RSS feed for InstantSpot site Digital Rewind

Easy Subclipse and Coldfusion Builder

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 22:00:00 GMT

After messing around with this for too long I got it too work.

Furnishweb on Handshake 2.0

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 13:12:00 GMT

Article on FurnishWEB a furniture industry service we wrote in Coldfusion and Fusebox.

Coldfusion Debug and Heap Space Errors

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 16:59:00 GMT

Coldfusion can run out of memory while debug is on.

MYSQL Slow Subquery using IN

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 13:24:00 GMT

Fix for MYSQL subqueries that take forever when used in an IN.

Mysql Joined Updates

Thu, 08 May 2008 15:39:00 GMT

Writing updates from more than one table.

Coldfusion Hates the New Macbook Pro

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 22:54:00 GMT

Please fix the Coldfusion Installer

Fun with Dabble, S3 and Coldfusion

Thu, 30 Aug 2007 16:00:43 GMT

Well another project done and set live today. We just released a new site for one of our furniture manufacturing clients: Solutions .

What's noteable and kinda fun is the technology behind this one. Our customer wanted a web presence quickly to showcase their products. The only information they had were EXCEL spreadsheets ( everything is always in excel :) ).

So what do you do?

We decided to try out some cool web based services to help them out.

Step 1: Imported all the product information into Dabbledb.

Step 2: Edited the products in Dabbledb and add any missing information.

Step 3: Used CFJSON and CFHTTP to pull the product information into MYSQL.

Step 4: Used the Amazon S3 component and a simple CF interface to resize images and store them in S3 based on product information.

STEP 5: Code the Screens using Coldfusion and Fusebox.

We decided to pull the information out of dabble and store it in MySQL to run the site so we could write the queries for the site in plain SQL. Dabbledb is really powerful for manipulating spread sheet data and saved us the time and our customers the cost of building a front end for marinating product information. We are using a custom script I wrote for ImageMagick for resizing the images. The java ones never seem to resize small thumbnails very well. Although i haven't played with the CF8 ones yet.

This project reminds me how great a community we have of CF developers. CFJSON,S3 and Fusebox are all thanks to them.

Our First Reactor Site

Thu, 02 Aug 2007 10:24:43 GMT

We'll we finished our first Reactor based website. It was a flat HTML site we upgraded to Coldfusion/Fusebox/Reactor/MYSQL with some basic CMS updates for links and content.

Before

After

It went pretty well. I wish the documentation for Reactor was more up to date. maybe if I have time this week I'll post about a few things I learned to help out others. I'm deep into my next reactor project already.

This project was the first one we used JQUERY on also. I have no idea how I got along so long without it. It is pretty fantastic and has really good documentation.

EDIT: For a test we used JQUERY for the Mouseovers on the main page. We were going from an premade FLASH design to HTML. So we made the Animated Gifs and swap them with the black and white images. The text on the main page is also swapped with JQUERY. Most of the JQUERY stuff is in the administrative section of the site to help manage the forms and links.

Since JQUERY lets you bind events to objects when pages load I have changed the architecture of our fusebox sites to include a dsp_jsp.cfm file for each page. This is included in the $(document).ready() section of the page via content variables. It's much better than all the JS cluttering up the HTML in our displays. In the future I might try and do something slick to have it as an include instead of stuck at the top of the page.

Web Icons

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 13:49:31 GMT

I am forever doing admin utilities for our web projects. CMS, Link managers, Photo Uploaders etc. With my limited art/fireworks skills I could never make anything that looked right :P. The other day I found a great website for icons. There are a ton of them and they look really nice.

Check them out : FAMFAMFAM

Generating Barcodes with Coldfusion

Thu, 05 Apr 2007 13:42:50 GMT

I was working on a proof of concept today which required Barcodes. I found a cool blog post : Generating Barcodes with Barbecue and Coldfusion. What a great post, but I don't have access to JSP servlets on my server.

So after a little more googling I found out how to do it using Barbecue and just Coldfusion. Make note that the Barbecue jar needs to be in the CF classpath.

[codeshare apr9de78]

Check out the Barbecue website for the complete java docs if you want to do a different kind of Barcode.

Web services without the SOAP

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 22:24:58 GMT

Inspired by the Basecamp API I took a stab at writing a similar interface to Furnishweb over the last couple of days. I liked the simplicity of their implementation and the fact so many people have written widgets and fun things to access Basecamp with it.

Now I know what you are saying "Well it's Basecamp that's why they use it!", but I think that is only a partial reason. It's just less complicated than SOAP web services. It also seemed like a fun challenge in doing something in Coldfusion that RUBY does.

Also after reading Ben's Blog on using CFHTTP to parse files in CFQUERY objects I thought my web services should return CVS files instead of XML (I will be adding XML later).

If you notice on the Basecamp API site they post the XML directly to the web service for complicated requests. I was sure Coldfusion could do this, but it took me awhile to find the answer.

To post xml to a url you do something like this:

[codeshare aprd97b0]

Then in your web service code all you have to do is:

[codeshare aprbbb64]

Seems to work great. The other parts of the request are simple to handle but the GetHttpRequestData() part had me stumped.

Trying out Instant Spot

Wed, 18 Oct 2006 13:29:34 GMT

I seem to set these up and never update them :). I hated haveing a php powered blog since I have worked with Coldfusion for so many years. I really think this is a cool idea.

So I am here to support a cool idea and Coldfusion.

Let's hope I have something important to say.