Posted on Thu. February 23, 2006 by Ryan Guill #
Entries for February 2006
If you haven't ever seen city-data.com you should really check it out. They have a plethora of demographics information for just about every city and town (and even most villages) in the US. Everything from average incomes, average home costs, population, crime rates, education rates and even how many sunny days you have compared to cloudy. They also have Top 100 lists that give you lots of good aggregate data. Definately worth checking out.
I just realized that I haven't posted yet about speaking at cf.Objective()! I will be teaching a class which is labeled as "Component APIs" but it will be more like "Designing Coldfusion Components with an API in Mind". As of right now, my class is on Saturday at 3:30 in the beginners track. If you haven't heard of cf.Objective() or looked at it yet, you really need to. There is a ton of great speakers that will be there and is should be a great, yet inexpensive conference! Early bird Pricing ends the 26th though so you need to hurry!
This will be my first class besides small classes for single companies. Im a little nervous, but more excited. It should be a lot of fun. This is also my first Coldfusion conference to ever attend, so I am definately looking forward to finally meeting all of you guys that I talk to all the time.
I should be getting in town around noon on friday (I took an earlier but cheaper flight) so if anyone else is going to be there friday afternoon or evening and you want to meet up, let me know!
Posted on Thu. February 23, 2006 by Ryan Guill #
Yesterday I was working with a small, two column mysql table and wondering if there was a better way to do something. Basically, what I had was a small table that held a tagID and tag Text for a tagging system I was building. This table was to be used in some joins later. I wanted my table to be clean in the sense that I only have one record for each tag, case insensative (all my tags will be uppercased anyway). Traditionally, I would do a query to see if it already exists and insert if not, but I wanted a better way instead of doing two queries. Now the two columns were keyed, so it would bomb if I tried to insert the same tag twice, but I didnt want to do conditional logic to catch an error, I just wanted the query to work if it was supposed to, and just not insert anything if not. So what we did was to create a dummy table.
I just created a table called dummy, with one column called dummy that was a boolean, with one record, true. Then I was able to do a query like so:
INSERT INTO tablename
(
tagTextColumn
)
(
/* This will select the tag name, uppercased, for the column name and the value in one record
If it doesn't already exist in the table. */
SELECT
Basically this does a subselect that selects a constant value of the tag name as the column and the value with one row, if the tag doesnt already exist. Otherwise it does nothing.
And its fast, quite possibly faster than doing the two seperate queries, especially if the table is indexed properly. Also, it makes it where if I want to change the table up later I only have to maintain one query instead of two.
Posted on Tue. February 07, 2006 by Ryan Guill #
I dont have to tell you that flex 2 beta 1 was released. I dont have to tell you that there are some aspects of it, not the least of which is a preview of Mystic, the new coldfusion updater, or the fact that we are going to get a free version of flex enterprise services that we are going to get to play with.
What I can tell you is where my mind is going with all these new promises of opportunities. I have several clients that are probably going to end up with nothing but coldfusion backends and flex front ends. I can see me forgetting how to code html in a few short years. I can see us developing web applications like never before. This is a very exciting time for coldfusion developers, and only going to get better.
I really really have to commend Adobe. I had my doubts, I will admit it, but they have really gone above and beyond my expectations. I think this is a sign of good, no, great things to come.
Im still trying to digest some of this information and how it all works together though. I tried ben fortas sample application showcasing flex 2 with coldfusion, but couldn't get it to work. Once I ran the flex app, it just sat there with the clock mouse icon. So if anyone has any insight on this, please let me know. But the possiblities are somewhat dizzying.
Here's to a bright bright future for Coldfusion!
Posted on Wed. February 01, 2006 by Ryan Guill #