Christian Schneider is an Allaire Certified ColdFusion and Web site developer. He has over four years of intensive experience developing CF-based intranet applications for banks and logistic corporations.
This article demonstrates how to customize and extend ColdFusion Studio's
capabilities. Allaire has built lots of nice widgets into the Studio
Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to help developers wherever they
can. And they did a good job, as you can see.
Starting at the customization level we can define our own color-coding
schemes, code templates, keyboard shortcuts, icons, toolbars, and more. Most
of this can be customized inside Studio's Options dialog (press F8 to open it
directly). At the extension level there are efficient techniques available,
including Tag Completion, Tag Insight, Tag Editors, and custom Wizards.
In this article I demonstrate how to extend ColdFusion Studio by using VTML
to integrate your custom tags into the Studio IDE.
What are Tag Editors, Tag Insight, and custom Wizards? I suppose most of you
working with Studio are using the Tag ... (more)
In Part 1 of this series (CFDJ, Vol. 3, issue 6), I explained how to easily
generate the necessary VTML code for providing Tag Inspector, Tag Help, and
Tag Insight features inside CF Studio for your custom tags. (Part 1 is
available online at www.sys-con.com/coldfusion/archives/.)
Part 2 focuses on building Tag Editor dialogs using VTML to provide real user
interface-based dialogs for your custom tags in CF Studio. If you haven't
read Part 1, take a quick look at it before continuing Part 2.
Building Tag Editor Dialogs with VTML
To build Tag Editor dialogs you'll have to leave the ... (more)
This article describes how to use Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), the amazing
new graphic format, with CFML to create dynamic charts and diagrams. SVG is
the W3C standard format for scalable graphics based on XML (see www.W3C.org).
Yes, that's right, graphics based on XML; for example, see the following
code:
This SVG snippet renders a vector graphic 250x300 pixels holding both a
red-filled circle with a r... (more)
During a recent intranet project, I encountered the need for live reports of
all currently open user sessions within an application.
The goal was for me to be able to see how many users were currently online
with an open session when rolling out new templates from the development
server to the production server. That way I would be able to determine
whether it was a good idea to update the live production server or if it
would be better to wait until the late evening (of course, I'd probably need
to call the local pizza service, instead of having a nice dinner with my
girlfriend... (more)
This article demonstrates how to use Allaire's XML serialization technique,
Web Distributed Data eXchange (WDDX [described at www.wddx.org]), to transfer
CFML data structures from the server to the client, and into JavaScript and
back. Generally WDDX's approach is to interchange data of all types
(including complex data types such as nested structures, n-dimensional
arrays, record sets, or even binary data) between different programming
platforms.
Overview of WDDX
WDDX is simply a way of describing data in a text-based form. Technically
it's an XML DTD (Document Type Definition)... (more)
Christian Schneider is an Allaire Certified ColdFusion and Web site developer. He has over four years of intensive experience developing CF-based intranet applications for banks and logistic corporations.
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