Welcome to Sorcerer's Isle, a weblog covering a multitude of topics, ranging from programming to 3D graphics; photography to gadgets; tutorials to tinkering.
Within Sorcerer's Isle are three sub-blogs, which each focus on different aspects:
At Sorcerer's Tower you'll find programming and web dev; Midnight Isle covers photography and digital art; and with 100% Geek you'll find gadgets, gaming, technology, and more.
Articles may appear on just one of the weblogs, or across multiple, but every article posted will always appear on this one.
It's nearly a year on from my last Railo blog post so it is well overdue that I write another - just in case there is anyone still sitting on the fence, unsure if they should use Railo - or indeed, anyone who might be unaware of Railo's very existance!
So to start with, a quick summary of what Railo is:
Find out why Railo is the perfect choice for your next development project.
Earlier today, the eagely awaited Railo 3.1 public beta was announced!
And the reason for much of this eagerness?
Railo is now Open Source and Free Software, released under the LGPL v2.
This license requires that any changes to Railo's sourcecode itself must also be released under LGPL v2 (or later version).
However, unlike the full GPL, it does not require that you release any packaged applications under a compatible license - so you can still use whatever license you like for your own CFML code, Open Source or otherwise.
Along with the announcement comes two new Railo websites: The commercial-oriented getrailo.com and the community-oriented getrailo.org, which also contains wiki-based documentation.
Details on updating this documentation, as well as information about the new features in Railo 3.1, will come later this week - stay tuned to the Railo blog for the latest details.
The next four months are going to be a very exciting time for Railo and CFML!
It's been nearly half a year since Railo 3 was released, and with 3.1 just around the corner it is a good time to write a post about some of the features that continue to make Railo such an excellent CFML engine!
This blog entry gives ten reasons for using Railo 3...
For anyone working with any other modern language, (such as CFML, C#, JavaScript, Ruby, and more), using a String within a switch-case statement is not an issue, and probably something you've done many times without thinking about.
However, when working in Java you cannot use strings in a switch statement.
Fortunately, despite what many sites suggest, there is a solution.
I have released v0.7 of QueryParam Scanner, which introduces a variety of improvements over v0.6.1:
For more details and download information, visit the project page at Hybridchill.
The following release, v0.8 will have three key features:
I recently* completed my very first Eclipse Plugin, and I found the whole experience to be very interesting.
*(well about a month ago; took me longer to get writing this than intended)
This blog entry will focus on two main areas - my experience with Eclipse (as opposed to CFEclipse and similar), and the issues I encountered from a development perspective
The long awaited Railo 3.0 is out of Beta and available to all.
There are a lot of exciting new features with Railo 3.0: multimedia video conversion and manipulation, video player with playlisting, task manager, cluster scope, CF8 compatibility, and more.
Also, with Railo 3.0, the Community and Professional versions have been combined - keeping the price of the Community edition (i.e free), but without the previous restrictions this had. (With Railo 3.1 due later this year, Railo will fully become Free Software, under the LGPL2 license.)
For more details, the best place to head is the rebrushed Railo website, which has been updated to provide information on what is new with Railo 3.0.
There will also be a three part series on the Railo blog covering the new features. The first entry in the series is already available.
As we (hopefully) all know, using HTML tables for layout is Bad and Wrong.
Unfortunately, the most common way people avoid using tables is to just replace their table, tr and td tags with divs, divs and more divs.
The div tag is a generic container that should be used as a last resort, if there are no other more suitable options.
Whilst the problem of excess divs is not limited to the conversion of table layouts, it is perhaps most obvious here, as it shows the developer is still stuck in the column+row frame of mind, rather than thinking about what they are actually displaying.
In this blog entry, I show an example of how avoiding this mindset can result in much simpler and cleaner code.
The first pre-release version of the qpScanner Eclipse Plugin is now available.
This is the very first Eclipse plugin I have created. It was an interesting experience, and something that I will be writing up in a separate entry as soon as I can collect my thoughts.
It order to use the plugin, you must be using v0.7 or higher of qpScanner - if you do not yet have this, you can download the latest development version of qpScanner, which contains details of the Update Site to use. If for any reason you cannot use the regular Eclipse Update method, you can directly download the qpScanner Eclipse Plugin instead.
Just to be clear, both v0.7 of QueryParam Scanner and v0.1 of the qpScanner Eclipse Plugin are currently considered development releases, and are being made available so that they can be tested and any bugs that might exist can be found - if you are unwilling to use pre-release software you should wait until the official release.
If you do get the Eclipse Plugin, or even just qpScanner on its own, I welcome any and all feedback you might have - whether to report bugs you have found, request new features you would like, or simply to let me know that works with your local setup.
Please send feedback via email to qpscanner_project@hybridchill.com or alternatively add a comment below.
Related websites:
The latest development version of qpScanner is now in SVN at RIAForge.
It would be great if people could test it out and let me know of any issues they encounter.
As before, it is all self-contained, so it can be installed and run with minimal effort.
Note: As this is still the development version, you need to use the zip option at the bottom of the RIAForge page, not the "Download Project" link - the button will only give the old version.
When released, v0.7 will be a significant new version, so I want to give a quick discussion of the new features...