JohnBs personal blog

Whenever there’s a new release of FarCry (the CMS) or BlueDragon one of the hot questions is - will it run on BlueDragon? Well - if you’re not subscribed to the BlueDragon interest mailing list you’d not have seen Vince’s post saying the BD7 runs FarCry - this is great news!!! Bad thing is, we have to wait 3 weeks to get our hands on the release candidate and then a further 3 weeks to purchase license keys for the final release….wow, an almost real date to work to for a product release - that must be a first in the CF world

Required reading for the day! READ THIS

A collegue of mine was making his first exploits with Spry and ran into an interesting problem. Given an XML packet like;



john
frank
al



Using tools like Cooktop xpath searches like //bar and //bar[@parentid=1] returns exactly what you’d expect but no matter what we tried we couldn’t get this to work as part of a Spry xpath statement.

I asked Ray if he may know - we knew the xpath syntax was right but Spry wasn’t play nice. He promptly went off and a few hours later sent me a link to Spry Tester - what a guy! Later on I caught up with Sean and he offered the exact same xpath syntax so I knew we must be on the right path…to cut a long story short we’d posted to the Spry Forums and Kin from Adobe responded that the google xpath library that Spry uses doesn’t like the word ‘parent’ in it. Playing around it also seems like it doesn’t like the word ‘child’ either - so just be careful how you name your xml nodes/attributes and subsequently search your xml with xpath if you’re using Spry!

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 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!

At the request of the Mach-ii guardians the former Mach-II category hosted on Fusebox.org forums has been set to read only in place of their new Google Group at http://groups.google.com/group/mach-ii-for-coldfusion

During Mark Drew’s presentation on CFEclipse a member of the audience asked;
Is there a design view?

and Mark immediately replied
No - it’s for developers!

which received a round of applause from the crowd….well it was funny if you were there!

Just home from today’s cfDevCon held here in the UK in Croydon! All in all an excellent mini conference and from my count approximately 200 attendees - where the heck did all those CF Developers come from???? It was especially great that the likes of Vince Bonfati, Charlie Arehart and Ben Forta were in attendance amongst more home grown talent like Alan Williamson, Alex Skinner, Kevin Roche, Nick Tong and others…Topics varied from Using APIs, Fusebox 5 lexicons through to Scorpio peaks and funky BlueDragon 7 stuff. I think i’ll take time to reflect before i blog more.

Thanks Russ for a great conference.