MDCFUG Blog

Adobe Fireworks CS3 Review

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 15:47:00 -0400

Simply put Adobe Fireworks is an intuitive and easy to use program to create graphics for small additions on websites to constructing entire website’s look and feel. It has become a web graphics staple to all professionals in the field and is quite frankly easy to use for people who may not be ask professional. That is, it as easy to learn as it is to use.

There are quite a number of tools to create bitmap and vector graphics which you can combine for entire website designs, and lets you edit virtually everything you could want with the help of photo-editing tools and animation tools. Fireworks can also export JavaScript that can control swapping images for rollovers and pop-up menus, as well as creating animated GIFs and can use XML files to import text into images.

Being that Fireworks has been around for about a decade now, the latest updates seem to be pretty great and just what users wanted/needed. One may now integrate into Photoshop and Illustrator, as well as Adobe Flex and Bridge. There is improved bitmap scaling and layer management. People are saying that it is still the best web graphics tool around, and has now made it easier for prototyping with its compatibility with other programs.

Developer's Research Study

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 11:58:00 -0400

Adobe User Research is interested in how you work!

We are looking for developers who would be available to chat with our Adobe User Researcher and share a bit of their work. We are interested in discussing with you what your processes are, what your challenges are, and what you believe could help improve your work tools.

We are also interested in taking a look at some of your current projects and being able to see how exactly you develop your apps with your current tools. We would be doing his over Adobe Connect, so you would only be sharing your screen and wouldn't be required to send us anything.

If you are interested, please follow the link to our survey screener and tell us a little bit about yourself: http://www.adobe.com/go/RIAintegration_study/

One session would last for 60 minutes and for your time, we'll gladly compensate you in either $75 AMEX Gift Check or the equivalent in Adobe software. These sessions will be running throughout June and July.

Mike Brunt's Pre-CFUnited Blog

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 11:40:00 -0400

I will be presenting at CFUnited on Friday June 20, 2008, on the subject of High Availability (HA)-Clustering for ColdFusion/JRun applications and I intend to make this as practical as possible. Having spent many years travelling the world helping to fix slow or unresponsive ColdFusion applications, I see HA as a natural progression to this and in fact Load-Balancing, which is a part of Clustering, has a direct impact on improving performance.

There is a point, often overlooked by even the manufacturers of clustering/load balancing equipment. Clustering is the overall term which, in my opinion, applies whenever two items or more appear as one, to the users. In our world, that typically means multiple web servers, with multiple application and database servers.

With this aspect of Clustering there are two services which are a part of the Clustering; Fail-Over and Load-Balancing. In my experience Fail-Over is always present, meaning if one member of the Cluster fails the remaining members ensure that continuity of service is maintained. This is a prime function of a Cluster.

Load-Balancing is the apportioning of load around members of the Cluster, typically an even distribution of the load is what is required. The most even distribution is via Round-Robin which means each single request moves around the Cluster members, like this (this example shows a 3 member Cluster):

· USER 1 > REQUEST1 > CLUSTERMEMBER1

· USER 2 > REQUEST1 > CLUSTERMEMBER1

· USER 1 > REQUEST2 > CLUSTERMEMBER2

· USER 2 > REQUEST2 > CLUSTERMEMBER2

· USER 1 > REQUEST3> CLUSTERMEMBER3

· USER 2 > REQUEST3> CLUSTERMEMBER3

· USER 1 > REQUEST4 > CLUSTERMEMBER1

· USER 2 > REQUEST4 > CLUSTERMEMBER1

This is the most evenly balanced Load Balancing algorithm and as I mentioned above is the Round-Robin algorithm. Problems can occur with that algorithm if there are user specific items in memory on one of the Cluster members, for instance in memory session state variables. If USER1 has logged in to CLUSTERMEMBER1 above and their details are in session variables on CLUSTERMEMBER1 when users next request takes them to CLUSTERMEMBER2 those in memory session state variables will not be there. My preference for the optimal Load-Balancing algorithm is Round-Robin with Sticky Sessions. In the case a user “sticks” to a Cluster member as follows:

· USER 1 > REQUEST1 > CLUSTERMEMBER1

· USER 2 > REQUEST1 > CLUSTERMEMBER2

· USER 1 > REQUEST2 > CLUSTERMEMBER1

· USER 2 > REQUEST2 > CLUSTERMEMBER2

· USER 1 > REQUEST3> CLUSTERMEMBER1

· USER 2 > REQUEST3> CLUSTERMEMBER2

· USER 1 > REQUEST4 > CLUSTERMEMBER1

· USER 2 > REQUEST4 > CLUSTERMEMBER2

This is not quite as evenly balanced as Round-Robin alone but unless there is a failure of one Cluster member the user will not lose their session state variables and the load balances across all Cluster members eventually.

This article serves as the first in a series of posts leading up to the CFUnited presentation and my next one will delve into differences between Hardware and Software Clustering.

Attention CFUnited Attendees: A District Live Music Guide

Tue, 20 May 2008 16:52:00 -0400

If you're in town for the conference and looking for some good live music, there's heaps of places to check out. The easiest to find are jazz clubs or punk clubs, the two things DC historically does best. I'll give you a quick summary of the DC scene.

The U St/African American Memorial/Cordozo metro stop is walking distance to a bunch of great venues, including Black Cat, a gritty punk venue (www.blackcatdc.com) which the week of the conference will have Dan Deacon on Wednesday, Grupo Fantasma and a Big 80's dance party on Saturday, and Cloak/Dagger on Sunday. That metro stop is also RIGHT near the world famous 930 club (www.930.com) which sadly only has two shows listed right now for that weekend, those being Abba on wednesday and thursday, and Fish on Sunday. That metro stop is right near the Velvet Lounge, a small punkish lounge, also, which always has great local music (www.velvetloungedc.com) as is the DC9 if you like really ratty really small dives. Also, U stree is famous for it's excellent Jazz Clubs. You can easily walk up and down just to find a place to sit up and sip, listening to good tunes. Bohemian Caverns is DC's largest jazz club and has had the biggest names in jazz play there (Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, etc.) so that's definitely a safe bet (www.bohemiancaverns.com). The other jazz bars on U street are Twins Jazz (www.twinsjazz.com) U-Topia (www.utopiandc.com) and a host of others. Little farther down is Saint Ex Cafe, which is pretty small, and amazes me that they can fit even a drumset in there,

Adams Morgan area is not exactly next to a metro stop, but there are enough bars and clubs on the 3 or so blocks that incorporate it that it is easy to spend the whole night there. In Adams Morgan, Asylum has live bands with no cover on Fridays (www.asylumdc.com), and Club Heaven (located right above Club Hell) has the city's best 80's dance party every Thursday.

H Street, the so-called Atlas District, is just recently blowing up in NorthEast. The Rock and Roll Hotel (not actually a hotel) (www.rockandrollhoteldc.com) is a quaint little place which hosts nationally famous indie rock acts and homegrown heroes. The actual "venue" part of it is small, so make sure you get there early to see any of the bands, and don't forget to check out the upstairs bar with poster relics all over the walls and flying guitars above your head. Shows playing during the conference haven't been posted yet. Also on H Street is The Red and Black (www.redandblackbar.com) which is a small place which holds local artists in a New Orleans style setting.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, there's tons of places to go in the city without spending a lot of money. This should get you started.

Maryland ColdFusion Lunch

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 13:17:00 -0400

Thank you to all of those who came out to the first Maryland ColdFusion Lunch! Because it was such a success, TeraTech will sponsor another one on Monday, April 28^th, at 1:30. It will be held at Cosi, located at 1700 Pennsylvania Avenue. To get there, get off the Farragut West Metro stop and walk south on 17^th street about four blocks; it will be on your right (*note: don’t be fooled by the Potbelly’s. Keep walking South on 17^th past that and you’ll be there).

For those not familiar, Maryland ColdFusion Lunch is an opportunity for people to meet up in an informal environment to network with other ColdFusion users. TeraTech holds monthly meetings at our offices in Rockville every second Tuesday, but this is an effort to accommodate those who cannot make it that far on a Tuesday evenings. As with our monthly meetings, these will be free (except for the cost of your own lunch).

If you are interested in having a lunch, but are not close to the location we chose this time, please let us know, and we'll work with you to get a lunch set up near where you work. All questions, comments, concerns and suggestions should likewise be directed to Matt Weiss, Matt@teratech.com. Hope to see you all there!

MDCFUG Lunch

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 15:19:00 -0400

We want to improve MDCFUG by making more social events. In addition to the user group meetings held at TeraTech every second Tuesday of the month, we want to accommodate people who cannot make it to Rockville due to where they live, or are simply too tired to do so in the evenings. TeraTech will begin hosting informal lunches during the work week, just as a way to relax and network with other people in the field.

The first of these ColdFusion lunches will be held at the Cosi at 17th and Pennsylvania in NW Washington, DC (about three blocks south of the Farragut West Metro stop on the Blue/Orange line) at 1:30 pm on Monday, March 31st. The only cost is that of your own respective lunch, and it is a great chance to talk shop with like-minded folks. Would you like a ColdFusion Lunch closer to you? Let me know where you work and we can work something out. Contact Matt (Matt (at) TeraTech.com) for all inquiries and comments. I'm looking forward to seeing all of you there!

Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 Review

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 13:52:00 -0400

This new Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 has a lot of nice features that help web developers create websites easily and efficently. It offers a lot of templates. I can simply use one of them and create a website without typing codes. One of the great things I have noticed is when the Dreamweaver insert CSS tags, not only does it create codes for those specific tags, but it also provides detailed descriptions. I really like this feature because it is very helpful in understanding the function of the tags. The "tag hints" are very nice too, especially when I create CSS tags. It is sometimes hard to remember certain properties for CSS, but Dreamweaver lists all the properties for me so that I don’t need to grab a book to find the ones I need.

Another feature where I can collapse certain area of codes is helpful and much appreciated. By selecting the area and clicking the "Collapse Full Tag" icon in the tool bar, I can hide unnecessary lines of codes and work on the part I need, allowing me to edit codes quickly and conveniently. Moreover, even though I close the Dreamweaver application, it will remember where I left off, thus know the codes I previously collapsed. This is very nice.

The "snippets" feature is useful and time saving for developers because Dreamweaver provides the option to apply predefined ones or gives the option to create my own "snippets."

Finally, I love the "Spry" tools. It is so easy to add nice visual effects to your website and this feature definitely helps attract people. Wow! You can simply click on an icon from the Spry menu and add menu bars, tabbed panels, or accordions in a second. I don’t have to work hard to create the effects, since Dreamweaver does all the work for me. No one will know I just click a few times here and there to create his or her website; unless, of course, he or she knows about this great Dreamweaver application. It just gets better and better! I'm spoiled! This is one of the best tools and a must-have for web developers.

One note: I do wish Dreamweaver could allow me to save or import the "snippets" I created as a file so that I can have them as a backup in case I need to reinstall OS or share with other developers. It does not have an option that simply allows me to do that without digging through a folder the Dreamweaver saves them. Hopefully, Adobe will add this functionality to the next version of Dreamweaver.

October meeting URL

Tue, 09 Oct 2007 16:30:00 -0400

The URL of this month's acrobat connect meeting is:

http://adobechats.adobe.acrobat.com/mdcfug/

6:30pm – "ColdFusion 8 and PDF Integration" with O?uz Demirkap?

8:00pm – "Spiral Web - The Future of Web Society" with Michael Smith

(Times are Eastern Daylight Savings Time)

MDCFUG August Meeting Photos

Tue, 14 Aug 2007 22:36:00 -0400

We have uploaded MDCFUG August meeting photos into TeraTech's Flickr account.

You can see reach the photos via http://www.flickr.com/photos/teratech/

August meeting URL

Tue, 14 Aug 2007 17:40:00 -0400

The URL of this month's acrobat connect meeting is:

http://adobechats.adobe.acrobat.com/mdcfug/

6:30 PM: "Application and Credit Card Payment Integration", with Montreal

8:00 PM: "What's New in CF8 Administrator", with Ajay Sathuluri

FusionDebug review

Mon, 06 Aug 2007 20:29:00 -0400

Fusion Debug review

By George Murphy

This is my third year in a row attending CFUnited. My name is George Murphy and I am a ColdFusion developer and contractor doing work for the Department of Energy through Technology & Management Services. One of the things that I have come to enjoy most about attending CFUnited each year is being able to discover new software and little snippets of code which I can use throughout the year. My first year was working with ColdFusion developer Selene Bainum to come up with functions to dynamically process form submissions. This year it was discovering the usefulness and value of FusionDebug 2.0.1. This plugin runs inside of CFEclipse and allows the user to set breakpoints and then have FusionDebug step through the code line by line. The coolest aspect of the entire application is being able to see every variable that is being created from when you start running your application until the breakpoint and even after if you step through the code.

Installer – Complete IDE Environment

Another interesting feature of FusionDebug is that it comes bundled with Eclipse 3.2 and CFEclipse 1.3. This is a handy feature if a developer is not running Eclipse on their machine. You don't have to fool with downloading and installing Eclipse separately. However, if you would like to install FusionDebug in your copy of Eclipse that option is available.

Server Configuration Wizard

There is also a Server Configuration wizard which is capable of updating the ColdFusion/JRun server configuration file in order to allow ColdFusion to accept connections from FusionDebug.

Source Code Lookups

Point to the exact project paths in Eclipse of the code that users need to debug on the ColdFusion server. This is part of the setup process for debugging. If you are having any issues this is the first place where you should look to make sure that your path information for your particular project is correct.

Debug Perspective

This is a window which contains all of the views needed to begin debugging your ColdFusion Applications. The variables tab allows you to see all of the variables that are running in your application. The breakpoint tab lets you see all of the active breakpoints that are set in the application. Finally the expressions tab allows you to monitor and settings that have been applied to any expressions. It is nice to have all of this information in one area.

Inspect Expressions

FusionDebug allows you to create multiple expression watchers. What this does is allow FusionDebug to evaluate those expressions. To simplify it creates a window into your expressions to allow you to see the values going into and coming out of the expressions that you need to know.

Those are just a few of the many features available in this application. To learn more about these features see:

http://www.fusion-reactor.com/fusiondebug/features.html

I have never used a debugger before; but after sitting through Charlie Arehart's presentation about FusionDebug and the new debugger that comes bundled inside of ColdFusion 8, I immediately saw the potential value of the two applications.

After the presentation I decided to skip the next presentation and visit the Fusion team to get FusionDebug installed and running on my laptop. The install process was very uneventful which made me quite happy.

I commissioned FusionDebug to solve a nagging problem that I have not been able to solve for the past month. I am in the process of building a LAN E-mail request application for the EERE (Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy) division of DOE. When users passwords are reset or new users are created I have a component which generates the password and stores it in the session scope. I then read that session scope back to the Administrator who copies it and gives it to the user. When the Administrator leaves the page I clear the session scope of the last variable that I created. I was using the variable CGI.path_info to check for the existence of the page I was reading to. And if the CGI.path_info was not equal to the page I was reading I cleared that session variable. This worked flawlessly while I was on ColdFusion 6.1. However when I ported the application to ColdFusion 7 or ColdFusion 8 the session variable was never available when I went to read it.

Before I worked with FusionDebug I attempted the classic methods to try and figure out why it was not working. I verified that the session was getting created and that CGI.path_info was available and equal to the page I wanted to read to. Right after setting the session variable I did a cflocation back to page I was reading to. I verified that CGI.path_info was available right before the redirect and right after. So, it was a mystery as to why the session variable was not available right after the cflocation. Well FusionDebug helped me solve the problem because I was able to see the value of CGI.path_info during the cflocation and the value was an empty string. That is why the session scope was getting cleared. For the life of me I could not understand why I did not get this same behavior in ColdFusion 6.1. So, with the discovery of this little bit of information I again turned to FusionDebug to try and help me solve the problem.

There are many different CGI variables which read the same thing. FusionDebug showed me which ones where available during the cflocation and did not change. I decided to use CGI.script_name and it is working flawlessly in ColdFusion 6.1, ColdFusion 7, and ColdFusion 8. My point is that I was able to see and correct this problem in 15 minutes. Without FusionDebug I would have chosen another method to correct the problem but not known for sure why I was having this issue. So, I would like to take my hats off to the folks who developed FusionDebug. It is great to have another great application in my tool chest to help me build better and more secure ColdFusion applications. Since CFUnited FusionDebug has become an indispensable development tool for me and TMS is looking at additional purchases for other team members. If you value saving time and working more efficiently then this is the tool for you.

To purchase or learn more about this application see:

http://www.fusion-reactor.com/fusiondebug/index.html

URL for July's meeting

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 15:09:00 -0400

The Acrobat Connect URL for tonight's meeting is:
http://adobechats.adobe.acrobat.com/mdcfug07102007/

We will begin at 6:30 PM EDT.

Topics:
6:30pm - "CFC's What are You Waiting For?" with George Murphy
8:00pm - "Building a CF Administrator Interface in Flex" with Theo Rushin Jr.

See you there!

Adobe Captivate 2 Displays Incredible User-Friendliness

Mon, 02 Jul 2007 17:32:00 -0400

When my boss first came to me and asked me to record several demos using Adobe Captivate 2, I was skeptical. Not only would I need to record the demos, but I envisioned myself spending hours just trying to figure out how to efficiently use all of the program’s tools. I immediately installed the program and began playing around with the different features. After a very short amount of time, I had already picked up most of the basic features of the program, and was able to put together short practice demos.

It takes very little effort and frustration to create a useful demo using this program. It has an incredible array of tools, allowing you to add audio, import and edit various media files, and easily edit separate frames after you are done. It captures every motion you make while recording, and you can even outline the area on the screen that you would like to be recorded if you do not wish the document the whole screen.

One of the best aspects of Captivate is what you can do with your storyboard after you are done recording. You can enhance each individual screen by adding text, audio, video, animation, and more. The program can be set so that with every mouse click, a new frame is automatically generated. This is very convenient, as the program automatically separates the frames into separate steps and allows for me to focus on the content of the demo without and having to stop each time I want to re-do a frame. For someone who has never used any program like this before, I felt as if I had been using the Captivate for a long time, after only a few hours of use.

- Daniel Rooner

URL for June's meeting

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 18:22:00 -0400

The URL for the June meeting is:
http://adobechats.adobe.acrobat.com/mdcfug061207/
We will begin at 6:30 PM EDT.

Topics:
"Exception handling", with David Lakein
"Scorpio: A preview of the next major release of ColdFusion" (ColdFusion 8) with Adam Lehman

URL for May's meeting

Tue, 08 May 2007 18:10:00 -0400

The URL for the May meeting is:
http://adobechats.adobe.acrobat.com/mdcfug050807/

We will begin at 6:30 PM EDT.
Topics are:
"BlueDragon 7.0 new features" with Josh Adams

"Selling ColdFusion to Clients" with Michael Smith

See you soon!