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I spent sometime today playing around with Jing and thought it would be a good platform for us to start showing off boomsocket. So below I've got 3 videos for you to watch which talk about some of the features in boomsocket.
Video #1 - Picnik integration - We've got Picnik, the online image editor, integrated into our file manager system. Watch this video to get a glimpse of file manager and how Picnik is being used.
Video #1 Local Link
Video #1 Jing Link (bandwidth restricted)
Video #2 - Building Forms Part 1 - In this first part I show how easy it is to build forms for collecting and managing the data in boomsocket. The Socket Builder is the corner stone of boomsocket and here we show you just how easy it is to use.
Video #2 Local Link
Video #2 Jing Link (bandwidth restricted)
Video #3 - Building Forms Part 2 - In this 2nd part we take the Socket we built in "Video #2 - Building Forms Part 1" and turn it into a front end form so our visitors can actually use the form to send trouble tickets.
Video #3 Local Link
Video #3 Jing Link (bandwidth restricted)
We have a client who recently moved from CF5 to CF7. We did all the normal things you would do during a migration like this.
So I was a little miffed when their automated email script wasn’t working properly. I checked the code and at first thought it was an issue with the SQL query but after about 40 minutes of poking around that turned out not to be the case. So I commented out the cfmail tags, threw in some cflog tags and started to look at the code as it executed (I’ve become a huge fan of the cflog tag).
After the first run through I immediately saw the issue. Because of the large number of subscribers requesting the emails, we write a portion of the email to a text file and store it on the server so we can retrieve it later on in the code. These text files are typically deleted and recreated at the start of the scheduled task. My log messages were telling me that we were skipping the first two files, one of which happened to be the body of the emails I was investigating.
Further digging into the code I found where the CF5 developer had diligently coded his query loop to start at row 3. I had an idea why this was, but it wasn’t till I talked to a developer in my shop with actual experience in CF5 that my suspicion was confirmed. In CF 5 if you looped over a directory list, you had to start at row 3, because row 1 was ‘.’ And row 2 was ‘..’, BUT in CF 6 & 7 this was changed so the ‘.’ and ‘..’ are ignored. This is something I didn’t realize during the migration and it’s not something the code analyzer would not catch since the code is legitimate.
So, a word to the wise, if you’re upgrading from CF5 do a quick search on your code for “ startrow=’3’ ” and see if maybe those attributes need to be removed.
Why do you use ColdFusion? This is a question Digital Positions gets every once in a while from prospective clients and even the occasional current client. Typically it’s brought about because they heard about some other language (PHP, ASP, .NET), or they’ve spoken to a “one-system” shop (“We only use Microsoft!” or “Give me Sun or give me death!”) who had less-than-positive things to say about ColdFusion. Digital Positions loves it when this happens because it gives us a chance to have the real conversation ... It’s not about the code, it’s about the application!
Yes, as a company Digital Positions made a strategic decision to use ColdFusion as our primary development environment. We chose ColdFusion over the many other options out there, because it allows our team to quickly and efficiently develop complex solutions .... Our applications are faster, more stable and out of production more rapidly than with other languages or environments.
So, solutions that are stable, robust and faster to market ... Now do you understand why we have chosen ColdFusion?
However, as a matter of course, we do not limit ourselves. In the real world, expertise in other languages and environments is required We have the ability to develop in PHP, ASP, .NET and Java when client projects demand.
In the end the language used to develop your site should not be the deciding factor. Your users typically don’t care what it’s coded in, they just want to get the information they need or to purchase the product they want quickly and easily. So leave the architecture to the web developers and concentrate on satisfying your users, hitting your revenue goals and getting that next promotion.
Microsoft recently announced they will no longer be supporting or improving upon the Internet Explorer browser for the Macintosh platform.
Eric spends a few moments pondering what this means and what user of Internet Explorer for the Macintosh should do about it.
December 3rd, 2005 marked a big day for ColdFusion developers and users of Macromedia products. It was on this day that the Adobe / Macromedia merger became official with both parties receiving word they had passed all the red-tape hurdles in their path. You can read more about the happenings on Adobe’s website and here. You can also do a Google search for the merger and get lots of opinions, speculation and more from news organizations and other bloggers.
So what does this mean for Digital Position clients and the future of the Macromedia product line? Well for the foreseeable future not much will be different other than a name change, a logo change, and maybe some product packaging. Work has already begun on the next version of ColdFusion (code named Scorpio) and we’ve learned that the ColdFusion product line (along with FLEX) will be in the “Enterprise and Developer Solutions Business Unit” which handles Adobe's LifeCycle product line.
Here at Digital Positions it’s business as usual and word on the street is that this is only good news for ColdFusion and ColdFusion developers. We’ve already seen Macromedia take the ColdFusion line down new paths by integrating much requested features. Now with the Marketing, Research & Development, and overall reach of Adobe, we can expect more of the same. We are excited about this merger and will keep you up-to-date on the cool and innovative stuff which is sure to come out of it.
Back in February of this year (2005) Digital Positions decided it was time to find a new hosting partner for our clients’ websites. This decision was talked about a lot in the months preceding but it wasn’t till February that we actually sat down and started to plan the migration and search for a host. This article describes some of the steps we took to ensure things went smoothly.
i3SiteTools is our custom content management system (CMS) here at Digital Positions. We use i3SiteTools as the fouindation for many of our clients’ websites and web applications. Over the last five years, our team has taken great steps to constantly improve upon the code base and feature set. One of our latest initiatives has been to move i3SiteTools into a more Object Oriented Programming (OOP) and modular world.
For those of you looking at the screen wondering what OOP is and why we want this let me digress a bit.
OOP stands for Object Orient Programming, as mentioned above, and it’s basically a way of writing code which can build upon other bits of code. So this would allow us to write a newsletter module for client A and later on when client E wants one too we can simply drop it in, customize the display for this client and, voila! they have a nice little newsletter tool. This ability to develop code faster and more consistently means our clients will be able to get greater bang for their buck ... faster.
OOP programming has a lot of benefits for us as developers as well as benefits for our clients. You’ll start to see more of this as we dive deeper into the OOP mindset and as I start to talk more about our experience in future blog posts.
If you’ve got questions feel free to leave me a comment.
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