What, you may ask, is an Unconference?

As per Adobe's MAX site:

Visit the Adobe ColdFusion® unconference area to participate in advanced tutorials and code show-and-tells. Share your latest cool code creations and explain how you built them.

Like last year, this year's ColdFusion Unconference will be organized and run by Ray Camden, with an assist by Scott Stroz.

Unlike last year, this year I will be helping out, as Ray's "Grunt Brute" (his term, not mine). I don't know exactly what the job description is, but with a title like that, could I really have said no? (Side Note: It wouldn't be the first time I've had a lapse in good judgment. I could tell stories, but my mom reads my blog and she's disappointed enough in me as it is. Every family get-together it's, "Oy, why ColdFusion? It's a dead language!" She tells her friends I'm a Ruby developer. But I digress...)

I'm looking forward to doing my part in helping to make all 3 days of the Unconference as memorable as possible. Ray recently posted a Call for Speakers/Comments, so if you'd like to set up a session, or have comments as to something you'd like to see, please drop either Ray or myself a line.

Hope to see you in October!

I'm a big fan of Mozilla's Firefox browser for web development. It's got a number of tools that I just couldn't imagine doing without. ColorZilla, Web Developer Toolbar, and of course, Firebug (just to name a few).

But as time went on, I found that Firefox could be a memory hog. I had a handful of plugins installed, but not many. And no themes. But on more than one occasion, I'd see Firefox's memory consumption start to increase dramatically.

Enter Google's Chrome. Ironically, in spite of the name, there was very little chrome to be seen. It was a nice, lightweight browser that I eventually transitioned to for day-to-day browsing. Development continued in Firefox, but I really enjoyed Chrome as a lightweight alternative for browsing.

Last week, I made the switch from PC/Windows to a Macbook Pro (blog entry on thoughts of a PC guy making the transition to OS X to follow eventually). Unfortunately, Chrome isn't available (yet?) for OS X. Well, back to Firefox as my "full time" browser.

Today in the #coldfusion channel on IRC (DALnet), somebody asked about a downloadable version of the ColdFusion documentation. I first suggested that he look at his local system since you can include the docs as part of your CF install, but he apparently didn't choose this option.

I did a quick Google search to see if they could be downloaded easily, since it's really just static HTML files, and came across a pretty neat AIR app by Brian Love, appropriately titled CFDocs on AIR.

The project looks to be about a year old, and according to Brian, was originally a project that he undertook in order to play around with AIR. It was a heck of a choice, because not only did he get some exposure to AIR, but he put together something that has a good deal of value. The application shows an alphabetical list of all of ColdFusion 8's built-in tags and functions, shows tags and functions by category, and is searchable.

When I posted this to the #coldfusion channel in response to the original question, a couple of people commented that they hadn't seen this yet and also thought it was a worthwhile effort. Since it seems to have flown under the radar since its release, I thought it'd be worthwhile to get the word out and mention it here.

Nicely done, Brian. Thanks for making this available.

Download CFDocs on AIR.

Registration... check. Hotel room reserved... check. Flight booked... check. Sunday February 22nd I start the cross-country journey from San Jose to Sarasota for a week of training with Hal Helms.

The course is Real-World OO Programming, and I've been looking forward to this since I first read about it on Ben Nadel's blog a few months back. I've been struggling with the transition from procedural guy to OO guy, and I think a classroom environment might do well to help me over some of the hurdles. I've gone through a few books, and I think I understand the foundations at a conceptual level. Sitting down with someone like Hal will help put those concepts into practice, I think.

I've been a big fan of Hal's since he and Jeff Peters did the aptly-named Helms and Peters - Out Loud podcast. Topics ranged from writing code to planning to running one's own business. Very diverse topics but always relevant. I always found that both Hal and Jeff just had a way of conveying their meaning very effectively. The material never sounded dry or forced. I'm really looking forward to 5 consecutive days in a classroom environment led by Hal.

Big thanks to my company, Amcom Technology. Amcom's a relatively small shop, and this particular course is a bit more than what they're used to paying for conferences. I appreciate that they recognize the difference here (5 full days, 8 hours per day, small classroom environment) versus a traditional conference and that they agreed to foot the bill.

I also need to send out a thanks to Hal and company, for deciding to include the cost of the hotel in the price of the training (and not increasing the price of the training). It's probably fairly safe to say that I don't think I'd have been able to make it if it were a case of paying for the class, and paying for airfare, and then paying for a six night hotel stay.

Anybody else going? If so, my understanding is that the free hotel stay is only valid 'til the end of January. Also, I've seen a few discount codes posted... but not quite sure if I'm supposed to be re-posting them. If you're aware of a code, and you're aware that it's OK to post, feel free to leave it in the comments for others.

UPDATE:
Register with code "charlie" and receive a $250 discount! Are you still here? GO GO GO!

Oh, and if anyone else is arriving in Sarasota at 10:45pm Sunday evening and wants to split a cab from the airport, let me know

It's been almost a month since Joe Rinehart, one of the superstars of the ColdFusion community, and an all-around good guy, revealed that his wife Dale had been recently diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis (MS).

To get right to the point, some folks in the community got together and organized an effort to collect some funds to try and help offset the cost of medications and treatment. Please visit http://www.helpsupportjoeanddale.com to read a little bit more about the effort, and to help out if you can.

I know times are tough for many. I know there may be people saying, "That's really terrible and my heart goes out to them, but I've got problems of my own so I can't help out right now." I can sympathize with that. Hell, I can empathize with that. On the personal side of things, we're dealing with a house in FL that we've not been able to sell since we left over 2 years ago. It's pretty much devastated our finances. Believe me, I understand. I might even have thought that way myself. But here's a little story that might help explain why I'm going to do what I can (aside from "Every little bit helps", which is true, of course).

Last year at cf.Objective(), I was sharing a hotel room with Scott Stroz, who is good friends with Joe. One night, at roughly 1:30 am (my memory's spotty on this, but it was late), Joe came knocking on the door looking visibly concerned/upset and asked Scott if he could come over to his room for a bit. Turns out what had happened is that while in his room, Joe heard a commotion coming from the room next to his. A commotion that clearly involved a woman being hit by somebody. He went over to the room, knocked on the door, and got the woman out. She was a bit shaken up, for obvious reasons. Joe wanted to call security, but she asked him not to. She knew this person and wasn't comfortable turning him in. After some lengthy discussion, Joe convinced her that calling security was the best course of action. She relented, and he made the call. Security came up to his room, and handled the situation from there.

I'm not quite sure what would have happened if Joe didn't get involved. But I do know that night likely would have ended much worse for her.

You might be wondering how this relates to the current situation. I thought a lot that night (and since that night) about what Joe did. Not only what Joe did... but what most other people would have done. Even what I would have done. Most people, I believe, would have turned up the TV to drown out the noise, and gone to sleep figuring it wasn't their problem. Why get involved? Maybe some would have made a call to security before turning up the TV. Surely that's getting involved "enough"? It wasn't for Joe. I'd imagine that he was concerned about what might happen in between the time he called security and the time it took them to get there. In any event, what it boils down to is that he knew somebody was in trouble (somebody he didn't even know), and acted on it immediately, with little regard for his own safety, in order to get that person out of harm's way.

Being in the ColdFusion community, I know as much as most of you do about Joe Rinehart the professional. He's intelligent, he's innovative, he enjoys teaching others, and he contributes a good amount of his own work back to the community. That night showed me quite a bit about Joe Rinehart the person. I know that if it were somebody in my family that needed help, it wouldn't matter what was going on in Joe's life. He'd do something to help. If it were someone in your family, he'd do something to help. There are precious few things in this life that I'm 100% sure about. That's one of them.

The http://www.helpsupportjoeanddale.com page will be up for as long as it needs to be. If you can't give something today, I urge you to give something when you can. I'd appreciate it if you could share the link with others, both inside and out of the ColdFusion community.

Thank you.

the much anticipated new-look of the http://www.halhelms.com web site was unveiled today. aside from the face-lift is an assessment to determine your "OO-Readiness". of course, i failed miserably with a score of 46.9%. altho admittedly that's about what i'd have expected, so no big surprise there.

think you're OO-Ready? take the quiz and find out.

UPDATE: as mentioned on ray camden's blog:

Be sure to scroll down when you get your results. I didn't notice it under his ad, but he goes through every question and explains the ones you get wrong. This is where the really valuable advice is."

over at amcom the boss has been asking us developer types to make use of the amcom technology blog a bit more than we had been. ok, a bit more than *i* had been (jon messer's been an animal posting about coldbox and transitioning from procedural to OO and is in the midst of a yet-to-be-published flex entry (rhymes with 'whizz')).

i've posted my first two entries, and will likely start transitioning to posting more frequently over there. if you're subscribed here, feel free to subscribe over there to follow me, jon, tariq, and the rest of the team.

on one of my current projects, i needed to barcode a document (via CF) and subsequently read the barcode (again, via CF). the documents would be sent via fax and rerouted to the CF server.

because of its durability, my client wanted to use a data matrix barcode. as luck would have it, ryan stille had already gone through the trouble of putting together a CFC for reading and generating data matrix barcodes (thanks, ryan!).

the CFC is a wrapper for some java libraries that read and write barcodes. in the docs for the CFC, ryan suggests a company called Java4Less.com. i grabbed evaluation versions of the appropriate libraries to ensure they'd work, which they did. i then instructed my client to go ahead and make the purchase and told him which 2 libraries we needed. now, Java4Less offer up a few components and i've been a bit sleep deprived and long story short, one of the libraries that i told the client to purchase was not the correct library.

the purchase process involves making a payment, and then receiving a link where you can access the product(s) that you've purchased. payment was made... and shortly thereafter we got an email from one of the Java4Less guys double checking to make sure that we were ordering the right components (we weren't). i'm guessing that the incorrect component we requested didn't quite "fit" well with the other one, and sent up a red flag. but it was very cool that the company noticed that red flag, and acted on it.

i responded, explaining what we were looking to do and got a confirmation back that we had definitely ordered the wrong item, and that they'd make sure the right components were in place at the download link.

the customer service didn't end there.

the other night i was implementing the barcoding, and got errors while instantiating the reader. java errors. not being a java guy, i immediately panicked. fired an email off to Java4Less with the error message (big old cfdump), our JVM version, and anything else i could think of that would help them to isolate the issue. less than a day later, i got an email response that i was missing a jar file. one of the components (which come zipped) had 2 jar files. apparently i had only extracted one. disaster averted.

it's really been a while since i've seen that kind of customer service. both proactive (in the case of our incorrect order) and reactive (in the case of me being an idiot). if you find yourself in the market for one of the following products, you can definitely buy from Java4Less with confidence.

over the past few weeks, i've had the opportunity to start playing around with some of the AJAX functionality built into ColdFusion 8. cfajaxproxy makes me happy.

in a nutshell, cfajaxproxy creates a "bridge" between client side javascript and a ColdFusion CFC. it's nowhere near the full blown AJAX framwork that jQuery is, but rather reminds me of JSMX, which is a very lightweight AJAX framework that does little beside facilitating communication between client and server. while it allowed you to pass data from the client to the server, and receive data back, it assumed that you would write the corresponding code to manipulate the client based on the data that was sent back from the server. i'm pretty comfortable with javascript, so i was ok with that. cfajaxproxy is essentially the same thing. no bells-and-whistles per se, but as far as i'm concerned, that's perfectly ok.

working on a model-glue application, i found myself in a situation where a <cfwindow> would come in handy. it's on a page that displays a list of items that belong to a user. for each item, the user can add a "journal entry". this is simply a plain text field and a time/date stamp. each entry displayed on the page has a link for "journal" that pops up a cfwindow that shows all of that item's journal entries, along with a form (a simple textarea) allowing the user to add a new entry.

using <cfform> allows the form submission to stay within the <cfwindow>, which worked great. a standard post allowed the page to refresh after the form was submitted (and the record inserted into the database), so it seemed to be a pretty user-friendly way to allow multiple journal entries to be added to an item. when the user was done adding entries, simply close the cfwindow.

here's where things got funked up... the first form submission worked great. the form's action page called an event-handler that did the insert, and added a named result to the event to redirect back to the journal.viewJournal event, which (obviously) displayed the contents of the journal. the event needed the concept of a transactionID, so i used the append attribute of the result tag as follows:

1. <result name="success" do="journal.viewJournal" redirect="true" append="transactionID" />

when i went to add a second entry, however, the cfwindow tried to reload into the main/parent window. no matter how many times i tried, the first submission would work (the form submitted to the cfwindow), but the second submission would break (the form submitted to the parent window). realizing i needed the big guns, i whipped out firebug.

it seemed the original submission (the one that worked consistently) had a few parameters that would appear to have been added by CF:

• _cf_clientid
• _cf_containerID
• _cf_nocache
• _cf_nodebug
• _cf_rc

so, i tried adding them to the append attribute of the result tag as follows:

1. <result name="success" do="journal.viewJournal" redirect="true" append="transactionID,_cf_clientid,_cf_containerID,_cf_nocache, _cf_nodebug,_cf_rc" />

fixed things right up. i could do submission after submission after submission, and they all worked within the cfwindow. not being the type of person who believes in overkill, and out of a bit of curiosity, i did try whittling down the list. seems all i really needed was the _cf_containerID (makes sense, since it was the concept of the container that was being lost). so, the code ultimately turned out to be:

1. <result name="success" do="journal.viewJournal" redirect="true" append="transactionID,_cf_containerID" />

and with that... i'll call it an evening.