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 :-
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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 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…..
I find Xpath very powerul for searching through a XML document. I have used it extensively in some of my projects and it might be worth it to post some of the examples here. For this example, I have used the books.xml sample xml file which can be found here.
Following are some examples of what we can do with Xpath in Coldfusion. I have tried to keep the variable names self-explanatory so it should easy to figure out which statement is doing what. More »
1) The coding style is very easy (tag based) and the learning curve is minimal. It takes minutes to get used to a new tag or new functionality and within minutes, you can have the new feature up and running.
2) The CF user community is not huge as compared to other communities but its closely bound and very much developer oriented which is what I like about it.
3) Another thing I notice about CF is, inspite of the relatively low popularity as compared to .NET or PHP, the people who use CF are kinda fanatic about CF and wouldnt bother using anything else. I have come across a lot of people who have stuck to CF once they got into it.
Just came across this rather interesting way to get the current hostname programmatically. Thought it might be useful to post here.