Dan’s Drivelings

I’ve attached my slides from the my CFinNC session called “ColdSpring: Solution to a Problem You May Not Know You Have”. I’ve also included the example files that I referenced during the presentation.

The slides have been uploaded to SlideSix.com or you can view them below. A PDF version of the slides is also available for download.

Thanks to all those folks that attended my session. Also a huge thanks and a job well done to the conference committee and volunteers that made the conference happen.

I am super excited to announce that I’ve been selected to present a session at the CF in NC conference in Raleigh, NC in October. This will be my first time presenting to a conference setting and I am really looking forward to the experience. Just last week I gave my first ever technical presentation to the CFMeetup group and got some great feedback.

I’ll be presenting an introduction to dependency injection using the ColdSpring framework titled “Intro to ColdSpring: A solution to a problem you may not know you have”.

I’m also looking forward to meeting face-to-face with a bunch of folks I’ve interacted with digitally over the last few years. Hope to see a bunch of you there!

As web developers one of the most frequent things we’re tasked with building is some sort of form to capture data from our visitors. As we’ve all learned (some of us the hard way), putting a form out there and trusting that our visitors will use it exactly the way we design it every time is the proverbial pipe dream. How many times have each of us written Javascript functions to validate the entries into form fields? It’s much the same every time and, honestly, it gets old reinventing the wheel each time. Enter cfUniform, a very robust, open-source custom tag library from Matt Quackenbush (with others contributing).

cfUniform is a ColdFusion custom tag library that makes adding validation to your forms a snap. The fact that it writes (most) validation for you based on attributes you put in the tag makes it worth using for that feature alone in my mind. However, the benefits don’t stop with validation. It also styles your form fields, labels, hints and error messages for you. Since you can configure a link to a CSS stylesheet in the configuration for the custom tag, you can skin the output generated by cfUniform to match your site’s look and feel.
Read more…

In my last post, we went through a brief introduction of ColdSpring and how you can use it to make configuring your application’s objects much easier. We discussed how objects (beans) are declared in ColdSpring’s XML configuration file and how you can pass any number of values into ColdSpring to be used in configuring those beans using the defaultProperties argument when you create the ColdSpring obect. At the end of the post, we touched on a slight “problem” with using ColdSpring this way.

To be fair, the “problem” isn’t with ColdSpring at all. The problem is with us developers–we’re lazy and we hate redundant typing. In a large application with dozens or more objects, we don’t want to constantly have to type ${dsn} every time we want to inject the DSN property into a bean. Multiply dozens of objects by potentially several properties needed by each object and you can set yourself up for quite a bit of typing, just to get the beans configured (and that doesn’t even take into account that most of us are bad typists and can’t spell DSN the same way a dozen times in a row). Read more…

Over the last two years or so I’ve been working hard to really “get” object-oriented programming as it applies to ColdFusion development. Like a lot of ColdFusion developers that have been around a while, when I started trying to create applications using CFCs, I essentially had CFCs that were collections of UDFs. Before long, after talking with other developers that understood OO principles, I started making my CFCs more “object’y” as I learned more about those principles.

Along the way I naturally heard about various frameworks related to ColdFusion (Fusebox, Model-Glue, Mach-II, ColdSpring etc etc) but never gave them more than a passing glance as I was trying to cram a bunch of new concepts into my brain as it was and I just didn’t have the mental bandwidth to take on frameworks at the same time (however that has since changed and I’ve had a chance to work with Mach-II and Model-Glue). Eventually I got to the point where my applications used numerous objects and some of those objects required the services of other objects to do their jobs. That’s the point that I really began struggling with the effort involved in writing a good OO application. It took lots of lines of code to create an object, configure it simply to pass it into another object. Sound familiar? Maybe you’re at that point with your ColdFusion OO trek. If so, read on and I’ll introduce you to ColdSpring, a free dependency-injection framework (whoa there, stay with me, don’t let the buzzwords turn you off) that will make your life much easier. Read more…