JavaScript Frameworks – Let There Be Light

Wednesday, 16th July 2008 in Development by Simon | No comments

For many web developers, whenever JavaScript is mentioned it provokes a rye smile; JavaScript is one of those programming languages that is rather avoided than embraced. This is not the fault of the language itself, but rather the browsers. A few years ago, the landscape of client-side scripting was a bleak scene. Browser inconsistencies, particularly with the dominant Internet Explorer, implementation bugs and numerous target platforms made developing client-side JavaScript a tricky undertaking.

To the consternation of these same developers, the landscape changed and Web 2.0 hit the mainstream. Almost overnight, every website on the internet wanted to use or was using AJAX. Marketers joined the bandwaggon and every feature requested had to involve something dynamic and revolutionary. Thus JavaScript development quickly hit the forefront of peoples minds and became as important as any server-side technology available at the time.

Over the next few blog posts, I will be using the popular frameworks jQuery, Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI), ExtJS and Adobe’s Spry with ColdFusion to demonstrate various techniques, such as autocomplete and form validation.

ColdFusion Is Hotting Up in the UK

Friday, 27th June 2008 in Development by Simon | No comments

In the past, the US has held a near monopoly not only in ColdFusion-based user groups, but also conferences, with CFUnited, cf.Objective() and the more general Adobe MAX leading the way.

But the landscape is changing and the UK is challenging for its share of the scene. 2008 is seeing a renaissance in the ColdFusion world following on from the buzz created around the release of ColdFusion 8 in 2007 and the eagerly anticipated future release of ColdFusion, codenamed Centaur. This buzz has resulted in not one but three conferences for 2008: CFUnited Europe was held in London in March, Scotch-on-the-Rocks was held in Edinburgh in June and soon we will see the return of CFDevCon.

The inaugural CFDevCon one-day-conference was held back in 2006, in Croydon, but in September 2008 it is heading down to what is arguably one of the creative capitals in the south of England, Brighton. The conference has not only become a two-day conference, but its scope has moved beyond simply Adobe-based products, with the introduction of Microsoft-based technologies, specifically IIS7.0, Silverlight and SQL Server 2008 and technology-agnostic topics such as Regular Expressions, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Accessibility.

As with all great conferences, CFDevCon has a great line-up of speakers with the likes of Sean Corfield, Hal Helms, Peter Elst, Peter Bell, Aral Balkan and Simon Bailey, to name a few, all presenting sessions.

So, lets get excited people, support the conferences and user groups and evangelise ColdFusion.

ColdFusion 8 and the Yahoo User Interface Library

Wednesday, 4th July 2007 in Development by Simon | No comments

ColdFusion, a key technology behind rapid application development, has been a much maligned technology in the web development arena for sometime now. However, through the efforts of Ray Camden a ColdFusion Developer Center has been created on the Yahoo Developer Network. This is great news for ColdFusion and follows on the back of the integration of the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) Library into the version 8 release of ColdFusion codenamed Scorpio. The YUI is one of the best JavaScript libraries out there and includes great documentation.

In the words of Yahoo:

The Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. The YUI Library also includes several core CSS resources.

Interestingly ColdFusion 8 also supports Spry, which could be considered a rather anaemic AJAX library compared to the YUI library. Whether Spry progresses out of prerelease remains to be seen, however, which ever AJAX route is taken, ColdFusion will benefit from closer integration in its core tag set.