Mark Drew (Redux)- cf_etc...

I am thinking of doing a range of blog posts related to common development patterns that I have seen implemented. These are not exactly Design Patterns, but practices that I see and have implemented myself.

To kick of this series, I thought I would talk about your application's settings depending on environment. As a background I was working on a Galleon application that in development runs on Apache with MySQL and in Staging/Live it runs on IIS and MS SQL. Generally you want to keep your environments the same of course, but the main changes were simply table names, emails and URLs so all the code was fine.

One of the things that annoyed me was that before I could check in my code to SVN, I would have to change the settings.ini.cfm file, putting all the live settings in there.

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As I was getting my presentation on ColdSpring ready for A Wee Dram of Scotch, I come across the following problem, that none of my webservices would work! I started getting the following error:

coldfusion.jsp.JavaCompiler$UnknownCompiler: Unable to run the internal Java compiler: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: javax/tools/StandardJavaFileManager.

Following a bunch of blogs and thanks to Peter Freitag, the answer was simple, move the tools.jar from your <ColdFusion Install>/lib (or <JRUN Install>servers/cfusion/cfusion-ear/cfusion-war/WEB-INF/cfusion/lib ) and restart the server. Bam... back to webservices working fine again. I am just putting this either to help other people, or to help me next time I forget about this

I just finished presenting my "Better living through configuration" presentation at A Wee Dram of Scotch in London. Its a great presentation so far with Adam Lehman and Claude from Adobe kicking off the proceedings and showing the (possible) Hibernate features in Centaur (or the "Eagerly Awaited next version of ColdFusion"). 

The rest of the day should be really interesting, and currently Peter Bell is telling us about RAD OO.

This is the smallest conference I have been to, and I think its great, there are only about 70 people in the same room and its only one day... a great way to really meet other developers (rather than the immense scale of other conferences)

If the wireless picks up, I shall try and post some more today, if not I shall give you a breakdown (after the hangover ) tomorrow!

In the meantime, here is my presentation and code for you to play with!

Coming up this Thursday 25th of September, the "a Wee Dram of Scotch" one day conference is taking place in London.

This is a great replacement to the cancelled CFDevCon that was meant to be happening over in Brighton, but alas didn't for various reasons. Which brings to mind whether we should have more conferences like this, one day, very cheap (at £10 for entry its surely the cheapest conference there is!) but with still some awesome speakers such as Sean Corfield, Peter Bell and Mike Brunt, not to mention Adam Lehman from Adobe doing the keynote!

So what do you think? Should there be more one day conferences? Would you like your CFUG to cover this instead? More cheap (or free) training in your locality?

Also, how would we expand the use of CF? Is this a good medium for this?

Would love to hear people's opinions on this.

During the CFUnited 2008 Conference in DC, most speakers were able to record their presentations onto Adobe Connect. This is a great feature for most presentation styles (of course not all, since you might want to have a discussion, rather than a presentation), rather than just filming the speaker. Here are the Adobe Connect presentations that have been posted so far:

• CFEclipse reloaded: http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p69604765/
• Coldspring: Better living through configuration http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p37989763/

You can see the other presentations posted here and here Let me know what you think!

Next week, CFUnited DC gets on the way, and what a busy conference it will be! Having checked my schedule it looks like it will be a real marathon for me. Here is my schedule: Wed 1:30 - 2:30 : ColdSpring: Better living through configuration Wed 8:30pm - 9:30pm : Improving quality through code reviews and mentoring Thurs 9:30 - 10:30: Fresh Air: Getting to grips with Aptana and AIR applications Fri 9:45-10:45: CFEclipse Reloaded Fri 11:00 - 12:00: Jing Demo (5 mins) Fri 11:00 - 12:00: Railo Demo (10 mins) Sat 9:45-10:45: CFEclipse Reloaded Sat 2:45-3:45: ColdSpring: Better living through configuration You might ask what the Jing and Railo Demo's are about, well, you are just going to have to turn up and find out! :) Hope to see you all there!

As promised, I wanted to share my "ColdSpring: Better Living through Configuration" presentation materials. I am not including the source code, since its very simple and its covered in the presentation itself (and if you work through it, you will get a better understanding!) Attachment: ColdSpringScotch2008.pdf

Tomorrow I shall be heading to Edinburgh for the fantastic Scotch on the Rocks conference. I know Andy Allan has been working really hard to get this conference going and last year's event was a real blast! This year I shall be presenting a couple of topics, ColdSpring: Better Living through Configuration and a new topic which is FreshAIR: Developing Adobe AIR applications using Aptana Studio. This makes a change to my usual CFEclipse presentations and I have been working hard on making them both informative and entertaining (no, no juggling... sorry!) I am really looking forward to meeting some old friends as well as new ones! So come and say hello!

Sean mentioned last night, due to Hal Helms being unable to come to cfObjective because of health reasons a few sessions have been flipped about but like one of those slidey puzzles where you are trying to get those squares in order to make a picture of a butterfly, there is still a slot missing. I shall try to fill in that slot with a introductory presentation into ColdSpring called "ColdSpring: Better living through configuration". Since its a last minute change, I am hoping *some* people will turn up! I actually enjoy doing this presentation so it should be a laugh if anything!

One of the downfalls of the current cfform implementation of validation is that it only does it on the client side (as far as I have used it, it might have changed). So, you design your form, add some client side validation, then realise that people without javascript enabled are sending junk and you have to re-implement the validation server side. So far so good. But then you are asked to change the validation ("hey, check it really is a creditcard number before we send it to the payment gateway", your boss says) and you implement that on the server side, and then copy the functionality to the client side. The list of changes go on, you go make a cup of coffee and forget to implement one side of the validation somewhere. With EventValidation, you define your validations in one place and you just define whether you are using client side validation. Lets check it out. Here is our modified form from before, and you notice, there is only one change, adding client="true" to the ev:setup tag (and make sure you import the form tags from "/EventValidator/taglib/form" as well as the showerror="true"): <h1>Register</h1>
<cfimport prefix="ev" taglib="/EventValidation/taglib">
<cfoutput>
<form action="#ViewState.getValue("myself")#register.action" method="post" >
<ev:setup id="ev_Register" successEvent="register.action" client="true" showerror="true">
<div>
<label for="email">email:</label>
<input type="text" name="email" id="email" value="#ViewState.getValue("email")#">

<label for="password">password:</label>
<input type="password" name="password" id="password" value="#ViewState.getValue("password")#">
</div>
<div>
<input type="submit">
</div>
</form> What happens when you call this page, the form fields are replaced with a normal formfield and a hidden div. Also, javascript links are added to the header (in this case JQuery, the form plugin and the EventValidator setup script), which setup your form and the AJAJ based calls are added to the forms on the page (of course, it only adds it to forms that need it!) And that is it, your headaches gone. Apart from one, you would need to make a Virtual Directory on your web server to the "EventValidator/scripts" so you can have access to these scripts, but what if you can't do that (or cant be bothered?). The easiest way to change that is to copy the scripts from EventValidator/scripts somewhere else and change the scriptsrc attribute in the ev:setup tag: <ev:setup id="ev_Register" successEvent="register.action" client="true" showerror="true" scriptsrc="/scripts/"> Now you are all sorted and can see it working.