By Rob, on June 2nd, 2010
Keynote (Adobe)
Terry Ryan kicked of the first day with an indy themed KeyNote. His initial demo was of a very impressive ColdFusion builder extension. Apptacular is a code generation system that runs natively from within CFBuilder and was demoed as being able to wire up CRUD from a DB (with smart table renaming for your CFCs and methods) and a massive amount of functionality that reduced initial project setup time from a few hours to about 20 seconds. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea given that a lot of CF devs will use a frame work of some sort to speed up the inital development process but Apptacular was certainly an impressive demonstration of CFBuilder’s extensibility and adds massive value to the IDE.
Continue reading Scotch on the Rocks 2010 – Day One
By Rob, on June 2nd, 2010
Scotch on the Rocks is done and done! I’m back home and relaxing the glow of 2 (and a bit) days spent learning stupid amounts of cool stuff, meeting even cooler people and doing it all in one of the coolest conferences I’ve ever had the good fortune to attend.
Continue reading Scotch on the Rocks 2010 – The slightly emotional preamble.
By Rob, on May 12th, 2010
The premier UK ColdFusion conference Scotch on the Rocks 2010 is less than 2 weeks away!
I’m starting to get excited. My flights are booked. My hotel is confirmed (and it’s all of 2 minutes away which is nice) and I’ve got my selection of geek t-shirts picked out. The laptop is loaded and cleaned down ready to rock some remote CF action.
Continue reading SOTR 2010 – What I’m going to see
By Rob, on May 7th, 2010
For those of us running on ColdFusion 8, Ben Nadel’s wrapper to the Apache POI classes are still the best way of working with native Excel files.
That said, the POI that ships with CF 8 is old … very old … 2004 old in fact and as such it has to be treated very gently and chokes on the slightest bit of Excel cleverness. The most common example of this that I’ve come across occurs when trying to import a sheet that has Auto Filter / Sort enabled. The Java layer explodes in a mess of unhandled exceptions and steadfastly refuses to read the file.
Continue reading Upgrade Java POI for Better Excel Support in ColdFusion 8
By Rob, on May 6th, 2010
The definitive ColdFusion bible by Forta, Camden et al has been updated for ColdFusion 9 and is now available for pre order from Amazon:
If you’re getting started with ColdFusion development then these are a must have reference and, compared to other IT tomes are pretty reasonably priced to boot!
(Note: the links above are affiliate links – click & buy = kickback for me)
By Rob, on February 11th, 2010
It has to be said that, in my search for Gadget Nirvana, I’ve frequently flip-flopped over which vendor or sector was more likely to provide the ultimate, all in one solution to … well … everything!
Circa 5 years ago my money was on open source (hardware, software, flapjacks, whatever!) to combine my massive list of entertainment, communication and connectivity requirements into one, affordable, hackable, workable device.
With the purchase of my first MacBook Pro I shifted over to Apple as the possible saviour of we the fickle, techno devout members of the Nintendo generation.
With the release of Android, Google OS, the Nexus One and their awesome web-based tool kit, my allegiances shifted to Mountain View for a while – they promised the answer to all my needs (well, almost all) in a shiny fun a clearly “Not Evil” package.
And now?
Continue reading The iPad – Less than it should have been
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