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.

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.

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.

Just a quick note to say that Kurt Wiersma's presentation was recorded and is available online here. He goes over the different aspects of having a local development environment and the different steps of setting it up. Looks like I've got lots of work to do!

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.

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).

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!

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.

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.