Mark Drew (Redux)- cf_etc...

Even thought I was late, and the room we had booked had no air-con I actually enjoyed last night's presentation on ColdSpring and Model Glue 2.0: Unity. There wasnt a major turn out (about 12 people) but considering we had to re-schedule it twice it was pretty good! I did promise to make my presentation available and this time I didnt bother recording it (takes so long afterwards to make the podcast with the slide presentations etc, I must find a better way of being able to record a presentation, images + voice and then switch to video+voice for the demos.) You can download the presentation from here!

I shall finally be presenting ColdSpring and Model Glue 2.0: Unity tonight at the UK CFUG after two (!) re-shedulings, one because I wasnt feeling well that week (oh, the headaches!) and then because of the England game last week (2-0 against Trinidad and Tobago! En-Ger-Laaand!), so its nice to finally do it. This is going to be an interesting presentation as nearly 90% of it doesnt even touch ColdFusion code but I shall still be creating an application faster than you have ever seen. This is a definate presentation to get yourself informed on some advanced ColdFusion frameworks that will change the way you code. Sign up for the presentation over at the UKCFUG website and join me and Niklas Richardson for a beer afterwards too!

An exciting bit of news! Joe Rinehart has finally released Model Glue 2: Unity as a beta. This version of MG is very exciting for a few of reasons, 1) it uses coldspring for its configuration which means you now only need one file to configure Model Glue and Reactor 2) It comes with built-in support for Reactor 3) It does Scaffolding for you! This is very neat as a demo but its an awesome feature, you can just define the objects you will scaffold and it will create all the forms and listing pages for you. These can then be copied into your views and modified as you need them. Its a great time saving feature. It is amaxing to be able to write a whole app without a single line of CF, all is done in the config files. Absolutely awesome! I shall be demonstrating this on next week's UKCFUG (which was moved from tonight to next week due to the World Cup, or more importantly, England Vs Trinidad & Tobago!!!)

After a number of days it looks like the model-glue site is back up! Hurrah! Now you can all download your MG core files and get on with those projects. It looks like they have also moved their hosting to HostMySite.com. I am thinking of looking for a new host for this blog, but I might do it over here in blighty rather than in some USA datacenter.

I just got pinged by Joe Rinehart: model-glue.com, clearsoftware.net, doughughes.netand boyzoid.com are all moving servers at the moment and hence they are down. Joe is on the case and all should return to normal soon. your patience, apreciated it is.

Ben Forta, Sean Corfield, Ray Camden, Spike Milligan in the house. Joe Rinehart, Doug Hughes, Simeon Bateman, Rob Rohan, Ollie Tupman in the house.
Jared Rypka-Hauer, Nathan Strutz,  Mike Nimer, Tim Buntel is out the house. 

Just a little sing song for all the people who have helped and taught me things about ColdFusion and CFEclipse along the way.

THANK YOU!
(Check out the song on )

As Joe steams on towards a Version 2 of the Model-Glue framework he has managed to update version 1.1.10 of the framework with some performance tweaks. This is great news! (and for me about a week too late, nevermind  Joe, you are doing awesome work)

I have to say that Model-Glue is an awesome framework that I am really enjoying using. Also that Joe is a superstar and has helped me out over the last week getting an application live. So much kudos to him and you definately buy him something.... does he have a wish-list? and if not, why not?! Buy him something nice instead.

Edit: He DOES have a wish list

Ok, a bad put for a headline, but I have to give a massive thank you to Joe Rinehart. His Model Glue framework has literally saved my bacon this week.  He also gave me some great pointers over the last three days, standard stuff really but during the heat of battle he clarified how it should work very nicely.

I have done my first commercial (i,e. paid for by a client at work) application in Model Glue. For this application (I cant say who its for or much about what it does yet) I had estimated would take me 5 to 7 days to build. Unfortunately another project got in the way and I had a hard deadline for this project which left me with THREE days to build it. I used MG and Reactor for this applicaiton, starting on wednesday and I got it finished, with tweaks and testing by friday at 6pm, with enough time to go down the pub.

The experience of being able to do a well structured, documented application in three days, all the while knowing you havent "Kludged" or put things together with bits of string to make the deadline is a very good sensation.

So a massive hats of to Joe Rinehart and also to Doug Hughes for the two frameworks that are a REAL time saver.

On a side note, I made some modifications to CFEclipse as I mentioned before, and even though they are not production ready or fully featured, the component insight has helped a hell of a lot with this project.

From ... me! I am now going to be doing some podcasts mainly presenting CFEclipse and Coldfusion notes and rambles, plus other things I hope. This is mainly a way of publishing some of the presentations that I have been doing so there will be video podcasts (vodcasts) as well as your "standard" voice based ones.

The first podcast that you can get by susbcribing to the link under RSS & Podcasts on the second pod on the right, has the first part of my Model-Glue presentation at the UK CFUG.

If you use iTunes (which I recomend!) copy the link and use the Advanced -> Subscribe to podcast menu item and paste in the following RSS feed: http://markdrew.libsyn.com/rss. The nice thing about the first podcast is that it gives you all the slides within the podcast as well as links to each of the items (this works well in iTunes)

Let me know what you thnk and submit any ideas of what you would like to have on the podcast!

(you can of course, go straight to the podcast by clicking here)

First off, a big thanks to the people that come to the UK CFUG last night. It was a nervous presentation for me since:
a) I am not an expert on the subject
b) Niklas (the host) wasnt going to be there as he is up in Edinbrugh
c) I had rushed the presentation off the previous night

But it all turned out ok in the end.

As has been requested I am making available the presentation and the little blog application I created to demonstrate Model-Glue and Reactor. If you are downloading the blog  application intending to use it, dont. It was just to demo a few aspects of the frameworks.

After the weekend I shall sort out a podcast of (some) of the presentation, I really need to figure out how to record more than one hour (the max it seems for Garageband), or make my presentations smaller!

In the zip, apart from the template site you can also find the FormUtil.cfc component that I created to quickly build a form from a Reactor record object, it isnt feature complete as I mentioned in the presentation, but it should give you some ideas on how to improve it (and if you want to improve it, send me the changes!!!)

If you want to know how to use this, its fairly simple, you instantiate the FormUtils with the reactor object, and then you can get the string content for a form by calling the getFields method, passing in the table name and the Reactor record object:

It was also really great to finally meet up with a couple of people who's blogs I have been following a lot in person, so a big hello to Andy Jarett (have a great time in Mexico!) and Alistair Davidson (Instant Badger-cooler in shades, but very funny fella!).

I might be doing another CFUG in the future about ColdSpring and Model Glue if people are interested. We are also looking for other topics to do presentations about, so any ideas are always welcome!