Apr 30, 2007

Ben Forta Presents ColdFusion 8 at DFWCFUG

Posted by: Dave L

We had a great venue for our presentation courtesy of Aidmatrix. They have a great presentation room with 3 giant screens and comfy chairs with data connections, power, and swivel trays to put your laptop on. SWEET! ;)

Dave intros ben and puts up a slide telling all of the stuff Ben has and is doing. It's a whole bunch of badassery. Check Ben Fortas blog for more.

Gives a disclaimer about features saying that everything he shows might not be around when it ships.

Focus on 3 things Developer Productivity, Integration, and Management and Administration.

Intergration as 2 parts

-integration to other adobe products

-integration to other systems

Developer Productivity:

Image manipulation and processing

cfimage tag

-border, captcha, convert, info, read, resize, rotate, write, writetobrowser

-IsImage(), ImageGetBlob()

-using java jai libraries with extensive additions

-some metadata for images

AJAX support

-support for JSON SerializeJSON(), DESerializeJSON(), IsJSON

-controls , widgets, Layout, Live asynchronous contorls

-cfinput autosuggest option (for small lists)

-can grab input from cfc (circle shows to display db activity)

-can bind form fields to other fields

-can customize pause

-datefield is html control (yahoo user interface)

-richtext editor for textareas (fck) (no image uploading)

-cfgrid html based with sorting, paging, small cf code to do it

-form binding built into cfselects

-cfwindow tag for a draggable dhtml window, closable, etc

-all can be styled with CSS

Eclipse plug-ins

-log browser

-ajax application wizard gens cfcs and cf code (similar to flex wizard)

-can debug the ajax code using cfdebug

Improved file i/o

-cfloop through file incrementally

-cfloop index =chars

cfdocument

-total pagecount currentpage number

REPORTING

-custom templates

-use css for styling

-conditional formatting

-render xml and html

cfc interfaces

-create object interface definitions

Argument Collections

-add arguments to tags using an argment structure (argumentscollection=)

Implicit Array Creation

-implicitly create arrays (single dimensional)

Implicit Structure creation

-implicitly create structures

Use javascript Oerators

-in all cfml expressions and in cfscript

CFFTP supports sftp

query caching when using cfqueryparam

cfcs now serialize properly

Integration

-dot net cfobject will talk to .NET assemblies within tte CLR

-can mix and match cf, java, and .net objects, classes, events

Full exchange client built in

-add task, meeting, calendar, contact

-has GET filters

-do all same things outlook can do programatically

On-Demand presentation

-cfpresentation tag: creates acrobat connect presentations on the fly, without needing access to a connect server (cfpresenter,cfpresentation slide)

-can build dynamic slides, on the fly

pdf's

-cfpdf tag obtain pdf file metadata, merge pdf files,extract pages from file,encryptpdf file

create page thumbnails, flatten pdf files, protect pdf files. execute DDX instruction sets

PDF forms

-cfpdfform tag, cfpdfformparam, cfpdfsubform

-populate forms, extract data from forms

-manipulate nested forms

-pass values to form

Flash Media Server Gateway

- new gateway added

Improved Management and Administration

-Server Monitoring: see activity, requests, usage details, load and more

User based administration and RDS

-define multiple user accounts and specify which coldFusion administrator pages each has access to

Per application Settings: mappings, custom tag paths, logging, debug settings

Thats all folks!

 
Oct 07, 2006

Testing podcasts with podserv

Posted by: Dave L
Testing a free easy way to deliver a podcast using cfblog ande blog fusion.
 
Sep 25, 2006

ColdFusion, Postgres and case sensitivity

Posted by: Dave L

One of the things I run into quite often is case sensitivty in postgres. This ususally happens with CF developers that have only worked in a Microsoft world (IIS, MSSQL, Access). Case problems dealing with the file system are pretty straight forward, if you just stick with all lowercase you are set. However case issues in the postgres database aren't quite that easy. There are two major things you have to deal with:

1.) table and field names

2.) data stored in fields

Now number one is just like the file system if you stick with lowercase table and field names you will have no problems. One of the things I discovered early on is that if your table name is similar to this: MyNewTable. The CF/jdbc driver will pass it to the postgres server as this: mynewtable. There is a way around that and that is to use quotes around the table and fieldnames. So: "MyNewTable" would work just fine, but for portabilities sake just use all lowercase and move on.

Number two is a pretty easy fix as well. I run into this wehn I have to do a text search or some sort of text type matching. There is a function in postgres that will allow you to select a field as all lowercase. It is called LOWER(). Then you just take whatever string has been passed to you and use the CF lcase() function to do the same. Here is a quick example:

SELECT * FROM mynewtable WHERE LOWER(textfield) = #lcase(form.searchword)# 

You can also use the LOWER() postgres function as part of the select statement. I have found that this is necessary when building a verity index from query data. Otherwise you will never be able to solve case issues when doing a search. Also you have to use the "as" part or else it will select all fieldnames as the name "lower" for some reason. Here is a quick example of a query to use when indexing table data :

SELECT 	course_id, LOWER(courses.course_name) as course_name FROM courses
 
Sep 04, 2006

Suse 10.1 runs vsftp natively not under xinetd

Posted by: Dave L
This isn't Coldfusion related but most web guys like to know how to admin their own servers especially ftp. In the past versions of Suse you had to start vsftpd through the xinetd service. Well per this little note, this is no more.  There is actually a script in /etc/init.d that lets you start and stop the ftp server. An FYI for all of you CF linux guys thinking of moving to Suse 10.1.
 
Aug 29, 2006

parsing .htm files as .cfm on CFMX 7

Posted by: Dave L

I have had a few instances in the past where I had to get CF to treat a .htm file as a .cfm file.This used to be really easy back in the CF 4/5 days with IIS. You just modified the IIS settings and told it to send .htm through the cf parser. It has gotten a little tricker in CF 6/7 on linux/apache. IIS I'm not usre about so I'll let someone else weigh in on that. One more quick thing before I get to the "how to" stuff I reccomend you exhaust allother options before you choose to do this. It opens a lot of hassles that you will have to deal with like pound signs and it's ust a bad idea to mix your logic and presentation.

So here is what I had to do:

1. Edit this xml file /opt/coldfusionmx7/wwwroot/WEB-INF/web.xml

Whether you are using CF's built-in webserver or not you need to edit this file. Find this in the xml file and underneath where that mapping closes you need to add:


CfmServlet
*.html



CfmServlet
*.html/*




CfmServlet
*.htm



CfmServlet
*.htm/*

After you have saved that file you need to restart cf. On my server it is "/etc/init.d/coldfusionmx7 restart" .

2. Then you will need to modify your apache virtual host or your httpd.conf depending how your server is set up. In the block of setting that cf adds to your config files:

JRunConfig Verbose false
JRunConfig Apialloc false
#JRunConfig Ssl false
JRunConfig Ignoresuffixmap false
JRunConfig Serverstore "/opt/coldfusionmx7/runtime/lib/wsconfig/1/jrunserver.store"
JRunConfig Bootstrap 127.0.0.1:51011
#JRunConfig Errorurl optionally redirect to this URL on errors
AddHandler jrun-handler .cfm .cfc .cfml .jsp .jws .htm .html

 

You change this:

AddHandler jrun-handler .cfm .cfc .cfml .jsp .jws

To this:

AddHandler jrun-handler .cfm .cfc .cfml .jsp .jws .htm .html

Now if you just want one virtual host to parse .htm and not others then only make this change in that sites virtual host instance.

I hope that saves a few folks from the many google searches and lost hours I have everytime I need to d this.

 

 

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