Intro to ColdFusion Components Presentation

I just want to thank everyone who came out last night and listened to me ramble for an hour and half. The presentation went great it seemed that everyone had a real interest in the subject and the turnout was really great. I would love to work on this preso more and maybe give it to another user group via connect so if your interested please drop me an email. If anyone has questions about the presentation material please let me know.

CFUG Presentation Reminder

This is just a quick reminder for anyone in the Cleveland area. I will be giving a presentation on Thursday on ColdFusion components.

This presentation will cover the basics of ColdFusion components. Learn why they exist, what problems they solve and how they can organize and reduce development time. Components are an essential tool for today's CF Developer and after this presentation you will have a better understanding of when and how to grab this tool from your tool belt.

I hope you can come and check it and for those of you with questions, write them down and I will see you on Thursday. The link below has more details about the meeting.

http://www.clevelandcfug.org

Learn Transfer from a Jedi

If you have not heard of Transfer or had a chance to take it for a test drive I have found another great resource for you. First off Transfer is a ColdFusion Object Relational Mapping (ORM) Library. The main focus of the library is to automate the repetitive tasks of creating the SQL and custom CFCs that are often required when developing a ColdFusion application. I have downloaded the framework before but because of other things going on I never really used it. This weekend I had the chance to use it in a real application and found a real good resource.

If you are just starting out you really need check Ray Camden's tutorials. He takes you through setting up the framework and shows some basic concepts. Ray while being an extremely smart (and humble) guy has a great way of explaining things for the rest of us. You can click here to the transfer articles he has written. If you have any questions about transfer shoot me an email. While I am pretty new to it I have a pretty good grasp on the basics already.

Writing good software Part II

In part 1 of this article I brought up the point that writing good software is not easy. The real problem that comes in to play here is that there are two main  tasks in writing software. First you have to come up a good plan (architecture) and then you have to actually make it a reality (implementation). In the new book I am reading there is a great exercise that I would really love to share with all of you and get your thoughts on the subject.

What does writing great software mean. This is such a great question because it means something different to different people. From the book we can take a look at a couple common answers. I am just paraphrasing here but the basic thoughts are the same.

The customer-friendly programmer says
Great software is always making sure that it does exactly what the customer wants it to do. Even if customers think of new ways to use the software it doesn't give them unexpected results.

The object-oriented programmer says
Great code is written in a object oriented manner. This ensures that there is not a bunch of duplicate code everywhere and each object controls its own behavior.

The design-guru programmer says
Great software is when you use tried-and-true design patterns and principles. You have also followed the guidelines of keeping your objects loosely coupled and your code open for extension but closed for modification.

[More]

Writing good software Part I

Now that I am starting to wrap my head around everything a little better I thought I would re visit a favorite book. Object Oriented Analysis & Design is a book in the head first series by O'Reilly. I have not read this book in a long time and even when I did I don't think I really understand it. Know that I want to learn more about the actual architecture side of things I thought I would dive back into it. What a better way to dive through it then to share everything with the 5 of you who read this blog ;)

Writing great software is not easy, if it was easier everyone would be doing it. There is more work involved in creating great software and for some the task in hand does not involve the future. The first thing we need to go over is modeling our application. A visual model is usually represented using UML. There are plenty of resources out there on UML but  I will quickly run down the basics.

[More]

Balsamiq Mockups: The newest addition to my tool belt

You really have to check out this product called Balsamiq Mockups. I have never had the design skills I wish I did so when products like this come around I get really excited. When I need to create a mockup I am really talking more about a wire frame or prototype. This is not a design mockup but more from a functional standpoint on how our project is going to function. We will spend some more time on this later but this leads into Interface driven development which I am becoming a huge fan of. This type of development is much more Agile and is starting to make a lot more sense to me.

I actually talked my boss into picking up some copies of this and everyone really loved the product. The first thing you will notice is that it is an AIR application. The interface is very user friendly and easy to drag components around. The available components are broken up into different sections and very easy to find. There is also a quick add so for those of us who hate the mouse will be happy

Another great feature of the product is being able to rapidly design prototypes using a clone feature. If you are going to use screens that are close to each other you can simply create a new prototype based on a current one. I found this to be a real time saver. Another feature allows you to dump the mockup to XML. I am not quite sure where this is going but I really hope this allows for basic html code generation later on.

[More]

Problems with Comments

I believe I have solved the issues I have been having with comments. There were some issues with the remember text that came up but I think we should be good going forward. Please let me know (danvega at gmail) if you have any problems leaving comments. Thanks for all of your help who let me know about this!

OOP Concepts Applied In CFML: Abstraction

One of the most fundamental concepts you will need to grasp is Abstraction. Let's take a look at the Wikipedia definition and we can break it down from there.

In computer science, abstraction is a mechanism and practice to reduce and factor out details so that one can focus on a few concepts at a time. The following English definition of abstraction helps to understand how this term applies to Computer Science, IT and Objects - i.e. abstraction is: A concept or idea not associated with any specific instance

Like everything else in life people really like to complicate things to stand above the rest. When developers speak of OO you will often hear Encapsulation and Abstraction. At first it may sound complicated but if you look at the definition, it really is not.

[More]

OOP state of mind In the land of CFML

A little background on me before I get into which may turn out to be a heated discussion but that's how we learn. I started out doing basic html web sites like most of you. I then found myself in a 2 year technical college learning a variety of languages such as Basic,C,C++ & Java. Now I truly never became skilled in all languages it prepared me for the future. I then started programming using ColdFusion and even to this day people say that does not classify me as a "real" programmer. I would of course disagree with you and say that language aside the very ideas of programming can be used across every language out there.

Now that we got that out of the way we can talk a little about Object Oriented Programming. I started picking up Action Script 3 about a year ago and absolutely love the language. While I am a ColdFusion addict (cfaddict) I am really loving the full OO structure of AS3. ColdFusion 8 is not a full OO language but it clearly exceeds it predecessors in giving you more ways to think OO.

[More]

Formatting Money for database inserts

This is a common problem and I use to come across this a lot. Here is a question from my friend Greg that I find many people scratch their head at.

Do you happen to know if there is any easy way in CF to mask against the use of commas in integer/float fields within a form? We are running into a lot of error on database insert due to the presence of commas (1,234 vs 1234). CF seems to let these through when a form is submitted, and then we get an error on insert.

So the first reaction is to say well why don't we just control what the user enters on the client side while entering a  new record. I really have to points to drive home about this. I don't think you can ever rely on client side validation and what happens when you come to this record to update it? We take the numerical value from the database and format it as money to make it more user friendly.

The easiest way to get around this problem is to strip any formatting characters that might be present before a database insert. I took a quick look around to find something that would help all. I went over to trusty old CFLIB and found this function for converting to a number written by Glenn Wilson. Here is a quick example of a money string and how to convert it for a database insert.

<cfset amount = "$50,000.00"> <cfdump var="#Convert2Number(amount)#"> <cffunction name="Convert2Number" access="public"> <cfargument name="strVal" type="string" required="true"/> <cfset var regStr = '[^/.0123456789-]' /> <cfreturn Val(REReplace(StrVal,regStr,"","all"))/> </cffunction>

One thing I will try and stress is getting away from the uber utility component that we all seem to create from time to time. You could easily abstract this method into a formatting library. I plan on writing an article shortly on this so stay tuned.