Just Another Tech Blog

CFDynamo: Weekend Updates

2012-01-30T12:32:00.001-07:00

Over the weekend I knocked out a few wrapper methods for CFDynamo (and pushed them to the Github Repo). I was hoping to get a bit farther but I'm the boys basketball coach here in Ouray (pop. 900) and we had homecoming this weekend. I was a bit more wiped out than I expected on Sunday! The following methods have been added and tested: create_table update_table delete_table The following

CFDynamo: A CFC Wrapper for Amazon DynamoDB

2012-01-27T11:51:00.001-07:00

Earlier this week I began implementing a DynamoDB solution for a client. DynamoDB is a NoSQL solution long ago planned but only recently released on Amazon Web Services. It is more closely related to Cassandra than MongoDB or CouchDB but offers some interesting and enticing features (e.g., all DynamoDB tables exist on SSDs, so the I/O is pretty damn fast!). My client's site is built with CFML

A sight we rarely see...Marley tolerating Dobie!

2011-10-27T12:17:00.001-06:00

Posted via email from self.is_a? Blog

CFWheels StatesAndCountries Plugin Updated

2011-09-23T12:44:00.001-06:00

With many thanks due to Jordan Clark, my StatesAndCountries plugin for CFWheels has been updated. Because my CFML work is focused solely on Railo and I do not have a current Adobe ColdFusion installation on my main work machine, I missed that there was an issue on ACF with the plugin (it could not find the asset files). Jordan tweaked the plugin to work for him on ACF and then I went back in

CFWheels and SES URLs

2011-09-19T12:52:00.001-06:00

I’ve been talking with a fellow CF'er and he was having some trouble getting SES URLs rolling in a Tomcat and CFWheels application that he’s working on. Since I had to go through all sorts of ‘fun’ times with SES URLs and Wheels a year ago, I thought I’d write up a little post on my experiences and how I got the URLs I want. And, really, it ain’t that bad. URLRewriteFilter First things first,

Rails HAML Heads Up with CSRF Tag and Destroy Calls

2011-09-10T09:09:00.001-06:00

Rails HAML Gotcha with CSRF I’ve been doing a good bit of work with Ruby 1.9.2 and Rails 3.0 and 3.1 lately. It’s been a pretty exciting time as I have not really delved heavily into a new language in a couple of years (I had lots of CFML work from 2009-2011). Right now, I’m working on a site for our volunteer fire department, of which I am a member. I’ve got the front-end of the site in place

How I Got Started in ColdFusion

2011-08-01T11:25:00.001-06:00

Steve Bryant recently suggested we make August 1, "How I Got Started in ColdFusion" day. The idea is to get as many CFML developers to write a blog post detailing how they got started with ColdFusion. I think it's a wonderful idea and, as such, following is my own story. My first forray into ColdFusion began late in the magical decade that brought us grunge, a revival of hippie/jam-band music

From VPS to the Cloud (AWS): Setting up an AMI for Railo

2011-06-16T12:08:00.001-06:00

From VPS to the AWS Cloud As I mentioned in one of my last posts, my primary client and I have undertaken a mission to make the application kronum.com more scalable and nimble, as we are experiencing sudden and dramatic spikes in our traffic. The process of migrating from a traditional VPS stack to a nimbler Cloud setup has been quite educational and illuminating. It definitely alters how you

CFML Many-to-Many ORM Gotcha ... Well, It Got Me!

2011-04-15T20:08:00.001-06:00

Many-to-Many’s I’m working on a few ORM entities in a client’s application tonight and came across an error that baffled me for a bit longer than it should have! I thought I would post it just in case someone else comes across it. I have two entities: Teams and Sessions. A team can play in many sessions and a session can have many teams. They are joined via a link table in the DB. That table,

Migrating a Railo Application from a Traditional VPS to the Cloud (AWS): It Begins

2011-04-15T12:49:00.001-06:00

This has been a very exciting week with the Kronum project (kronum.com). Kronum is a new entry to the American sports scene. It's a mashup of several different sports (basketball, soccer, and others) played on a circular field outdoors. Over the past two weeks, we've seen our web traffic go from ~200 visitors per day to 13,000+. What happened to increase our traffic so dramatically and so quickly

Railo/CFML Spreadsheets Made Easy (Well, Easier, Really)

2011-03-23T16:24:00.001-06:00

Spreadsheets Made Even Easier in Railo First and foremost, I want to give a huge shout out and thanks to Andy Jarrett (@andyj and Blog ) for his work on the tag & functions extension for Railo. His work on this extension, and making it publicly available for all of us, just made my life infinitely easier. The Problem My client wanted to get a list of all members on his site who have logged in

CFEclipse Themerations

2011-03-04T14:28:00.001-07:00

CFEclipse Themes I’ll admit it … I’m one of those developers who prefers to work with dark backgrounds in his IDEs. To that end, I use Atpana Studio 3 and CFeclipse for the bulk of my work. Aptana Studio 3 has some great theme options out there (you can actually import TextMate themes directly to Aptana). So, when I’m coding my JavaScript, XML, CSS, and HTML editors look bad-ass. Naturally, I

Time for Something New

2011-02-18T08:23:00.001-07:00

The first two months of the year are always the toughest for me. In early January my middle school basketball coaching starts up in earnest (we start pre-season practices in late October but those are just not the same as when the real season gets rolling). I basically spend the first 8 weeks of the year treading water; keeping my clients' projects moving along but not really having much time for

Dogs in Snow

2011-02-14T10:55:00.001-07:00

Nothing better than dogs having funin the snow! Posted via email from Today in Ouray

Some New CFWheels Plugins to Checkout

2011-01-28T08:18:00.001-07:00

A couple of pretty sweet-looking plugins have been released on the CFWheels site (http://cfwheels.org/plugins).> I'm particularly excited about WURFL (love the name as it reminds me of a radio station's call signs :). It's a wrapper for the Java API for mobile device capabilities and features. It's one of those projects that I wanted to actually create a plugin for but, fortunately, someone

WireFrame Sketcher - Excellent Eclipse Plugin

2011-01-20T14:16:00.001-07:00

In late December, I was given an opportunity to test WireFrameSketcher, a wireframe plugin for Eclipse. I've used (and enjoyed) Balsamiq mockups over the past year or two and I like it very much. However, I found that I typically gave up on those mockups because I had to open another app, toggle between the apps, and so on. Enter WireFrameSketcher ... Rather than a lengthy review of features, I

CFWheels Plugin - States and Countries

2011-01-18T13:07:00.001-07:00

While working on an on-going CFWheels project for OurayClimbing.com, I have been spending a ton of time on the CMS. As is always the case for me, I have several form fields in a CMS that require select lists for US States and Countries. In the past, I've thrown this data into a DB, queried it as needed, etc. Since I am using CFWheels and a bit plugin crazed, I decided to create a basic plugin

Manage your TextMate Bundles with GetBundles

2011-01-13T08:50:00.001-07:00

I dig TextMate a lot. I use it for all my scratch CFML (a la the Scribble option in CFEclipse) and some small projects. It's simple, lightweight and quite efficient for small projects and tasks. Well, this morning, I was reading a couple of posts on the newtricks blog about ColdFusion Unit Testing with MXUnit and TextMate and stumbled over this line:Install the GetBundles tmbundle (github.com/

SimpleFlickr - My First CFWheels Plugin

2010-12-30T12:55:00.001-07:00

The Task and the Flickr API One of the projects I am currently working on is Ouray Climbing. It’s for a friend’s mountain and ice climbing guide service in our hometown of Ouray, Colorado. The guys and gals at Ouray Climbing are world-renowned bad-asses (for real … I’m not exaggerating). If you ever get the chance to come to Ouray and want to head into the backcountry with some expert guides,

CFWheels - Super Cool Feature: provides() and renderWith()

2010-12-17T11:33:00.002-07:00

Please visit my Posterous site for the details

Railo, Tomcat, and ActiveMQ Together Again for the First Time (Part II of II)

2010-12-14T09:13:00.002-07:00

Please visit my Posterous site for the details

Blog Moved

2010-12-08T09:55:00.000-07:00

I've officially moved my blog from Blogger to Posterous. If you would like to continue to follow my posts, please visit http://craigkaminsky.posterous.com. Thanks! Craig

Railo, Tomcat, and ActiveMQ Together Again for the First Time (Part I of II)

2010-12-04T17:00:00.002-07:00

Please visit my Posterous site to read the post.

Apache, Tomcat, Railo on Win2K3 Server

2010-12-04T09:36:00.002-07:00

Please visit my Posterous site for more.

New Projects S3 Bucket

2010-07-26T08:59:00.001-06:00

I'm slowly moving into the 21st Century and have, finally, loaded some of my projects onto an S3 bucket. All links go to the original blog entry I wrote for that project. Utilities: CFZipper (CFML)http://s3.amazonaws.com/oss-projects/cfzipper.zip Email Verification (CFML)http://s3.amazonaws.com/oss-projects/email.verification.cfml.zip Flex File Upload Component (MXML)http://s3.amazonaws.com/