I've heard from quite a few programmers who are interested in putting their toe in the RoR waters. It is a big step -- and to make that as non-stressful as possible, I'm going to hold a free two-hour online "Intro to Ruby on Rails for ColdFusion Programmers" training on September 22 from 12.30 to 2.30 Eastern US time.

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Most of you will be familiar with blogger extraordinaire Ben Nadel. Ben recently posted about a fundamental misunderstanding he had about jQuery event objects. There's something very important to be learned about how Ben approaches problems.

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Well, I finished that monster prototype, with much credit to my coding partner, Maciej. I figured that over 11 days, I worked 165 hours. Whew! Yesterday, we gave the presentation to a large multi-national corporation. To my relief and gratification, they were very impressed. Which leaves me, now, with only one small problem...

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I'm part of a select group of developers who have access to a secret web app called "Google Mail". Since you, doubtless, are unfamiliar with this software (I did say "select", after all), let me explain how it works.

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In earlier posts on this topic, I suggested that you split your "view" into two files -- one that is pure HTML (and the CFML you may need to process the view) and another one that holds your JavaScript and jQuery. One of the nice features of this is that it allows for unobtrusive JavaScript -- meaning that there's no JavaScript mixed in with HTML, making it possible (if you wish) to have a site that works both with JavaScript enabled and disabled.

Today, let's see how we can pass information to jQuery that it may need to do its job.

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We're all familiar with the process of showing content to a user and letting them edit it by means of perhaps an "Edit" button that takes them to a form. Today, let's look at a different way: allowing users to do inline edits in an unobtrusive manner.

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We use a simple jQuery tablesorter to allow users to sort tables by various columns, but at times, users want to restrict their view of table rows -- perhaps only viewing rows of a certain type. Today, we'll look at how to do this with some jQuery and POJS (plain old JavaScript).

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I've been working on a job where different people in different places are working off of a shared queue of work orders to be processed. When they first log onto the system, they see the current work orders and their status in a table. (Don't tell the CSS police that I used the "T" word...) The problem is that, as existing work orders are processed and new work orders are submitted, their screens quickly are out of sync.

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Today we won't actually be looking at jQuery, but about JavaScript itself. While jQuery is a terrific library, it's simply an abstraction of JavaScript methods for interacting with the Document Object Model (DOM). An abstraction is a wonderful thing, but it shouldn't be a substitute for understanding the base model -- JavaScript, in this case. Today, we'll look at one of the more confusing aspects of JavaScript: the "this" variable.

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Today is a quick tutorial on how to prevent the problem of a user clicking the "submit" button more than once -- usually in the case of a slow-responding form processing page.

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