Join Nathan Strutz as he shoots the breeze on techie geeky web dev stuff.
posted under category: General on October 17, 2011 at 9:39 am by MrNate
I'm not related to Adobe, but I do co-manage an Adobe software users group for ColdFusion. Adobe has been really good to the group, giving us shirts and pens (swag items), plus two huge software giveaways every year, and lots of other benefits for my co-manager and I. That's my disclaimer. I like Adobe because they like me, and because their software is great.
Another thing I do is school my children at home. Well, who am I kidding, my amazing wife really does all of the hard work! There are a lot of up-sides and down-sides to homeschooling, same as any schooling option, but it's just a choice we made and are taking it year-by-year with each of our kids.
With all that said, I want to highlight a couple things that I found on Adobe.com for home schooling families.
According to Adobe's educational purchasing eligibility page, Adobe's education discounts apply to homeschooled students and their teachers. To prove that you are a valid home school family, about 2/3 down that same page lists the articles you can send Adobe as proof. We are a member of a couple homeschool associations, so I scanned my AFHE ID card.
Now what can you get with it?
Adobe.com has a great site for introducing their software in education, Adobe Education. Check it out. From there, I discovered the educational price list. You can see it for yourself that the price differences vary. I would say that most of the software is around 60% off, but some is 75% and some only 25%. A few of them are even free!
Those free packages point to the Free RIA Tools site. You can get ColdFusion 9, ColdFusion Builder 2 and Flash Builder 4.5 for free, just because you homeschool your kids! I made my request last Saturday and was given a serial number today (2 days later).
That's a win, fellow home-schooling families. Very expensive software, yours free.
(
1 comment)
posted under category: CSS on October 7, 2011 at 9:21 pm by MrNate
Last Wednesday, I had the great pleasure of showing off LESS CSS to the ColdFusion community at Adobe MAX. I had a good crowd for the unconference area, I would say maybe 40 people. Honestly, that unconference tent was too small for this group, and the area was noisy, but that's all part of the adventure. Anyway, during the presentation I promised I would put all the presentation demo files up on GitHub, so here we go, Write LESS CSS - Presentation Material.
I'll try to make an official something-or-other review of MAX 2011 in a few days. Stay tuned. Thanks!
(
1 comment)
posted under category: CSS on September 13, 2011 at 7:23 pm by MrNate
Foreword: I am giving a LESS CSS talk at the Adobe MAX 2011 ColdFusion Unconference. Blogging about LESS is just one of my stepping stones to presenting. If you want the really good stuff, you should come to my session!
I recently blogged about LESS ports to other platforms, and I thought about mentioning Java there, but this is not a port so much as just reusing the native implementation. Let me break it down like this: Yes, LESS runs on the Java Virtual Machine. It's not even that hard. How you may ask? Like this...
Mozilla makes browsers and Javascript engines. One of their Javascript engines is called Rhino, a JSR 223 compliant Javascript engine for the JVM. You can run any Javascript in Rhino, except that there is no browser, no window, no document and no DOM (I know, it sounds like a dream come true). The conflict comes where LESS.js relies on browser constructs to get its job of compiling and preprocessing LESS CSS into plain CSS, so we have to defeat that.
Lucky for us, we live in the future, and along with our flying cars, we also have Google and GitHub, which pointed me to Asual's project, lesscss-engine. Asual is a software company in Bulgaria, and their GitHub projects are run by Rostislav Hristov.
The easiest method of setting up Asual's solution is to download his browser.js and engine.js, then from Rhino, within Java, include them in the order of browser.js, less.js, then engine.js - the order is important. I did this in an Ant build file like this:
<script language="JavaScript" src="browser.js" />
<script language="JavaScript" src="less.js" />
<script language="JavaScript" src="engine.js" />
From there it's just a matter of calling the engine methods to load LESS CSS code, convert it to CSS and output to a file. Here is how I did it, this is my code that is directly after the script loading:
<script language="JavaScript"><![CDATA[
var inputFile = readFile('input.less');
var css = compileString(inputFile);
writeFile('output.css', css);
function writeFile(filename, content) {
var fstream = new java.io.FileWriter(filename);
var out = new java.io.BufferedWriter(fstream);
out.write(content);
out.close();
}
]]></script>
The engine.js has a number of good helper methods (readFile, writeFile, compileString, etc.), I did it this way in case there were more LESS files to compile and I wanted to add it to the same
css output string. When you do this, make sure you have the Rhino file, js.jar, in your Ant classpath. In Eclipse I loaded the external jar by adding it to the 'Run as...' dialog when you right-click on your build.xml file. Also make sure you are on Java 1.6+ to support JSR 223 Java Scripting.
You aren't limited to compiling LESS when you do this, you know. You can actually do anything you want in Javascript from right inside your Ant build file. It's fantastic.
There are other methods of accomplishing the same goal.
Erwan Loisant did
something similar by altering the core LESS.js files (including the proper pull request). While he calls his release LESS for Rhino, it's really more of LESS for Ant. Even still, it works great as a rhino-javascript-ant all-in-one solution. I especially like his use of an Ant macrodef to create a <lessjs> tag. His examples work straight across from his blog, perfectly.
Not content to rest on my laurels, I went back to the Asual's LESS Engine project to see if I could make a jar and see what I could do with it. I cloned the GitHub repository locally over http, then I added it as a project to Eclipse. I had to install Maven, which was simple with Eclipse's software installer, and running it is almost exactly like running an Ant build. When you build the project you get a few jars in the
target/ folder. I recommend using the
lesscss-engine-1.1.4-jar-with-dependencies.jar file, as it's the most likely to work anywhere you need it.
When I checked the LessEngine class, I noticed a
main method that was added recently, which means we can call it from the command line, like so:
java -jar lesscss-engine-1.1.4-jar-with-dependencies.jar input.less output.css
Incidentally, if Asual (or someone) were to add a -w command line switch to watch the input file for changes, this would essentially make it identical to the Ruby LESS compiler,
lessc. Except, of course, it would be much faster. Just a thought.
So we can call it from the command line. The next, most obvious step, is to put this in an Ant build. This was so simple. Here is what I did:
<java jar="lesscss-engine-1.1.4-jar-with-dependencies.jar" fork="true" dir="${basedir}">
<arg value="input.less" />
<arg value="output.css" />
</java>
Copy and paste that, with the jar, and it will all work as advertised.
To summarize, You can compile LESS on Java. It's fun and easy to do!
If you want to get all the files, or want to see it in action, I'm doing this talk September 28, 2011 at the AZCFUG in Tempe, AZ, then at Adobe Max on October 5th, then again October 12th at the Tucson CFUG. Look forward to more of this kind of chatter here on this blog.
(
4 comments)
posted under category: Software Quality on September 9, 2011 at 11:28 am by MrNate
Last July I gave my presentation, Holistic Program Quality and Technical Debt to the Denver CFUG, for my friend John Blayter. This is cool and stuff, but the truly impressive thing is that the audio and video is consistent all the way through, and the awful jokes were even relatively funny.
If you haven't seen it, this is the definitive version. This is the one to sit through.
Watch Holistic Program Quality and Technical Debt
Thanks, John, for getting it up there, even though I may have insulted your programming around the 14:30 mark. Yeah, I apologized, then pointed out exactly where I threw you under the bus. That just happened.
Update: You can hear my awesome kids screaming their heads off around 42:00. Fantastic.
(
0 comments)
posted under category: CSS on September 8, 2011 at 9:13 pm by MrNate
Something I enjoy about LESS is how its ecosystem is a microcosm of a lot of other more well known software ecosystems. There are competitors, contributors, and even ports to other languages. I'm going to talk about those ports today.
Aside from the original Ruby release and the subsequent Javascript browser/Node version which were both written by the creator, Alexis Sellier, there are these other ports.
First, there is LESSPHP. You'll never guess what language that ports to... QBasic! Nah just kidding. There is an obvious benefit to running LESS in PHP, mostly for the fact that your PHP application can now compile the LESS files at the server when they are requested. The JavaScript compiler is great, but doesn't work withthe oldest browsers, and some might take a second glance at having to download another .js file and compiling CSS in the browser. Running PHPLESS will let you get away from the need to eiher preprocess or postprocess your LESS source code. Also, you can invoke it from the command line, and it works just like the Ruby compiler but you only need PHP instead of Ruby.
The second unofficial port is DOTLESS, a port to... DOS batch files! No, just kidding again. Running a native LESS compiler in the CLR is fantastic if you are on Windows or doing .NET development. DOTLESS can run as a filter in IIS that intercepts all .less file requests and translates them on the fly. That also gives way for you to call it programmatically like through a build process, or from the command line in an EXE file, just like the Ruby or PHP command line programs.
Which one of these is better completely depends on what kind of development you do and where you do it. Both projects have their files hosted on GitHub, and they are both very active. It's just good to know there are options.
(
0 comments)
posted under category: CSS on September 6, 2011 at 7:21 pm by MrNate
You are not as far from using LESS CSS as you may think. What does it take to switch from plain CSS to LESS? It's 2 steps.
- Rename your .css file to a .less file
- Include less.js
That's it! From there, you can start to add some variables and nest your selectors, or get more advanced with mixins and color functions. Oh, and also my favorite thing in the world, the
// single line comment!
There are a few cases where your stylesheet won't convert perfectly. I've noticed just a few. They are:
- Font sizes with a slash for a combined font-size / line-height, LESS tends to divide; the fix is to escape them, surround some or all of it with ~"tilde quotes"
- Missing semicolons and sloppy CSS won't compile in LESS; it won't validate either, so you should clean it up anyway
- IE-specific transformation filters and similar unofficial fringe CSS rules, escape the entire thing with the tilde quotes
(
3 comments)
posted under category: CSS on August 30, 2011 at 10:18 pm by MrNate
Foreword: I am giving a LESS CSS talk at the Adobe MAX 2011 ColdFusion Unconference. Blogging about LESS is just one of my stepping stones to presenting. If you want the really good stuff, you should come to my session!
A few weeks ago I stumbled on a CSS shapes demo, The Shapes of CSS from a great site, CSS-Tricks. It's good code, really good, but nobody wants their shapes the same size or color, and changing these means changing a lot of properties. Say you want three sizes of triangles on your site, you have to do the math three times. That's not a huge deal because it's a simple divide-by-two equation, but the heart shape is going to cause a lot more problems, a lot of rework, and a lot of checking.
The great news for you is that I made a LESS CSS mixin library that does all this work for you! All the shapes are LESS mixins, so they don't output anything unless you call them explicitly. You can add the library to your project and if you don't use them, it shouldn't add any overhead.
All of the shape mixins take at least 2 optional parameters, size and color. Some of them have additional properties, like width and height instead of size, and angle for some shapes like the parallelogram. The default size is 100px, which means that at least one edge of the shape will be 100px wide. The default color is red.
The best way to see it in action is to check the demo page, affectionately titled, The Shapes of LESS CSS.
When you decide it's awesome, check it out, download it and fork it on GItHub:
The LESS CSS Shapes Library.
(
0 comments)
posted under category: CSS on August 26, 2011 at 5:09 pm by MrNate
A couple weeks ago Scott Hanselman blogged JavaScript is Assembly Language for the Web. He's right. We now write programs that generate Javascript. We have languages that compile to Javascript, and not just a few! Javascript is our lowest-level language for client-side development.
Scott mentions HTML and Javascript as compiler targets, but he does not mention CSS. It's not a surprise, web developers generally don't think of CSS as a language you can program to. It's not a target you can compile for. CSS has to be hand-crafted over an intensive, grueling, month-long period of awful interaction between designers and developers. Or at least that's the common wisdom of writing a stylesheet.
Of course I'm being facetious. Sarcasm runs deep in my veins. Really deep. Obscure English humor deep.
The truth is, there are a lot of languages that compile to CSS. The overwhelming most popular two being LESS and SASS. I have a list of 14 "CSS Preprocessors," that I looked at, granted many of them are not worth their weight in magnetic bits... a lot more zeros than ones if you know what I mean. Also, I use "language" in a very liberal sense; none of these are even remotely Turing complete. Only one has the concept of an if or a loop. Semantic detractions aside, CSS is growing up, and our near future has compiled CSS written all over it.
Wouldn't it be dreamy to wake up one day in the future where you didn't have to write all that CSS to get a web page to look nice? Maybe we're close to that dream already. Maybe we're there today.
(
0 comments)
posted under category: CSS on August 25, 2011 at 12:00 am by MrNate
Foreword: I am giving a LESS CSS talk at the Adobe MAX 2011 ColdFusion Unconference. Blogging about LESS is just one of my stepping stones to presenting. If you want the really good stuff, you should come to my session!
Today I am making public a tool I created to work with LESS CSS. This is a simple converter that takes your LESS and makes it CSS. It will help you learn and work with the LESS CSS language by showing you how things get converted and displaying any errors as they come across. Here's a screenshot to give you an idea of what you're up against.
You can type or paste some LESS code into the box on the left, then click the stupidly large center button to see the CSS that LESS generates in the right box. You can keep the CSS and use it for whatever, that's fine. I have been using it over the past couple weeks to test LESS code snippets - in this case, it's really more like a snippet compiler, a test driver or a debugger. I tried to make sure all the errors come across with as much detail as possible, but that doesn't mean that LESS always gives useful compile errors.
It's up on GitHub, so you can download, clone or fork it and make a million dollars, or you can run the LESS CSS JS Converter right here from dopefly.com.
The tool uses the Javascript LESS compiler, so there is no server connection, it's all in your browser. Try it out and see for yourself how fast and easy it is to write LESS CSS!
(
0 comments)
posted under category: CSS on August 22, 2011 at 11:07 pm by MrNate
Foreword: I am giving a LESS CSS talk at the Adobe MAX 2011 ColdFusion Unconference. Blogging about LESS is just one of my stepping stones to presenting. If you want the really good stuff, you should come to my session!
A couple years ago I mentioned the LESS CSS project. I stated one problem with it back then, which was the dependence on Ruby. Creator Alexis Sellier has since moved the project to Javascript, which opens it up to a lot of possibilities, the most magical being that we can run it from our browsers.
The performance that I have seen so far has been nothing short of instantaneous. Even on IE8, the overhead is nil. If you've seen LESS but had reservations like I did, fear not, because LESS has come to you!
LESS has also been ported to PHP and .NET. It has picked up in popularity and community support, and is turning into a great open source software ecosystem.
So, why would you want to use LESS? It's because it makes CSS think like programmers do. Set a variable, Call a function, include a file, these are just the start to the kinds of things you can do when you use LESS CSS.
(
0 comments)
posted under category: Life Events on August 20, 2011 at 12:09 am by MrNate
A little quiet around here for the second half of the year. I hate those blogs that do nothing but apologize for lack of interesting content, and I don't like blogging just because it's been too quiet, but I have a goal for this year, and that's to blog more than last year. I have more than doubled it already, I think I'll beat the last 2 years combined, so I'm able to feel a little smug there. See, I like to set goals that I've already hit. No disappointment that way.
We took a couple vacations over the last couple months. Legoland in May, then San Antonio and Schlitterbahn in July. My wife likes to keep me away from screens when she can. We were supposed to head up to the Rim this weekend but she's going to be busy showing houses. She's planning on closing her first two within the next few weeks, working her tail off. Also, I won a big glass award trophy thing at work for a project I did last year. I need to find a way to top that.
Anyways, before August slips away, I really do have 3 interesting things to say.
1. AZCFUG has famed CF podcaster and presenter Dave Ferguson to talk about Application Intrusion, Detection and Tracking. If you haven't seen it yet, you should come and catch this talk before he stops giving it! That's next Wednesday, the 24th, check the AZCFUG site for details.
2. Along with Dave and a lot of other really smart people, I am speaking at the Adobe MAX ColdFusion Unconference. The unconference area is where the smartest, coolest, most attractive people hang out, so naturally I'll be there most of the time. My time slot is on Wednesday afternoon, so don't leave the conference early, the best stuff is on the last day! The topic of my talk is LESS CSS, being a programmer while working with stylesheets, and doing amazing things with beautiful technology.
3. With all that LESS stuff, I have learned far more than I can put in a single technical presentation, so I'm going to start leaking LESS content onto this blog. Hopefully it will whet your appetite enough to catch my talk. Look forward to it. You will love it. Also you can catch the preview at the CFUG in late September, and after MAX if your local user group or tech conference wants to see it and can book my time.
(
0 comments)
posted under category: Life Events on August 1, 2011 at 12:00 am by MrNate
August 1st 2011 is "How I started ColdFusion" day, thanks to Steve Bryant.
This may not be entirely fantastic, but it's my story.
I was working at 7x, a start-up web design and development company in Anchorage, AK. there were only a small handful of those when I started out of high school in 1997. Development at 7x was all based on Tango; the "server" was a mac, Tango would crash often and there was only one guy who could hack it. We started hearing about ColdFusion as a better web platform. A little positive press and the CEO was sold.
The following year, 7x sent 3 of us to a week of training in Seattle. The other two with me wore those customer relations, project manager and designer hats, and I was really a web producer or content engineer at the time. My business cards actually said I was the 'Sr Web Slinger'.
Thinking back I can't believe how naive I was at the time. I knew so little. The world was all blurry to me.
The training was an Allaire class put on by a guy who drove down from Vancouver, BC (as opposed to Vancouver WA where I was born). Nice guy, I think his name was Jonathan. We actually went through two classes in the week, first was a web development (in general) class, then the "Cold Fusion" class. I think I was the only one of the three of us from 7x who seemed to really get what was being taught in the CF class. It's that technical brain of mine I guess.
This was my first business trip. We toured Seattle, I visited my uncle in Kirkland, discovered GameWorks and Ikea, and made some life-long friends.
They put me right to work when I came back, working on shopping carts and early CMS-like apps. I sure hope none of that code is still running today.
So, here's to the bright future! I hope I can look back at this time and say "I knew so little" 13 years further down the road.
(
0 comments)
posted under category: IDEs and tools on July 26, 2011 at 8:12 pm by MrNate
I've been a pretty big fan of revision control software since I started hearing about it. It's crazy that I was a developer for so many years before I heard about it at all. I guess that's what I get for keeping my nose to the ground (note to self: write about being a new developer and getting connected).
I thought I had skipped the entire CVS generation until I joined a very large, almost 100 year old company. Boeing loves CVS, I guess just because it's reliable and was around when they set up their servers. My CVS server is doing fine, but it's slated for a migration to a new data center, possibly facing an end-of-life soon; the guy who maintained it left the company over a year ago. Naturally, I looked into Subversion. There is an enterprise hosting group that hosts SVN over SSH, which means SSH software, managing keystores, telnetting, all kinds of things that I am not a fan of. I had it working, just barely, only through Tortoise and not Eclipse, but it was hard and I would have to help all my teammates get it to work, too. They're smart, but this setup is harder than I want to work. I would have migrated to SVN, but they made it way, way too hard.
The great news is that they do make Git available to me (if I know where to look [Boeing has a strict software installation policy {I can only install the software they give me <recursive parentheses are fun «sometimes»>}]).
I had big initial troubles with understanding the concepts of Git. Everyone who switches has the same trouble. Expect it and don't let it get you down. Git uses a lot of the same words with different meanings, and the need to branch and manage branches is much more prevalent. I found EGit (the Git plugin for Eclipse) completely confusing and stupid. The command line was out, come on, this is 2011. Even TortoiseGit was acting broken. I needed help, and lots of it.
Thankfully, I got to attend two different hour-long Git sessions with Tim Cunningham, who pointed out some other resources. I watched a few other videos, the best was probably Jenny Donnelly's Introduction to Git from Yahoo. Then I read a lot, practiced some, and finally, here I am - switching!
I came to terms with EGit and TortoiseGit - they both make sense now and they work great. I use the Git Bash shell now and I don't even feel weird about it. I keep a cheatsheet on my wall and refer to it regularly.
It's at this point that I can look for the real benefits, to see if this little project pays off.
My Git architecture is very simple and based on what Tim showed off. It's simple file shares across the network. At first it sounded awful, but in reality this works like a charm. The shares are backed up. I control file access. I just have to enforce a couple strict pushing practices and everything is gravy.
I think what I most like about this setup with Git is that it inverses the control (IoC! [kind of]) of my source control software. Where before I needed a server, IT hardware support and had one repository, now I make and control the repository when and where I want it. Where before committing to a subversion repo on a flash drive seemed like a half-broken hack and it would never sync to a remote server, now it's a way to win easily. It feels liberating. It's really cool. This developer's tool doesn't need a server anymore. It just needs a capable developer. It's developer's software for developers, and I love it.
As I've progressed with Git, I have branched and merged and pushed and rebased and stashed pulled and diffed. Some of it has been a big challenge, like putting current work aside to get out a quick fix, I had to learn to stash, then make remote branches, and so on. It's tough, but thanks to google's index of stackoverflow, I'm making great progress!
In summary, Git is good, you should learn about it, give it a try and have patience.
(
3 comments)
posted under category: Software Quality on June 30, 2011 at 10:25 pm by MrNate
This month it looks like I'm presenting Holistic Program Quality and Technical Debt (HPQaTD? Can someone pronounce this for me?), twice! If you haven't seen it yet, you have two chances in July.
Tuesday, July 12, for the Denver CFUG and my friend John Blayter. Read about it and RSVP at The Denver CFUG's Meetup site. It's at 5:30 PDT / MST, or 6:30 MDT in Colorado. John ran the CFUG in Phoenix for a few years, and actually was my boss at Interactive Sites until he moved to Colorado.
Thursday, July 14, for the Central Georgia CFUG and my friend Tim Cunningham. I have not met the user group manager Matt Abbott, but I warn you not to misspell his name. You can see the event and RSVP at The CGCFUG's Adobe Groups site. This one is at 3:30 PDT / MST, or 6:30 ET, Tim hooked me on to this as a trade in services for his presentation on Git at the June Phoenix CFUG.
Both of these are remote presentations. If you want the address, you should follow me on twitter, where I tend to post only the most important subjects, and links to cool speeches.
Thanks for the interest in my talk!
(
0 comments)
posted under category: AZCFUG on June 20, 2011 at 9:33 pm by MrNate
This month at the Phoenix ColdFusion Users Group we have my friend Tim Cunningham talking about Git. I think this is a reprise of his CF.Objective() session titled A Git's Guide to Gitting Along. As with all the CF.Objective() content and speakers, this is going to be another example of something great. Thanks to Tim's talk at the conference, I have been able to get up and running (ok, maybe jogging) with Git!
If you are in the Phoenix area, come to UAT, this Wednesday, June 22nd 2011 at 6:30 PM. It should last about an hour, we'll bring pizza if you bring yourself.
Also, we have to give away some software. Like, lots of software. Any product that Adobe sells, exactly one copy (short of something terribly expensive, but most of the CS5.5 bundles are included). You can even get a copy of ColdFusion Server or ColdFusion Builder. Yours, free, it's a random raffle, and you have to be here, in person, for the whole meeting to get in the drawing.
If you're not in Phoenix, we are still broadcasting this over the internet! Right around 6:30 on Wednesday (Arizona / Pacific time), tune in here: http://experts.adobeconnect.com/azcfugjune2011/!
(
0 comments)
posted under category: ColdFusion on June 16, 2011 at 6:38 pm by MrNate
I have been working on a project for a while now. Really, for about 6 years, but only in the past month did I get everything written down. I call it The Final Nail for ColdFusion Client Variables. It's an eight page (printed) look at ColdFusion's client variables scope, and all the problems that come with it.
If you are looking for a reason to go through your ColdFusion app and replace you client vars, print off a copy and take it to your manager.
If you use client variables and think everything is fine, I suggest you read it and find out exactly what you have gotten yourself into.
If you are in love with client variables, well, I'm so sorry. I'd hoped we could be friends. I really am a nice guy, but we have to draw the line somewhere.
I had a ton of help, so thanks to everyone who pitched in (whether you know it or not)!
Last, this is the standing comments post for the article, so if you want to talk about it, this is the place. You can also get me on twitter, @nathanstrutz if you have any quick comments.
That's all; enjoy The Final Nail for ColdFusion Client Variables!
(
4 comments)
posted under category: Free Code For You on June 8, 2011 at 6:29 am by MrNate
A little bit ago I committed my first code to GitHub in the form of a project I've been tinkering with, a cyclomatic complexity measuring tool for your CFML apps. It's just a few files and a snazzy interface that will give you a heatmap kind of display to help highlight areas of complexity in your ColdFusion apps.
It's a quick toy to play with, and maybe it can help you reduce or refactor some of the more complex aspects of your applications, so give it a try!
RIAForge site
Project & Files on Github
And screenshots, so you know what you're getting in to:
Finally, big props to Sean Coyne for already dropping a patch on it. I like this Github stuff, but I don't understand all the terminology yet.
(
9 comments)
posted under category: AZCFUG on May 23, 2011 at 11:48 pm by MrNate
Just a quick note to say Jim Bambrough, local comedian and ColdFusion developer (great mixture, right?), is going to talk about building applications with Sencha/Ext JS, Sencha Touch and ColdFusion, tomorrow night at the Phoenix ColdFusion Users Group. Jim is an awesome speaker, funny, and knows his stuff, so come watch him with the rest of us.
Same location as always: UAT's main auditorium at 2625 W. Baseline Rd, Tempe, AZ. We will meet at 6:30 PM on May 25th. If you are anywhere near Phoenix, then I hope you can join us!
* UPDATE : Catch the show live, tonight - http://experts.adobeconnect.com/azcfugmay2011/!
(
0 comments)
posted under category: ColdFusion on May 23, 2011 at 6:35 pm by MrNate
Oh no, the last day!
Early on, I went to What is Function Programming with Sean Corfield
Slides
I get it, finally. Not that I hadn't seen FP before, not that I hadn't had it explained before, not that I am going to start writing clojure today, but now, at least, I get it. Here's the short answer. The strength in functional programming comes down to map and reduce, and to having very limited side effects except for transforming the data - this explains why it's great for testing, for thread safety and thus parallelization. Sean is always great to listen to, and it's usually about something cutting-edge, pushing us over the cliff so we can try our wings. As a bonus, we also had an interesting discussion about closures versus anonymous functions (hint: it's about context) that we got to continue at lunch.
Next I went to Relax with CouchDB by Mark Drew
Slides (pdf)
Mark went briefly over NoSQL databases, which made me wish I saw Peter Bell's NoSQL talk on Thursday. I picked up everything I could during his brief NoSQL discussion, I especially liked the slide on the CAP Theorum, with what category databases fall into (you can see it here). Mark is funny on stage. He keeps the crowd awake by throwing things at them. Candy, USB drives, toys, etc. It's entertaining (and dangerous). CouchDB looks like an awesome product, and Mark made a really nice case for it. It's essentially a document database with a REST interface. He showed it returning a lot of JSON, but I'm sure it can do more.
Before lunch I sat in on Just Mock It with Louis Majano
Slides (pdf)
I saw this at the MAX unconference tent, but a couple things have changed - I am developing for CF9 now instead of CF6, so a mocking framework is feasible, and MockBox version 1.3 was released, so I was hoping to see something new. I didn't see anything new, so that was a bummer. What I got instead was a refresher course on MockBox and some tips on unit testing, not a loss at all. Mocking is an important topic when you talk about unit testing. Some tips I got were to make a 1:1 relationship from components to test components, remember to test private methods, with mocking you can test what happens when another component throws an error, and a good source for unit testing examples is ColdBox's test suite. Final note, it's easy to get lost in Louis' fantastic accent!
A scene from Lunch
After lunch was Time Management for Developers by David Shepherd
No slides
David gave the case for using Mylyn in Eclipse, and showed how it works. Unfortunately I was underwhelmed by the presentation, I don't know what it was about it, maybe just because he was sitting for it, maybe because it was right after lunch. Even still, Mylyn gets a win. It lets you keep context while you switch between tasks, it lets you share your context with other developers, and it integrates your tasks with bug and task tracking systems. Cool product. I've already started trying it out!
Finally, the last session, I went to AngularJS with Elliott Sprehn
No slides
Elliott was the one who talked me into writing my session notes on this blog. I have to say I was overwhelmed by Angular. I told him afterward that for a bit, it felt like he was just telling us everything we wanted to hear, it was too good to be true: How would you like a javascript framework that works with jQuery, gives you includes and templating, dynamic variables, 2-way data binding, magical mustache expressions, unicorns and rainbows, total extensibility, ORM over REST, MVC for JS, mocking and unit testing, free beverages for life and a friendly DSL for writing tests, plus it's smaller than jQuery and written by Google. Yeah, that's AngularJS. Basically, I think he was trying to blow us away in order to get us to try it out. It worked. I am now getting familiar with the double-magical-mustache syntax. I just need a project to put it in. You should look into it yourself.
That's a wrap.
To summarize CF.Objective() 2011 for me, I will say that I met a ton of amazing people, talked about a lot of programming, learned a huge amount of things, shared ideas with the best minds in ColdFusion and was blown away with the things some people are doing with this technology. CF.Objective() truly made me a better developer. My take on the conference is that they billed themselves as the conference for enterprise ColdFusion development, and they delivered.
Thanks to the organizers, the speakers, the other attendees and the sponsors! You are all doing great stuff. Believe it!
(
0 comments)
posted under category: ColdFusion on May 22, 2011 at 4:30 pm by MrNate
Second day!
First up, I went to Setting up a Solid Local Dev Environment with Kurt Wiersma
Old slides
Kurt told me it was going to be stuff I already knew, but I like to assure myself that I'm doing things right, or if not, that I at least know why I am doing it wrong. He was right, I didn't learn a lot, but it made me think about the way I do it versus his. He recommends the Apache/CF Multi-server stack with a shared database. I have been doing stand-alone CF with the built-in server, which has been great for my current projects. Also, he mentioned DDLUtils, which I need to play with. In the end, it was a well thought out session, and Kurt did it like a pro.
Second session, No-Nonsense REST & Taffy with Adam Tuttle
Slides
The first of two consecutive REST sessions, Adam talked about the tangible use of RESTful services in ColdFusion. The 5-minute intro to REST was just what we needed to get going, then he showed what it takes to do it in CF - y u c k. Hundreds of lines of code - we need a framework! Intro Taffy, a simple conventions-based RESTful framework for CF kind of like FW/1 meets jQuery, then mashed into REST. The killer feature of Taffy I think is the dashboard, which lets you call your REST services from an admin-like interface. Adam was funny and his software was keen.
Here is Adam talking about boring programmer stuff
Last before lunch, Everything you wanted to know about REST with Simon Free
No slides
Simon Free's REST talk right after Adam's was very helpful. Simon approached REST with the sort of philosophical hippie free love type of approach that REST was based on, which I think is comical because Simon is really just a cool, smart guy, not the hippie type. It was great to finally have someone tell me exactly what REST is and everything it stands for and how it was really meant to be used, plus how where and why to break the rules. I had a lot of takeaway points, so this one was a win for me.
After lunch, I gave my presentation, Holistic Program Quality and Technical Debt. I think it went pretty well. I could criticize myself all day on my performance, but instead, I will say I had a good interactive audience considering it was right after lunch, there were maybe around 40 people (?), I got a few laughs, we had some discussion at the end on code reviews, I think I hurt some people's feelings in a thought-provoking kind of way, which is good, then I had some requests to re-use my slides for themselves, plus one person called me "smart guy." Still I was kind of unsure until Sean told me that he liked it (but in person, not just on his site). Whew, that did a lot for my nerves, thanks! I felt better. A few kind words go a long way.
Slides
In the last session of the day, I went to A Git's guide to Gitting along with Tim Cunningham
Slides
Tim did something unique, he pre-recorded his screen as he used Git and while it was playing, he talked over it. It ended up being a little bit awkward because he hit the ffwd button a few times on accident, and sometimes couldn't pause it fast enough. Tim does great in front of a crowd and is fun to listen to, so it was kind of a bummer that the recorded part was only so-so. That said, I learned a great deal about how Git works, it's impressive and I am going to start using it because of this session. Mission accomplished, Tim.
CF.Objective() was well attended. Here is another shot from the keynote. My day 2 photos were lacking, so I'm dropping it here :-)
(
1 comment)