Hal Helms On Web Development - Simplicity

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]

Thoughts on Object Oriented "Purity"

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 05:39:00 -0400

Ben Nadel recently wrote a blog post on his disillusionment in his attempts to "get" OO. His conclusion was that he was going to have to give up on "object purity" and accept a more practical OO approach. Based on the comments on his post, a lot of people are feeling this. [More]

Code Formatting in Blog Pages with jQuery

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 18:58:00 -0400

In my Occasional Newsletter, I want to have my code nicely formatted. And I want to just copy working code to display it. ColdFusion code has those troubling angled brackets that play havoc with browser display. I didn't want to have to swap those for the HTML entity representations. Also, when I indent my code, I use tabs instead of spaces. I didn't want to have to manually replace every tab with non-breaking spaces. Here's what I came up with: 1. I place my code in a TEXTAREA.
2. I style the TEXTAREA via CSS to remove the borders, provide a light grey background, switch the font, and change the font color.
3. I wrote a little bit of jQuery that...
a. sets the "cols" and "rows" setting of the textarea dynamically
b. replaces all tabs with non-breaking spaces
Here's the jQuery:


$(document).ready(function(){
   $('textarea').each(function(){
      $(this).val($(this).val().replace(/	/g,'   '));
      $(this).attr('rows',$(this).val().split("\n").length);
      $(this).attr('cols',80);
      $(this).attr('readonly', true);
   })
});

Now, what was a chore becomes really easy. I love jQuery. Note: This works with HTML pages, but ColdFusion pages will still interpret the code.

The Beauty of Simplicity

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 18:19:00 -0400

For the past several weeks, I've been working on a very complicated app. I've been working with Maciej, my colleague, and together we've been struggling to keep the whole thing going in our heads. At the same time, I've been reading a biography of Einstein that concentrates on the Great Man before he had attained his now-exalted status. What I find fascinating is how much Einstein struggled with the different, competing observations and theories before arriving at his breakthrough understanding of relativity. Einstein was not content with a theory that would explain observations; he wanted to understand the fundamental nature of the universe. Once that was done, he was convinced, theories for individual phenomena would arise naturally. He found that understanding by hewing to a belief that reality was, at its heart, beautifully simple. And, as far as equations go, there's not much simpler than e=mc^2. Ah, but getting to that simplicity nearly broke him. [More]