Joe Rinehart on ColdFusion, Flex, and Java "I am, therefore I'll think" - AR

CFGoto follow-up: It was a joke!

Some folks (Brian, Barney, Sean) caught the deadpan immediately, but to those who've emailed or commented worrying about my sanity, my Friday post about wanting a CFGoto tag was a joke.  Double points to <a href="http://barneyb.com">Barney Boisvert</a> for writing his reply so dryly that I thought he was taking me seriously until I IM'd him!

Since Firemoss is no longer my full-time gig, this blog is likely to take on a bit more of a relaxed, personal tone - including the occaisional joke, however dry or un-funny.

4 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 12:21 PM - Categories:

Another Broadchoicer: Brian Kotek

When I announced that I joined Broadchoice a few weeks ago, I mentioned a marathon job interview at their 2008 Global Developer Meetup.  What I couldn't mention at the time was that I had some very good company in the form of another interviewee:  Brian Kotek.  We both decided to join the team, but while I could immediately begin work, we couldn't announce Brian's hiring until today.  This morning, I was happy to see that the news is public in the form of Brian's announcement on his blog.

As he mentions, he and I have worked together on other projects for a good chunk of 2008, and the collaboration has been a great experience.  Brian is a fellow North Carolinian (living about 20 minutes from me), a ColdFusion and ColdSpring wizard as well as an all-around evil genius (in the best sense of the term), and I'm excited to have the opportunity to continue working with him.

0 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 12:12 PM - Categories: Broadchoice

I want CFGoto!

Sometimes when I'm working in ColdFusion, I get a little fed up with trying to do things that aren't quite functions, aren't quite objects, and aren't even justifiable custom tags. Things like rendering a specific pod in a stack, or programatically choosing which pods to render.

I'd really like a solution from a much older form of thought to show up in ColdFusion: I'd like to be able to have a given .cfm template jump to any line within itself, run some code, then jump back. This'd include any template it <cfinclude>'d, allowing me to use variables in my <cfinclude /> to do some really dynamic stuff.

I think I'd call it <cfgoto />, and it could jump to any <cfmarker />. Seriously, it's in many high-level languages, why can't we do it in ColdFusion?

This'd be so nice:

<cfloop from="1" to="#arrayLen(pods)#" index="i">
<!--- Forks to the block of code that renders a pod --->
<cfgoto marker="renderPod_#pods.getName()#

<!--- Pod rendering code <cfgoto />'s back to here --->
<cfmarker name="podRenderLoop" />
</cfloop>

20 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 11:09 AM - Categories: ColdFusion MX

iPhone 3G vs My Old Palm Treo

Last Friday, I stood in line for a few hours to pick up an iPhone 3G out in Durham.  I've had it a week now, and I figured I'd write up a short review comparing it to what it replaced - I'm afraid I don't have as much to say as Ben Nadel, so if you're looking for an in-depth iPhone 1.0 vs. iPhone 3G review, I'd check out his review.

First, some background:  for the past year and a half, I've been lugging around a Palm Treo 6-something.  About the only cool thing about it was that it was red, which continually made Adam Lehman jealous.  I'd picked it up because I was travelling a good deal more than I had been prior to its purchase, and I wanted a phone that'd let me do four things:

1. Sync my iCal
2. Sync my Address Book
3. Get e-mail
4. Instant Message (via GTalk or SMS)
   

When I bought it, I was assured that this phone handled all of it in spades, being even more compatible with my Mac than its Treo 7-series brethren, which ran some portable version of Windows.  It did perform all of the above, but with the following caveats:

1. An iCal event spanning multiple days would result in one event per day on my phone.  When it sync'd back up, it'd create all of these events in iCal.  Considering that I'd keep 90-day consulting engagements as events on a calendar, this made iCal syncing absolutely useless.
2. Address book sync'd fine.
3. E-mail....worked like 1 in 10 times.  Normally connections would just fail.
4. SMS worked great, but the IM software I used would crash randomly and reboot the phone.  I don't really blame the software, though, because of the largest problem I had with the Treo
   

At least once a day, I'd be doing something with the Treo, and it'd freeze then show me its boot screen.  About one in three of these times, it wouldn't even make it to reboot, and I'd have to remove / reinstall its battery.

Ok, now on the iPhone 3G side of the fence:

1. iCal just works.  It's their own software, kind of a no-brainer.  I'm impressed by the UI and by it automatically picking up alert settings.
2. Address book works, sometimes a little too well:  I changed the photo associated with the "Joe Rinehart" contact that I use to call home to a picture of my house.  It's also associated with the joe@firemoss.com e-mail account.  It unexpectedly reverse-synced the photo change to Address Book, so I now see my house whenever I read an e-mail I sent.  Works exactly as it should, but that's not something we're used to in the IT world (things working in the most logical and seamless manner).
3. E-mail works nicely.  I was out working from a coffee shop yesterday, my phone shook, and it was a grocery list arriving from my wife Dale.  I could zoom in and keep it legible while in the store.
4. SMS works great, giving an iChat-like interface.  I wish there was a mini iChat client on the thing, though, for GTalk - using Google's Safari based mobile app for the iPhone works, but it's not my favorite thing.

All in all, the iPhone has exceeded my expectations when it comes to business purposes.  Its wi-fi paired up great with the 4-5 local networks I use regularly, so if I'm not in a car and I'm in my hometown, I'm likely to be wi-fi.  3g is acceptable, but burns batteries - I've got it turned off unless I need IP connectivity and I'm not in a hotspot.  The UI, of course, blows away any phone I've ever used.  I'm a happy iPhone 3G customer.

8 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 7:45 AM - Categories: Off Topic

Sean Corfield is Frustrated

Last night, Sean Corfield indicated that he's a little frustrated because he's not blogging as frequently as he'd like.  That's largely because we're working on a few projects at Broadchoice that we really can't talk about, but I can say that I've been working a little bit of overtime because the subject matter is just so darn cool.

So, while Sean's frustrated, we've got a triad of SaaS products under development that are chock full of interesting technologies keeping us busy.  Hopefully we'll be able to blog about the technology soon, maybe even on a new official Broadchoice Engineering blog.

4 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 11:54 AM - Categories: Broadchoice

Broadchoice is a meme!

John Whish has posted a blog entry entitled "How to get a job at Broadchoice" - apparantly we're a meme now! His blog entry is both insightful and nakedly honest, talking about some of the hurdles to be overcome when you're a lone developer without a development team or mentor.

Apparantly I work with a bunch of trendsetters...

1 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 11:59 AM - Categories: Broadchoice

Want Spring and Hibernate? Buy these books.

I've been messing around with Hibernate for the past year or so, and have used Spring to manage it whenever possible.  Last Summer, I spent a full weekend Googling and piecing together information from blogs to learn how to "properly" integrate the two (along with ColdFusion) - there's a ton of information out there (some wrong, much outdated).  Spring 2.x, in particular, simplified a good deal of stuff when you move beyond simple wiring up of beans and into concepts like transaction management.  Many of the blog entries and articles I could find contained pretty stale information.

Luckily, there's a book that I've recently read that shows you the "right" way with a minimum of fussing about:  Spring in Action.  Its second edition covers Spring 2.x and the many simplifications (esp. for AOP) it's introduced into the Spring framework.  It begins as a great introduction to Dependency Injection (DI / IoC) and Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) then covers the major spring modules (DAO / ORM, remoting, security, MVC, and so on...) in order.  I'm likely to skip some sections, such as AOP or SOAP-based remoting, but they're there if I need them.

If you're shopping for Java books, I'd also recommend Java Persistence with Hibernate if you've any interest in Hibernate.  It covers (sometime in a more academic depth than necessary) just about every imaginable case for using Hibernate.  What I really enjoy with this book is that it often talks about the theory and underpinnings of ORM, showing you why things are the way they are in Hibernate, even if sometimes counterintuitive.

Last but not least, make sure you check out Amazon's used book prices - I picked up Spring in Action along with O'Reilly's Java Message Service for a combined total of $31.49.

0 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 8:12 AM - Categories: Joe Drinks Java