One of the nice aspects of the “Professional Open Source Sofware” business model is that you can be very flexible for your customers. The Railo server has a roadmap of core features and downloadable extensions - some free, some paid - but our roadmap can easily be influenced by our customers. Now that more developers are trying Railo every day, we’re seeing more interest in certain features that were already on our roadmap but were either lower priority or scheduled some distance off in the future. (more…)

Gert Franz just announced the release of Railo 3.0 and one of the important changes for many CFers is that this release combines the previous Community and Professional editions into a single free edition with no restrictions for use (it’s a single “web” with no clustering support but there’s always the commercial Enterprise edition if you need those features).

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As many folks know, I’ve long been an advocate of Paul Kenney’s cfcUnit unit testing framework. I felt it offered the most solid code base and the best all-round feature set in a package that was idiomatic for ColdFusion developers. Unfortunately, the website has not been updated in over 18 months and, although a new build was made available on sourceforge.net a year ago (1.2.0 Beta 1), there has been no progress on integration with Eclipse.

Since unit testing has become an increasingly important part of any project that I work on, I’ve had to review what else is available. Right now, the best of breed for ColdFusion seems to be MXUnit.

The documentation is still somewhat thin, albeit somewhat better than cfcUnit, but it has a rock solid ant integration and a very slick Eclipse plugin, as well as a very convenient way to automatically run any unit tests found within an entire directory tree.

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I’ve done more than a few posts recently about error handling and robust exception information, so I thought I’d write up one entry that can serve as a nice guide for folks to bookmark. By using “Complete” in the title, I’ve also virtually assured that I will forget something critical, so please, send suggestions for what I’ve missed. Let’s get started.

What is the point of this guide? Unless you are a perfect code, there is a chance that your ColdFusion application will have errors in it. The question is - what are you doing with your errors? What was the last error that occurred on your site? If I asked you how many errors your site threw yesterday, could you answer with 100% complete accuracy? I’d be willing to bet most people would say no. Shoot, I know I couldn’t answer that. So what do we do to help resolve this issue?

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Michael Brennan-White asks:

I am attempting to create a new RIA app using the new Ajax tools in CF8. Is there a special trick needed to display a FlashPaper or PDF in a cflayoutarea?

I am calling the report with this link:

<a href=”javaScript:ColdFusion.navigate(’DebtMFReport.pdf’,'center’)”>
Agency Scheduled Payments Report</a>

All that displays is text like this:

(freaky stuff here)

It doesn’t matter if I am using an existing PDF file or a PDF generated by a cfr file.

Any suggestions?

What you have to remember is that when you run ColdFusion.navigate, the JavaScript will request the remote URL and take the resultant HTML and place it in the container (whether it be cflayout, cfdiv, etc). When you pointed to a binary file, ColdFusion attempted to write out the binary data to the container, which obviously won’t work well. PDFs can’t be embedded in a page. They must take over the complete page to work. So you are out of luck.
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One example that I’ve been meaning to post is how to get Image Metadata using the Exchangeable Image File Format or EXIF a using ColdFusion 8.

It’s actually quite simple, to get a list of all the EXIF tags simply use the ImageGetExifMetaData function.

Here’s a quick example:

<cfimage action="read" source="#ExpandPath("lobster.jpg")#" name="img">

<cfset exif = ImageGetEXIFMetaData(img)>

<cfdump var=”#exif#”>

Here’s a screen shot of a CFDUMP of the EXIF Image Metadata.
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I’ve been using FeedBurner for quite sometime now to host my RSS feeds, and when they bought Blogbeat, I was even happier since Blogbeat was a great blog-stats tool.

Now I get both feed and general item stats all from one source. FeedBurner has an API to retrieve information about your stats so I decided to wrap up some of the API into a nice little CFC. FeedBurner.cfc supports getting both general feed data as well as item data. For example:

<cfset fb = createObject("component", "feedburner")>
<cfdump var="#fb.getFeedData('RaymondCamdensColdFusionBlog')#" label="No date, will be yesterday">

This will retrieve the most current stats from the API, which will be yesterday. To get a week of data:

<cfset date = dateAdd("d", -8, now())>
<cfset last7 = fb.getFeedData(uri='RaymondCamdensColdFusionBlog',
dateBegin=date)>
<cfdump var="#last7#" label="7 Days of Info">

And finally last month:

<cfset date = dateAdd("m", -1, now())>
<cfset dateBegin = createDate(year(date), month(date), 1)>
<cfset dateEnd = createDate(year(date), month(date), daysInMonth(date))>

<cfset lastm = fb.getFeedData(uri='RaymondCamdensColdFusionBlog',
dateBegin=dateBegin,dateEnd=dateEnd)>
<cfdump var="#lastm#" label="Last Month">

This data then can easily be dumped into a chart:

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A quick and simple tip - ColdFusion 8 lets you set a default selected tab by using selected=”true” in the tab.

Here is a simple example:

<cflayout type="tab">

   <cflayoutarea title=”Tab 1″>

</cflayout>

In this example, the second tab will be selected when the page loads, as opposed to the first one which is the default. But what if you wanted more control over the selected tab? Here is a way to do it so that you can control the selected tab in the URL itself.
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So once again I’m messing with ColdFusionBloggers to show off some ColdFusion 8 AJAX goodness.

This time the idea came from Todd Sharp. He suggested making the paging AJAX based. That way when you move from page to page, only the content is loaded. Turns out the change was rather simple.

My original code simply got the data and displayed it inside a layout custom tag. I began by changing my index.cfm page to this:

<cfajaximport tags="cftooltip">

<cf_layout title=”coldfusionBloggers”>

<cfdiv bind=”url:content.cfm” id=”content” />

</cf_layout>

I’ll explain the import in a sec. But basically I moved all of the content into a new file. I then used cfidv and bound it to my new file, content.cfm.
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Ok, time for a little revelation. This may prevent me from ever working for Adobe, but I have to be honest.

PDFs are boring.

Ok, ok, I get it. They look nice. They are powerful. But… outside of that, when I hear folks talk about PDF as a technology, I have to stifle a yawn. Not because I don’t like PDFs. I like them just fine. But to me they are about as exciting as, well, other file formats. As long as they work, I’m not too bothered to really care about the internals.
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