Central Alabama ColdFusion User Group - 2009
Employment
- Browse "Local Sites" and ask individuals at a site near you how they found their job. Help us keep this list current.
- Look for the word "employment" below and in other archives. Let us know when you learn of opportunities you don't need.
- Or, simply contact the group managers.
3 December 2009 Meeting
Finished Business: Jrun
Marty reports that Jrun behaves better on Vista if you tell it to run in compatibility mode for Windows XP! It uses one-half to one-third as much memory as it did before the change.
- Open the Windows Task Manager
- Right-click jrun.exe
- Select properties
- Select the compatibility tab
- Use the pull-down and checkbox to tell Windows to run this program in compatibility mode for Windows XP
- Click OK; close the task manager
Activity: Conversion to ColdFusion 8
First, make it work. That was the order of business today: quickly check applications on hand to see how many run under CF8 without changes.
5 November 2009 Meeting
Activity: Jrun Configuration
On Marty's machine (a Toshiba Satellite with a Gig of RAM and 1.73 GHz clock), Jrun takes up more than four times as much memory as the next memory hog (IE), and this cripples the laptop to the extent that some other applications won't open.
Others seem not to have difficulty with Jrun. For example, Don is using ColdFusion 8 successfully. (However, much of his work is on non-Vista operating systems.)
1 October 2009 Meeting
Life Happened
No attendees.
3 September 2009 Meeting
Activity: ColdFusion 8
It's sad to leave ColdFusion 7 behind. There are sites that do just fine with ColdFusion 5. Still, in order to take advantage of onTap's promise, we made the transition today.
6 August 2009 Meeting
In Memoriam
Marty's wife of 38 years died in July after a prolonged downhill slide brought on by an inexorable series of small strokes. You can see pictures of her in the 2007 archives when she accompanied Marty to CFUnited Express in Atlanta.
Prior to 2004, she had earned multiple Masters and Ed.S degrees and ran a private school. She's survived by Marty, three married children, six grandchildren, and her mother and sister.
Activity: onTap Configuration
We had homework from July: port Human Help - a chat application powered by a periodically refreshed hidden frame for each participant - to onTap and ColdBox. However, we didn't have much to bring to the meeting.
onTap has great promise, but it refused to run on ColdFusion 7. It should - others claim to have succeeded in doing this - but we did not.
2 July 2009 Meeting
Activity: Framework Comparison
This month, we walked through S Isaac Dealey's discussion of ColdBox, Fusebox, Mach-II, Model-Glue, and onTap. We found it to be a sound comparison. After an hour or so of that, we drifted to a discussion of theoretical and practical aspects of single sign-on for multiple sites based on a trusted third party.
4 June 2009 Meeting
Activity: ColdBox...
We discussed the ColdBox framework briefly, but we spent more time on things we wanted a framework to do for us. Discussion also drifted to middleware considerations and on development environments such as Eclipse.
7 May 2009 Meeting
Activity: ColdFusion Procedural Patterns
We reviewed some common patterns used to perform various functions procedurally with ColdFusion. We started at the newbee level but toward the end discussed the growing shift to doing as much processing on the browser side as possible (with tools like Flex and coralling javascript with JSON and couchDB.
Discussion: Change in Mission
Proposal: We agreed to drop the third bullet of the User Group's mission. The third bullet used to say: "Help organizations, especially local organizations, learn to benefit from ColdFusion in context." This made us sound like we're collectively in the business of making proposals to firms: something we're not equipped to do.
As individuals, we might pitch the strengths of ColdFusion to our bosses, but since the group has no independent existence - it's not a corporation - we are not set up as a group to approach businesses as if we were collectively a business. From from a liability standpoint, an organizational standpoint (we're essentially a social club and self-help group whose focus is programming), or a practical standpoint (we have enough to do just trying to spread ColdFusion knowledge among developers, who may then choose to apply that knowledge individually in various ways) - it shouldn't be in our mission statement to "Help organizations, especially local organizations, learn to benefit from ColdFusion in context." That will probably occur as we help individual programmers understand the benefits of ColdFusion, but influencing their businesses is their role, not ours.
2 April 2009 Meeting
Activity: Code Corner
We looked at a subset of tags that would be good for a beginning ColdFusion programmer to get familiar with. Here's the list, sequenced by purpose:
- Populate variables with cfset
- Set defaults (if not set) with cfparam
- Interact through HTML tags: form and anchor
- Make decisions with cfif, cfelseif, and cfelse
- Loop lists with cflist (leaving its other uses for later)
- Produce output and do implicit looping with cfoutput
- Build modular code with cfinclude and cfabort
- Create static queries with a custom tag from Hal Helms: cf_querysim
- Interact with databases with cfquery
- After these are well in hand, do explicit looping with cfloop and cfbreak
Oops
The meeting was held at the usual time and place, but the agenda didn't get posted in advance. Regrets to those who look at the topic on line when deciding to attend.
5 March 2009 Meeting
Activity: Create Human Help Video Demo
During this meeting, we tried to create a video demonstration of customer assistance chat that relies on ColdFusion, javascript, and hidden frames. The demonstration went OK. We brought up multiple customer windows served by one or two administrators. However, although we ran through the demonstration several times with the desktop shared to the recording site, we were unable to share the recording. It's not clear what went wrong.
5 February 2009 Meeting
Alternate Locations
This month's meeting was at Starbucks on 6501 Atlanta Highway (near Wal-Mart and Brown Springs Road), Montgomery, AL. And we learned that *Krystals* at 5650 Atlanta Highway (across from Eastdale Mall) would have been a better location for someone without a roaming wireless plan to use a wireless connection. To connect at Starbucks, you have to make arrangements with AT&T. Although Krystals doesn't sound elegant, it has multiple power outlets and freely available WiFi that supports ftp as well as http/https. And, after you order at the counter at Krystals, workers bring your items to your table, minimizing your time away from your laptop.
Next month's meeting will be at 844 Brookland Curve, with wireless available once more.
Activity: Tool Selection
Since it appeared that January would too busy a month for extended prep - unusual, huh? - as planned, we focused on tool sets for this meeting.
8 January 2009 Meeting
Watch Location; Notice Slipped Date; Remember the New Time
- Watch this space; the meeting location might change soon. [Cue the mysterious music.]
- Notice that January's meeting isn't January 1st. [grin] The normal schedule will resume in February.
- Remember that the meeting time has been moved to 6 PM to make it easier for group managers to catch the tail end of the manager-to-manager meeting.
Activity: Learning Through Imitation
Art students used to (and still do) copy famous works to improve their technique; imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Internet Retailer magazine describes "strategies for multi-channel marketing". We started the meeting by looking at techniques used by market leaders cited in the January 2009 issue and then shifted to known leaders such as Amazon.