Aaron Greenlee's Blog - A Personal Journey

CFWDUG First Orlando Meeting is next Tuesday

The Central Florida Web Developers User Group is holding our first Orlando, Florida meeting next Tuesday! Join us on the last Tuesday of the month (3/29/2011) at Full Sail University for two presentations to kick-start our Orlando meeting schedule! The Central Florida Web Developers User Group will continue to meeting on the first Tuesday of the month in Tampa, Florida and now will hold meetings the last Tuesday of the month in Orlando Florida.

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The Life Cycle of a ColdBox Request

With the imminent release of ColdBox 3 I wanted to stop and share some examples of how ColdBox 3+ can be applied in a real world application. To start what may become a series of posts I thought it would be wise to first provide a foundation for these posts by explaining the life cycle of a ColdBox request.

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Track and Report Errors in ColdFusion Apps using Hoth

How many errors are happening in your Web application?

If you answer "not many" you may not know enough about what is happening with your application. I love building Web applications--specifically, I build applications that deliver a great experience and quality service. In the game I play even a single error is one error to many. I am an advocate of test-driven development and I build all sorts of unit/integration tests to confirm my applications behave as expected. But, Web applications are constantly evolving and the way clients interact with our services constantly changing. Errors happen. They just happen. Sometimes it's a hardware failure and sometimes it is a bug in your code. I've been searching for a way to easily parse logs to pluck the relevant data. I've looked at logging products and definitely see their value; but, none solved my problem the way I required.

Introducing Hoth: ColdFusion Error Tracking and Reporting

Hoth is a lightweight, framework agnostic solution to understanding the answers to two important questions without wading through log files:

Is this a new, unique error I have not seen before?
How many times has this error occurred?

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Backbone.js Presentation Slides, Recording and Code

Yesterday I presented "Give your JavaScript some Backbone" at the Central Florida Web Developers User Group in Tampa, Florida. If you are interested in seeing what you missed you can access the recording, download the slides and get the code. The code is heavily commented (please ignore my spelling errors) so you should be able to take a self-guided tour as you learn how Backbone can work for you.

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Monitoring Tomcat Performance with Open Source Software

Last night, I setup Tomcat monitoring for a Railo application deployed on Tomcat 6. Of course, Tomcat is just a servlet container so these instructions will work for any web-app deployed on Tomcat including Adobe ColdFusion, Spring, Groovy or your custom Web application.

This brief tutorial guides you on setting up JavaMelody which monitors a wealth of data--I've summarized a list at the end of this post.

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URL Rewriting for Tomcat

This month it seems as if Amazon has sent a shockwave through the various developer communities I frequent with their announcement of the Amazon Beanstalk. Amazon selected Apache's Tomcat as the servlet container for their ground breaking product and a lot of people have started to ask about Tomcat. A few months ago I read a book on Tomcat and I recommend it to anyone considering deploying with Tomcat. However, the book does not cover URL Rewriting for search engine safe (SES) links–also called pretty urls.

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Give your JavaScript some Backbone

October, 2010 I began a search for a JavaScript framework to provide a conventional structure to my applications. After spending hours (and hours) with JavaScriptMVC, PureMC, KnockOutJS, Sprote Core and even Google’s Web Toolkit nothing felt quite right. I setteled with Ben Naddel’s corMVC mainly because his code reminded me of the framework I would have written if I rolled my own. In fact, I even asked Ben to get corMVC up on GitHub so I could start playing with it and molding it to my needs. But, then I got some Backbone.

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Adobe TV now has a Community Translation Project

This morning you can experience my favorite Adobe TV video "Scubaman: Behind the Snorkel" in quite a few languages! But, that is not even the best part. The coolest new feature of Adobe TV is that you can translate Scubaman into your favorite language! Do you think Scubaman should be shared with people fluent in German, Japanese, Spanish or Arabic? If so, join Adobe TV's new Community Translation Project and translate Scubaman into the language of you're choice! The project launched last night and some great perks are in store for everyone who participates in the project.

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Google Closure, ColdBox and ANT

I find myself shifting more and more of my focus away from the server and onto the client. When building Web clients powered by JavaScript proper management of your assets (you know, the JavaScript and CSS files) becomes increasingly important. I wanted to take a moment and share my current solution for managing assets which allows me to reduce HTTP calls in production, make my source transparent in development and allow JavaScript to be tested directly in Eclipse thanks to JSTestDriver.

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WHAT THE #@$K?!? Why is this so sloppy?

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