Years ago I had the pleasure of meeting Ben Forta and listen to his thoughts on web development. One thing that stuck with me was his statement that:

“Dynamic programming languages like PHP and Coldfusion are great, but developers need to leverage the database more. Allow the database to do it’s job, the heavy lifting”

With that being said, I was recently working with a database that contained users first names. The data was not snantized at entry, and contained a mix of lower cased (ex. josh) and upper cased (ex. Josh) first characters in the firstname column. I needed to always present the users first name in a capitalized format.

The first solution that most developers would reach for is dynamically parsing the users first name, then upper-casing the first character. This works, but in my opinion isn’t the most elegant solution.

With a simple SQL statement, like the one below, we can return the users first name already in a capitalized state.

SELECT (UPPER(LEFT(firstname,1))+SUBSTRING(firstname,2,LEN(firstname))) AS firstname 
FROM users

Most of the time I only work with UTF-8 or UTF-16 character encodings. With that said, recently I was working on an old coldfusion project. Do to database restrictions, required all inputs from the user into the application to be Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) character encoded.

Coldfusion does not have a good way of checking the character encoding of a string, so I had to pull out some of my Java skillz.

Dropping into Java from ColdFusion is a lot easier then it sounds. Check it out

<cfscript>   
   //use this to test character encoding. We only want Latin-1
    encoder = createObject("java", "java.nio.charset.Charset").forName("ISO-8859-1").newEncoder();
 
    if(encoder.canEncode(testVar))
    {
        //its Latin-1
    }
    else
    {
        /NOT Latin-1
    }
</cfscript>

The Java layer of Coldfusion is very powerful and under utilized by many developers.

If you want to see some true ColdFusion magic, check out the ColdBox Framework, http://ColdBoxFramework.com

Last month I had the honor of being a presenter at CFUnited 2010.
Luis Majano and I gave a presentation on creating “ColdFusion Powered iPhone Applications”. Specifically, coldfusion apps running on the ColdBox Framework

The volume is low, so you need to crank it up. You can download our demo source code and slides here

Click here to view the embedded video.

I will be speaking at this years CFUnited conference in Lansdowne Virgina, at the Lansdowne Resort

CFUnited is an annual conference based around the Coldfusion, Flex, and AIR languages and platforms.

This year I will be co-presenting with Luis Majano on “ColdFusion Powered iPhone Applications”

The session will cover how to develop and power iPhone applications via ColdFusion REST Services. I will cover all the development basics, intricacies, best practices, etc of iPhone development. The focus will be on how to make an iPhone application connect and consume ColdBox REST services.

The ColdFusion portion of the session will be led by Luis Majano, Creator of the Coldbox Framework.

I’m really looking forward to this great experience. I will be posting the slides and sample code here, after the presentation.

Bill Garoutte, just made a great blog post about using JSON with Coldfusion, as a faster and more light weight alternative to using WDDX to serialize data. If you use Coldfusion at all, I highly suggest you read it, and download his code sample.

http://garoutte.com/?p=21

At work, I have been lucky enough to work directly with Luis Majano, the author of an awesome Object Oriented Framework for ColdFusuion, ColdBox (I have blogged about it before)

Using the Coldbox Frame work really took my CF coding to the next level.

At home, I am not lucky enough to have access to a Coldfusion server. I run everything off of a dedicated PHP machine that I have had for some time now. Mostly due to the cost of the CF licenses, and the investments I have already made in the running so many sites in PHP.

After using ColdBox, I wanted to find something similar that would really help me write better code, and do it more quickly. I first looked at cake and wasn’t that excited about it, it seemed more complicated then it should be.

After doing some more research, I came across Code Igniter. Code Igniter has turned my PHP world upside down. Its easy to use, straight forward, and has a lot of build in functionality that would take me forever to achieve on my own.

Working in an object oriented frame work just makes me feel like a more effective programmer for some reason. Maybe its because I feel more organized and can really see how fast I can put applications together using it.

The user guide, video tutorials, wiki, and forums for code igniter all rock. There is a wealth of information in there that I can draw off of.

I am re-working notpopular.com 2.0 once again (at this point maybe i should call it notpop 2.5), and I am using Code Igniter to do it. Lets hope that my newly peaked interest in object oriented PHP development will carry me though the development and launch of notpop 2.0 (2.5?!)

WOW! NASA just adopted the Coldfusion Framework, ColdBox as their official web development framework. NASA!

I’m excited about this for several reasons. I have been using the Coldbox framework for about a year now. Before Coldbox, I was using Fusebox. Fusebox isn’t bad, but it just doesn’t compare to the features that I get out of Coldbox. I suggest that all serious Coldfusion developers take an in depth look at Coldbox as an application framework. Heck if its good enough for government rocket scientists, its got to be good enough for anything that you or I are doing!

Coldbox is developed and maintained by Luis Majano. Please stop by his blog and encourage his to continue the development of this software.

While you are at it, please stop by DIGG, and digg his blog post about NASA adopting ColdBox!

I have been working long and hard on a project at work (yes i have a realy job outside of working on notpop and related sites)
I’m lucky enough to work with Luis Majano, the creator of the ColdBox Coldfusion Application Framework. Working with ColdBox has really increased the performance of the site, and brought the company fully into object oriented ColdFusion programming.

Along with Coldbox, we have really relied on Transfer-ORM to handle 99% of our database operations. Again, a huge improvement over what we were doing in the past, and a great time saver also. Transfer-ORM was created by Mark Mandel.

I’m a member of the Inland Empire Coldfusion users group, and last Friday we had our month meeting, held by Luis Majano, with Mark Mandel as the guest speaker, talking about Transfer. It was a really great presentation, with a lot of great information.

We recorded the presentation through adobe connect, so its available online. If you are interested in taking your coldfusion database operations to the next level, I suggest you check out Mark Mandels presentation, I learned a lot, I’m sure you will also.

check it out: https://admin.adobe.acrobat.com/_a200985228/p10885427

At work, I write ColdFusion, at home I write PHP. I bounce back and forth between worlds. Jack of all trades, master of none I guess.

One thing that I have always loved about ColdFusion is the cfdump tag. You feed it any variable, and it will spit out whats in it. Struct, String, Array, Query, Object, XML, it doesnt matter, it just works. I would go as far to say that its one of the best native debugging resources I have ever seen in a web development language.

In PHP, you can do a print_r() and look at the source, but that is no where as cool as cfdump. I have longed for a cfdump style resource to be available in PHP. Today I got my wish when I stumbled upon “dBug”. http://dbug.ospinto.com

dBug is a small PHP class that duplicates the cfdump tag from ColdFusion

look how simple it is to use:

include_once("dBug.php");
new dBug($myVariable);


The output looks like this:

dBug will handle anything you throw at it, just like cfdump does. This is going to help me so much in the future. If you develop in PHP, I think that this class is a must have in your tool kit.

dBug is free! get it today from http://dbug.ospinto.com

I am a web developer by trade. I write a lot of ColdFusion code for my job, I write a lot of PHP in my spare time. Being involved in both the CF and PHP communities, I have seen an overwhelming number of tutorials for things like generating RSS feeds using PHP, but not too many geared towards CF developers.

Here is some quick and dirty code that I wrote using CF MX to generate an RSS feed using some data that I had stored in a MS SQL database.

Download the source code here