RSS feed for InstantSpot site A little bit of what interests me.

New Home

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 19:08:00 GMT

I think most people know that I have moved my blog. I will do this from time to time. I really liked Instant spot and it was my first Tech related blog and I enjoyed the year here. I still regularly stop by and read most of the new posts. For now my blog home resides at http://blog.kukiel.net which it probably always will but I'm always looking at the different blogging engines especially Coldfusion ones and have multiple dev installs of BlogCFC, Mango and FarCry. Thanks to Arron and Dave for there support though out the year.

Reverse Proxy In Ubuntu

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 22:51:00 GMT

The last few days I have spend some time setting up 2 new servers. One running Railo on Ubuntu and the other Coldfusion in Windows. I needed to host this on a single IP address and needed both machines available on the internet. There are 2 ways I know of that can accomplish this task 1. Using Microsoft ISA and 2 Using Apache as a reverse proxy. As I already have Apache up and running I went with option 2. While a seemingly trivial task I had never done this before and got hung up a few times the following are the steps I took:

Flex, Data grids and Excel

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 04:00:00 GMT

I write a lot of data-focused applications, a lot of grids, reports updates and inserts. It's the usual stuff the business wants, Flex and Coldfusion work really well together for this sort of thing. We produce quite a few custom reports using the often unknown little gem that comes for free with cf Coldfusion Report Builder. It can be clunky but I doubt there is a quicker way to produce what we need. When all this is said and done and we are happy with what we have produced ( and so is the business of course ) they seem to inevitably come back with "This report is great, any chance I can get it in excel?" As per usual it was required ASAP. We already write out several reports into excel but each report is different and I was after a generic solution. I was directed to this article by Dale Fraser: http://www.cflex.net/showfiledetails.cfm?ObjectID=298 Which didn't really work and had a few issues not surprising it was for Flex 1. Plus I felt that all the HTML was unnecessary and I was after a cleaner simpler solution. I didn't want to restrict the use to IE either so the js was to go aswell. What I came up with was a solution that loops the datagrid columns ( hidden and seen ) and produces a tab separated block of text that will paste into excell perfectly separating the grid columns into nice excel columns. It even takes into consideration label functions. The accountants where happy and could now paste into excel with 1 click and manipulate the data in anyway they want. You can see an example of this where I grab the rss feed from fullasagoog and tidy it up a bit and put it in a grid. Let the grid load up, click copy, open excel, click in a cell and paste. It works on mac and windows ( I'll assume linux my desktop is at home so I cant test ) in ie, safari and firefox. http://code.kukiel.net/dgc I also enabled code view.

Adobe MAX day 3

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 02:40:00 GMT

Well I am back home and the excitement has begun to die down. I've begun running trough my notes on new idea's and products to try out and my wife is probably sick of me talking about Adobe, Coldfusion and Flex for a while and I'm actually looking forward to heading back to work. Day 3 was still a fun day where I participated in the Coldfusion/Flex/Live cycle lab. Some of what we went over I was already currently using but I did pick up few tricks one of those was that while there is a connection limit to the included LCDS services in CF 8 standard the limit is around 1000 which is more then I need for the current app, but still good to know. I spent some more time at the CF Unconference where I sat in on the CF Uber panel which will be on the CF Conversations podcast. I also got to meet Joe Rinehart the creator of Model Glue. He talked about Broadchoice and the technologies used. He actually spoke a bit on Groovy which I already have been thinking or looking at but after some of the quick demos I intend to take a closer look. I also sat in on a session where I was introduced to the webserver stress tool. A mid priced web stress testing tool. http://www.paessler.com/webstress/download ( I'm sorry I forgot the name of the presenter ). I also went to the very last session on what's new in Flex 4 and there are some nice new things, the integration of Flex Unit for one, 2 way data binding ie testInput.text ="{@myValue}", the separation so a designer can do there thing and the dev there's, the tighter CF intergration and more. I hope I get to attend next year and catch up with everyone I met but I definitely intend to keep in touch with you all.

Adobe Max 2008 Day 2

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 13:09:00 GMT

Well it's the end of Day 2 at 2008 Adobe MAX and I have to say I was impressed. I really like the look of the new ColdFusion IDE "Bolt" and it really looks like its gong to work well with CF9 and Flex, which to me is a huge plus. Ive been using CF Eclipse for a while now but a true ColdFusion extension its going to be great. The ability to type datasoure=" and have a lookup to available data sources is really nice. The right click and generate a CRUD from the IDE looks like what we can do in Flxbuilder already but is still nice although with all the noise of Hibernate ORM integration it surprises me that we didn't see right click of a table, from a datasource and a CRUD generation using hibernate and CF. Although Ben did mention "Other frame works" I can only assume this is still to come. I'm also really looking forward to Adobe Catalyst ( formerly Thermo ) as I'd really like to be able to produce some more applications that don't look like standard Flex apps. I attended 2 labs High Powered ColdFusion by Dave Watts and Extending Flex components with Matt Boles. Both were great sessions but it was the Flex session which in the first 10 mins I saw a solution that would help me cut down code by fixing some hacks I used to get around things I wasn't sure you could do. Lastly the sneak peaks did show a server side implementation of actionscript as a .sas file that is compiled on the fly and includes but the usual Flex code for displaying the data and the server side code for retrieving the data from the data base. This is interesting but I don't think we will see this available for some time as currently CF and AS are a really nice fit. Bolt information/Beta signup: http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Bolt (shame about the .php ? ) Oh and I forgot to mention there are plugin's for Flex support into Visual studio 2008: http://www.ensemble.com/

Adobe Max Day 1

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 05:12:00 GMT

Well MAX is definatly bigger then I initially thought. It was the biggest turn out at any MAX event topping 5000 attendees. The opening session was full of Flash and the recent Flash 10 release ( including many mentions of AIR 1.5 ) and even included a visit from Arnie's wife Maria Shriver ( First Lady of California ). Strangely absent was any news of ColdFusion although Flash being Adobe 's best known product ( other then Acrobat ) its not surprising that's what they focused on. I was almost sad as they talked about Flash on the iPhone ( as I just got a new Blackberry ) and while they say they don't have it yet I highly doubt Adobe haven't done there part and actually have it running on the device. I was impressed with the CF un-conference and got to meet, in person Ben Forta, Ray Camden, Sean Corfield and Brian Meloche. I finished the night with the Meet the CF team and the CMFL BoF's which was great to meet the team and hear Ben give away some hint's relating to CF9. Not really hints but anything cool he refused to answer I took as a hint ? It was great to hear Gert from Railo and other members of the committee discuss the standardisation of core cfml functions as choice gives freedom and I hope the 2 big open source CFML engines ( Railo and Open Blue Dragon ) can help promote cfml as a alternative to php. I'm really looking forward to tomorrow key notes with Ben regarding Centaur.

Adobe Max 2008

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 22:57:00 GMT

From the first moment I learnt of Adobe Max ( Vegas 2006 ) I wanted to go. It wasn't until this year that I became as big a fan Adobe due to a position change and working with Flex and Coldfusion. I'm really excited and can't wait to see/meet some of my internet idols and look forward to news regarding Coldfusion 9 and Flex 4.

Looping over objectElements in an arraycollection

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 02:15:00 GMT

Looping over objectElements in an arraycollection

Alternate CFML engines

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 02:22:00 GMT

I've recently spent some time looking at alternative CMFL engines Including Open Blue Dragon and Railo. I've set up a spare server running VMware Server 2 which is just great and surprisingly, even on older hardware, performs quite well running multiple VM's simultaneously. The Open Blue Dragon image worked perfectly and although I haven't used Linux as a server for some time it was easy enough to get Samba working so I could edit from a remote machine. I endeavour to spend more time with BD in the coming months. The real surprise was Railo. It had a nice installer ( windows 2k3 server ). Worked without issue and following Gert Franz's how to I was up and running in IIS without too much trouble (once I got the hang of resin.conf ). The admin section was great and I had no trouble connecting to Mysql, MS SQL 2005 and 2008 without changing anything. I really like how close it replicates CF8's special features and so far have had no issues with generating PDFs with cfdocument, reading/writing/manipulating images with cfimage and reading rss feeds with cffeed. The one caveat with anything other than ColdFusion is the lack out an out of the box, working AMF solution. So in the short term Ill be sticking with CF8 but defiantly intend to set up a Railo box at home for prototyping.

iPhone and Flash again

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 19:10:00 GMT

As I will shortly be in the market for a new phone the re-emerging rumours of flash on the iPhone sound good to me. I have heard some criticism about the iPhone but I still feel that I want one regardless of the issues an hearing more about Adobe and Apple working on a solution gets my hopes up. www.webkitchen.be/2008/10/01/flash-on-the-iphone-confirmed-we-said-nothing-new/ http://www.flashmagazine.com/news/detail/flash_for_the_iphone_confirmed_at_fotb/ At the moment I'm not really sure what other phones I should be looking at but hope withign the next few weeks I make a decision. Finger crossed Adobe and Apple work this one out sooner rather then later.

Adding Clickable links and TextArea.html

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 16:56:00 GMT

I really wanted clickable links in my Twitter pod and I saw how easy Steve did it so I used his really nice regex. As per my original design I really wanted my Twitter feed to be a bit less generic so I remove my name from the start of each post and add a date stamp each entry looping over the 10 most recent tweets. I'm quite happy with the result. At first I was only using TextArea.text and not getting nice links when I saw there is also TextArea.html this is really nice and I can see many places I can use this in any data centric application.

Code View

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:23:00 GMT

I tried to get my code view working for my Twitter Pod but it seams there is a bug in Flex 3 that wont let me specify the code view source. Every time I change it Flexbuilder changes it back when it exports the release build. And here is the bug report at Adobe. It was already entered but I put my vote forward hopefully they fix it. bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FB-13194

Twitter, Flex and Coldfusion

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 21:40:00 GMT

Well I have been playing with a new homepage and wrote a small section of code to display my twitter feeds using CFFEED. This is a great tag and I was able to in 4 lines of code read my feed and loop over it displaying it nicely. It was only a small step to port it into a flex widget which you can see on the side of my blog. I'll post up the code shortly.

CFEclipse

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 16:36:00 GMT

CFEclipse and its XML files.

Coldfusion Forums

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 18:15:00 GMT

I don't mind browsing an online forum now and then and I really liek to have a place I can go to ask questions. Mailing lists are great but often I tend to skip over alot of emails. So I did some searching and found the following Coldfusion forums....

Subeclipse in Flexbuilder

Tue, 20 May 2008 15:01:00 GMT

I wanted to intergrate SVN into Flexbuilder. As flexbuilder doesn't include all the java plugins installing SubEclipse took 1 or 2 extra steps. I found this blog post which worked for me withotu issue: http://www.flexer.info/2008/04/30/how-to-install-subclipse-on-flex-builder-3/ It's working great. Now to find a MS SQL explorer plugin so I don't need Enterprise manager open as well.

Adobe Air Camp

Sat, 17 May 2008 15:13:00 GMT

I recently attended Adobe's Air Camp ( Melbourne Australia ). There was quite a large turn out and a surprising amount of interest. I spoke with a few people and, as noted by Adobe, one of the key points is due to Adobes push for cross platform frameworks.

I'd say 70% of laptops I saw there were Macs and 100% of the Adobe staff were on Macs. I sat with a few guys who basically said if this didnt run on Linux then they wouldn't have been there that day. I think this is a good thing for Adobe. I have personally been using Flexbuilder in OSX, Windows and I played with it in Linux all with great success.

One of the nice things Adobe is doing is working hard to integrate its products and although I don't use CS3, others at work do and now they can design UI in Flash and Fireworks then pass that onto a developer to implement the logic.

The presenters and their blogs were:

Andrew Spaulding - http://www.flexdaddy.com/

Mark Blair - http://www.blairsblog.com/

Matt Voerman - http://blog.schematic.com.au/

Coldfusion XML Unformat

Thu, 08 May 2008 15:38:00 GMT

I found this function very usefull just recently so I though I'd share. Description This is a simple UDF which does the exact opposite of CFMX's XmlFormat() function. Specifically, it replaces the following five characters in XML-escaped data with their normal equivalents: > with > < with < ' with ' " with " & with & http://cflib.org/udf.cfm?ID=800 "This is a simple UDF which does the exact opposite of CFMX's XmlFormat() function. Specifically, it replaces the following five characters in XML-escaped data with their normal equivalents: > with > < with < ' with ' " with " & with &" http://cflib.org/udf.cfm?ID=800

Macbook and Wifi

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 20:15:00 GMT

Well after wiping Leopard and rolling back to Tiger I was really disappointed as I had the same wifi dropping issue. This time I knew it wasn't specific to Leopard so I began to investigate options to fix this permanently. After much trial and error I came across this: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1017323&start=50&tstart=0 which while I had to cross my fingers and hope for the best on reboot worked! So now I have my environment set back up and a reliable wifi connection. I guess I will try Leopard again when 10.5.3 is released. BTW this is not affecting everyone but it seams it's specific to the router/access point you are using as Apple Airport AP's seam to have no issue.

Coldfusion on OSX ( again )

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 00:56:00 GMT

Well the CF 8 install on leopard was working well the constant wifi drop outs I was experiencing were just not worth the price on the "newest and shiniest" OS. So today I wiped the old partition and reinstalled OSX 10.4. Ill follow the same steps as before on hopefully have my setup running again soon.