thecrumb.com » Blog http://www.thecrumb.com ColdFusion, Ant, jQuery and other geeky stuff with the occasional motorcycle post. Fri, 25 Jul 2008 12:40:50 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6 en http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ CMFL IDE Survey - Initial Results http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/04/17/cmfl-ide-survey-initial-results/ http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/04/17/cmfl-ide-survey-initial-results/#comments Thu, 17 Apr 2008 13:32:46 +0000 Jim http://www.thecrumb.com/?p=425 The ‘Open’ CFML Survey has been up for about a week. As promised here is the first round of results:

Total Number of Survey Results 371
First Result 4/09/08 1:35 AM
Last Result 4/16/08 6:45 PM

Results are available in both PDF and Excel:

Both these are just a dump of the data - no pretty graphs. I’m going to try and go through some of this data and summarize it a bit in a more readable format (hopefully I can get to this over the weekend)

I did dump the HTML output (with pretty graphs) into a PDF as well.

This is a bit nicer to look at but you can’t drill down into the ‘other’ replies, etc.

You May Also Enjoy Reading:

]]> http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/04/17/cmfl-ide-survey-initial-results/feed/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ OpenBD Steering Committee http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/04/08/openbd-steering-committee/ http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/04/08/openbd-steering-committee/#comments Tue, 08 Apr 2008 16:13:20 +0000 Jim http://www.thecrumb.com/?p=412 Alan has a list of the OpenBD (Open BlueDragon) Steering Committee on his blog:

Andy Allan, Peter Amiri, Mike Brunt, Sean Corfield, Mark Drew, Adam Haskell, Jordan Michaels, Alan Williamson, Matt Woodward and Andy Wu

LOTS of good names on there and some really nice quotes but obviously I’m going to have to step up and volunteer for the committee myself.

OpenBD is FREE

“formalised language”… “masterful clustering-replication mechanism”…

Huh?

Not one of them mentioned the dreaded ‘f-word‘…. Can’t anyone say it??! Me of shallow pockets (have you priced kid sneakers lately?) will…

OpenBD is Free!! (it even rhymes - marketing will love that)

OK. Now I feel better.

On a serious note - I am happy to see such prominent names on the committee and I’m really looking forward to seeing where all this goes. Exciting times!

You May Also Enjoy Reading:

]]> http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/04/08/openbd-steering-committee/feed/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ Quickly Setup New Projects Using SVN http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/04/07/quickly-setup-new-projects-using-svn/ http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/04/07/quickly-setup-new-projects-using-svn/#comments Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:00:20 +0000 Jim http://www.thecrumb.com/?p=409 We have a standard directory structure for each of our projects:

PLAIN TEXT
CODE:
  1. projectname
  2. /docs
  3. /testing
  4. /build
  5. /priv
  6. /pub

Testing contains our Selenium scripts (and in the future - unit testing scripts). Build contains our Ant scripts.

At the office I'm in charge of setting up new SVN repositories and one of the things I've done to speed up setting up new projects is to create a 'template' project directory. This contains all the folders listed above along with some default buildfile and testing scripts.

I first created this layout in a new repository. I then added our standard buildfiles and testing suite files. I then created a SVN dumpfile using the svnadmin dump command. You end up with a dumpfile containing the contents of your repository.

Now when I create a new project I simple create the new project's repository, and then use the svnadmin load command to import my 'default' dumpfile contents.

PLAIN TEXT
CODE:
  1. /usr/bin/svnadmin create --fs-type fsfs /var/www/svn/projectname
  2. sudo chown -R apache:apache /var/www/svn/projectname
  3. sudo svnadmin load /var/www/svn/projectname </var/www/svn/tmp/template.dumpfile --ignore-uuid -q

Now when the first person checks out the project - they already have the required directory structure, buildfiles and testing templates.

You May Also Enjoy Reading:

]]> http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/04/07/quickly-setup-new-projects-using-svn/feed/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ Vince Bonfanti On ColdFusion Weekly, OpenBD Mailing List http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/04/03/vince-bonfanti-on-coldfusion-weekly-openbd-mailing-list/ http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/04/03/vince-bonfanti-on-coldfusion-weekly-openbd-mailing-list/#comments Thu, 03 Apr 2008 23:01:40 +0000 Jim http://www.thecrumb.com/?p=407 If you haven't listened to the Vince Bonfanti interview on ColdFusion Weekly yet - go do it.

To be honest I was expecting a bit more of a 'cut-n-paste' interview where Vince responded with canned responses. It was anything but. Vince gave a great overview of his history (he's a developer GASP!), the history of BlueDragon, and why they decided it was time to go open-source. He answered a ton of questions and cleared up quite a few things I was wondering about.

It was funny because he mentioned using File Maker Pro and having it connect to the web. That was EXACTLY the reason I discovered ColdFusion. A Mac user at my company had a huge File Maker database that he wanted to 'webify'. At the time there was no ODBC connection to File Maker and I went exploring options and found ColdFusion.

Listening to Vince, it's clear that he gets open-source. I'm even more excited about the release of OpenBD now than I was before.

On a side note there is a new OpenBD mailing list.

You May Also Enjoy Reading:

]]> http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/04/03/vince-bonfanti-on-coldfusion-weekly-openbd-mailing-list/feed/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ Trac - Ticket Sort Order http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/02/21/trac-ticket-sort-order/ http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/02/21/trac-ticket-sort-order/#comments Thu, 21 Feb 2008 14:07:41 +0000 Jim http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/02/21/trac-ticket-sort-order/ One of the things that bugs me with the default Trac install is the ticket list. By default the Active Tickets list sorts by value (?), milestone, type and time. Usually however I want to sort by Ticket # so I can see what I added most recently. Luckily Trac makes this easy as the Ticket 'reports' are driven by simply SQL queries.

Depending on your permissions when you click on an available report you should see several buttons at the top of your screen:

Trac Ticket Edit

Simply click Edit Report and you will be taken to a dialog where you can adjust the title of the report, the description and the query which pulls the data for the report!

The query for the default Active Ticket report looks like:

PLAIN TEXT
SQL:
  1. SELECT p.value AS __color__,
  2.    id AS ticket, summary, component, version, milestone, t.type AS type,
  3.    (CASE STATUS WHEN 'assigned' THEN owner||' *' ELSE owner END) AS owner,
  4.    time AS created,
  5.    changetime AS _changetime, description AS _description,
  6.    reporter AS _reporter
  7.   FROM ticket t, enum p
  8.   WHERE STATUS IN ('new', 'assigned', 'reopened')
  9. AND p.name = t.priority AND p.type = 'priority'
  10.   ORDER BY p.value, milestone, t.type, time

Changing the sort order is a simple matter of adding an additional field to the ORDER BY:

PLAIN TEXT
SQL:
  1. SELECT p.value AS __color__,
  2.    id AS ticket, summary, component, version, milestone, t.type AS type,
  3.    (CASE STATUS WHEN 'assigned' THEN owner||' *' ELSE owner END) AS owner,
  4.    time AS created,
  5.    changetime AS _changetime, description AS _description,
  6.    reporter AS _reporter
  7.   FROM ticket t, enum p
  8.   WHERE STATUS IN ('new', 'assigned', 'reopened')
  9. AND p.name = t.priority AND p.type = 'priority'
  10.   ORDER BY ticket DESC, p.value, milestone, t.type, time

Since it's simple SQL it's very easy to create new reports as well. I've created a few new ones including one for closed tickets and several to pull up tickets based on certain components, etc.

You May Also Enjoy Reading:

]]> http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/02/21/trac-ticket-sort-order/feed/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ CFEclipse - In The Gutter http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/02/07/cfeclipse-in-the-gutter/ http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/02/07/cfeclipse-in-the-gutter/#comments Thu, 07 Feb 2008 18:28:06 +0000 Jim http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/02/07/cfeclipse-in-the-gutter/ Eclipse Gutters

Today I was editing some code and for some reason (spacing out?) I noticed what the gutters were doing. The gutters are the area I have highlighted in the image above in yellow.

I knew about the TODO icon in the left gutter - but then I noticed the small yellow arrow. That is highlighting the line which contains text you searched for! (CTRL-H). Then notice the right gutter - the blue block is my TODO - the lighter blocks below my search text - so I can easily scan the entire document and clicking on the block will take you to that location.

These appear to be on by default. I clicked around a bit in the preferences very briefly and nothing popped out at me (doesn't mean it's not there!). If you know where to turn these on/off leave a comment!

While digging I did notice a "Quick Diff" option under the General > Editors > Text Editors section.

I enabled this as well as the "Show differences in overview ruler" option. Under "Use this reference for source" I selected "Pristine SVN Copy".

Now I see this in my left gutter:

Show Diff

When I hover my mouse over the gutter it pops up the difference between my copy and the last from SVN which is very handy if you have memory problems like I do :)

You May Also Enjoy Reading:

]]> http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/02/07/cfeclipse-in-the-gutter/feed/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ Free Software http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/01/25/free-software/ http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/01/25/free-software/#comments Fri, 25 Jan 2008 16:09:19 +0000 Jim http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/01/25/free-software/ Today reading John Resig's post about Open Source Release Syncing I thought there were some good bits in there about WHY people support open source software, especially this quote (I added the bold emphasis):

At the jQuery project I've generally split our time indiscriminately but with a sleight bias towards Free Software. By biasing towards Free Software projects we're able to get better mind share amongst developers - who are our key users. For example, getting jQuery support in Drupal was a major victory for us as it meant that all future Drupal module developers would be compelled to, at least, examine jQuery to see if it suits them well, or not. While there isn't, necessarily, a financial reward to working closely with Free Software the eventual market control will be quite significant and useful for further leverage.

I think companies like Adobe could leverage the same ideas with the goal being the same as jQuery's: market control.

You May Also Enjoy Reading:

  • No Related Posts Found
]]> http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/01/25/free-software/feed/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ Developer Toolbox - Text Editor http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/01/11/developer-toolbox-text-editor/ http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/01/11/developer-toolbox-text-editor/#comments Fri, 11 Jan 2008 14:59:40 +0000 Jim http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/01/11/developer-toolbox-text-editor/ Like a trusty six shooter, every developer needs a good text editor in their toolbox.

jEdit screenshot For heavy lifting it's great to wheel out the IDE (CFEclipse, Dreamweaver, etc) but for those quick edits using an IDE can seem like overkill. A simple text editor is lightweight and designed for doing one thing well - editing text!

There are text editors for every platform, ranging from bare bones command line interfaces to Window's built in Notepad to elaborate applications like UltraEdit.

Notepad++ screenshot A good text editor will offer syntax highlighting, code assist, search and replace, multi-document editing and more. Many support plugins or bundles to further extend their functionality. In this screenshot you can see one of the many text editing menus available in Notepad++.

If you are editing your Ant scripts in Dreamweaver or still using Windows Notepad - check out some of the alternatives!

You May Also Enjoy Reading:

]]> http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/01/11/developer-toolbox-text-editor/feed/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ Ant Explorer http://www.thecrumb.com/2007/11/13/ant-explorer/ http://www.thecrumb.com/2007/11/13/ant-explorer/#comments Tue, 13 Nov 2007 13:28:00 +0000 Jim http://www.thecrumb.com/2007/11/13/ant-explorer/ I mentioned this briefly in my 15 Ant Tips posts but thought I would follow it up with a more in depth post...

Ant Explorer is available as a standalone version or as an Eclipse plugin. Installation is via setting up the usual Eclipse update URL to point to the yWorks site. After installation - you can right-click on a build.xml file and select "Show Ant Visualization" (also available via the View menu).

Ant Explorer

While viewing a build file - you can right-click on each node within the diagram and drill into it, execute it or view the source code related to that target. In addition to the Visualization view - you can select Window > Show View > Other > YFiles Ant Visualizer > Ant Properties Visualizer which will show you a visual outline of your build file properties. Checkout the walkthrough for more.

I'm not sure how actually useful the tool is for everyday use but it may be useful for debugging inherited scripts or if you are working on something particularly complicated.

You May Also Enjoy Reading:

]]> http://www.thecrumb.com/2007/11/13/ant-explorer/feed/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ My Old Blogs - The Wayback Machine http://www.thecrumb.com/2007/10/16/my-old-blogs-the-wayback-machine/ http://www.thecrumb.com/2007/10/16/my-old-blogs-the-wayback-machine/#comments Tue, 16 Oct 2007 14:24:13 +0000 Jim http://www.thecrumb.com/2007/10/16/my-old-blogs-the-wayback-machine/ I was having some fun this weekend digging though the Wayback Machine. It's neat to check out what I've run my 'blog' on over the years:

  • Pre 1999 I was on all sorts of weird stuff but mostly static HTML (and maybe some PERL), on shared hosting (Tripod, etc).
  • In 1999 - when we found out we were having Abby - I registered 'thecrumb.com'. I was still handcoding it in old school HTML.
  • 2001 - ColdFusion!
  • 2003 - Geeklog - A PHP CMS
  • 2004 - I tried out Movable Type and a few others...
  • 2005 - Found WordPress

I couldn't imagine going back to hand-coding! I have considered switching from WordPress to Movable Type again now that it is free but I've gotten comfortable with hacking on WordPress so really have no reason to move other than the geek factor of trying out something new.

You May Also Enjoy Reading:

]]> http://www.thecrumb.com/2007/10/16/my-old-blogs-the-wayback-machine/feed/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/