A recruiter contacted me seeking a Senior Web Application Developer who is a ColdFusion expert in Tampa, FL. I wanted to pass the information on in hopes of helping others in our community.

Writing code in a dark color scheme makes you a better programmer. The evidence is overwhelming but takes a little discovery on your part. Fortunately, I have taken the time to document some instruction to help you transition from the boring "Mr. Anderson" coder into "Neo"--the badass deadline defying "there is no spoon" computer hacker.

On the first Tuesday of each month, the Central Florida Web Developers User Group holds a meeting in Tampa, Fl covering a topic of interest to our members. For the September 2010 meeting (09/07/2010 at 7PM), we are going to do something a little different. Inspired by Sean Corfield and the BACFUG, we are asking members to share their code, offer insight to help others and work on any problems our members may be having (or wish they could solve more elegantly).

As I surfed the Web to discover ColdFusion ORM examples, found messages in the CF-ORM Google Group and developed my own ORM application I realized how easily it would be to create an insecure application that allows a User to submit data you did not expect and have it persisted in the database. Fortunately, you can avoid this security issue by taking one little step during development.

Those who augment their development practice to include unit-testing--as I hope you have if you are following this series--can help insure they continue to embrace the discipline of 'test first' by saving their understanding of the software-under-test (SUT) within the actual test. This practice guards against you or another developer modifying the SUT without informing the test. For example, if someone adds a new property or function your test can alert you. This practice provides a little insurance to keep you honest to your promise to test first.

This practice can also check the implicit functions found within the SUT. Generally, I only check for the functions/methods I explicitly define within the SUT and ignore the implicit assessors provided by ColdFusion 9. But, the samples below can check for both if desired.

On the first Tuesday of each month, the Central Florida Web Developers User Group holds a meeting in Tampa, Fl covering a topic of interest to our members. In July, I will be presenting on the crazy cool features provided by the ORM integration in Adobe ColdFusion 9 and the soon to be released Railo 3.2. If you are not a ColdFusion developer you should take a moment to participate to see what you are missing. If you are a ColdFusion developer and are not using ORM you definitely do not want to miss out.

You should take a moment to head over to the Central Florida Web Developers User Group ORM event page and register.

A unit test isolates and executes a small part of your software and compares the result with your expectations. The small part of your software being tested is generally called the Software-Under-Test (SUT). Isolation of the software (SUT) is improved when you fake the dependencies. Faking the dependencies is called 'Mocking'. Mocking will be covered in the next post in this series.

My client (who is also a member of the Central Florida Web Developers User Group) has an opening for a ColdFusion Web Developer. They are migrating to the ColdBox Framework and are seeking people with ColdBox (or other MVC framework) experience.

A few weeks ago I gave a free day of training to members of the Central Florida Web Developers User Group on ColdFusion's ColdBox framework. The training was a success. Everyone recognized the benefits of the framework and embracing the design patterns shown. In fact, one member who manages a site that yields 150,000 visits monthly has started to convert their existing spaghetti site to the ColdBox framework. The features of the ColdBox framework that stood out to those who attended were debugging, caching, plugins, interceptors—and testing.

Last week I was asked to modify the appearance for results generated by the jQuery Autocomplete plugin for a site WRECKINGBALL was about to launch and discovered I needed to enhance the autocomplete plugin to achieve the desired results.

Problem: The autocomplete plugin only provided a single DIV to style with the class (ac_results). This forced the div to have a fixed height which looked weird when only a few results were returned.

Solution: Modify the jQuery autocomplete plugin to provide end-caps for the results.

On Saturday May 8 2010, the Central Florida web developers user group came together for a seven-hour presentation covering ColdFusion, ColdFusion builder and the ColdBox framework.

Organizing code can be a challenge even for the smallest teams. Frameworks help us solve this problem by establishing conventions that bind us to expected behavior. This contract can greatly improve the quality and efficencity of your product/service. And, while there are many approaches to code organization (and frameworks) I most appreciate the ColdBox Framework. If you are not familure with ColdBox, it is CFML framework and toolkit that supports Adobe's propriatary ColdFusion CFML engine and two open source CFML engines Railo and OpenBD. ColdBox is an event-driven framework that offers 16 conventional interception points while supporting an infinite number of custom interception points you declare.

This afternoon, I am writing some JavaScript for a CMS system and FireFox was not always fetching the new scripts from the development server. I ran across this helpful FireFox tip and wanted to share and save on my blog.

The Reserved Routes interceptor can be used to prevent users from obtaining any keywords used in your SES routes as usernames. Additionally, you can also explicitly reserve words you do not desire usernames to have (such as admin). To reserve these words my ColdBox interceptor should be loaded in your applicatons ColdBox Config file after the SES Interceptor. The Reserved Routes Interceptor then pulls the SES interceptor from the ColdBox Cache, extracts the routes and reserves any static strings in the first position of your URL.

This afternoon I encountered an error 'A CFC with entityname X could not be found' as I was working on a new campaign entity for our Adwords campaign.