Well what do you know, another year has come and gone. If you're wondering about Hogmanay, it seems I'm following a couple of Scots on Twitter and that's their name for the last day of the year. I hope 2008 was everything you expected from it, and that 2009 will be even better for all of you.

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This from the TwitterVerse: Brain Swartzfager posted a link to EtherPad, a neat little in-browser application for simultaneous collaborative editing of simple text files. The nice part it there's nothing to install; everything runs on Javascript and is compatible with most modern browsers. For more details, Ben talked about it on his blog yesterday.

On a completely unrelated note, I've been having hardware issues at home (spent last week without a computer), but everything seems better now. I should be back to posting regularly.

For those of you that missed it, Peter Bell gave a great presentation on Iterating Business Objects (IBO) in ColdFusion. The entire presentation was recorded and is available here.

Last night I had a little time on my hands and decided to start a project I'd had on the backburner for a while (hint, hint). While setting up Coldbox, I wondered: Why not use application-specific mappings to reference the right framework versions? You might remember I had made a (short) series on refactoring Coldbox, Coldspring and Transfer for this exact reason. However, reading the Jedi's Transfer adventures made me realize that being on ColdFusion 8 meant that I could have these specific mappings, rather than refactoring the frameworks. I ran into an issue or two, however, and here's how I got rid of them.

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Last week, I showed you how I had setup my register method in my project. After a couple of comments, I realized I had tied my service layer too tightly with my MVC framework (ColdBox), by passing in the entire event object, rather than just the data that I needed. Today, I explore a different way of doing things, while also making a couple of little changes to the way the handlers are setup.

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That may seem like an odd post title, but trust me, there's a good reason for it. As I get to do more and more personal work, I've had the chance to compare the different computers I work on. Here's a glimpse of the systems that I currently develop with.

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I've been stuck reinstalling Eclipse and friends (read plugins) for the last hour or so, so I figured I might as well read up on my backblogs (you never know, that word just might stick). If you haven't seen it, Jason's been writing up a really neat series on Coldbox and Coldspring. He's taking a different approach than I am, which is great since you get to have different point of views.

Yeah, yeah, I forgot the links. They're in now.

I've been having lots of fun playing around with my shiny new Linux (Ubuntu) installation. However, for someone that's been used to the easy life under Window$ I have to admit that there is a little of a learning curve. One of the things that's been causing me the most grief (right after all that hacking in the terminal) is the fact that Linux is case-sensitive. As a ColdFusion developer, that means I have to be extra careful about how I name and call my pages.

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Recently I've been hard at work trying to understand the core principles of OO programming in ColdFusion. Last week Ben Nadel shared his experiences at a week-long course devoted to OOP with Hal Helms (the summary, which can be found here, also has links to his daily briefs). His posts opened my eyes to a couple of concepts that are now new to me, and since I'm on a new project I thought it'd be a great opportunity to try them out. As you know from my previous posts, I'm also trying to implement IoC (Coldspring) and ORM (Transfer-ORM) frameworks into my project, so figuring out where these two stand in relation to what I think I now know about OOP is my next challenge.

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Who likes building forms? I know I don't. Creating basic forms can really be a chore: repeating the same layout over and over again and checking for errors on every field is not something I like spending time on. Luckily, ColdFusion custom tags can help relieve some of the pain. There are actually some great tools out there (cfUniForm comes to mind) that already leverage custom tags to make building simple forms a(n almost) pleasant task. The purpose of this entry is to help you see the light of custom tags, and show you how you can leverage them too make your life easier.

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