I’m getting pretty excited for Scotch On The Rocks. It should be a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to meeting all the cool folk who are going. I’ve just had a good look at the agenda and I’m thinking, how can I be in 3 places at once!? Oh well, gotta make some sacrifices.

I’ll be getting in to town about lunchtime on Tuesday and I’d be grateful to hear about any pre-event drinks or catch ups.
I will keep an eye on Twitter (the bloody thing is broken for IM which is a shame). Feel free to drop me a line on mrbuzzy@gmail.com or Google IM. Dooo it, hey, do it!

Stop, badge time…

Release Status
Alpha3 has just gone out to a few interested people. The compliments are most encouraging (thanks peeps!) however no bug reports means it clearly needs more users. It’s in no way stable but I’m happy for anyone else to try it. Just drop me a line ;)

Sites and Sounds
I’ve purchased domain names and will probably settle on coldface.org. And why not, it’s catchy. It currently points to the ColdFace category on this blog. I just started up a generalized Facebook group on ColdFusionCommunity.org so please do join if you’re interested in Facebook app development. There’s some documentation on the wiki, it’s on assembla.com and I will probably use them for SVN too. Sorry the doco is sketchy and already needs some re-editing, doh!

In my next post I’ll talk about the basic features and the road ahead.

I use both Dreamweaver and Eclipse split about 50/50. IMO both are missing features and could do with more work done on them. However I can use both proficiently and the ColdFusion IDE war is not a huge deal for me. I am not a designer so there’s heaps of stuff in Dreamweaver I don’t use. Of course I’d love one fully integrated, feature rich, speedy development environment that sparkles like diamonds while doing so, but I’m not really waiting for it.

Generally I choose which IDE to use, by the style of code I’m working with. I think it’s fair to say there are different development ’styles’ and we chop and change as appropriate.

Anyhow my primary thought at this time … I heard once that the /CFIDE folder was once supposed to enable/host a completely ‘online’ code editing system. Which never really eventuated. Don’t kill me on the specifics it’s like a chinese whisper or something.

Fast forward 10+ years and we have Ajax, Flash, Flex and AIR and others. Desktop applications like MS Word and others are going ‘online’.

My vote would be to have a ColdFusion developers environment in the same style. AIR could be a great platform for this ‘online’ development approach which could work dare I say ubiquitously across my PC and my Mac and my local CF installation and my remote CF hosting. And then there’s that whole communal collaboration potential (slight tongue in cheek), sheesh don’t even start me!

Taking java development completely ‘online’ (as in Eclipse going the same route as other online apps) would be quite a task. Doing something revolutionary with CFIDE and AIR might be insanely easy (maybe, shit what do i know) and it would be kudos for those technologies I guess.

It’s 3:20am and I wont hold back in saying those original CF guys were way ahead of their time :)

Disclaimer: just got home from interstate, didn’t read anything other than Mark Kruger’s post. Night night 2008, just slow down, ok.

‘More stuff I’m not allowed to chew on’

The ColdFusion docs say CreateTimeSpan returns a ’special’ date-time object. Experimenting with CreateTimeSpan, you can see it just returns numbers. These numbers when treated as a timespan or date have special meaning. But on their own they’re just numbers. So if I really wanted to, I could store these numbers in my config file. Yay.

[viewcode] src=”http://code.mrbuzzy.biz/blog/functions/createtimespan.cfm?sauce” geshi=cfm showsyntax=no lines=1-8[/viewcode]

So what is a timespan? It’s a length of time (in days) represented as a decimal fraction. ie; 0.25 is a timespan of 6 hours.

CreateTimeSpan is simple (in a good way). You could even roll your own ‘MyCreateTimeSpan’;

[viewcode] src=”http://code.mrbuzzy.biz/blog/udf/mycreatetimespan.cfm?sauce” geshi=cfm showsyntax=no lines=1-12[/viewcode]

But is a timespan also a date? Yes, by default a timespan is also the number of days since December 29th 1899. ie; 0.25 is ‘6am on Dec. 30th 1899′.
Note: the timespan value does not contain a date as such. It’s just a number – a ‘numeric date’.

From the DateFormat documentation;
When passing date/time value as a string, enclose it in quotation marks. Otherwise, it is interpreted as a number representation of a date/time object.

Cool, so stuff like this is possible;
[viewcode] src=”http://code.mrbuzzy.biz/blog/functions/createtimespan.cfm?sauce” geshi=cfm showsyntax=no lines=9-11[/viewcode]
So how can we create one of these numeric dates? Do we really want to? Not unless you’re a walking calendar who likes to write confusing code.
[viewcode] src=”http://code.mrbuzzy.biz/blog/functions/createtimespan.cfm?sauce” geshi=cfm showsyntax=no lines=12-13[/viewcode]
Finally (it’s getting late), not all ColdFusion tags/functions can handle the numeric date. I guess that’s why we have IsNumericDate()…
[viewcode] src=”http://code.mrbuzzy.biz/blog/functions/createtimespan.cfm?sauce” geshi=cfm showsyntax=no lines=14-19[/viewcode]

Thanks for reading. Enlightened or stricken with boredom?

Hey, if you get a test account, why not look me up, or try the ever evolving (and decaying) Coldface Example App.

The example application now includes a bunch of tests and examples. It tests all known Facebook REST methods, including photo uploads (which I’ve only just mastered). It’d be great if someone, anyone, could try it out.

And a while back I started the Coldface Wiki.

Thanks to BiteMan and Edifier for (both) suggesting the name ColdFace. I had another in mind and I might still change it. Because I can. ColdFace is a ‘big’ word, maybe too big for my wee project. But for now we can blame those guys ;)

What is ColdFace? I’m loathed to use the word framework. It’s more like package of components and tags that can make Facebook apps ridiculously easy for ColdFusion developers.

I really hope a few people try it (when the time comes) and give me a little feedback.

Sorry, no code to show yet. A while back I did try to write some doco.

It continues to annoy people who then vent about it on Sean’s lengthy CF GoDaddy blog entry. And fair enough too.

Here’s the good news… CreateObject(“component”,…) works just fine on the Linux hosting! No really it does.

Here’s the working ModelGlue Widget example (Reactor version). That would never run if CreateObject was barred.

What about the Transfer version of that example? Well that ain’t going to work properly. It uses CreateObject(“java”,…) which is still blocked. Let’s check the ORM scoreboard… Reactor 1 – Transfer 0.

Finally, CF8 is just around the corner. It has a number of features that address these issues, like; Optionally restricting access to runtime/system java classes. Per application settings (think custom tag paths and mappings).

How long it will take GoDaddy to upgrade to CF8? A fricken long time is my guess :(