, it's mental work.

Now, the fun part is putting something together and seeing that it makes sense is very neat.

I don't have much more to expound on here, just thought I'd post that in between Dreamweaver saves.

so simple, so basic, and yes of course, I only now realized it.

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 03:10:00 GMT

Cfscript for long a## structs and arrays! Duh.

I have a pretty big struct I have to create to regenerate a pdf. So, after putting in about, oh 150 lines of code (lotsa cfsets...) I picked up an old CF MX book of mine and read up that one chapter I so ignorantly, uh...ignored?
Anyway, yeh, whattya know, cfscript is good for those.

Live, learn, repeat.

oh, ok. Slowly, but surely...

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 04:43:00 GMT

Alrighty, so far, here's what I know (I believe) about Mach II:

Listeners simply forward to the service layer.

Services contain logic to pull data via either DAOs or Gateways.

DAOs handle single records, and CRUD related work.

Gateways return multiple records, and/or more complex SQL.

Beans are simply instances of single records, with getter and setting methods for each attribute the object may have.

I'm working on fiddling with the service layer on this sample user manager app. I've added a table, 'recipes', and want to tie recipes to each individual user. This should be fairly straightforward.

5 tagger and proud of it.

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 22:03:00 GMT

ok, the title is tongue in cheek. I'm doing my best to continue to expand how I approach web development, especially as it concerns ColdFusion. I'm in the process now of applying more and more OOP approaches to things I'm doing at work. I like figuring out more and more about how CFCs really do some neat things.
That said, man, oh man, while there are plenty of 'cool' kinda CF guys out there (like Dave Shuck, to cite a local example), there are alot of big headed types out there. I've been reading more and more blogs out there from ColdFusion programmer types, and yeesh. The hubris is certainly up there.
For those of you who have been in programming for years, and may even have your CS degree, please: keep in mind that some of us didn't start when you did, or, hell, don't have the aptitude you do.
Yes, there are plenty of CF coders who just stick with the tried and true 1000 line procedurally coded template-style of coding. (That's a terrible sentence, I realize.)
Trust me when I say there are also at least a few of us who are learning, and are going to catch up eventually. Having said that, every person I've met face to face locally that is in the CF community have gone out of their way to be helpful and nice about it all. To them, I'm beyond grateful. Anyhoo, just felt the need to get that off my chest.

beans, daos, gateways and services.

Sat, 17 May 2008 16:14:00 GMT

so, this weekend is the time I've chosen to play around with a User manager app that Mr. Shuck built. Mainly cuz we're starting to apply more and more of these concepts at work. SO. Here goes nothin'. Time to setup MySQL on my laptop.

CF8, Flex, etc.

Thu, 08 May 2008 19:06:00 GMT

a few housecleaning items:

CFPDF worked like a charm. I was able to output our pdf like we had with the custom tag without a problem. Very, very cool.

Flex is more and more fun for me. As it stands now, I've got an image preview/upload app that puts the images you have into a tile list 3x4.
The images all have a 'sort_order' property to them, and that gets updated in the db when you drag and drop the images around in the list.

I hope to get an example of this up in the next day or so. While it's not exactly reinventing the internet or anything, it was a HUGE amount of fun doing it.

jeez, it's been a while...

Sat, 16 Feb 2008 17:53:00 GMT

Good lord, I am a slacker.

Anyhoo, I'm switching my ISP for my podcast website for one that is using CF8 currently. (the plan, with more SQL server space, is VERY competitive with my current plan, and they seem to get positive reviews)

I'm in the process of redoing the site, and my plan is to do several different things there to play more with technologies like Flex, Mach II, CF8 related stuff.

Here goes nothin'.

PS, why isn't this blog ColdFusion powered?

Juuuust kidding, Dave. :D

Mach II, continued.

Wed, 21 Nov 2007 20:19:42 GMT

Good lord, finally got more of the site moved over to Mach II.

Events are your friend! Not nearly as hard to do as I'd thought when I first heard about Mach II. Not so much. There's some setup on the front end of things when you first start designing your application, but it's worth it.

Far easier to make changes in ONE place instead of going all over to make sure your path to your cfc in 1 billion templates is right. (yes, I can be quite the sloppy coder)

Example of the 'front page' of my site:

(this is what is called in my mach ii config file via event handler)

<event-handler event="topfiveblog" access="public">
<view-page name="blog_top5" contentArg="content" /> <announce event="defaultLayout" copyEventArgs="true"/>

</event-handler>

"blog_top5" is the template that has what I wish to show in the main template.

"Content" is where I am going to put this template inside of the main template.

"default layout" puts together a header, the main, and footer templates.

And now, time to work on the login listener, so's I can add the admin side of this whole thing.

(and fix my editor, once and for all. What a POS it became. Oy.)

moving to Mach II finally.

Sun, 28 Oct 2007 17:35:30 GMT

ok, so I finally decided to begin moving my podcast website to Mach II. The code I had been messing with finally got to be too big a pain in my posterior.

I'd already started using a really rudimentary type of code that resembled (very faintly, mind you) Mach II anyway, so i finally decided to bite the bullet and get to work moving over to this framework today.

More to follow very shortly.

moving the website over to Mach II, etc.

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 15:32:58 GMT

Ok, so after the last DFW CFUG meeting, and seeing Mr. Shuck show the wonders of Mach II, I now see that the podcast site I have could benefit greatly from an event driven framework.

On my site, I have a navigation bar at the top that uses AJAX to call whatever page that link points to and puts it in a div.

While it works as a kludge, it's not very scalable. I'm still banging around with Mach II to really understand it, but I wanna move the entire thing over to Mach II by the end of the week.

CFEclipse and life.

Mon, 11 Jun 2007 19:51:56 GMT

Yeh, yeh, I'm a day late, dollar short in alot of ways.
So I'm getting Eclipse/CFEclipse working on the machine, and once I get the FTP end of things really going (and SQL Explorer) I'm gonna be one happy camper.

Sorry, but there is not any bigger of a beating than having Dreamweaver, Flex Builder, AND either Enterprise manager or the newer version for SQL Server 2005 that replaced it all at once.(oh, and ftp command prompt or FireFTP)

If, if, IF I could use ONE tool for that, man oh man, I'd be just giggly. Just about there, so I'm getting happy.

ColdFusion 8 "Scorpio" from a newbie

Tue, 01 May 2007 16:51:01 GMT

So I got to see Mr. Forta in person for the first time, and I have to admit. I'm TOTALLY energized for Coldfusion in general.

My gosh. The man knows how to sell it.

(not to mention everything being added to the new CF version. I MUST find a copy somewhere!)

I'm planning on using this space to blog as a CF newbie, so don't expect earth shatteringly new ways of programming; I'm just posting here as I learn better ways of coding stuff.