JohnBs personal blog

Just in case you haven’t already seen Sean’s post - Fusebox 5.1 beta is available for download at http://www.fusebox.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=downloads.listDownloads so go grab it and give it a try. It contains a number of backwards compatibility tweaks as well something I added to the feature list - the ability to use lexicons/errortemplates and plugins from a mapping or absolute path. This is great for corporate use - because with fb5 we could have multiple FB applications in the same CF application namespace but lexicons/plugins/errortemplates still lived with the application but now with 5.1 we can have a single collection of lexicons, plugins and errortemplates. Great job Sean!!!

When Sean makes the public Beta on Fusebox 5.1 available he’ll also be adding to the release notes to say it’s not compatible with BlueDragon.NET 6.2.1 - due to the new way of determining last modified dates of file on disk using a Java object. Anyway, all is not lost as I’ve just tested it on the upcoming BlueDragon 7 release and it works just fine - and damn is that thing fast!! I’d seen various blog entries recently regarding performance of upcoming BlueDragon, Railo release but hadn’t yet tried it for myself - worth checking out if i were you!!!

I’d been wanting to play with Spry for ages now but couldn’t find a project to use it on, but a recent project involved quite long winded forms which require conditional validation based on previous responses and such like. I had originally used jQuery with a validation widget but when I brought in Spry to do a 2 selects related drop down things didn’t play well.

Fortunately for me, the new 1.4 Spry release brought with it Form Validation (or was it there around before 1.4, i could be wrong???). Out of the box, it’s not immediately obvious how to perform conditional validation but a post onto the Spry Forums revealed a direction to look in, making use of functions destroy() and reset() in the Spry library.

So here’s my setup; a page with a set of radio buttons say for example asking for a persons sex, male or female (this is a hypothetical situation!) and if a user chooses female then they are required to fill in additional details. The javascript I ended up writing looked like this;

What’s happened here is that if a user selects Female then it displays the div and creates a new spry validation object(s), if the user then changes back to Male then it resets and destroys the validation objects…very neat!

EDIT: Turns out the validation objects weren’t being reset/destroyed with my original code, the trick is not to var the validation objects!

I was going to labs to pick up the latest Spry install but ‘JSEclipse’ caught my eye - and from the notes it sounds really cool. From the intro notes;

JSEclipse is a new plugin for the Eclipse environment that helps developers code JavaScript faster and with no errors. With JSEclipse, you can complete a variety of tasks, from editing small sections of code to working with the next big AJAX library or developing plug-ins for a product that embeds JavaScript snippets.

Try it out for yourself from Adobe Labs

For the benefit of those folk that don’t subscribe to Hal Helms’ newsletter (shame on you….) you’ll have missed the annoucement regarding the future of Fusebox

“In recent years, John Quarto-vonTivadar and I have been the “custodians” of Fusebox. As of today, I’m very happy to announce we’re given that trust to TeraTech (www.teratech.com). Michael Smith, CEO, has been a long advocate and contributor to Fusebox and will now hold the reins. John and I will be helping as time allows, but feel certain Michael will do a great job. Special thanks are also due to Sean Corfield and his team of developers who built Fusebox 5.”

All of us closely attached to Fusebox have spoken to Michael regarding the news and all feel that this is excellent news for Fusebox and moving it forward - Michael has long been a promotor of the fLIP methodolody which will I’m sure make a great new custodian of Fusebox - My thanks go to Hal and John for their great work thus far and I’m sure it’s not the last we’ve heard of them with Fusebox!

s game of small yellow blobs - LocoRoco! With the recent PSP firmware update - or maybe even a new version of ‘myPSP’ you can now download game demos much like on the Xbox 360. One of the limited games is LocoRoco - now, I’d seen it in the stores but it look like a kids game but it really is addictive, if you’ve got a PSP then give it a try I’m sure you’ll like it!!