I was called over to Stu’s desk earlier today when he asked me "Dude, have you heard of Ralio?" (which is a Java Coldfusion - CFML - interpreter or engine).

"Yes I have", I replied.

"Just imagine for a second you didn’t know about it and take a look at this", he said pointing to the Railo website open on his screen.
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Ok, so before you get too excited it’s not really a fully fledged version fantastic Firebug Firefox plugin, but the lite version does go some ways to easing your cross browser development.

If you’re not aware what Firebug is, the official site quote is:

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

But that doesn’t explain just how excellent Firebug is, it is by far and away not only the most complete debugging plugin I have found for any browser, but it also seems to be one of the most complete and professionally executed Firefox plugins around.
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cross trainer

I’m currently in the middle of writing a reusable little JavaScript utility, which I’ll probably release when it’s finished, for one of my many projects and I wanted to employ unit testing as part of the development process, as I believe in the benefits of it quite strongly.

However my previous experience with unit testing JavaScript haven’t been the most pleasent, I have tried the most common nUnit variations for JS, the best of which was JSUnit. But I always found this a little cumbersome and difficult to use, however I had recently read about the unit testing available with script.aculo.us and although the only documentation I could find was the PDF available at mir.aculo.us I thought I’d give it a go.
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As I have mentioned before, or as anyone who practices OO in Coldfusion will know, that object instantiation in Coldfusion has quite a bit of overhead.

I’ve seen a few thoughts about how to best work around this, such as the above post on Java vs CFC instantiation by Mark Drew and the ideas presented by Peter Bell with regards to iterating business objects which I’ve mentioned before.
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I’ve just had to work on a task which creates a couple of CSV report files for an external business partner and then uploads them to their secure FTP server. In it’s original state it was using the Putty FTP client by writing a batch file and then having a scheduled task execute that batch file later (as the Coldfusion could not execute the batch file).
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I came across this funky little script earlier today which allows you to dump variables of any data type in JavaScript and presents the results in exactly the same format as the default output of a <cfdump var="#myVar#" /> in Coldfusion.

I really like the completeness of this script, how it handles the node elements and the cross browser support. I’ve not tried using it in development yet and I doubt it would replace my console.log() calls in Firefox when using Firebug, as that offers so much more, but for the poorer members of the web browser family (poor little IE) I can definitely see it coming in handy.

I’ve had this on my list of post ideas for months now and haven’t seemed to get round to posting about it, but a recent question from a friend about what I used to handle comment spam reminded me about it.

I use WordPress to power this site and ever since day one I received lots of spam, at first I just manually cleaned them up but once I started getting some decent traffic I had to move onto a more automated solution. So looked at lots of different plugins for WordPress and tried about 5 or 6 until I came across the fantastic Spam Karma plugin , since that day I haven’t looked back.
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I’ve finally released the latest version of the JavaScript Image Cropper UI which has been updated to version 1.2.0.

This adds quite a few bugs fixes, feature additions (the much requested ability to set maximum dimensions) and speed improvements and general streamlining.

NOTE: One really important change to note is that the cropper no longer has the default behaviour of automatically setting a ratio when both min width & height passed, the ratioDimensions must be now passed when this functionality is required.
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For those of you who have had the pleasure of dealing with browser testing slightly complex CSS the title explains it all.

For those of you who haven’t, all I have to say is this: you lucky bastards.

At work today I spent quite a bit of time shouting and throwing things at my monitor, it tends to take the brunt of my frustrations when things really annoy me. The reason for my frustration today was Coldfusion’s WSConfig tool, which is supposed to easily allow you to configure web servers or individual sites (in the case of IIS anyway, I’ve not tried with Apache yet) to work with the Coldfusion JRun connector.
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