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Blog Archives - 19 Record(s)

Remove Filter Year: '2008' - Month: '7'

Implicit Views in ColdBox

Posted by Luis Majano
Jul 31, 2008 00:00:00 UTC
I really forgot to blog about this, but Tony Garcia has done an incredibly useful post about how to go about setting up ColdBox for Implicit Views. As part of his trajectory I even committed an update to the layout manager due to what he was trying to do. I really recommend that you read this article if you love conventions. Great Job Tony!!

ColdBox Eclipse Plugins Updated

Posted by Luis Majano
Jul 30, 2008 00:00:00 UTC
A new update version 1.0.4 is now online at the eclipse update site. So please update your ColdBox Eclipse plugins to get the latest and greatest.

If you don't know how to update your plugins, just head to the Eclipse Plugins Installation Guide

Thanks

Some ColdBox Forums Data Lost!

Posted by Luis Majano
Jul 28, 2008 00:00:00 UTC
I had a huuge scare today when my hosting provider's raid system fell and I got corruption on my databases. They where able to recover about 95% of my data, but I lost about 10 days worth of data on the forums and other applications. Although unfortunate, it was not tragic. If you created a forums account or posting since july 20th, please note that they are in limbo now!! Sorry for the inconvenience

Railo Visiting the IECFUG in Cal Poly Pomona!

Posted by Luis Majano
Jul 28, 2008 00:00:00 UTC
If you are in the OC area or the Inland Empire, we would like to invite you to our CFUG this coming Friday, August 1st 2008 at 7PM. We will be hosting Gert Franz on an incredible Railo Presentation. You can find more information about our CFUG and our location by visiting our website. We meet at Cal Poly Pomona University in Room 98C 4-27 (campus map)

Railo (www.railo-technologies.com) is a CFML engine that runs on a wide variety of Java servlet engines, and provides a cost-effective, high performance alternative to using Adobe's ColdFusion engine. As you may have heard, at the Scotch on the Rocks ColdFusion conference in Scotland in June, Railo announced that they are partnering with JBoss to convert their software to a completely free, open-source offering.

Gert Franz, CEO of Railo and member of the recently founded CFML advisory committee, will be visiting to present an overview of Railo, and what the advantages of using Railo are for CFML developers. He’ll also be talking about the upcoming open-source conversion of Railo, and what that means for the community and the developers. Of course, Gert will have some free versions of the Railo software to hand out, and some other goodies as well.

Early Bird Pricing on ColdBox Training ends in 4 days!

Posted by Luis Majano
Jul 28, 2008 00:00:00 UTC
The early bird pricing for the ColdBox Training Seminar ends in 4 days, so get to it and register online.

onSessionEnd does not respect per-app mappings?

Posted by Luis Majano
Jul 25, 2008 00:00:00 UTC
I have been breaking my head on this one and I can reproduce something. Maybe I am missing something, but I do not believe my per-application mappins in cf8 are working in combination with onSessionEnd(). I created a very simple test and wallah, failure.

Application.cfc - I setup my timeout to 2 seconds, so I can see the onSession end errors come up quicker.

Then I have an index file with the following:

This is mappings Test.

I execute the page, the page executes the component and dumps it correctly. After two seconds I fire up the cf admin and this is what the logs say:

OnSessionEnd : coldfusion.runtime.CfJspPage$NoSuchTemplateException: Could not find the ColdFusion Component or Interface coldbox.system.beans.requestContext.

Now, if I am totally wrong on this one, please comment. However, I do believe the correct behavior would be that onSessionEnd() would respect my per-application mappings. Do you agree?

To solve this, I have to actually create a CF Mapping in the administrator and then it works. But it gets weirder!! Let's say my application is not in the root but here:

http://localhost/testing/appmappingTest/index.cfm

I placed a cfc under /testing/cfc/requestContext.cfc. I then modified the code to use this create statement:

And again, it breaks, so it can do absolute references to cfc's either. I moved it to inside the test application and then it works. So there you go, I am totally confused in this behavior. Any comments??

10 Concepts that every software engineer should know about!

Posted by Luis Majano
Jul 24, 2008 00:00:00 UTC
I just found this incredible article via digg and had lots of fun reading it. I really recommend for you to read it and get some good concepts in your toolbelt.

The top 10 concepts are:

  1. Interfaces
  2. Conventions and Templates
  3. Layering
  4. Algorithmic Complexity
  5. Hashing
  6. Caching
  7. Concurrency
  8. Cloud Computing
  9. Security
  10. Relational Databases

New ColdBox Addons - Transfer Config Factory and Transfer Decorator Injector Observer

Posted by Luis Majano
Jul 24, 2008 00:00:00 UTC

I am releasing today a set of addons for ColdBox-Transfer interactivity:

  1. TransferConfigFactory.cfc : A factory cfc that produces transfer configuration objects based on ColdBox Datasource configurations. This is thanks to Tom de Manincor
  2. TDOBeanInjectorObserver.cfc : A transfer observer based on Brian Kotek's amazing TDOBeanInjectorObserver in his Coldspring Utilities project, used to create rich decorators by injecting them with dependencies from Coldspring and Lightwire. However, we had to take it a step further, so it can even inject dependencies from the ColdBox Cache.

You can download these tools from here. All you need to do to install them is drop them in the /coldbox/system/extras folder. This will create a transfer folder that holds these cfc's inside of the extras folder. That's it. Then you need to configure them via a coldspring.xml or a lightwire configuration object or manually (ohh brave one). The tools have also been added to the SVN and I will be adding a link to them from the extra downloads section of the website.

Transfer Config Factory

This object is used to create a transfer configuration object based on the datasource information found in the ColdBox configuration file. This idea is thanks to Tom de Manincor and his musings in ColdBox-ColdSpring-Transfer. This let's you maintain all of your application's configuration in one single location and not create a datasource.xml. It is meant to be used alongside coldspring but it can be used as a separate object too (You will have to do the wiring). Anyways, here is a sample coldspring declaration for this usage:

${Setting: TransferDSNAlias not found}

${Setting: TransferConfigPath not found}

${Setting: TransferDefinitionsPath not found}

As you can see, we first define the coldbox factory element and construct a datasource bean element with it. We then setup the transferConfigFactory.cfc as a coldspring factory bean. The last step is configuring the transfer factory. We send in a configuration bean and set it up as a call to our transfer config factory with the same parameters we are used to, except that for datasource we use the dsnBean element and have it referenced to the datasource that we want to use, in our case MyDSN, that we defined at the beginning. If you need a refresher on how the ColdBox Factory for IoC works, please read the following IoC Integration Guide. That's it. Simple as that, now you can define all your configurations via the coldbox configuration file and let coldspring do the heavy lifting.

TDOBeanInjectorObserver

This handy tools is based on Brian Kotek's original observer. I want to say thank you to Brian for his contributions and incredible code. Thanks Brian.

However, we have modified it to use ColdBox beanFactory plugin to do the autowiring for us. For those familiar with the ColdBox autowiring conventions, you can do autowiring via annotations using the cfproperty tag or via setter injection. Not only that, but you can use ColdSpring or Lightwire seamlessly, and to top it off, you can autowire objects from the ColdBox cache. Here is a sample of some cool autowire annotations:

As you can see from the code we have two dependencies marked by their types: ioc and ocm. The type of ioc means that this dependency must be injected from the ioc plugin (coldspring/lighwire) and the type of ocm means that the dependency must be injected from the ColdBox Cache. The scope attribute is also useful as you can define in which scope or pathed scope you would like this dependency injected. The default value is variables.

The theory behind this tool is to be able to very easily create rich decorators that can be injected with dependencies from the IoC container or the ColdBox Cache. It is a great way to have your objects be composed of other objects and utilities. So let's see the coldspring.xml, but first, please note that the instructions below are for ColdSpring 1.2 that enables the usage of the lazy-init property. For Coldpsring 1.0, you will have to do some more manual work. (More instructions found in the cfc's themselves).

beanFactory

true or false

onDIComplete

true or false

We first define the ColdBox Factory, then the beanFactory plugin we will use. We then define our Observer with some cool parameters:

  • Transfer : The transfer bean reference
  • ColdBoxBeanFactory : The beanFactory plugin we just defined
  • useSetterInjection : A boolean variable that enables or disabled setter injection in preference of annotations via cfproperty. If enabled, it will do cfproperty annotations first and then look for setters.
  • onDICompleteUDF : The name of the UDF to call in your decorators once they have been injected with their dependencies. The default value used is onDIComplete. This means that you create a method in your decorators called onDIComplete or whatever you like and when the bean factory injects the dependencies, it will call this method afterwards. You can use this to do configuration or object setup.
  • debugMode : This boolean variable is part of the bean factory plugin. If set to true, it will log to the logging facilities all the interactions when trying to autowire the objects.

That's it folks. Once application starts up, coldspring will create and register this observer for you. So when transfer objects are created and have autowire dependencies, they will be wired up.

Simple CSS Based Graphing ColdBox Plugin

Posted by Luis Majano
Jul 23, 2008 00:00:00 UTC
Russ Johnson, of team coldbox, has just released his new graphing plugin based on CSS. The plugins looks awesome and so simple to use. Thanks Russ!! You can download the plugin here.

ColdBox 2.6.0 Final Release is now available.

Posted by Luis Majano
Jul 20, 2008 00:00:00 UTC

ColdBox 2.6.0 is finally out and in final release. You can now download it from the downloads section of the website.  This has been a much anticipated journey and it would have not been possible without all the collaboration from contributors, team members and the community. It would take so many lines to thank everybody, but for this release I want to thank Sana Ullah for a TREMENDOUS amount of work and dedication to the team.  We also welcomed Matt Quackenbush to the team and more might be joining the efforts soon, especially Ernst van der Linden for always helping out and creating tons of sample applications.  So thank you for your time and dedication to this project and making it a true world collaboration project.

As you can see from the image below, ColdBox has become more than just a framework but into a robust application development platform composed of several pieces that when used in conjunction, they can be an incredibly powerful development platform.  ColdBox 2.6.0 introduces tons of new features and optimizations that can be read in the What's New Guide in the official wiki site.


The ColdBox Platform

I also recommend reading the compatibility guide for pre 2.6.0 applications. This guide will show you if there are any compatibility issues with your application when upgrading. It can show you the workarounds and even guide you from version 2.0 if necessary.  Our vision for version 2.6.0 was to solidify our 2.5 features such as caching, interceptions, conventions, stability and tools.  We have included more than 100 cfeclipse snippets, an enhanced insight dictionary for both CFEclipse and Dreamweaver, a new eclipse documentation and reference plugin that will help you read all the documentation about the framework's API and configuration file from within Eclipse Help, a new enhanced ColdBox Dashboard with even more code generation features, more cheatsheets and help.  There are over 500 pages worth of documentation in the ColdBox wiki, searchable and indexed in such a manner that you can find all the information you need.  The entire documentation set has been revised and ready for reading. It has been a long project I undertook more than 2 months ago and finally finalized.  The entire documentation is up to date with version 2.6.0 and also prepared for the upcoming versions.  Version 2.7.0 has already have a few tickets already assigned and the wheels will be spinning to still provide a community based development environment and help developers around the world create better ColdFusion applications. In summary, thank you for the support and contributions to this project, as they are absolutely of the utmost importance to such a community project. 

Also, take note that ColdBox Platform Training Seminars begin this October 4th and 5th in Dallas, Texas. You will be able to register online at our training section of the website and take advantage of our early bird pricing until July 31st.  You will be able to get more than 16 hours of training and several hours of QA with us and discuss your specific needs.  We are extremely excited about how ColdBox will be able to help your business in the future.  So once again, thank you for the support and please enjoy this release.

FAITH

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