Observations on Technology from an Aging Geek
I use Subversion for my source code management needs. Every project that I work on gets put into my Subversion account at my hosting provider even if I’m the only one that will ever work on it. Using Subversion has saved me from significant loss of work on a number of occasions, so there’s no … Read more
Most of us that have been around programming for a while have heard the arguments for separating content and layout in our applications numerous times. Likewise, most of us have nodded our heads and generally acknowledged that it’s a “good idea” or something similar. Over the last few days, it’s really hit home for me … Read more
For the past couple of months, I’ve been running my CFML server engines (yes engines, plural) on top of Tomcat on my local development environment. This offers me, as an independent developer that works on a number of different client projects, a great deal of flexibility in matching a particular client’s production configuration. Also lately, … Read more
As web developers one of the most frequent things we’re tasked with building is some sort of form to capture data from our visitors. As we’ve all learned (some of us the hard way), putting a form out there and trusting that our visitors will use it exactly the way we design it every time … Read more
One of my current clients recently commissioned me to write a feature for their site that allows visitors to listen to snippets of MP3 tracks that they sell directly from within the product’s “detail” page. In my particular situation, one of the requirements was to use the design commissioned by a separate design firm. In … Read more
I dodged a very large (metaphorical) bullet yesterday. I’m not in the habit of trying to find bullets to dodge, but this one found me because it turns out I didn’t plan as well as I thought I had. It all started yesterday morning when a client asked me to make some batch updates to … Read more
Every small business has issues with accounting and billing. As Dan reported in an earlier blog post, we were in search of the “perfect” solution that included the ability to get data into the system from a variety of devices and covered time tracking, invoicing and accounting. What we have found is the “perfect storm” … Read more
In my last post, we went through a brief introduction of ColdSpring and how you can use it to make configuring your application’s objects much easier. We discussed how objects (beans) are declared in ColdSpring’s XML configuration file and how you can pass any number of values into ColdSpring to be used in configuring those … Read more
Over the last two years or so I’ve been working hard to really “get” object-oriented programming as it applies to ColdFusion development. Like a lot of ColdFusion developers that have been around a while, when I started trying to create applications using CFCs, I essentially had CFCs that were collections of UDFs. Before long, after … Read more
In my last post I mentioned that I had been toying around with using Tomcat as the only servlet container to deploy all my ColdFusion applications to, regardless of what ColdFusion engine you needed to use for a specific project. My goal in trying to get this working was actually 3-fold: Learn more about how … Read more