the singularity of being and nothingness
Archive for August, 2013
Sencha Fiddle 1.0.0 RC
Aug 25th
Sencha recently released some nice enhancements to Sencha Fiddle, a browser-based sandbox for experimenting with the Ext JS and Sencha Touch frameworks (see my previous post about the features). The best way to learn about the new features is to experience them for yourself, but here’s a quick run-down of some of the more interesting changes:
Bug FixesA few of the more show-stopping bugs have been fixed, including:
- You can now search for your own fiddles by author (e.g., author:existdissolve)
- Creating “data” tabs now successfully save as a part of the fiddle
- Some “un-indexed” fiddles are now back into the search results
If this is your first time visiting Sencha Fiddle in a while, you’ll notice that it’s gotten a significant face-lift. Gone is the bluey-blueness of the Neptune theme, and in its place is the new-ish “Charcoal” theme. It’s still distinctively “Neptune” in the aesthetic, but the contrast of the lime and charcoal are much more tolerable, IMO, than the unrelenting blue of stock Neptune 🙂
Sharing OptionsOriginally, Sencha Fiddle beta offered sharing for Twitter and Facebook. This has now been expanded to include Google+. Hooray!
Additionally, you can now also grab an embed snipped for using on websites (see example More >
Parsing HTML with ColdFusion and jsoup
Aug 10th
Whether you’re scraping content from a website, or simply dealing with the “tag soup” generated from your own site’s WYSIWYG, you probably know that reliably parsing HTML is a pain at best, extremely difficult at worst. Not only do you have to contend with unpredictable content, but there’s no guarantee that the content you try to parse will be well-formatted.
In my first pass at CFGloss, I made a pretty big error in parsing the documentation from ColdFusion, namely, I tried to do it with regular expressions. Ultimately, it worked out *okay*, but it was inefficient, unpredictable, and resulted in miles and miles of regular expression soup. Now that I’m overhauling CFGloss, I want to revisit how I parsed the scraped content and try to make it better.
Enter jsoup. This is an awesome little Java library that takes the headache out of parsing HTML. Besides turning unpredictable, and potentially mal-formed HTML into something usable, jsoup is additionally packed with some awesome features, most notably leveraging CSS/jQuery-esque selectors for manipulating parsed HTML content.
An ExampleTo get a feel of the tip-of-the-iceberg of what jsoup can do, let’s take an example from the Railo documentation. Take a look at the source of this page: http://railodocs.org/index.cfm/function/each/version/current. Our More >
