2008 WebManiacs Conference

Hurry, seats are filling up fast!

Conference Highlights:

 

• Four concurrent HANDS-ON sessions where you will practice implementing best-practices techniques with your Adobe certified instructor in one of our recently remodeled computer labs!

   

• Four concurrent lecture-discussion sessions from industry veterans

   

• Sessions targeted specifically for Government IT, non-profits, and commercial sectors

   

• Sessions for beginning, intermediate, and advanced developers

   

• Over fifty (50) speakers!

   

• TWO HUNDRED sessions in total covering nearly 140 separate and distinct topics!

Since well before coining the term Rich Internet Application (RIA) in 2002, Adobe has been deeply focused on improving the web experience and delivering the underlying technologies to produce more interactive and expressive web applications.

Join Adobe and Carahsoft for a webcast showcasing how ColdFusion 8's built-in integration enables the development of Flex and AIR applications to meet users' demanding requirements more efficiently.

RIAs offer organizations a proven, cost-effective way to deliver modern applications with real business benefits, which include:

• A richer, more engaging experience for users
• Keeping pace with users' rising expectations
• An increase in customer loyalty and higher profit generation
• The ability to reach 98% of Internet-enabled desktops
• Leverage of existing personnel, processes, and infrastructure

Someone sent me this "JOKE" today. While it is quite entertaining, the sad fact is that it is also true and this is what the world has come to today, parent nor schools cannot discipline your own children without fear that you might be accused of child abuse or worse. There is a good reason why in 1977  kids didn't carry guns, do drugs, verbally abuse people in the street, commit violent crimes etc, because they simply would not have not have gotten away with it and were scared of the consequences.

Anyway I don't really want to open up a huge debate on child discipline, I think common sense wins that argument, so here is the joke for your amusement. 

Scenario: Johnny and Mark get into a fistfight after school.

1977 - Crowd gathers. Mark wins. Johnny and Mark shake hands and end up mates.

2007 - Police are called, Armed Response Unit arrives and arrests Johnny and Mark. Mobiles with video of fight confiscated as evidence. They are charged with assault, ASBOs are taken out and both are suspended even though Johnny started it. Diversionary conferences and parent meetings conducted. Video shown on 6 internet sites.


Scenario: Jeffrey won't sit still in class, disrupts other students.

1977 - Jeffrey is sent to the principal's office and given 6 of the best. Returns to class, sits still and does not disrupt class again.

2007 - Jeffrey is given huge doses of Ritalin. Counselled to death. Becomes a zombie. Tested for ADD. School gets extra funding because Jeffrey has a disability. Drops out of school.


Scenario: Billy breaks a window in his neighbour's car and his Dad gives him the slipper.

1977 - Billy is more careful next time, grows up normal, goes to college, and becomes a successful businessman.

2007 - Billy's dad is arrested for child abuse. Billy is removed to foster care and joins a gang. Psychologist tells Billy's sister that she remembers being abused herself and their dad goes to prison. Billy's mum has an affair with the psychologist. Psychologist gets a promotion.


Scenario: Mark, a college student, brings cigarettes to school .

1977 - Mark shares a smoke with the school principal out on the smoking area.

2007 - Police are called and Mark is expelled from School for drug possession. His car is searched for drugs and weapons.


Scenario: Mohammed fails high school English.

1977 - Mohammed retakes his exam, passes and goes to college.

2007 - Mohammed's cause is taken up by local human rights group. Newspaper articles appear nationally explaining that making English a requirement for graduation is racist. Civil Liberties Association files class action lawsuit against state school system and his English teacher. English is banned from core curriculum. Mohammed is given his qualification anyway but ends up mowing lawns for a living because he cannot speak English.


Scenario: Johnny takes apart leftover firecrackers, puts them in a model plane paint bottle and blows up an anthill.

1977 - Ants die.

2007 - MI5 and police are called and Johnny is charged with perpetrating acts of terrorism. Teams investigate parents, siblings are removed from the home, computers are confiscated, and Johnny's dad goes on a terror watch list and is never allowed to fly again.


Scenario: Johnny falls during break and scrapes his knee. His teacher, Mary, finds him crying, and gives him a hug to comfort him.

1977 - Johnny soon feels better and goes back to playing.

2007 - Mary is accused of being a sexual predator and loses her job. She faces three years in prison. Johnny undergoes five years of therapy. Becomes gay.

If you are hosting your application in a sandboxed environment, such as shared hosting, then you may find yourself coming up against the the following error, especially if your using FuseBox 5 which is what caused it in my case.

Security: The requested template has been denied access to C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\CFIDE\scripts\ajax\messages\cfmessage_en_US_.js.

There are 2 issues involved here.

1) This file doesn't actually exist, at least not on any servers I checked.

2) Your code wont have access to this path in a sandboxed environment.

Now the quick and easy solution to this (for the host) would be to add the above path to your default sandbox with READ permission so that all customers have access to it, even if the file is not there at least CF can look for it. But alas this is not possible as sandbox security is not this flexible and does not allow you to globally give access to paths in this way. Sadly you must explicitly put paths into each and every sandbox for each and every site. Why Adobe have still not addressed this I have no idea, as I have informed them of this issue since ColdFusion MX 6 as the same problem occurs with all paths that CF needs access to for certain tags, such as temp folders (for file uploads), the windows fonts folder (for cfdocument) etc.

Thankfully there is another solution, at least for those of us that do not actually need this file. It seems that the inclusion of this file is locale specific, so if you set your locale to UK then CF no longer tries to load this file and the error goes away.

SetLocale("English (UK)")

I have not tested other locales, but I am guessing here that different people will have different versions of that file depending on their installation locale. So because I am in the UK, perhaps I got the plain old cfmessage.js file, which seems to be the default. If your in the USA then perhaps you do have a cfmessage_en_US_.js.

This problem may also be specifically caused by FuseBox 5 setting the wrong locale somewhere in its core files, and the same may apply to other frameworks too. 

One of things I see a lot of in my various jobs and contracts is Content Management Systems (CMS), and they come all manner of shapes and sizes. The most common is where you are given nothing more than a textarea to edit your pages HTML content, some might implement a WYSIWYG editor such as HTMLAREA, TinyMCE or FCKEditor, but on the whole they are usually very simple and do not give the client any real control. Then you have the other end of the scale, where the CMS is so complex that no-one except the developer who wrote it knows how it works and even the client doesn't really know how to use it properly. 

One of common issues I have found with all the CMS systems I have worked on is "how to insert dynamic content". Dynamic content would be anything that is not static HTML and needs to be generated from code, whether it is just inserting a variable, including a file or calling a CFC. How do you allow this in your WYSIWYG HTML editor without having to insert actual code or rely on the client to do so or hard code routines between your content that the client has no control over, the answer is actually quite simple, lexicons (or macros to use a more generic term). All this really means is putting a placeholder in your HTML and at runtime substituting it with the code that generates the dynamic content, and even the code that does the substitution is not complex, so in this article I will be showing you how it's done.

Read more...