the singularity of being and nothingness
existdissolve
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Posts by existdissolve
Multi-CFML Engine Environment on Apache
May 17th
For local development, I typically deal with ColdFusion 10 and Railo 4. Recently, however, the pain of switching back and forth (copying files and what not) has surpassed the threshold of feasibility. Plus, I would *really* like to be able to easily test ColdFusion 9 and ColdFusion 11 as well (specifically for compatibility with ContentBox).
The ideal setup is that I would install ColdFusion 9, ColdFusion 10, ColdFusion 11, and Railo and simply create local sites which all run off of the same core code, something like:
- mysite.cf9.com
- mysite.cf10.com
- mysite.cf11.com
- mysite.railo.com
I think it is fate or Providence, but the genesis of my search for a solution to this problem coincided ALMOST PRECISELY with cf.Objective 2014. While I wasn’t able to attend, the amazing Gavin Pickin presented on a topic entitled Setting up your multi-engine environment:Apache, Railo and Coldfusion – Play Nice Kids. Yes, I know: exactly what I was needing to do.
I followed along as best I could with the PowerPoint, and after only a few missteps, it was working.
Gavin, you are the man. The next time I see you I will buy you several beers ๐
If this is something that you’ve been interested in doing for your own development environment, be More >
An Aside: Opinions on Proposed NFL Rule Changes
Mar 22nd
My blog is 99% percent about my development exploits, but I do like other things too…like football. Next week, there are a number of rule changes up for vote by the owners. Here are a few opinions on the matter:
1. Move the kickoff from the 35-yard line to the 40-yard line.
No. Most kickoffs already go out of the back of the endzone. If we’re so interested in preventing kickoff-related injuries, why not just get rid of it altogether? I say either make the kickoff relevant (move it back to the 30-yard line), or drop it altogether.
2. Expand instant replay to include personal foul penalties.
I think this is fine. Personal foul penalties are costly, so having recourse on such calls is a good idea.
3. Eliminate overtime periods in the preseason for player safety reasons.
How about eliminating the pre-season altogether? I’d rather have a longer regular season (like 2 more games), rather than suffering through the yawn-fest of the pre-season. Since that’s not going to happen, yes, let’s drop overtime in pre-season games…no need to drag them out any longer.
4. Extend the goalposts an additional five feet above the cross bar.
I honestly don’t care. I’d prefer that the goal posts just be removed More >
Ext JS: Speech Recognition Wrapper
Feb 16th
On Friday, I saw a write-up on using the Web Speech API for capturing and transcribing speech. I was inspired to see how this could be incorporated into Ext JS, so I started exploring.
First, I discovered that you can already add theย x-webkit-speech attribute on a text field, and it will automatically create an audio-capture-ready text field in Chrome. All you have to do is hook up listeners to handle particular events. While this was promising, I found a big problem: if you try this in Canary, you’ll be greeted with a nasty deprecation warning. Apparently, Chrome will eventually be ditching the input-support in favor of full-on use of the JavaScript API.
No matter, that’s more flexible anyway. Based on this conclusion, I dove into the API and created an Ext JS wrapper that supports interactions with the Web Speech API. You can try out an example, and grab the source on GitHub.
About the APIThe API has a fair amount to it, so I’ll highlight some of the configuration options, as well as describe a bit about the results, which can be a bit confusing.
Configuration- continuous: If false, you get a one-shot stab at capturing audio. Once the audio is no longer detected, the capture More >
Sencha Fiddle 1.1 Released
Feb 6th
Awesome news today–a new version of Sencha Fiddle was just released! This version (1.1) has a bunch of new goodies included in it, some of which really add benefit to the tool.
I’m not going to rehash all the features (you can read those here), but I’ll highlight the…er…highlights ๐
Improved SearchThe search in the prior version of Sencha Fiddle was pretty basic. It worked, but could only get you so far. The updates to search in 1.1 make it incredibly easier to search by multiple criteria, as well as controlling the sort order of the results. You can still search by simple keywords, but the advanced search really allows for some more fine-tuning of results.
In the future, I’d like to see some enhancements in the way of being able to clear search criteria, as well as even being able to save search criteria sets…but for the time being, the new search is a very big improvement!
Downloadable FiddlesI think this enhancement is especially nice. Fiddle 1.1 now includes the ability to download your fiddle as a standalone “app” of sorts. Basically you get a zip archive that includes an HTML file, an app.js, as well as any other files that More >
Ext JS 4: Demystifying Grid Paging
Jan 25th
Between the Ext JS forums and Stack Overflow, there are LOTS of questions that get asked about grids, and for obvious reasons: the data grid is one of Ext JS’s most powerful data-driven components.
With new developers especially, I see a common question asked quite a bit about a pretty standard bit of functionality: the “paged” data set. In this post, I’m not going to necessarily go into all the nuances of *how* to configure a paged grid in Ext JS (there are plenty of docs for that). Rather, I want to focus on *what* paging in an Ext JS grid is, and how it relates to the server.
What It Isn’tThe most important rule to understand when dealing with paging data from a remote data set is that Ext JS grids–regardless of how powerful they are–are STUPID. By this, I don’t mean that they are poorly built, or that they lack features, don’t work, or anything like that. Rather, I simply mean that when it comes to the data you are asking them to display, they are completely ignorant. When you configure an Ext JS data grid to display (and page) remote data, you will be lost if you think that More >
I’m Speaking at Into the Box 2014
Jan 23rd
Exciting times are upon us!
On May 13, 2014, Into the Box will be exploding onto the scene. ITB 2014 is a 1-day, 2-track conference focused on the family of ColdBox products, CFML, and web tech in general. It’s right before cf.Objective(), so if you’re already going, you literally have no excuse to miss it!
I’m super-excited because I have the opportunity to speak at Into the Box 2014!
My session is ColdBox + ORM: Pink Unicorns Do Exist! In this session, we’ll take a look at all the awesome ORM services that ColdBox brings to the table to help you super-charge your app development. Hope you can make it!
If you want to learn more about Into the Box 2014, be sure to check out the official site. And please help promote it by putting one of these shiny banners on your blog or web site.
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2013 Year in Blogging
Dec 31st
Well, it’s that time of year. WordPress today gave me a nice little infographic about my year in blogging. Check it out!
On the whole, it was one of my more active years, but not nearly as active as I’d like. I often get caught up in doing “big” blog posts, but in 2014, I’m going to endeavor to do more in quantity as well. I’ve got a lot of exciting stuff coming in the new year, so there should be plenty of fodder for writing.
I do appreciate everyone who takes the time to check out what I blog about. I hope it’s interesting to you, and hope that the stuff I post in the next year will be even better.
Hope that your 2013 was a great year, and best wishes in 2014!
Share this:Ext JS: Custom Event Domains and Complex Controller Event Selectors
Dec 15th
A while back, I did a post on creating a custom Event Domain in Ext JS. If you’re new to the concept, Event Domains in Ext JS are simply classes that fire events which your controllers can listen to. The awesome part about domains, however, is that the “domain” of the events getting fired within your application are grouped together by type (read domain). This allows for very granular control over the event listeners that you construct in your controllers.
For example, the boilerplate for your controller since Ext JS 4.2.1 should now look something like this:
Ext.define('CustomController', { extend: 'Ext.app.Controller', init: function() { this.listen({ controller: {}, component: {}, direct: {}, global: {}, store: {} }) } })
Ext JS comes with the 5 domains bolded above, and as we saw in the last post that you can create your own rather easily. In the example I shared, I created a custom event domain for “proxy”. With this custom domain setup, Ext JS will now monitor all events fired by the Ext.data.proxy.Proxy class, and our controllers can easily listen to those events and do whatever we need them to do. Pretty slick.
A Little FancierAs nice as this works, I recently came across a scenario where I wanted a bit more More >
Sencha Fiddle Documentation
Oct 10th
Yes, yes, I know. It’s been over a month now since I’ve posted anything. Life is life, and all that.
Anyway, exciting stuff–the good people over at Sencha put up some documentation for Fiddle today! If you’ve ever wanted to really dig into the features that Fiddle has to offer, be sure to check out the docs.
That’s all for now–happy fiddling!
Share this: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.,ย 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 ๐
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 >