What Are You Listening To?

May 8, 2008 – 10:20 am

Been a bit slow blogging lately. Swamped at work and working at home on the new TACFUG site using Matt Woodward’s CHUG application. At work I also got an office mate!! It’s been awhile since I’ve shared an office with anyone but it’s always interesting to see how other people work. He doesn’t listen to anything during the day. I’m the exact opposite - I’m always plugged into my MP3 player…

Dan Switzer is about the only other person I’ve seen post about music on a regular basis… We seem to have similar musical tastes - a bit of metal, progressive rock, etc.

So what do you listen too (if anything) while you code? If you don’t listen to music - how do you stay sane? :)

Right now I’ve got TNT blasting away…

By Jim | Posted in Code | Comments (7)

CFLunch Reminder - May, 16

May 5, 2008 – 7:47 pm

Just a quick reminder - the CFLunch date for May has been set!  If you are in the Triangle area (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill) come on out and relax with other ColdFusion developers and grab a bite to eat.

You’ll also notice a new site for CFLunch!  Please leave a comment so we can get an idea of who’s going to show up!  See you there!

By Jim | Posted in CFLunch, Code | Tagged | Comments (0)

Open Source Flash, Apple and Google

May 2, 2008 – 8:27 pm

A few interesting and somewhat related blog posts:

Simeon Bateman blogs on Mozilla Europe’s founder, Tristan Nitot’s recents comments about possibly both Adobe and Microsoft having an ‘agenda’ with Flash and Silverlight.

But we also know now that Adobe recently announced they were open sourcing FLV and Rich Tretola wondered where was Apple in the list of supporters of the Open Screen Project.  Good comments on that one!  Ed Burnette has similar thoughts…

By Jim | Posted in Code, Open-source | Comments (0)

Keeping Up With My Ant Wiki

April 30, 2008 – 8:12 pm

I recently overhauled my wiki - switching from Mediawiki back to Dokuwiki.  Lots of reasons for the switch but one of the big benefits is there is now a RSS feed for recent changes!

You can add this link to your feedreader and easily find out when I update something.

I’m regularly adding links that either I find, or people email me so if you are interested in Ant this is an easy way to keep up to date.

By Jim | Posted in Ant, Code | Tagged , | Comments (0)

FriendFeed - Tying It All Together

April 30, 2008 – 8:03 pm

Critter and I were talking last week during CFLunch about all the social apps.  I usually sign up for these to 1) make sure no one else steals my username, and 2) check out the interface, etc.

The problem is there are too many of these and I just don’t have time to keep up.  Today I was reading Scoble’s blog and he was going on about FriendFeed.  This is a neat application that condenses all these services into one stream.  Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, delicious and lots more - all rolled into one.

If you haven’t checked it out yet (and use a lot of these social apps) check it out.

I’m online at: http://friendfeed.com/thecrumb

By Jim | Posted in Code | Tagged | Comments (2)

CFML IDE Survey Summary

April 30, 2008 – 7:13 pm

I finally found a bit of time to sit down and pull out some results from the CFML IDE survey:

393 Results (4/9 - 4/28)

1. Which of these describes your role best as a CFML user?
- Application Developer (172)
- Web Developer (129)
- Application Architect (60)
- Other included “superdude” and “all around scrub”

2. Which IDE(s) do you currently use for CFML development?
- CFEclipse (319)
- Dreamweaver (133)
- Eclipse (118)
- Homesite/CFStudio (91)
- Flexbuilder (82)
- Other - Aptana, Notepad++

3. What is your platform of choice for development?
- Windows (320)
- Mac (101)
- Linux (57)

4. Which features in your IDE do you most commonly/frequently use during development?
- Syntax highlighting of code (351)
- File Explorer (237)
- Help for CFTags/Functions (220)
- HTML editing (217)
- Source code control (205)
- CSS editing (160)
- Javascript editing (94)

5. How important are the following features for you in a CFML IDE?
Must Have:
- Syntax high-lighting of code (288)
- HTML editing (237)
- CSS editing (210)
- Javascript editing (199)
- Help for CFTags/Functions (193)
- Source code control (185)

Very Important:
- Integrated debugger (124)
- Framework Support (121)
- Intelisense on CFCs (114)

Useful:
- Integrated CFC explorer (161)
- Integrated log viewer (146)
- Integrated CRUD wizard (126)

Nice To Have:
- Integrated RDS data explorer (104)
- Customizable code coloring (83)
- Simplified Flex/Air development (71)

Unnecessary:
- Integrated CRUD wizard (71)
- Integrated RDS data explorer (50)
- Simplified Flex/Air development (31)

6. What in your opinion would be the right price range for CFML IDE?
- Under $100 (138)
- $100-500 (124)
- Free (109)

7. What features would you like to see added as one click install to an CFML IDE?
- Source control (294)
- XML tools (240)
- Documentation generation tools (220)
- Diff / compare tools (216)
- Unit testing tools (203)
- Other: “The ability to harness the magical powers of the internet.”

Still disappointed in the low number of results.  According to this recent article in Infoworld…

Adobe officials cited analyst estimates of 400,000 developers using ColdFusion

So 400 results seems a tad low.  So either people just ignored the survey, or there is a huge number of ColdFusion developers that don’t know about my blog :)  I’d love to know what kind of results Adobe got on their IDE survey.

By Jim | Posted in CFEclipse, Code, Open-source | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

John Resig on Accessibility, ARIA and Fire Vox

April 30, 2008 – 8:00 am

I’ve been using jQuery more and more at work but have been having to hold off some of the more advanced uses because of accessibility concerns. Working with the Government we are looking more and more at 508 and accessibility and right now AJAX is a bit of a gray area.

Today John Resig (author of jQuery) has a great blog post about Ajax Accessibility in which he discusses Google’s use of ARIA in Google Reader and also mentions  Fire Vox:

Fire Vox is an open source, freely available talking browser extension for the Firefox web browser. Think of it as a screen reader that is designed especially for Firefox.

In addition to the basic features that are expected of screen readers, such as being able to identify headings, links, images, etc. and providing navigational assistance, Fire Vox provides support for MathML and CSS speech module properties. It also works on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux.

I’ll certainly be setting this up today to give it a whirl! If you are interesting in accessibility, 508, and AJAX I’d check out John’s post!

By Jim | Posted in Code, Tools, jQuery | Tagged , , | Comments (1)

Two New Testing/Automation Tools

April 24, 2008 – 2:29 pm

I found both these over the weekend and they both look really interesting:

Cubic - from the same folks that make Selenium

CubicTest is a graphical Eclipse plug-in for writing Selenium and Watir tests. It makes web tests faster and easier to write, and provides abstractions to make tests more robust and reusable.

CoScripter - IBM(?)

CoScripter is a system for recording, automating, and sharing processes performed in a web browser such as printing photos online, requesting a vacation hold for postal mail, or checking flight arrival times. Instructions for processes are recorded and stored in easy-to-read text here on the CoScripter web site, so anyone can make use of them.

By Jim | Posted in Code, Tools | Tagged , | Comments (7)
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