Hal Helms On Web Development - ColdFusion

Ready to Learn Ruby on Rails?

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 11:27:00 -0400

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. [More]

So...ColdFusion is Dead, Right?

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:27:00 -0400

Since I announced that I was going to do future development with Ruby on Rails, I've received some email asking "Is ColdFusion really dead then?" CF developers have been hearing this for years, but I started thinking about the question itself. [More]

Why I'm Moving to Ruby On Rails

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:25:00 -0400

Well, this is a hard post to write. After months of investigating, soul-searching, and examining, I've decided to move future application development to Ruby On Rails. [More]

Orthopraxy

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 19:42:00 -0400

Try googling "quote simplicity" and "quote complexity" and you'll find some wonderful thoughts from people like Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Christopher Alexander, and Charles Mingus on the virtues of simplicty and the perils of complexity. But it seems the way of things that they often start out simple and accrue complexity. [More]

Glad THAT's Over, But ...

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 17:36:00 -0400

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... [More]

Event-Driven Programming: Why?

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 10:09:00 -0400

Yesterday, we looked at some simple server code that is called by events generated on the client. We saw that the server returns an EVENT property in its response -- but that my example never uses it. Today, we're going to see how that is used -- and why I think EDP is a BigDeal(tm). [More]

Event-Driven Programming: an MVC Example, Part II

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 05:37:00 -0400

Yesterday, I showed an example of an EDP implementation on the client. Let's do a quick review of the main points and then look at the server code. [More]

Event-Driven Programming: an MVC Example

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 12:04:00 -0400

I recently wrote a blog post on EDP (Event-Driven Programming). Ray Camden asked me to come up with an example of using EDP with a Model-View-Controller architecture. Over the weekend, I did just that. As a bonus, I'm including a jQuery plugin that will allow you to make Ajax calls to the server without using ColdFusion's CFAJAXPROXY tag. [More]

ColdFusion and OOP - A Match Made in Heaven or a Long Road to Hell?

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 11:23:00 -0400

Well, now I've done it. If I had not sufficiently alienated both Adobe and the ColdFusion community leaders, I participated in a discussion at the suggestion of my good friend, Clark Valberg. Having read my blogpost from a few weeks back in which I expressed my concern that ColdFusion was losing its way, Clark decided that it would make for an interesting podcast to have Brian Kotek (as an able proponent of OO in CF orthodoxy), Ben Nadel (as an honest developer looking for answers) and me (as a reluctant heretic) talk about OO in ColdFusion. [More]

Project Serenity

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 11:32:00 -0400

Every cool project needs a cool code name. The open source ColdFusion ecommerce project now has one: Project Serenity. [More]

Update on "Ideas"

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 20:18:00 -0400

A while back, I did a post asking for ideas for an open-source project. Having thought long and hard about the many (truly excellent) ideas, I think I'm ready to begin the next phase. [More]

Who the !@$^# is Marc Funaro and What's Wrong With Him???

Sun, 31 May 2009 19:40:00 -0400

A recent post by Marc Funaro has stirred up a storm of controversy in the ColdFusion world. You can read it at http://www.advantexllc.com/blog/post.cfm/how-oo-almost-destroyed-my-business. When his blog post was picked up by the reddit crowd, it looked as though Marc might need to enter Witness Protection. [More]

A Small But Helpful Tip

Sat, 23 May 2009 14:14:00 -0400

If you're using CFEclipse, one feature you may not be aware of is the special attention it pays to comments marked with "todo". I've found this feature very helpful in managing the complexity of writing software. [More]

Learning jQuery, Day 12: Inline Editing

Wed, 20 May 2009 08:45:00 -0400

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. [More]

Learning jQuery, Day 11: Saving Table State with Cookies

Fri, 08 May 2009 11:51:00 -0400

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). [More]