Posts Tagged Coldfusiondocs

First Take at Swiz Framework

I came across a project at work that was written using Swiz so I decided to spend the weekend getting my head around Swiz Framework for Flex. Swiz is a framework that provides Inversion of Control and Dependency Injection as its killer feature. I have been using Cairngorm for too long now and I was pleased with how Swiz handles the events, handles the dependency Injections and makes life so much easier.

In order to learn something, you always have to write some code with your own hands to actually see whats going on. So I decided to re-write coldfusiondocs using Swiz. Its currently written using Cairngorm and it still is using the Cairngorm version on the live website. For those of you who want to see what I ended up doing, I have committed everything to the SVN repository. I have created a new tag called coldfusiondocs_swiz which has all the code. You are more than welcome to review the code and suggest any improvements or changes. The project is open source anyways and its always good to have extra pair of eyes looking over. :)

Anyways, back to Swiz, here are a few things I learnt while doing this mini-project. :-

  • All Swiz expects you to do is define the Bean Config in the main Application file. After ofcourse dropping the .swc library in the ‘libs’ folder. There is nothing else you need to do, framework wise. Everything else is pretty much framework independent.
  • There are no imports required from the Framework source and the Events are native Flex Events, which I think is, one less thing to worry about.
  • The Event handling and Mediation leaves the developer with only the application logic to worry about rather than firing events and mapping them to commands etc.

Overall, I think I could get used to this quite easily. The framework is still not as stable and mature as some of the other frameworks but I can see it going in that direction.

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ColdFusionDocs now using Cairngorm

This weekend, I thought of revisiting the Coldfusiondocs.com application which I didn’t get the time to even touch for last so many months. I thought using Cairngorm to re-write the app would be ideal as it’s the most widely used Flex framework around.

So, I went ahead and re-wrote the whole thing using Cairngorm (took me one full day) and in the process optimized/fixed the existing minor problems as well. And I also thought that, since this is a project for the community, why not release the code to the community as well. So, for those who are interested, here is the Project with the source code. And yes, project contributors are most welcome. There is loads we can do with it.

A note for those code critics : I am not a Flex guru and definitely not a Cairngorm guru. So, please keep the code critics to be postive ones please. This doesn’t mean my code is bad, it just means it “might” not be the best code around. Also remember, this is not a paid project anyways.

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Railo Support Added to coldfusiondocs.com

I have just released an update to coldfusiondocs.com . As the title says, I have added Railo support to the documentation, so now you get a new tab for Railo tags and functions and just like before, you can search and view the documentation.

I think it makes sense to add this as part of the documentaiton. As always, any feedback is more than welcome.

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More updates to coldfusiondocs.com

Last night, I made some more updates to ColdFusiondocs.com, although minor updates again. I have changed the right panel to have a tabbed layout rather than a top and bottom layout, I think this gives more room for the actual content and both the documentation section and the useful url’s section should be easier for the eye.

Another minor change I did was to focus the search field on load and place the text caret in there. I cant seem to get it to work in Firefox though, would be nice to know if anyone has a fix.

On a side note, I am still struggling to get the deep linking to work mainly because of the fact that the way this app is written. I wil try some more when I get some time as I know its an important feature for this app.

Oh, by the way, as a reminder, you are more than welcome to go and add you CF related links to the app.

Here is the link. www.coldfusiondocs.com/app/

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Add your CF links to coldfusiondocs.com

Yes, thats right. I have just released some updates to Coldfusiondocs.com. It’s now got a 4th panel to it which lists the related links for the tag or function in question. The idea here is that, lets say you are browsing cfquery tag on the left panel, you should be able to look at the cfquery related links (ideally blog posts or other useful links specific to cfquery), right there on the right panel.

I think this adds more value to it in a way that you can look at the documentation and the “interesting” blog posts at the same time in the same interface. It would be really helpful to have these links “rated” and the most rated ones show on top but I would leave it like this for few weeks and based on the interest it generates, I would then later on add the rating feature. Remember, this is not a paid project, so I have to keep this development only to my limited free time.

At the moment, anyone can add links by entering a name and email address, and apart from some very basic validations, its straight forward to add a link. You just need to select a tag or function on the left panel (I have added a few in cfgrid to start with), and then on the right lower panel, fill the form in to add links. Thats about it.

There is no moderation at the moment but I will periodically do an exercise to remove any “non-genuine” links (not that I expect them but you never now), until I put some checks in place to validate a link (as in if it really is a CF related link).

So, go ahead and add links. www.coldfusiondocs.com/app/

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Minor Updates to coldfusiondocs.com

I have added a new category to the coldfusion documentation at www.coldfusiondocs.com. The category is called ‘CF8 Javascript Functions’ and it lists all the available JS functions in CF8. There are 33 functions in total, however, I wouldnt mind adding any ‘undocumented’ JS functions to the list, so if you know of any, feel free to send them over.

Go check it out.  – Select ‘CF8 Javascript Functions’ in the dropdown.

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Coldfusiondocs.com Updates

I had some free time this weekend so I decided to work on some of the requested features of coldfusiondocs.com. I could not get a lot done but here is what I have done :-

The search now allows for a “type search” which means you can now search for e.g. Application framework tags, data manipulation tags etc. This was the most asked for feature. So here it is now!

Secondly, I really wanted to work on some way of bookmarking feature to be available. So I used this SWFAddress tool to implement some Deep Linking, it seems to work, however, I am still not confident that its got to a point where I want it to be. More to come on this later. But for now, just those minor updates have been implemented.

The app can be found here .

Any problems, please get in touch.

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Forums now working on coldfusiondocs.com

As a minor update, I have just setup Forums on coldfusiondocs.com for users to report bugs/issues/feature requests etc.
Its here. http://www.coldfusiondocs.com/forum/ (yes, its the Galleon Forums by Ray Camden, thanks Ray:) ).

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coldfusiondocs.com is now LIVE

As a result of feedback from one of my previous posts , I have made a few changes based on the feedback and the site is now live. This site is basically about giving a new face to the Coldfusion documentation, valid upto the latest version.

Website : www.coldfusiondocs.com

Documentation : www.coldfusiondocs.com/app/

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Feedback wanted on new coldfusiondocs.com

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.

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