ColdFusion

PhoneGap Day 2013 is officially one month away. For those of you interested in developing apps with PhoneGap or already working with it on a regular basis, this is a great (and fun) learnng event. This year, it is even bigger, featuring pre-conference workshops. The PhoneGap Essentials workshop is already sold out, but there is still room in the PhoneGap Ecosystem workshop, so act fast! Tickets for each day only run $50, so you could get two days worth of fun and training for $100 - seriously, you cannot beat that! Of course, there are great speakers lined up as well. This event usually sells out, so grab your tickets soon!

Out of the box, AngularJS feels magical. You add a few notations here, define a few objects there, and suddenly your page is actually doing something. And you didn't even need to write any jQuery to make it work. AngularJS is awesome; and it is magical; but sometimes, side-stepping the magic, so to speak, can give you more options. Take, for example, collection filtering in ngRepeat. You can easily wire a search field into an ngRepeat and magically your collection collapses and expands as you ... Read More »

Good morning, folks. I know a few of you are tired (as I am) after staying up last night for the launch of Creative Cloud. If you haven't kept up to date, the Creative Cloud (CC) is the new version of our Creative Suite. Creative Cloud gives you access to over thirty different applications and services, including hundreds of new features to products like Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and the Edge tools. Pricing options include versions for individuals, teams, enterprises, and education. You can also sign up for free to get trials and download preview versions of some of the applications. (The free membership also gives you 2 gigs of storage space!) You can see details here: https://creative.adobe.com/plans Even better, it is now much easier to actually install these applications. The new desktop application gives you one click access to installing new applications as well as handling updates. Along with simplifying installation and updates, the desktop tool gives you a history of your actions and integrates with Behance. Soon it will provide for file syncing and Typekit desktop fonts. But what if you don't even know how to use these new tools? Today we also launched over 200 new videos. These are great for both old and new users alike. I plan on blogging more later about some of my favorite tools (Reflow, Inspect, Code) but would love to hear any questions (or comments) about any of the tools.

As always - just passing it on... ColdFusion Developer State College, PA http://www.higheredjobs.com/admin/details.cfm?JobCode=175762625 HigherEdJobs is looking for a Web Developer to work closely with our Project Manager in design, development and maintenance of all web applications. Our ideal candidate is organized, able to act independently and switch rapidly between different projects. Excellent interpersonal, written and verbal communication skills are required. HigherEdJobs specializes in listing open positions at colleges and universities. Founded in 1996, the company is now an industry leader. The HigherEdJobs.com web site is visited over 2.5 million times a month and lists over 20,000 jobs from over 2,100 colleges and universities. The company is based in State College, Pennsylvania and also has a location in Illinois.

Thanks to those who showed up today for my PhoneGap presentation as part of ColdBox Developer Week. You may find the recording here: https://experts.adobeconnect.com/_a204547676/p6a701ksfig/ Slide deck and demos may be found on GitHub: https://github.com/cfjedimaster/Introduction-to-PhoneGap As always, comments and criticisms are welcome.

Just a reminder for my readers that my weekly update of the best blog posts, articles and new libraries/frameworks in HTML, CSS and JavaScript has moved to my Flippin' Awesome site. Here is this week's edition: Best of JavaScript, HTML & CSS – Week of June 10, 2013

Before I say anything, I should probably mention that as of ColdFusion 9.0.1, ColdFusion has had native file-support for Amazon S3 using the "s3://" protocol. That said, I wanted to try experimenting with the Amazon S3 REST API using ColdFusion's CFHttp functionality. I know that I'm like 5 years (at least) behind everyone else on this topic; so, this blog post won't add much to the conversation - really, this is just here for my own reference. Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is a hu ... Read More »

It's been a while since I reviewed a video game on this blog so I thought I'd use today to catch you guys up with what I've been playing the last few months. As always, comments are welcome. Dead Island: Riptide I reviewed Dead Island nearly two years ago, and it is stands out as my favorite zombie game ever. I had high hopes for this update but was rather disappointed to discover that it was nothing more than a packaged up DLC. Turns out other reviewers noted the same thing. It certainly starts off like a sequel - pretty much picking up mere minutes after the finish of the previous game - but the actual gameplay is nearly identical to the previous game. That bugged me at first, but, honestly, I let go of that and just tried to enjoy myself. I remembered how frightening some of the situations could be in the original and the same applied here. I remember how fun it was to attack zombies and the same applied here. As I've said, I'm not a gore person, but there is something just plan fun about taking a katana to a zombie. I've finished this game, and I enjoyed it, but I'd definitely not pick it up while it is still full priced. (I just checked my Amazon link and I see it is 30 dollars now. To me, that's on the edge. If you really enjoyed the first game than go ahead and jump.) By the way - I wonder if I'm the only one who encountered the "ship bug". I had been playing for roughly five minutes when a wave pushed me into a room with no exits. I can't remember the last time I saw a bug like that in a video game. Aliens: Colonial Marines I'm really torn about this one. Let me start by saying that I'm only about 20% through this game and - obviously - my opinion may change by the end. I went into this game with low expectations. The reviews were not good. But - I love the Aliens franchise. I've watched every movie, and while the quality goes downhill rather quickly in 3 and 4, I still will watch them and enjoy parts of them. I can remember watching Alien when I was too young, and since that time they have continued to scare the crap out of me. My thoughts going into this game were simple - as long as the game was barely decent, let's say "C" level, then being in the Aliens mythos would be enough for me. Did that work out? Well, the first thing you notice when playing is how horrible the graphics are. I mean - my god. The graphics are so bad you almost want to congratulate the developers. They had to work hard to ship a game with an engine that looks - I kid you not - like a 10 year old game. Way back in 2011 I reviewed Homefront. This was another game with a bad graphics engine. But to me - the story and other aspects more than made up for it. Let me be clear. Aliens:CM makes Homefront look like freaking Crysis. As others have noted - many screenshots of the game were released before the game and not one of them come close to the actual final product. Here is a great image which just about sums it up. (Credit: http://furiousfanboys.com/2013/02/aliens-colonial-marines-summed-up-in-one-image/) Then there's the controller. I can pretty much deal with any controller setup, but something about this game's design just doesn't work out well for me. Mainly it is the melee attack. I accidentally trigger it in just about every encounter I have. I've died multiple times when I swung my weapon instead of actually firing it. Oh - and then there's the difficulty. I can generally play more FPS games at medium level. Not this one. With large gaps between checkpoints I had to 'give up' a game I was 2 hours in and restart back at the beginning on the lowest difficulty level. It is insanely hard and unforgiving. But... there is something to this game that keeps bringing me back. Maybe it's the sound of the pulse rifle. Maybe it's the sound of the range finder and memories of the Aliens movie. You have all the parts here to a potential epic game. Combat, even with frustrating controls and difficult

Over the past couple of days I've made more progress on the Node project I started. If you haven't read the first article, click that previous link for the background. Here's what I've been able to do since my first post.GitHub I mentioned this in the comments, but if you want to look at, and criticize, my Node code, you can do so at GitHub: https://github.com/cfjedimaster/javascriptcookbook. Every thing is in there except for the JSON file that I used to store authentication information for the admin panel and my GMail integration (more on that in a minute). As I think I say every time, I'm still a Node/Express noob, so I wouldn't consider this to be good code, but the site is complete for now. Email I used the excellent Nodemailer module to setup email support for my application. All I needed was the ability to send an email to myself and this worked fine. Here's a code snippet from my app.js showing this in action. The only oddity I ran into was that even though I set the From to be your name and email address, when it shows up in Gmail it is always my email address. I'm assuming that is a GMail security thing. If anyone knows better, let me know. Since I include the sender's email address anyway this isn't a deal breaker for me. MongoDB I tell ya what. I never want to write SQL again. This isn't the first time I used Mongo but my god - what a pleasure. Here are a few examples. I think that $or search is the one I like the most. Templating I hate the Jade templating system and EJS is ok, but my favorite templating system is Handlebars. The HBS module gives me access to that inside my views. I can even extend it with my own utility functions. Here is one sample view: Commenting Yeah, Disqus. Done. Hosting I love AppFog. How much do I love AppFog? AppFog is this: Let me describe what their process was like for me. I signed up. I made a new app. I clicked about 2 buttons to add Mongo support. I installed the command line tool via npm. I typed "af update javascriptcookbook" That's it. I was done. Period. And it worked! Now it turns out I was supposed to modify one line: app.listen(3000) needed to change to app.listen(process.env.VCAP_APP_PORT || 3000). But even before I did that it worked. Heck, I didn't even have to tweak Mongo. So now my process is - I make some changes - I commit to GitHub - I push up to AppFog. The update process for AppFog takes about 20 seconds. I'm so happy with them that I'm going to ahead and take the plunge and spend the 20 bucks a month. (Although I'll probably end up putting an Adsense ad on the site to help pay for it.) Want to give it a whirl? Check it out here: http://javascriptcookbook.aws.af.cm. I am definitely looking for some submissions now and would love someone to make a favicon if they feel so inclined. ;)

In an AngularJS application, $scope instances are all part of a prototypal chain. That is, every $scope instance (except $rootScope, I believe) has, as its prototype, the $parent scope. This is a brilliant way to architect the view-model because it means that data loaded in one controller can be accessed by controllers (and views) farther down in the same $scope chain. But, does the "visibility" of this data imply anything about which controllers should modify this data? From a functional sta ... Read More »