Earlier this week I announced that I was going to start working on cwBlog, my attempt at creating a full-featured blogging application. Reactions to this announcement were divided, but that was to be expected. Although some comments were supportive, others questionned the fact that I was planning on starting from scratch, rather than helping out on existing applications. You see, the reason why I decided to start this project is to see what I can do with what I currently know. See it as an exploration, of sorts. At this point, I don't even know whether I'll be able to finish the project... However, what I do know is that I'm planning on learning every step of the way!

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Before I even start talking about cwBlog, or telling you what it's all about, I want to say a big Thank You to Ray Camden for writing and maintaining BlogCFC. It's a great piece of software and a perfect example of how ColdFusion applications can rock! *sheds a tear*. But, there comes a time in every relationship where you just have to sit down, take a couple of minutes and wonder: is it all worth it? Do I really need to put up with all of the shortcomings? Of course, I jest. However, there have been occasions where I find myself wanting to tinker with the inner workings of BlogCFC and thinking: what happens to my changes when a new update comes out? This is where cwBlog comes into play.

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I was recently trying to merge the development branch of cfExcelProxy back into the trunk over at the RIAForge repository. Now I have to admit this was my first time doing this, so it might all be my fault, but for some reason I couldn't get the merge to work.

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With the launch of the Wiki yesterday, and with all the work I've been putting into cfExcelProxy recently, I find myself wondering what's left for me to do. I've put pretty much all the features I could think of, but I'm sure I that I haven't thought of everything. That is why I need you, the users, to help me out! What would make this project a full, stable release? Would you like to see more methods available? Are there some things that you would want cfExcelProxy to do for you, but it currently can't (forget getting the newspaper, I tried training it for that but gave up hope)?

I know I promised I'd have a big announcement for you last week, but I don't know if I can talk about it yet, so I'll have to make you wait . Luckily for me, though, I've got some other interesting news for all of you. I've just installed CanvasWiki and prepared a couple of reference pages for cfExcelProxy, my attempt at creating a wrapper cfc for Apache's POI-HSSF Java classes. Not all the pages are ready, however a comprehensive list of all available methods is already online so that's obviously the first thing someone interested in using cfExcelProxy should be looking at. I'm hoping I'll have most of the method detail pages up before the end of the week. Some day I'd like to have a couple of example scripts available there also, so stay tuned!

You can hit the Wiki from the cfExcelProxy project site, or from the main Wiki page.

Just a quick note to let you all know I made some updates to cfExcelProxy, my wrapper object for Apache's POI HSSF library. Here are a couple of juicy new methods that are now available: setCellsFromQuery, getQueryFromCells, getCellRangeValueAsArray, mergeCells and shiftRows. You can get the source from the cfExcelProxy-rewrite branch in the repository over at riaforge.

I've been trying to finalize the rewritten version of cfExcelProxy, and one of the final obstacles I'm trying to get across was reducing the time required when populating an Excel page. In most situations, processing time is rather short. However, in one of my examples I need to dump a query with 4000 rows and 25+ columns... that's over 100k different cells!

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As part of the ongoing rewrite of my Coldfusion wrapper cfc for Apache's POI HSSF object, I'm constantly looking into ways of adding more and more functionality. One of the limitations I had struck with my previous iteration was using already available styles from an existing workbook. Let's imagine, for a second, that you carefully take the time to create a basic template in Excel for your reporting. You take all necessary precautions to ensure that the logo is placed appropriately and the colors match with your site's layout. When you read in that template to add in data, how do you set the new cells' format to match with the template?

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You heard me. I've been busy rewriting the base code for cfExcelProxy, my wrapper cfc for reading/editing/writing Microsoft Excel files. I was happy with the first draft (0.1), as in I was happy I got it to work at all, but now that I've had the chance to use it in real projects I noticed a couple of things that made it's usage a little, difficult. Amongst other things, I didn't like that I had to specify which sheet I wanted to do each and every operation on. Also, editing an existing workbook while using the existing styles was, for all intents and purposes, impossible.

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Ray Camden just approved my project over at RIAForge, so I thought it was a great oppurtunity to talk about it here. Basically, cfExcelProxy is my attempt at using Apache's POI HSSF java libraries to talk to and modify Microsoft Excel files.

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