CF Needs An Open Source Contact List Importer

What do I mean by contact list importer? Well, join any 'social network' nowadays and you'll likely be presented with a utility to allow you to invite your friends to that network by importing your contact list from GMail, Yahoo Mail, etc. These utilities are pretty nice, but if you think about it the code behind them is pretty powerful. Essentially you need a mechanism to speak to each individual web mail clients API to authenticate and retrieve the user's contacts, then grok each individual response based on the API to normalize the contact data.

There are paid software products available that do this (for example this one from Octazen Solutions) but I say there is no reason we can't build a comparable open source product. I emphasize 'we' becuase I simply don't have the time to research the API for every client and bang out the necessary code to make all them work. On top of that, I don't have an account with most of them, so I'd have to take them time to sign up for each service too.

So here is my suggestion. We, as a community, work on this project. I've already started it - I've got a simple GMail importer built that does the trick. I think we'd need to come up with a standard return format and then have a handful of folks willing to contribute code for the individual API's out there. Do folks think this would be useful, and if so are you willing to contribute?

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More On CF+Hibernate - Do We Need A CFValidate Tag?

To expand a bit on my last post I wanted to brainstorm on some more potential enhancements for CF 9's potential Hibernate integration. Specifically I'd like to propose the ability to define validations within an object. I know some folks cringe when it comes to this topic, but check out my pseudo code below. I think what I propose could really work, and greatly simplify validation while still being powerful (with potential custom validations).

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The Future Of ColdFusion As Blogged By Dan Vega

With commentary by yours truly...

I wanted to point everyone to a short series of blog posts by Dan Vega where he discusses the future potential features of ColdFusion as shown by Adam Lehman and Ben Forta at CFUnited 2008.

The Future of ColdFusion Part 1

The Future of ColdFusion Part 2

The Future of ColdFusion Part 3

Part 3 discusses the Hibernate integration that Adam demo'd during the keynote. I'm particularly intrigued by the prospect of this. For one, the implementation - although extremely early to speculate - looks very nice. I like the fact that it focuses on the objects themselves and not the database or anything else. I'm also intrigued by the possiblity of the object actually generating the database tables though I know some folks are skeptical of this kind of thing (gasp...what happens if I make a typo!!!).

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Any ColdFusion/OpenOffice Gurus?

I'm abusing the blog a bit here by asking a question, but are there any folks with experience integrating OpenOffice with CF out there? I'm really looking for a basic quick start guide for getting started. What do I need installed on the server?

I did some quick tests last night but couldn't even get past creating the bootstrap object to connect to OO. In my first attempt tried using JavaLoader to load up the OO jars, but got an 'no office executable found' exception. I then figured I'd try adding OpenOffice to my class path, but the connection just timed out.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

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CFUnited - Note To Speakers

I'm sitting here at the keynote for CFUnited 2008 and wanted to post a quick reminder to all the super talented speakers to make sure you post your presentations to the CFUnited 2008 group at SlideSix.com. That way everyone who couldn't make it to the conference can check out your wonderful presentations! Don't forget you can even attach a zip containing your code samples or other supporting material directly within your presentation on the site! If you should have any problems or encounter any bugs while uploading come see me on the 12th floor of the hotel ;)

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Off To CFUnited

I'm officially heading out to begin my journey to CFUnited 2008. We have an overnight stay at my in-laws along the Ohio/Pennsylvania border and then it's off to DC early tomorrow morning. Leave a comment if you're coming into town a day or two early and we'll try to hook up. If not I'll see everyone Tuesday night/Wednesday. Looking forward to some good networking and lots of learning!

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Persisting Session Variables Within An Iframe on IE

Wow, this one really boggles my feeble mind. Found an issue where session variables do not persist when browsing in an IFRAME on IE. I Googled it and amazingly found the solution here.

Basically you just add:

And they magically work. Anyone know what the hell that does?

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SlideSix - Now With Pretty URLs

I pushed some changes last night to SlideSix.com to enable SES URL's. I used IIRF, a free URL rewriting filter for the URLs, and so far it seems to be working out pretty well. Nothing terribly interesting to most users I'd say, but I wanted to put the word out to all of my friends in case you come acrossed a glitch with the URL's. If you do, please let me know.

The cool part is that you can now share a friendly URL with everyone you know. For example, profile URL's now use the following format:

And groups:

Presentations follow the format too:

The alias is a clean version of your group or presentation name (no special chars and spaces are replaced with '-').

It looks like I missed the friendly format for playing a presentation full screen - I'll work on that.

That's about it for the changes. What else would you like to see at SlideSix?

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CFLib 2008 - Redesigned And Relaunched

After talking about it for four years, Ray Camden has finally launched the rebuilt version of CFLib. Congrats Ray! The new site looks fantastic and is speedier then ever. Everyone attending CFUnited that uses CFLib is now required to buy Ray a beer (imported only please).

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Quick iLearn Update

Just a quick update to add the default roles and question types that should have shipped with version 1.8 (they have been added to the end of the /install/ilearn_install.sql script) and a quick feature addition. You can now create 'news' announcements from within the admin. Some other minor modifications were added too - minor CSS things, etc. Thanks to Thomas Messier for pointing out that I didn't ship the roles and question types. Download iLearn at RIAForge.

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