I was trying to come up with a nice way to introduce working with Transfer in Coldbox. At first I wanted to have a service layer to control interactions with my objects. With Transfer, however, the relations became a little fuzzy. Take, for example, an event trying to register a new user. When thinking about submitting a registration form, I normally see at least two steps: validation and saving. Trying to imagine the flow of something like this in an application that's trying to be as close to OOP as possible isn't as easy as I thought, though. Here's what I got so far.

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Yesterday, I showed you how to refactor Coldbox, ColdSpring and Transfer on an unconventional server layout. Now that we`ve taken care of that, we can get the three to talk to each other. Luckily, Coldbox makes this extremely easy. (This is also my first post using the afae editor plugin for Eclipse, so bear with me if everything goes wrong (which I don't expect it will).)

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Today I started (gee, that's such a big and meaningful word) work on cwBlog. Since I'll be experimenting with this application, I thought it would be a great opportunity to try out some new (for me) technologies. I've been using Coldbox for a while, but decided it was time to take the plunge and try out some IoC and ORM frameworks (if you're not subscribed to Adobe Edge (you should be! (3rd-level nested text)), here's a great overview article Mark Mandel wrote on some of the most popular frameworks: Adobe Edge: October 2008). After reading the article and careful deliberation (5-10 minutes), I decided on ColdSpring for IoC, and Transfer-ORM for, well, ORM. Before I go into more detail, I just want to say that if it weren't for my unconventional server layout, this entire process would've probably been alot simpler.

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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.