In this interview, Jeremy discusses:
If you have DRK 3, and if you have looked at the calendar ColdFusion component, you might have noticed that the test file called calendarTest.cfm that is referred to in the documentation is missing. We will fix the problem shortly as well as make the file available from Macromedia’s website, however in the meantime, it can be downloaded from here:
http://www.markme.com/cantrell/downloads/calendar.zip
The calendar component builds a model of a calendar page given a particular month and year. It returns a two dimensional array which represent the rows and columns of a calendar so that you don’t have to worry about months having different numbers of days, starting on different days of the week, leap year, etc. All those calculations are encapsulated in the calendar component. The calendarTest.cfm page demonstrates how to use the component and how to iterate over the array that it returns to build an infinite HTML calendar. Even if you don’t have the DRK, you might want to check out the sample file to see how it works.
Macromedia just published several very high-quality ColdFusion (with a little Java thrown in) articles on DevNet:
Advanced ColdFusion: Simplicity Is Just the Start of It
Ben Forta
http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/logged_in/bforta_advcf.html
Building ColdFusion MX and J2EE Hybrid Applications
Drew Falkman
http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/mx/coldfusion/j2ee/articles/hybrid.html
Controlling Database Transactions in ColdFusion MX
Simon Horwith
http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/mx/coldfusion/articles/cftransaction.html
Improving Performance of Rich Internet Applications with Flash Communication Server MX
Giacomo ‘Peldi’ Guilizzoni
http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/mx/flashcom/articles/improving_ria.html
Building an Object-Oriented User Interface in ColdFusion MX
Dave Friedel
http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/mx/coldfusion/articles/oo_interface.html
Caching in ColdFusion
Matt Boles
http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/mx/coldfusion/articles/cfcaching.html
From Macromedia’s webliste:
“For a limited time, Macromedia is making Studio MX available to purchasers of new Apple Macintosh computers for $399 when they are purchased together at the same time. “
You can find details on Apple’s site here:
http://www.apple.com/promo/macromedia/
Details on Macromedia’s site here:
http://www.macromedia.com/go/mac
Story on CNET here:
Unit testing is a great way to black-box test your components. By “black-box testing,” I mean that you are only testing the results of function calls as opposed to white-box testing which actually exposes the inter-workings of components and functions.
Unit test is code written to test other code by simulating a real use case and comparing the results of function calls to expected results. These types of tests are most often done with languages that are object oriented, which means that unit testing code is appropriate for ColdFusion components. There is a unit testing framework on DRK 3 called cfunit (named after the very popular JUnit testing framework for Java). Read more about cfunit on Macromedia’s website.
Raymond Camden came across cfunit last week. You can read his reaction here:
http://www.camdenfamily.com/morpheus/blog/index.cfm?mode=entry&entry=60
I would like to get a feel for where people stand on the transition from table-based layouts and font tags to CSS and CSS positioning:
The Macromedia Flash MX Data Connection Kit is now available on the Macromedia online store. From the website:
The Data Connection Kit provides prebuilt connections to web services, XML data, databases, and application servers so you can easily access, save, and display data in Macromedia Flash MX.
For details, see:
