POLITICO.COM – New Site Design! (powered by ColdFusion)
Posted by Kevin in ColdFusion on December 10, 2011
Today (this morning in fact), we launched a new version of POLITICO.COM. I know political junkies (aka politicos) are very familiar with our site but for the uninitiated, POLITICO is a national political news source that covers mostly national political news stories. We have the website and a print newspaper that circulates throughout the DC area. Politico also runs PoliticoPro.com, a subscription based news service for certain verticals. Our parent company owns a number of other news properties, including TV stations and other web properties.
So why am I blogging about it? Because POLITICO is powered by ColdFusion. We flatten our CF to HTML for content distribution and our dynamic sites are all CF. So congrats to my colleagues at POLITICO for delivering another great example of the power CF in a high volume enterprise!
Goodbye Steve
Like most of you, I learned about the passing of Steve Jobs as the news broke yesterday. I was in a restaurant when the screen flashed the “breaking news” tag line followed by “Steve Jobs dies at 56 (1955-2011).” In my 35 years on this earth, I have never met Mr. Jobs. I know, it’s incredible to think that somehow I missed the same circles he ran in. The truth is, he ran in circles that just happened to be around most of us. He brought an insight to the technology world that many other tech companies still do not understand. His belief was that you should relentlessly focus on the customer and then all of the other ancillary stuff would fall into place. He had a vision for what products and services should be. He did not need to test them with a focus group, because he knew what people desired. He didn’t try to solve a problem with technology first, instead Steve worked backwards started with the customer first. Most companies fail to do that even today. In fact, I can only think of a few that think of the customer first … Google, Amazon, and my favorite company Zappos.
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Adobe MAX – No Real Server / CF News
Posted by Kevin in ColdFusion on October 7, 2011
Day 2′s keynote which is classically developer centric, had really nothing new in the server world and specifically CF. That is not to say that MAX did not have such news, but the keynote fell silent (and a little bit flat). In the years since Adobe has taken over MAX, Day 2 had little in the way of “news” but was always fun … at least I am told since this was my first MAX.
I have heard from reliable sources that the history of Day 2 keynotes was that pre-Adobe they used to be more serious like they were this year. Now since Adobe is big enough, they wanted to release developer related news on Day 2 as they used to. Indeed they had developer news, just none for the ColdFusion community. In fact, I tweeted what a failure it was to see a myriad of developer product icons on the screen but not one CF product icon. No acknowledgement of CF at a developer keynote, even in a graphic, is a missed opportunity to at least say … “CF Community … stay tuned.”
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Adobe MAX – Introducing the Adobe Creative Cloud
Posted by Kevin in ColdFusion on October 3, 2011
Keynote 1 – Design Centric
First we start with a record scratchin’ DJ as the Adobe team got ready for the big keynote. Then a classical violinist came out with a rock’ ballet. The visual opening was fantastic. Something I’d expect with the largest software company in the world.
With other major company keynotes, you expect the CEO of the company to present info about upcoming product releases. Not so with Adobe. The main keynote was Adobe’s CTO (chief technology officer) Kevin Lynch which is completely appropriate for a software company. Now my discussion of the keynote may not be as verbose as others, because frankly I am not a design guy which is where the focus of these products lie. However, I did find some of this ridiculously cool so I did want to highlight.
The big announcement from Adobe on the first day was Adobe Creative Cloud.
Adobe Creative Cloud
The Creative Cloud is broken down into three areas: Creative Services, Creative Community, and Creative Applications. Each user gets 20GB of storage to use.
Creative Services
This represents a number of services, some existing like Business Catalyst and some new like Typekit which Adobe announced today they acquired. Typekit is an interesting company, as a web service they make tons of fonts available to use on one’s website as a web font. No need to make the font into an image like we had to in the past. Truly a cool service. They have a free option for super small sites, but most will have to pay based on their page views per month. A fun example of the font potential is: http://lostworldsfairs.com/atlantis/
Creative Community
Not much here, other than the cloud allows you to share with other people more easily.
Creative Applications
Other than the traditional desktop apps, now Adobe will focus a lot of attention on touch devices. Some of the cooler apps in include Photoshop Touch and Proto (a wireframe tool).
Photoshop Touch got lots of wows in the audience because of its the 3D layer effect. Very cool.
This new Creative Cloud includes all of the creative desktop apps you’ve come to know and love plus all of these touch apps. Beta coming in November to Android as well as pricing information.
Adobe MAX – Let the Countdown Begin!
Posted by Kevin in ColdFusion on September 20, 2011
In just 2 weeks, Adobe MAX will be underway. The main Adobe MAX conference does have a few great ColdFusion related classes available but the “bread and butter” for ColdFusion developers will be the Unconference. Sadley, Adobe has relied heavily on the content of the Unconference. It seems that ColdFusion does not on the same level of emphasis as some of their other products. This is especially true in non-new release years. That being said, the Unconference as well as the MAX courses in CF that are offered make MAX well worth the time and money.
I also fully expect more information about CF10 to be announced. Although there has already been some good tidbits about CF 10 released at previous conferences, MAX is Adobe’s official conference and as such we can expect a bigger “show and tell.”
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ColdFusion Developers Week – Online Classes Available!
Posted by Kevin in ColdFusion on September 13, 2011
I just wanted to let you everyone know that this week is Adobe’s ColdFusion Developer Week. It started yesterday and will continue through Friday. What does this mean? Adobe will have a series of “online classes” on a number of various topics. I believe these courses will be available after next week, but if you have a need to watch them LIVE here is the list for the remaining topics this week. Perhaps you could watch on your lunch break or after work. Note, the registration site is in PACIFIC TIME, but the schedule listed below is in EASTERN TIME.
To register you need your Adobe.com membership login and password. http://adobe.com/go/cfdeveloperweek
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
1:00PM – 2:00PM US/Eastern
Improve Your ColdFusion Code Through Unit Testing
4:00PM – 5:00PM US/Eastern
Using ColdFusion Frameworks for Application Development
7:00PM – 8:00PM US/Eastern
Understanding and Using the ColdFusion Server Monitor
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
1:00PM – 2:00PM US/Eastern
ColdFusion Builder: The Professional IDE to Boost Your Productivity
4:00PM – 5:00PM US/Eastern
Expand Functionality with ColdFusion Builder Extensions
Thursday, September 15, 2011
1:00PM – 2:00PM US/Eastern
Developing Your First Application Using ColdFusion 9 and ORM
2:30PM – 3:30PM US/Eastern
Speed Up Your Apps with Caching in ColdFusion
4:00PM – 5:00PM US/Eastern
ColdFusion and Mobile – Browser-Based Applications Made Easy
7:00PM – 8:00PM US/Eastern
Become ColdFusion Empowered in Under an Hour
Friday, September 16, 2011
1:00PM – 2:00PM US/Eastern
Accessing ColdFusion Services From Flex Applications
2:30PM – 3:30PM US/Eastern
Securing your ColdFusion Applications
4:00PM – 5:00PM US/Eastern
Make Your Site Searchable with Solr
7:00PM – 8:00PM US/Eastern
Bringing ColdFusion to Java SpringMVC
Hurricane Irene and ColdFusion
Posted by Kevin in ColdFusion on August 27, 2011
As many of you know, I work for POLITICO in the DC area. Yes, this is the same area that experienced an 5.8 magnitude earthquake this week on Tuesday. Now we are staring down Irene, a hurricane that is threatening much of the east coast. So as you can imagine, the ColdFusion posts this week have been sparser than I would have liked. It has made landfall this morning in North Carolina and his heading up the coast. We suspect (that is my family and I) it will hit us tomorrow morning. Our previous residence was the Fort Worth area, where tornados were the weather threat to worry about. It has been about 9 or 10 years since we have experienced a full force hurricane, when we lived in Florida. In Texas we’d get the remnants of hurricanes that hit land and was on land for a few hundred miles. Of course, I lived in South Florida when Hurricane Andrew hit. That was a bit stronger, because it hit as a Category 5. I was not in the eye, but the damage was incredible.
So, being part of a news company (POLITICO, WJLA, TBD) all of our developers are on “emergency” standby, so that we can still deliver news in case of server issues. Needless to say, I won’t be whipping up Hurricane Irene related ColdFusion code examples for this event. Plus, I have stuff to secure outside!
I did remember an interesting post from another hurricane prone developer, in which he wrote a cool tracker for his hurricane tracking needs (or fun). Although this post is specific to his hurricane, it could be easily modified for the hurricane of your choice. Check out Ray Camden’s Hurricane Gustav tracker code from almost exactly 3 years ago (Thursday, August 28, 2008).
For those of you with me from the Carolinas up throughout the east coast, hunker down and be safe. If you are supposed to evacuate, do so! Had my stepmom not worked for the local hospital during Hurricane Andrew we would have promptly evacuated. There are no hurricane parties worth your life. Ok, that’s the end of my Public Service Announcement. I will likely tweet (@askBenore) our experience and when we are finally on the other side of the storm.
ValidateThis and Custom Rules and Conditions
Posted by Kevin in ColdFusion on August 16, 2011
This is PART THREE in my ValidateThis Series.
In my previous posts on the ValidateThis series, I introduced you to ValidateThis and its Rules (PART I) and then I showed you how you might overcome issues with multiple objects (PART II). Today’s post is an extension of those other posts. In the last post I left you wondering why I had a function in my combined object called user.cfc. Below, I am displaying function once again.
ColdFusion 9 and OS X Lion
Posted by Kevin in ColdFusion on August 13, 2011
This topic as been covered ad nauseum around the ColdFusion community, both on the Adobe site and through various CF bloggers. But let me recap the issue as of today:
What works:
- ColdFusion 9 and 9.0.1 single server instance fresh install on OS X Lion
- ColdFusion Administrator on single server instance (after reboot)
- ColdFusion 9 (not 9.0.1) multi server instances fresh install on OS X Lion (not recommended because 9.0.1 dies)
What doesn’t work:
- ColdFusion 9.0.1 multi server install on OS X Lion (known issue)
- Many ColdFusion 9 installs that ran before the Lion upgrade fail after the Lion upgrade (OS X document root issue)
ValidateThis and Multiple Objects
Posted by Kevin in ColdFusion on August 12, 2011
This is PART TWO in my ValidateThis Series.
So I ran into an issue with ValidateThis that took a little elbow grease to solve. Now, this may not be the most elegant solution but it works. If you have a better solution feel free to put it in the comments. The problem? I have a form that is going to be handled by two separate ORM objects. For example, I have a user form that has all the demographic user information including username and password but it also has a “group” selector. The user information gets saved to the user ORM object, whereas that group selector saves the corresponding user id and group id to a group/user lookup table handled by another ORM object.
In ValidateThis, you send a single object (or even the form field itself) to the validate function and it evaluates that object based on rules you set up. For an example of the rules, see my previous post titled: Validation Made Easy: ValidateThis. The problem is I could not send only the user object to be validated, because I also wanted rules based on the group selector. So I needed an object that contained items from both the user object and the group user object. So I created a CFC in my validation directory for just this purpose. Below is sample code used to illustrate my issue, it however is not my exact code base.