Welcome to the Tower, my programming and web development blog. Here you will find articles relating to CFML, CSS, HTML, Java, JavaScript and Regular Expressions, plus discussions on the associated tools, technologies, techniques and ideas.
For more general topics, please visit Sorcerer's Isle, where you will find articles on my other interests.
It's nearly a year on from my last Railo blog post so it is well overdue that I write another - just in case there is anyone still sitting on the fence, unsure if they should use Railo - or indeed, anyone who might be unaware of Railo's very existance!
So to start with, a quick summary of what Railo is:
Find out why Railo is the perfect choice for your next development project.
I've recently been working on a gallery website for my brother, a brilliant artist and illustrator. The site is still under construction, but he's already got some great examples of his drawings and sculptures on there, and it is definitely worth checking out.
Head over to eldavo.co.uk to take a look, and if you like the work take a look at his blog where he has more of his art.
On the technical side, the main site is pretty simple, so far, with extra complexity coming later on. It runs on Railo and uses jQuery. The (private) admin part of the site was my first opportunity to use cfimage functionality, allowing thumbnails to be generated from uploaded images. I used jCrop for the client-side crop selection.
It's been nearly half a year since Railo 3 was released, and with 3.1 just around the corner it is a good time to write a post about some of the features that continue to make Railo such an excellent CFML engine!
This blog entry gives ten reasons for using Railo 3...
For anyone working with any other modern language, (such as CFML, C#, JavaScript, Ruby, and more), using a String within a switch-case statement is not an issue, and probably something you've done many times without thinking about.
However, when working in Java you cannot use strings in a switch statement.
Fortunately, despite what many sites suggest, there is a solution.
I have released v0.7 of QueryParam Scanner, which introduces a variety of improvements over v0.6.1:
For more details and download information, visit the project page at Hybridchill.
The following release, v0.8 will have three key features:
The long awaited Railo 3.0 is out of Beta and available to all.
There are a lot of exciting new features with Railo 3.0: multimedia video conversion and manipulation, video player with playlisting, task manager, cluster scope, CF8 compatibility, and more.
Also, with Railo 3.0, the Community and Professional versions have been combined - keeping the price of the Community edition (i.e free), but without the previous restrictions this had. (With Railo 3.1 due later this year, Railo will fully become Free Software, under the LGPL2 license.)
For more details, the best place to head is the rebrushed Railo website, which has been updated to provide information on what is new with Railo 3.0.
There will also be a three part series on the Railo blog covering the new features. The first entry in the series is already available.
As we (hopefully) all know, using HTML tables for layout is Bad and Wrong.
Unfortunately, the most common way people avoid using tables is to just replace their table, tr and td tags with divs, divs and more divs.
The div tag is a generic container that should be used as a last resort, if there are no other more suitable options.
Whilst the problem of excess divs is not limited to the conversion of table layouts, it is perhaps most obvious here, as it shows the developer is still stuck in the column+row frame of mind, rather than thinking about what they are actually displaying.
In this blog entry, I show an example of how avoiding this mindset can result in much simpler and cleaner code.
The more observant visitors to this blog may have noticed the badge floating in the corner, indicating that I will be speaking at the cfDevCon developer conference later this year.
CFDevCon 2008 is a UK-based ColdFusion and web development conference, being held this September down in Brighton.
Whilst ColdFusion and CFML are the focus of the conference, the organisers are keen to also cover complementary web development subjects, and there is a good variety of topics on the schedule.
As promised previously, here is a more detailed entry on the announcement to Open Source the Railo CFML engine.
Well the first day of Scotch '08 is now over, so here is a quick round-up of the sessions I attended.
Day two has ended, and I have updated the main entry with details on today's events.
Scotch on the Rocks 2008 is now unfortunately ended, as before please see the main entry for the final day's summaries.