OscarArevalo.com - Coldfusion

Version 3.1.570 Released

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 18:46:00 -0500

The new update for HomePortals is now released. The current version is 3.1.570; This is a roll up of all the latest bug fixes since the last release. If you use the nightly build then you will not notice any difference right now. The full post about what is new/fixed on this release is here: http://www.homeportals.net/blog/index.cfm/2010/4/15/Version-31570-Released All comments are welcome!

Introducing the New HomePortals CMS Plugin

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:09:00 -0500

A few days ago I released the latest update to the HomePortals framework and its counterpart management platform ColdBricks. Besides the obligatory bug fixes and improvements, there was one new major feature on this release: the CMS Plugin. The CMS Plugin is a HomePortals extension to provide content management and site administration features to any HomePortals-based application without requiring the use of an external application (like ColdBricks) or building your own administration features. [More]

Available Update for HomePortals and ColdBricks

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 17:35:00 -0500

I just pushed new updated versions of HomePortals and ColdBricks to their respective sites and are now available for download. As usual the updates contain multiple bug fixes and small improvements here and there. However there are a couple of features that are worth mentioning. [More]

Update to 'Core' Framework. Now in GitHub!

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 03:31:00 -0500

A while ago I shared a small framework I created which I use to develop pretty much all of my projects (both open source and paid engagements). The framework, as is usual for web frameworks, follows the MVC and Front Controller patterns; also like Sean Corfield's FW/1 and Barney's FB3 Lite (and many others) it has an emphasis on minimalism and makes an effort to stay out of the way as much as possible. I recently made some changes to the framework and wanted to share them with the community. [More]

Model-Glue / HomePortals Sample Application

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:10:00 -0500

A few weeks ago I wrote about how to use the layout management features of HomePortals on a ColdBox 3 application. This time I want to show how to do the same but with an application built with the Model-Glue framework and also explain a bit more of why would you want to do so in the first place. [More]

ColdBricks 1.1 Update: Custom Resource Libraries & Extension Modules

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 17:57:00 -0500

A new update to ColdBricks CMS is now available for everyone to download and play. This is still part of the greater 1.1 release but it adds some new interesting features that I thought would be interesting to blog about. Besides the obligatory bug fixes/performance enhancements, the two most prominent features are Custom Resource Libraries and the completion of a full modular architecture, including the option to install/uninstall modules directly by the end user. [More]

CFShell 0.2: Even More CLI Goodness for CFML Servers

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 01:13:00 -0500

Today I uploaded to RIAForge an update to CFShell. This update focused on making the client behave more like a standard command line tool, and also added a couple of useful commands and shorthand expressions to the shell. [More]

CFShell: A command line interface for CFML engines

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 17:21:00 -0500

Many times when we are working on our ColdFusion apps there are situations in which we want to quickly evaluate something or try some one or two-liner snippets to do something quick. The typical process then is that we have to create a .cfm page, put in on the server, go to the browser and execute it. And that's pretty much the only way we have for interacting with the CFML engine. This contrasts with other languages like Ruby, Python, or even PHP in which you can quickly interact with the language directly from a command line or terminal window. Wouldn't it be nicer to have the inmmediate satisfaction of evaluating our CFML/cfscript statements interactively? Well, that's where CFShell comes in. [More]

Launched 2 New Homeportals/ColdBricks powered Websites

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 01:59:00 -0500

I wanted to quickly share that two new ColdFusion websites have been launched recently: MSDynamicsWire.com (a news portal) and Meancycles Owners Galleries (a social network). Both sites were developed using HomePortals and ColdBricksCMS. Both sites show different level of integration and customization, as each serves a very different function, but they are good examples of the wide range of solutions that can be obtained by combining the HomePortals framework with the ColdBricksCMS platform. [More]

Creating Your Own Alert Rules For BugLogHQ

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 19:41:00 -0500

One very useful feature of BugLogHQ is the 'Rules' feature. These are basically rules or conditions that get evaluated every time a bug report is processed and can be used to provide custom behaviour. Rules may be used for things like alerting you when some special condition happens; For example you can create a rule that will send you an email as soon as you receive a bug report with the words "stack overflow" on it, or to possibly send you an SMS message once the amount of errors on the last X minutes is greater than 100 errors, or well, you get the idea. In this article I want to go over how rules are implemented and give a brief example of how to create your own rules and add them to your BugLogHQ instance. [More]

BugLogHQ 1.4 is now available

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:47:00 -0500

The newest release for BugLogHQ is now available for download at RIAForge. This new version has lots of new additions and improvements that will make it even more powerful and easier to use. Here are some of the highlights of the new version: » Asynchronous processing of bug reports and rules. I think this is the single most important feature of the release, so I'll go into a bit of detail here. In the previous versions every time the listener received a bug from another application it had to parse the bug, add one or more records to the database and process any rules that were defined; although this implementation responded very well (even collecting errors for a 30+ server deployment on a really high traffic website), it was obvious that this approach was not going to be very scalable, especially if many rules were defined for processing. So, on the new version the receiving and processing of bugs are two independent processes; that way BugLog can receive a bug and return a response to the caller application almost immediately since there is virtually no processing done at that time. It's responsibility of another process fired at regular intervals to process all bug reports on a queue along with any rules that are defined and this process can now takes its sweet time to do whatever it needs to do without the pressure of having to return a response to the caller application. [More]

Anyone wants to help test the new ColdBricks CMS?

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 15:26:00 -0500

I am finally ready to enter the testing/packaging phase for the new version of ColdBricks. ColdBricks, if you don't know is a CF-based Content Management System (CMS) that is used to build sites on a modular fashion. This new version includes some nice features such as: - Template management (author and manage your own page templates and layouts) - Module maker (create and customize your own configurable modules/widgets) - Site monitor (monitor site, cache, and memory status of your sites from within ColdBricks) - Fully modular and extensible architecture (think 'custom plugins') - A new and more simpler page management format - Create your own catalog of resources to use in your site (great complement to the ModuleMaker) - Completely updated rendering engine (yes, that means HomePortals 3.1) - And more! At this moment there is not an official distribution package, but if you want to play around with it (and help me test and/or provide feedback), here are the download links: ColdBricks 1.1 (Beta) Also you will need the new version of HomePortals: HomePortals 3.1 For both of these, just download and unzip on the root folder of your site, and go to http://your_domain/ColdBricks to get started. Additionally some of the site templates in ColdBricks, like the StartPage and the Blog, require a couple of HomePortals plugins. Here are the links: HomePortalsAccounts HomePortalsModules Again, just unzip on the root and thats it. As for requirements, this version has been mostly developed on Railo 3, but was tested on CF 8.0.1. I did all my dev on a Windows machine, so if you test on a *nix or mac, let me know if you run into any upper/lowercase issue. As always, documentation is still trailing behind (far behind), but i'll be happy to explain and even write some blog posts to clarify any doubt. Feedback and bugs are **really** appreciated. Cheers! *** UPDATE: I updated the download links to point to the general downloads page for each project, rather than a specific release. From each download page, you may download the "Beta" version for each project.

So, How about a templating engine for BlogCFC?

Fri, 08 May 2009 02:40:00 -0500

Recently I finished overhauling the way HomePortals 3.1 handles page templates and wanted to find a real-life (and useful) way in which I could demonstrate its new features. So, in this post I want to show how the templating features in the new HomePortals version can be leveraged to provide layout management capabilities on top of an existing application like BlogCFC. Why BlogCFC? well, first because it has a great segmentation between the blogging engine (the actual blog.cfc) and its presentation layer, and second because I already use it on my own blog and have plenty of real-life data to play with. [More]

Using jQuery.UI.layout to handle HomePortals layouts

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 18:57:00 -0500

** Update: ** Updated code examples and attached file to be compatible with HomePortals 3.1.570 A few days ago I found out (via tweeter) about this plugin for jQuery. Apparently UI.Layout is a port or adaptation of extJS border-layout but done the jQuery way. Well, this is basically a plugin to create complex full-screen layouts, with resizable panels and everything... really cool stuff. So I started wondering if I could use this to leverage the way HomePortals deals with page layouts and see if I could use hp to declare the page modules/widgets/content but on a layout controlled by the UI.Layout plugin. It turns out in fact that I was able to mix both projects pretty easily. Here's how. First of all, lets jump to the end and see what the finished product looks like And this is the corresponding HomePortals page:




	Using jquery UI Layout with HomePortals. Example 1

You can check out a live demo of this page here. So, did I pick your interest? well, if yes, then keep reading to find out how this was implemented. At the end of this post you can find a zip with the entire example, but let me go over the important bits here. ** Note that this example requires HomePortals 3.1, and will not work in earlier versions. You can get the latest release here First of all, we need to setup a HomePortals application for this example and set the appropriate environment. For the purpose of this example, our HomePortals application will live on a directory named "uilayout". You can find the complete dir structure and required files on the attached zip file. For the main settings we will use the standard config xml file. homePortals-config.xml.cfm

Here we declare all the necessary jQuery javascript files. These are ones required by the UI.Layout plugin plus one additional "init.js" to handle our jQuery initialization routine for this page. init.js


$(document).ready(function () {
	$('body').layout({ applyDefaultStyles: true });
});

The only thing this does is to initialize the layout plugin. Then finally the final bit of configuration that we need to add is to define a "page" render template. This is because the overall HTML markup needed by the UI.Layout is way much simpler than the default HTML structure that comes out of the box in HomePortals. The "page" render template controls the overall HTML structure that will be used to render all HomePortals pages. pageTemplate.htm



	
		$PAGE_TITLE$
		$PAGE_HTMLHEAD$
	
	
		$PAGE_CUSTOMSECTION["HEADER"]$
		$PAGE_LAYOUTSECTION["REGION"]["DIV"]$
		$PAGE_CUSTOMSECTION["FOOTER"]$

The relevant part here is the $PAGE_LAYOUTSECTION["REGION"]["DIV"]$ line. This just tells the HomePortals renderer to render all "region" sections one after another and use DIV tags around them. The HEADER and FOOTER custom sections are really not needed and not even used on this example. The UI.Layout plugin uses CSS class names on DIV elements to determine the type of layout region. There are five types: center, north, south, east and west; each one with its own specific class name. So, since all our layout regions will be rendered the same, we will need only "one" kind of layout region. We will name this a "region". So, once that is in place, we can just declare our pages and use the UI.Layout class definitions to create the layout. Like this: default.xml




	Using jquery UI Layout with HomePortals. Example 1

The layout section is where we declare the page layout using the UI.Layout class names for the different regions. So if we want to customize the layout, say, do not have a footer, or have only one left column, we can change that here easily by just removing the location tags that we don't need. The next section body is where we declare what goes into which layout region. the content tags just display plain text or html content while the view tag does a cfinclude of a CFML template. Of course you can now use the whole HomePortals framework features to create your own tags and do whatever you need. And since jQuery is so awesome, here is another example that uses pretty much the same setup but adds some drag & drop funkyness.

A Peek Inside the Software Factory: Core Framework

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:11:00 -0500

*** THIS IS A REPOST OF AN EARLIER ARTICLE THAT GOT WIPED OUT ON A RECENT DB CRASH. *** If you ever wanted to modify ColdBricks or BugLog, but didn't understood how these application were constructed; or if you just want to see yet another way of developing CF applications, then this post may be for you. I just posted some pages describing the framework I use for developing CF projects. It doesn't even has a proper name, I just call it "Core" due to its simplicity and its minimalistic nature. The basic principle of this framework, and the reason why I choose to use it instead of going with more traditional offerings, is that it only focuses on one thing and one thing only: provide a formal mechanism for going from one page to another and for invoking actions. It doesn't do any fancy things, no complex request lifecycles, no sophisticated caching, no extensive API, none; however, it does provide enough extension points to which I can hook any functionality that I desire on a per-project basis. Basically the framework consists on a Front Controller implementation, a base event handler and a few conventions for directory structure and nomenclature. Anyway, you can find the code and read more about this framework by going to the Projects section or by going directly here.