I have been spending some time lately on this idea of mine and I would like to get some initial feedback on this. Its to do with the CF documentation that is available to developers. As a developer, I always have to search for CF tags or functions and there is no easy way to do that without doing atleast 3 or 4 clicks or searches. So I went ahead and put it all together in a Flex app. And I also purchased a name for it. www.coldfusiondocs.com (which is not live yet).
The demo app is here ( www.coldfusiondocs.com/app/ ) . It lists all the tags and functions and its easy to filter down to what you are looking for and it lists the attributes and also opens up a HTML version of the tag/function. At the moment, it does not have display the attributes for every tag and function (because thats something I am still working on). I am going to put together a homepage and possibly a forum for the site sometime during this week but the heart of this project is this Flex app I am working on.
I would like to have some feedback and find out if the effort is really worth it.
Here is what I did with the new CF8 image functions. This is actually drawn to the canvas and not just some text.
Here is the code :-
More »
I have been playing around with this idea of giving a new face to the CF documentation on tags and functions. Whenever I had to search for some tag or function (which I do almost daily), I had to make several clicks before I got to the page. So I decided to play around with this little idea of mine. I put together everything in a Flex app. (http://cfdocs.anujgakhar.com/) . (try in IE for now)
I know there is room for enhancements and features but this is my first step forward towards this project. Any new ideas/features/improvements/critics are welcome and I am keen to make this a really useful tool for fellow developers.
One known issue is, it doesnt load up the online URL in Firefox. I am using IFrame class from Alistair Rutherford which does a really nice job, I just need to work out this Firefox bug.
Extracting links from a piece of HTML code is a very common task and any programmer would have come across this requirement at some point. I have always used regular expressions to achieve this and it has always worked for me, no complaints there. However, I was just curious to find some other way to do it.
Here is what I did.
used CFHTTP to get the HTML code.
Put it all in a CF XML Object
Got all links using Xpath
Put everything inside a CF query.
And it works! I was delighted to see the results. However, the only condition is that the HTML should be valid HTML or XHTML I must say. Well, nothing special I know but atleast I found out which people dont have valid HTML on their sites! ha!
I joined ColdfucionCommunity.org 2 days, a bit late in blogging about this, I know! But really, am surprised by the number of people already using it. Way to go, Nick Tong!
You can find me here http://www.coldfusioncommunity.org/profile/AnujGakhar
My original post on this subject got some improvements and suggestions from different people. So I decided to put together all the improvements and write a new post. The improvements were suggested by Dan Wilson and Qasim Rasheed. Thanks to both of them. The function can be found here Updated DirectoryListing Function.
Here is what has changed :-
- Instead of using list(), the function now uses listFiles() method which gives direct access to the underlying methods like getName(), getParent() etc .
- I converted the long Date variable to a CF Date object using java.util.Date .
- The code is lesser now and all the unnecessary CreateObject() calls are now removed.
Update : 21/02/2008
I have received some modified code from Ed Martin which he talks about in his comments below. Thanks Ed. Here is the code :-
I never really bothered to look at the URL’s in the Coldfusion error template but I just clicked one today and to my surprise, the URL’s still point to macromedia website and one of them doesnt even exist!!
Interesting, huh ?
I had some free time today so I thought of writing some code to mimick CFDIRECTORY functionality using Java objects. As always, the idea of being able to call Java from within CF has always got me excited. I have seen a lot of code out there that uses JAVA to list files in a directory, however, I havent seen any code that returns all the attributes that CFDIRECTORY does. So this is what I decided to do today. More »
XML parsing in Coldfusion has improved a lot in the last few versions but converting a complex XML object to a Coldfusion structure is still a struggle I beleive. There are a few custom tags out there for doing this but the ones that I have used or know are all only for simple structures, not nested or subnested structures. So I use this little function I and one of my other friends worked on and it works like a charm. More »
Just found out from Ray’s blog that Coldfusion 9 has been code named Centaur. I am a little surprised by this as I really think people havent been able to fully absorb or migrate to CF8 yet because there are so many new features, and its a bit early to hear about the next release. Anyways, I am really excited to find out what new features CF 9 is going to have. Will keep an eye…..