Web Biz

This announcement is pretty late, as I started the new job the second week in June, but none the less: I recently left my position as the Web Integration Specialist on the Hamilton College Web Services team to join the Webucator team as the Development Manager. I also have been asked to serve as the co-manager for the ColdFusion User Group of Central New York!

I recently worked on a project that required obtaining the resolution of photograph.  The approach I used was to limit the photographs to Jpeg format images only, which I could then use the new imageGetEXIFMetada() function in ColdFusion 8 to obtain the X-Resolution and Y-Resolution tags.  Here is a quick summary of some of my findings and problems.

Borrowing some code & ideas from Pete Freitag’s CFIMAGE presentation; this is a rather simple, safe, and easy way to upload photos using a User-Defined Function in ColdFusion.  Uploading files is very straight forward in ColdFusion, but I like this function because it takes care of all the little details, so I can concentrate on working with the file afterwards, and moving to the next iteration when programming.

I ran into two small hurdles when installing the ColdFusion 8.0.1 updater on my CentOs Linux server.  Here is a quick overview of what I did to get the installer to work.

If you are using ColdFusion 8’s <cfgrid> tag for a CRUD interface you might be utilizing the editable grid feature or you might be utilizing the <cfwindow> tag.  Because of some of the limitations of inline editing, such as the lack of a rich text editor, I am using <cfwindow> for a project and here is how I am setting the title programmatically from the <cfgrid> binding.

Have you ever wanted to know if a request is coming from an Ajax call or from a standard GET/POST from the browser when using the ColdFusion 8 Ajax functionality?

I will be giving a brief presentation at the local ColdFusion User Group meeting tomorrow on my Ext.CFC that implements the basic features of ColdFusion 8’s <CFGRID> and associated tags.  After releasing the inital CFC I began working on upgrading to the implementation to using the latest Ext 2.x - which required some minor changes.  I have also completed the basic implementation of an editable grid, but want to finish the rest of the form controls available.  So, here is the Ext.CFC upgraded to Ext 2.x with grouping ability.

Adobe wants to pick your brain.  They have released two surveys to gather information from the CF community on the future release of ColdFusion.

I wanted to learn what Adobe AIR was all about, so I created an AIR application with the ColdFusion 8 documentation that utilizes the Ext 2.x library. The application allows you to easily view and search the ColdFusion 8 documentation.  Best of all, no need to be online - everything is stored locally in the sqlite database - so it runs extremely fast. There are still a couple of minor bugs, and I am hoping to make some future improvements to the application, so be sure to check back.