Brookflow - Web Development and Marketing

This is a useful resource showing a detailed comparison of the differences between the primary CFML engines.  It compares CF 8, Railo 2 and various versions of Blue Dragon 7 (including Open Source version).

It is a thorough analysis by function and tag.

http://www.cfml-engines.info/wiki/index.php/Comparison

I have been assessing Model-Glue and Reactor.  Like many others there is lots of ‘noise’ about frameworks at the moment.  Some useful starting points from all of the reading and listening that I have been doing are as follows:

Listen to episode 16 of ColdFusion Podcast http://www.coldfusionpodcast.com/node/45

Review articles on MVC framework concepts at http://www.benorama.com/coldfusion/

Review Ray Camden’s Quick Guide on Model-Glue

Review Ray Camden ColdFusion Cookbook implementation for a more full on example of using Model-Glue.

I found this great list of free CF framework and applications on  this site.

“There’s millions of lines of free code out there in the form of frameworks, tools, and other packages intended to aid and abet the skilled and professional development of ColdFusion applications.” Examples:

• CFEclipse
• Fusebox
• Mach-II
• ModelGlue
• onTap
• CFCDev.org
• cfLib.org
• Tartan
• COAL
• ColdSpring
• http://www.productivityenhancement.com/plum/WhatPlumCanDo.cfm

As for complete applications, here’s just a few (and there’s more!):

• Galleon Forums
• BlogCFC
• FarCry

Several months ago a requirement to use manipulate images came up and we did a hunt around for a suitable library to use with ColdFusion.  We ended up choosing the Alagad Image Component however since then I have become aware of 2 additional approaches which both seem to be very good.

1. http://efflare.com/products/cfx_imagecr/ CFX_ImageCR is a professional quality custom tag for processing images natively and very efficiently in ColdFusion.  Now I know this is a CFX but it seems to have some very good qualities and is particularly good for doing many of the common image manipulation tasks. CFX_ImageCR loads an image file and saves another after performing the operations it has been directed to. Operations include converting, resizing, cropping, resampling and much more.

2.  The second approach I have discovered is to work directly with the Java image library (which the Alagad Image component wraps into a CFC.  Obviously this will be more work. But less cost.

Whilst these other two approaches are not the opne we have chosen and we are happy with the Alagad solution, I wanted to post about them in case someone else is out there looking into this.

The Alagad Image Component is a 100% native ColdFusion Component (CFC) used to create and manipulate image files. Written entirely in ColdFusion CFML, the Image Component does not require installation of any additional software. The Image Component is not a CFX tag and is not Platform dependant.

Because the Image Component is written in pure ColdFusion and instantiates only native Java objects, it compiles with the rest of your CFML files to Java bytecode and performs much better than competing products.

I have recently been updating my knowledge of creating PDF’s from web pages using ColdFusion.  I have discovered 2 useful techniques for doing this.

1. Using a pre-defined ColdFusion tag called DynamicPDF from http://gilgamesh-solutions.com/products.cfm#p1.  We have done some scalability testing on this and it seems to do a very good job.  Under the hood it is using HTMLDoc http://www.easysw.com/htmldoc/ and seems to do a good job.

2. Using iText http://www.lowagie.com/iText/tutorial/.  This is the technology that Macromedia use in CFMX7.  Not looked into that yet, but the quality of PDF’s produced by CFMX7 is very good.

Note 31-May-08: Since the release of ColdFusion 8 PDF manipulation is embedded in CF.  Well I mean Adobe owns both so just as it should be.

As part of my nightly reading on all things interesting I stumbled across a mind-blowingly useful MS-SQL identity trick to get the value of the last inserted primary key.  How many times will you use this in your code?

Using Identity Keys in SQL Server

Most applications rely on primary keys in database tables. Many of those same applications use the auto-increment capabilities of some DBMSes like MSSQL Server. When inserting a record in a table that uses auto-increment primary keys, you do not have to insert the value of the primary key yourself - the DB does it for you. But what if you want to know the value of the row’s primary key that you just inserted? Commonly, developers will run two queries in a row, wrapped in <cftransaction>. The first one inserts the record and the second one selects the newest record. But using this syntax, SQL server can insert the record as well as return the value of the new primary key all in one query.

<cfquery name="insert" datasource="DSN">
   set nocount on
   insert into customer (firstName, lastName)
   values
   ('#attributes.firstName#', '#attributes.LastName#')
   select @@identity as newID
   set nocount off
</cfquery>

I am the new primary key value:
<cfoutput>#insert.newID#</cfoutput>
source: http://developer.fusium.com/code/

As anyone will know who has tried clustering CFMX 6.1 is a painstaking process.  I have stumbled across this useful blog that Steve Erat has written.

http://www.talkingtree.com/blog/index.cfm?mode=entry&entry=25A98D33-45A6-2844-7E780B5AEBD8C085