Welcome to the Tower, my programming and web development blog. Here you will find articles relating to CFML, CSS, HTML, Java, JavaScript and Regular Expressions, plus discussions on the associated tools, technologies, techniques and ideas.
For more general topics, please visit Sorcerer's Isle, where you will find articles on my other interests.
It's been over two and a half years since my last "why railo" post, and - despite Railo "only" being 0.3 versions on - there's been a lot of improvements!
In fact, because it's been so long, a few of the things here are not new with v3.3 (though they are all new since the previous article), but are still great features that deserve mentioning!
So, what are my ten favourite new features? Read on to find out.
The cfRegex project is two things. Firstly, it is a complete regex implementation for CFML, providing more functionality, flexibility, features and power than the existing CFML RE functions. Secondly, it is a drive to encourage people to properly learn and make use of regex.
Read the rest of this article to find out more.
It's 1st June 2010 today, and that means we're celebrating for the third time the annual International Regular Expressions Day.
Ben Nadel kicked off this event two years ago, in order to promote the use of Regex, especially amongst those who might consider them something scary and obscure.
As before, Ben is running a contest, this year's prizes being some O'Reily Regex books and IIS Mod-Rewrite Pro licenses.
Entry to the competition requires writing some code, and the deadline is today, so if you're interested then hurry up and read the blog entry to find out more.
It's nearly a year on from my last Railo blog post so it is well overdue that I write another - just in case there is anyone still sitting on the fence, unsure if they should use Railo - or indeed, anyone who might be unaware of Railo's very existance!
So to start with, a quick summary of what Railo is:
Find out why Railo is the perfect choice for your next development project.
I've recently been working on a gallery website for my brother, a brilliant artist and illustrator. The site is still under construction, but he's already got some great examples of his drawings and sculptures on there, and it is definitely worth checking out.
Head over to eldavo.co.uk to take a look, and if you like the work take a look at his blog where he has more of his art.
On the technical side, the main site is pretty simple, so far, with extra complexity coming later on. It runs on Railo and uses jQuery. The (private) admin part of the site was my first opportunity to use cfimage functionality, allowing thumbnails to be generated from uploaded images. I used jCrop for the client-side crop selection.
It's been nearly half a year since Railo 3 was released, and with 3.1 just around the corner it is a good time to write a post about some of the features that continue to make Railo such an excellent CFML engine!
This blog entry gives ten reasons for using Railo 3...
For anyone working with any other modern language, (such as CFML, C#, JavaScript, Ruby, and more), using a String within a switch-case statement is not an issue, and probably something you've done many times without thinking about.
However, when working in Java you cannot use strings in a switch statement.
Fortunately, despite what many sites suggest, there is a solution.
I have released v0.7 of QueryParam Scanner, which introduces a variety of improvements over v0.6.1:
For more details and download information, visit the project page at Hybridchill.
The following release, v0.8 will have three key features:
The long awaited Railo 3.0 is out of Beta and available to all.
There are a lot of exciting new features with Railo 3.0: multimedia video conversion and manipulation, video player with playlisting, task manager, cluster scope, CF8 compatibility, and more.
Also, with Railo 3.0, the Community and Professional versions have been combined - keeping the price of the Community edition (i.e free), but without the previous restrictions this had. (With Railo 3.1 due later this year, Railo will fully become Free Software, under the LGPL2 license.)
For more details, the best place to head is the rebrushed Railo website, which has been updated to provide information on what is new with Railo 3.0.
There will also be a three part series on the Railo blog covering the new features. The first entry in the series is already available.
As we (hopefully) all know, using HTML tables for layout is Bad and Wrong.
Unfortunately, the most common way people avoid using tables is to just replace their table, tr and td tags with divs, divs and more divs.
The div tag is a generic container that should be used as a last resort, if there are no other more suitable options.
Whilst the problem of excess divs is not limited to the conversion of table layouts, it is perhaps most obvious here, as it shows the developer is still stuck in the column+row frame of mind, rather than thinking about what they are actually displaying.
In this blog entry, I show an example of how avoiding this mindset can result in much simpler and cleaner code.