RSS feed for InstantSpot site Aaron Lynch

Combine and compress your javascript files: Scriptalizer.com

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 13:37:00 GMT

After creating a custom tag and minifier component (using YUICompressor) I decided it would be a pretty neat service to offer to everybody. Last night I scrounged up a website and called it Scriptalizer.com.

If you want to test what cf_scriptalizer does to your javascript before you actually use the tag, you can try out the generated script provided by Scriptalizer.com.

NOTE: All source files uploaded is immediately deleted once generated.

Problem: WAY too many javascript files. Solution: cf_scriptalizer

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 15:44:00 GMT

Information about a custom tag to combine and compress javascript files.

InstantSpot.com is open for business!

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 14:56:00 GMT

You might have noticed, ever since our Version 2.0 release, InstantSpot account creation has only been available for those with a valid invitation code.

Well, that is a thing of the past.

Thanks to all of our testers/users for helping us sort through any bugs encountered along the way. As always, if any issues are encountered please feel free to contact me directly or use the link in the control panel to report problems.

So what are you still doing here??! Go create your 'Spot now!

Create a custom pod with Sproutbuilder

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 14:44:00 GMT

Sproutbuilder is a new application that recently rolled out in a beta status. Basically it allows you to create widgets in a pretty nice Flex interface.

From their howitworks page:

Building a sprout is easy. Choose from dozens of pre-built templates or start from scratch. Drag-and-drop shapes, text, images, video, and more. Then add components such as slideshows, jukeboxes, and countdown clocks, as well as interactive services such as chat (Meebo), phone (Ribbit), fundraising (ChipIn), and more. Once you’ve got your content in place, use advanced editing and navigation tools to perfect your sprout.

Ultimately you end up with an embed code, like this

<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,0,0" width="180" height="171" id="sUAAKe0cDAJqAatXf"><param name="wmode" value="transparent" /><param name="align" value="middle" /><param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff" /><param /><param name="movie" value="http://farm.sproutbuilder.com/17661/load/UAAKe0cDAJqAatXf.swf" /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" src="http://farm.sproutbuilder.com/17661/load/UAAKe0cDAJqAatXf.swf" width="180" height="171" wmode="transparent" align="middle" bgcolor="#ffffff" /></object>
<img style="visibility:hidden;width:0px;height:0px;" border=0 width=0 height=0 src="http://counters.gigya.com/wildfire/CIMP/Jmx*PTEyMDE3OTA5NTUxMDcmcHQ9MTIwMTc5MDk1NTY5MSZwPTEyMDc*MSZkPTE4MjgyJm49.jpg" />

Now, to add it to your InstantSpot site...gotta tie that in right :)

Log in to the control panel and click on the Widgets section.

Then, once you are there, you can click to add a pod, reorder, deactivate, etc...

Then, on to the end result...go look at your Spot.

CFUNITED 2007: Step One - Get There

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 20:12:41 GMT

Early Morning

The alarm clock goes off at 4:30 AM Tuesday morning. There I am, for a moment wondering what must have caught on fire for me to be awake at that terrible hour. but then I realized I had to be at Park Central Surgical Center at 5:45 AM in order for my son to have surgery! After several hours there (everything went perfectly btw) it was time to go home and get ready to head to the airport.

Getting There

My flight to Dulles was scheduled to depart at 4:15pm and touch down around 8:15pm, where I would be picked up by Enterprise and delivered to my rental car. I usually like to get to the airport a couple hours before take off, just to be sure I don't have any issues parking, getting through security, etc. So, around 2pm I roll through security with no issues (small blessings right?) and start waiting. And waiting. Apparently mother nature didn't like the plan, and proceeded to bring the pain on DFW.

I think somewhere around 200 flights were cancelled Tuesday night, luckily mine was not one of them. My flight was just delayed from taking off until around 7:40pm, placing me on the tarmac at Dulles around 11pmish. By the time I got my bag, and found the place where Enterprise was supposed to pick me up it was near Midnight. I waited and watched the Avis, Dollar, Alamo, National, Hertz, and Thrifty shuttles come and go over and over...for about an hour. It was then when I started realizing Enterprise wasn't really coming. Just as a last ditch effort I tried calling them...ALL of them! World Wide numbers, local numbers, road side assistance even! and I never could actually talk to a human.

I decided to just go ahead and get a cab to the hotel, it was a good 30 minute drive but I was tired and all of the other rental car companies were sold out anyways. So, lucky me I pulled the short straw and got the nice young Ethiopian taxi driver who was either drunk or very tired. And we embarked on a "thrill ride" swerving across lanes, speeding up to 80mph then dropping down to 50mph at no predictable interval. I wonder if he realized that I wasn't really interested in where he came from, but the only things I could try to talk to him about (to keep him awake!) was about Ethiopia (their form of currency is called a Birr, did you know that?) :|

Luckily, I made it here in one piece. Got a little bit of sleep. And made it to the key note speech only a few minutes late.

Thanks to Todd Sharp for giving me a ride to the conference!!!

It Was Worth It

Yes, it was worth the trouble getting here. Afterall, that is just something that can happen when you travel and after today's sessions (Wednesday) and getting to meet a few of the people I email with/read their blog/etc it has been a great experience.

Get to the Good Stuff

I have some notes that I took during my sessions today, and since its way too late to be first (thanks to Todd and Matt W.) :) I will do some summary posts for each day.

ColdFusion MX 7.0.2: Hot fix for IllegalStateExceptions in ModuleTag

Thu, 24 May 2007 01:05:32 GMT

Great news to those of us who have been experiencing the illegalStateExceptions and the related corrupted/truncated cfquery calls. Adobe just released a hotfix for ColdFusion MX 7.02.

Get the fix here: ~~http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=kb401830~~

***EDIT*** New Link (thanks for the new link Rich): http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb402002&sliceId=1

This was issued to resolve the strange behavior I blogged about here: Corrupted queries in ColdFusion MX 7

(Issue documentation from Adobe.com)

Issue

Adobe has resolved an issue with IllegalStateExceptions thrown intermittently by ModuleTag. The stacktrace generated is similar to the following:

java.lang.IllegalStateException
at coldfusion.tagext.lang.ModuleTag.doAfterBody(ModuleTag.java:439)
at cfindex2ecfm842540228.runPage(C:\InetPub\wwwroot\IllegalStateException\index.cfm:18)
at coldfusion.runtime.CfJspPage.invoke(CfJspPage.java:152)
at coldfusion.tagext.lang.IncludeTag.doStartTag(IncludeTag.java:349)
at coldfusion.filter.CfincludeFilter.invoke(CfincludeFilter.java:65)
at coldfusion.filter.ApplicationFilter.invoke(ApplicationFilter.java:219)
at coldfusion.filter.RequestMonitorFilter.invoke(RequestMonitorFilter.java:51)
...

The scenario where this problem occurs typically includes the following items:

Use of an application framework.

Use of Application.cfc and OnRequestEnd or OnSessionEnd method.

Calling methods on ColdFusion Components stored in shared scopes, often the application scope.

The use of custom tags.

Secondary issues caused by the IllegalStateException are often resolved by application of the patch. These issues have included query truncation and invalid parameter binding errors with cfquery and cfqueryparam.

Ben Forta in action

Tue, 01 May 2007 09:33:45 GMT

Ben Forta's Scorpio presentation to the Dallas Fort Worth CFUG last night did not dissappoint. I'm sure there are going to be a couple synopsis blog posts (I hear Dave furiously typing right now) so I figured I'd just post up a few of the pics.

Things of note.

The venue was fantastic, thanks AidMatrix!
Ben Forta knows how to work a room. This was my first opportunity to hear him speak, and he had me hooked in from the start.
The AJAX tie-ins look to be very very easy to use. There is soon to be absolutely no excuse for not using a little sprinkle of AJAX here and there in your application.
I can't wait to get my hand on the server monitoring tools. (What is this going to do to Seefusion and FusionReactor?)

....well, I'll let other people list the rest. Let me just say it has enough stuff that I'm sure Adobe will be able to sell upgrades fairly easily.

Thanks to Ben for putting on such a good show!

Corrupted queries in ColdFusion MX 7

Tue, 10 Apr 2007 11:51:08 GMT

I hate to think that there is possibly a flaw in ColdFusion...it pains me to say it. But I think there might just be a problem.

One of our latest projects was an object oriented application (lots of objects stored in memory) that sees a pretty decent load. For example, one day when we noticed a problem we had in the neighborhood of 20k connections.

After getting everything as smoothed out as possible, we are still seeing some pretty strange exceptions coming through. And for the most part they seem to deal with invalid SQL syntax of some sort of another.

Our system has quite a bit of dynamic querying going on, but I would say probably significantly less actual queries to the DB server on an average request.

It seems, that around a heavy traffic period we begin to see these SQL errors coming through. So, we feel that it could very possibly be related to memory issues...but, being pretty shorthanded we have not been able to really dig as deep into the issue as we would like.

Some of the more common exceptions:

Message: Error Executing Database Query

Detail: ... Syntax error at token 0, line 0, offset 0.

Message: Error Executing Database Query

Detail: ... Invalid parameter binding(s).

And a handful of actual corrupted SQL statements that make its way through.

Something like when querying a Users table... it might say

Message: Error Executing Database Query

Detail: ... Table 'Use' not found.

...basically truncating (maybe?) the SQL statement itself.

Initially the code was suspect, but we cannot find the source of the problem and so we hit Google for some commiseration.

Notice the last few comments on this blog post

And this forum thread on Adobe.com

Is anybody else experiencing this on their applications? The rumor is this issue is not present in Scorpio, but it would be nice if we could get a fix for MX7 if it truly is a CF bug.

***EDIT*** Link to the HotFix : http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb402002&sliceId=1

cfcPowerTools is now open source

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 17:44:16 GMT

Tom Shreck just announced that he has decided to open source his cfcPowerTools product. Not too long ago Tom gave a presentation on thi s to our local cfug , and I was really impressed.

DEMO HERE

Some of the things it offers (lifted from riaforge):

* generate CFCs from database tables
* generate database table from CFC
* batch generate CFCs from multiple database tables
* generate HTML, FLASH, and XML data entry forms
* supports round trip editing
* getter/setter generation

cfcPowerTools is highly scalable. cfcPowerTools is built using templates. You can modify the templates packaged with cfcPowerTools, or generate your own. cfcPowerTools comes with the following templates out of the box:

* Model Controller
* MACH II
* Concrete
* Simple
* Default

cfcPowerTools makes you more productive. cfcPowerTools produces consistant, reliable, predictable, and documented code. Productivity features:

* Component Doc View - cfcPowerTools upsizes ColdFusion's component doc view allowing you to interact with your CFC. From the component doc view, you can add, edit, and delete methods as well as view methods.

* Code Behind - you can toggle between the meta data view for a cffunction and the actual cffunction code.

* ColdFusion Admin - cfcPowerTools utilizes your ColdFusion administrator login to secure access to cfcPowerTools functionality.

* Managed Code - you can designate section(s) of your code as managed code. cfcpowerTools will only regenerate the managed code sections, ignoring the rest of your code.

WANTED: ColdFusion contractor (Dallas/Fort Worth)

Fri, 19 Jan 2007 14:24:04 GMT

We NEED a junior to mid level ColdFusion developer on-site!

The job will consist of primarily maintenance on existing web applications, with the possibility of some new development (Mach-ii experience is a plus).

The contract would be at the very least 3-4 months in duration.

We are in a very aggressive new development cycle here, and there is a good chance the contractor would be included in that (given the right skill-set).

please email me for questions

Listen to ColdFusion Weekly...do it, do it

Wed, 13 Dec 2006 00:17:10 GMT

Just a quick shout-out.

Matt and Peter do a great job with their podcast (get it at www.ColdFusionWeekly.com ). So if you are even remotely interested in the current status of ColdFusion (and other related web dev topics), you need to do yourself a favor and give it a shot.

Those guys have been great supporters of InstantSpot. Giving us airtime , reporting feature enhancements, etc.

Thanks Matt and Peter!!!

WANTED: An application to share site designs.

Tue, 21 Nov 2006 16:03:42 GMT

Looking for an open source app to basically catalog and display thumbnail images of site designs, and then offer a way for the user to download the .css file associated with that style. (something like www.OSWD.org would be awesome).

Something that could take uploads from other users would be rad.

I did some SF.net searching but didn't see anything blatantly obvious. So I figured I would put it out there to see if there was some easy answer.

Get Your Free InstantSpot Site Now

Junior level ColdFusionist Needed

Mon, 20 Nov 2006 22:12:28 GMT

We are still looking for a junior (to mid) level ColdFusion programmer to come on site as a contractor. The company I work for is located in Addison, TX near Beltline and Midway.

Pay will depend on experience.

Please email me if you are interested. aaronjlynch AT gmail DOT com

Do you ever look at your old code...

Fri, 17 Nov 2006 06:13:16 GMT

...and hate it?

I notice that continually happens to me. Almost any time I revisit old code I am surprised by at least one thing I did that I would do differently now.

On one hand, I feel a very strong urge to re-write the darn thing...on the other, I feel like it is a good mile-marker for my progress as a developer. The fact that I can recognize better more efficient solutions to those old challenges means I am still learning.

Is DFW short on ColdFusion programmers?

Wed, 15 Nov 2006 14:10:26 GMT

Last night at the DFWCFUG meeting I thought it would be a good idea to mention that we are looking for a contractor to come help us out with some maintenance/new development for a 4ish month contract.

Well, I wasn't the only one with that idea. TEK Systems (the recruiter who offers the meeting room to us) announced they needed to fill a contract for Verizon. After that announcement, there were another 4 positions announced among our various members.

While it seems to be a good time to be a ColdFusion-ist in Dallas/Fort Worth...it might turn out to be a difficult time to find one to hire!

ps... if you are interested in an on-site contract position email me at aaronjlynch AT gmail DOT com

ColdFusion NEQ Cold Fusion

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 20:58:51 GMT

I notice a lot of Google searches where the user has searched for something related to "Cold Fusion" but really are looking for info on a ColdFusion topic. For some reason it annoys me, so here is my message.

It's spelled "ColdFusion" people!!! (you know who you are)

PER WIKIPEDIA:

ColdFusion is an application server and software development framework used for the development of computer software in general, and dynamic web sites in particular. In this regard, ColdFusion is a similar product to ASP.NET or Java Enterprise Edition.

Cold Fusion is a theoretical fusion reaction that occurs near room temperature and pressure using relatively simple devices. In nuclear fusion, multiple nuclei are forced to join together to form a heavier nucleus, and during that process, energy is released. The only known method of fusion that releases significant energy is the thermonuclear reaction, where temperatures and pressures are tremendous and must be contained within an as-yet technologically impractical fusion reactor - or be released, as by a fusion bomb.

Does ColdFusion stack up?

Tue, 07 Nov 2006 14:15:04 GMT

Lately, there has been quite a bit of discussion on our local CFUG mailing list regarding ColdFusion's ability to "hang" with other technologies in large scale operations. (Interestingly enough, the major proponents of non-ColdFusion languages, were no longer ColdFusion programmers.)

In order to make sure I could form an objective opinion, I decided to do my own scientific research. What I discovered may shock you.

Vindication?

Ok, you can start using .CSS files again

Mon, 06 Nov 2006 14:30:08 GMT

I started this post and was toying with the title of "Using ColdFusion caching to lessen the load" or something to that effect, but during the course of the entry I think I had a change of heart.

In a recent post I made about one solution to the problem of dynamically created .css files , there was some great discussion regarding the caching (or lack there of) of the .css templates. In my post, since each .css call was to a Mach-II event, and not to a flat file on the server, there would need to be an extra CF thread used for each page load.

On less traffic'd web sites this would not be an issue at all, since it is such a small process to retreive and display this data. BUT, we were are hoping to make InstantSpot.com able to scale nicely (come on users!).

Some things I did not mention in my previous post:

The site's style is cached in memory for that user's session, this should help out with any "thinking" that CF would have to do, but it still has to manage the request.
There aren't a finite number of options the users have with our app. In the very near future, there will be any number of style combinations, so this isn't a case of simply writing a few .css files to the server and referencing them from there.

I started down this path doing some research on cfcache, since it seems to me (and still does) that there should be a cool way to cache this view without doing any cffile "write"'s. I think we could do some <cfcache ACTION="CLIENTCACHE">'ing to store it in the browser cache and programatically signal a flush on any change to that site's style info.

But, the reality of the situation is that all of the sites' styles will be fairly static as a whole. There will of course be exceptions to this, as I'm sure some of the more "techy" of our users will be interested in customizing their site.

I think it would make more since to write these .css files to disk and allow the webserver to manage the caching, leaving CF to handle the one main request.

Do I need to print a retraction? :)

PS. Thanks to the great commenters on the other post . Another great reason to share ideas (good and bad) on a blog.

New code sharing site

Mon, 06 Nov 2006 03:35:10 GMT

Ryan Everhart and Robert Froehling have just released their new pet project "codeShare". From the looks of it, this is a very cool way to post code examples. Simple 3 step process,

Post Code
Review Code
Send Code

Once you post your code, codeShare provides a specific URL to your code example like : http://codeshare.everfro.com/novf4288

Nice work guys!

CFHunt.com: A new ColdFusion Search Engine

Wed, 25 Oct 2006 18:18:02 GMT

Yesterday I blogged about setting up a Google Co-op specifically related to InstantSpot sites. Well...just kidding about all that. (maybe...for now...I think)

Joshua Cyr set up a cool site built around the use of Google Co-op, targeting sites related to ColdFusion. We have decided, since thus far the majority of our user base has been ColdFusion bloggers, that we are going to just focus on populating his new site www.cfhunt.com with 'Spots that fall in our ColdFusion category.

Thanks for the cool Co-op Josh!