What is better than a FREE T-Shirt?
Posted on July 23, 2010 in ColdFusion
What could be better than a FREE t-shirt? How about a FREE t-shirt plus 10% off AMS consulting work!
What is AMS?
Posted on July 23, 2010 in ColdFusion
Application maintnenace can easily consume over 50% of the time and cost during an application's lifespan. As developers, we like brand new development because it is fun and exciting. We get to start with a clean slate and design a masterpiece. Maintenance work is ... well ... maintenance work. You have to go dig through somebody else's code (or worse, your own) and try to work in changes and bend code to do things it was not originally intended to do. This is where AMS comes in. AMS is ColdFusion Application Maintenance Services by Admentus.
ColdBox - Refactoring the Application Template
Posted on June 28, 2010 in ColdBox
In my time of developing web applications, one of my preferences is that the only files under the web root should be web accessible files. With the addition of application specific mappings in ColdFusion, this has become even easier as you can use standard mappings for frameworks without running into collisions between applications. Over the years, I have come up with a fairly standardized application folder structure for Fusebox, Mach-II, and Model-Glue based applications. I recently decided to give ColdBox a spin and one of the first things I had to do was refactor the default template application to move everything that does not need to be directly web accessible out of the web root.
Today's Light Bulb Moment - Configuration Beans
Posted on October 14, 2009 in ColdFusion, ColdSpring
In the past, I have always utilized an xml file that would contain all of the configuration information for an application … things like data sources, paths, etc. Then, in the application.cfm/cfc file, I would read that xml file, parse it into a structure and store that structure in the application scope. Recently however, I came across an application that was originally designed using a series “config” beans. The application was pretty rough and I was doing a lot of refactoring, so I just inserted my usual xml config file, commented out the beans and moved on without really considering the potential benefits.
Structured CSS with Compass and SASS
Posted on October 04, 2009 in CSS
Cascading StyleSheets are a great thing for front end development. However, they have their short comings, especially for somebody that comes from a structure programming background. It seem no matter what methodology or organizational pattern I try, I always get to the end and my stylesheets feel like a jumbled mess of spaghetti. I have several projects in process right now that require front end development, so I have been continuing my search for a better pattern for CSS development.
ColdFusion 9 ORM on Tomcat Gotcha
Posted on September 18, 2009 in ColdFusion
I am sitting here working through an application that makes use of the new ColdFusion 9 ORM capabilities. I have a simple business object that I created using EntityNew(), then populated it, and attempted to save it using EntitySave(). Nothing fancy and everything straight out of the docs.
The problem was, when I ran this code I would just get a blank screen – no errors, nothing.
Hibernate & ColdFusion 9 – What is ORM?
Posted on September 18, 2009 in ColdFusion, Hibernate
Before we dig into Hibernate, I wanted to take a quick textbook look at what ORM is since Hibernate is an example of an ORM framework. ORM spelled out is object/relational mapping. One text I read said that the slash between object and relational is supposed to emphasize the mismatch problem that occurs when the object oriented world meets the relational world.
A New Series: Hibernate & ColdFusion 9
Posted on September 15, 2009 in ColdFusion, Hibernate
Recently I have been working on a project using Groovy and Hibernate amongst other technologies and while I have definitely missed ColdFusion, it is good to get out of your comfort zone on occasion. The problem with using new technologies in a project setting is that most of your focus is on delivering the project and not on really learning the ins and outs of the technology. So, with a few minutes of breathing room allotted before the next project, I wanted to delve a bit deeper into Hibernate, especially with its integration into the next major release of ColdFusion.
No Object Oriented Cookbooks Here
Posted on June 03, 2009 in Object Oriented Development
With all of the recent talk regarding object oriented development in ColdFusion, a common theme appears with developers attempting to make the jump that I have seen many times in the past. You see comments like “where are the OO tutorials” or “where can I find an OO book”. The problem that people don’t seem to grasp here is that object oriented development is not something that you can just follow a check list for and be an expert at. There is no step A, step B, now you have a world class object oriented application.
Data Validation vs. Object Validation
Posted on October 27, 2008 in ColdFusion, Object Oriented Development
Back when I was working on the Validat project, one of the topics of discussion was whether validation should occur at the object level or at the data level (i.e. a collection of user submitted data). This topic came up again last week on Ben Nadel’s blog with his postings regarding his class experience with Hal Helms. The comment Ben made that really got me thinking again was ….
"An object can only ever exist in a valid state. An object should never be created or allowed to enter a state that is not valid within the domain."
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