If you haven't seen Joe Rinehart's preview of event generation in MG3 you should check it out. He also shows how MG3 handles SES URLs behind the scenes. The video is truly exciting to me. I can't wait to see more of MG3 at cf.Objective()!!

I will be presenting a preview of my cf.objective() presentation 'Integrating ColdFusion 8 Ajax with Model-Glue Applications' at the Cleveland ColdFusion User Group meeting on April 10.

I've been trying to attend more meetings in person but things often come up for me. Brian Meloche and Dan Vega do a great job with the group, so if you're in the area you should try to attend. I believe Brian is also presenting at the April meeting and I think Dan is presenting in May.

Over a month ago I launched the Model-Glue Cookbook with full intentions of immediately adding some super delicious content. Well, things happened (just minor things like Christmas, New Years, Work, 2 sick kids on 2 seperate occasions) and I just didn't get to adding anything. For that I apologize. Thankfully Brian Ghidinelli has submitted a few entries over the past few days so there is actually some good content on the site finally! I have a few other unanswered questions in the queue that I hope to get to soon. If anyone is interested in 'volunteering' to answer questions please let me know.

I had intended on making this announcement this morning, but due to a nasty bug that I came down with in the middle of the night last night I didn't get out of bed all day. Anyhow, the Model-Glue Cookbook has officially launched. The intent of the site is to help folks learn Model-Glue techniques in the same way the ColdFusion Cookbook does. Simple questions/answers that will help folks understand the how and why behind MVC and Model-Glue. Many thanks to Ray Camden for sharing the code from the CF Cookbook.

Last night I fixed my issues with emails being sent from CFSnippets.org. About a week ago, in the haste of my hosting fiasco (which I still need to do a proper blog post about) I quickly realized that I would also need to move my email as I moved my blog. I decided on Gmail for your domain (or Google Apps - or whatever it's called). So I made the switch and made sure my CF administrator pointed to the new SMTP server (as described here).

The one problem with doing this was that CFSnippets.org used the Email Actionpack that ships with Model-Glue which does not use the default server mail settings. No problem, I figured I'd just point it at the new server and all would be great. Well, not really. If you look at the Gmail settings page I link to above you'll notice that you must specify 'TLS' and/or 'SSL' when using Gmail's SMTP server - which I had done when configuring CF, but I wasn't sure how I'd handle this at the individual cfmail level. I had a quick chat with my buddy Brian Rinaldi who pointed out that cfmail has a few new attributes as of CF 8 - two of which were exactly what I needed. (For the record, the new attributes are useSSL, useTLS and priority).

So after a few mod's to the Email Actionpack, a quick loop over my Undelivr folder to change all the existing queued mails, a copy/paste from Undelivr to Spool and my email is back in business.

Thanks for your patience. If you've signed up for CFSnippets.org you should now have your verification email. Again, I apologize for the inconvenience!

I wanted to dedicate a specific post to the technology/framework that powers my new site CFSnippets.org. In case you haven't noticed just yet (and if you haven't noticed, shame on you, go create an account!), CFSnippets.org is powered by Model-Glue. This was my first full experience with the magic that is MG and I must say I'm hooked. It just all seemed to make sense - and it just 'worked'. I found myself thinking very little about 'what goes where' once I got comfortable with the framework and thinking more about the user experience and the overall flow and look and feel of the site. It's hard to fully explain just how cool it is to finally understand and be able to develop a full application within a framework. My learning curve was a bit steeper seeing as how I decided to also take the time to fully soak up OO design patterns and put them into practice with this site. The end result is something that I'm really proud of - and for once the site is not something that I dread going back into to make a minor change or add a bit of functionality. I know exactly where to go to change/fix something and that's a feeling that I like a whole lot! I'm not completely sold on what my next full blown MG project will be - but I know there will be another one. I still metally waiver on those 'smaller' projects and whether or not the end result will be 'worth' using MG. I know that sounds silly - and again - I can't really explain why I feel that way since it's so darned easy to work with.

So about that user experience that I spoke of earlier. Bits and pieces of the site make use of ColdFusion 8's Ajax features. For example, when you're logged in and viewing libraries you may notice a 'Subscribe' option underneath each library that you can use to subscribe and create your own custom feed. I thought it would be nice to allow you to do this without a page reload so when the link is clicked, an Ajax request is submitted to update your subscription and the link fades out and is replaced by the 'Unsub' link. Subtle, but still pretty cool if you ask me. I also am using <cfwindow> on the site to display the code view of each snippet that you see as you browse a given library. Another small touch that seems to work out nicely.

The initial reaction to the launch has seemed very positive and I'm hoping that the momentum keeps up. I really feel that this can become a valuable asset to the ColdFusion community. If you have any ideas for the site please feel free to let me know.

Sorry about the non-creative title for the post. So last night I was working on a MG application and came across a bit of Spry in my page that would not work. I goofed around a bit with the code, assuming I had done something wrong. Double checked that the Spry libs were being included - yep. I checked everything - nothing seemed off. Then (after an hour) I remembered that I had read somewhere in my Model-Glue research that having debugging turned on can interfere with JavaScript. If you've done any work with MG you'll know that your views are actually rendered within the debug output - which means your JS is potentially included more then one time. Sure enough, turning off debug output did the trick and everything was back on track. Just another bump in the road on the path to MG enlightenment.

My next stumbling block on my journey is the creation and persistence of application level data. Specifically the DSN for my application. Don't worry, when I get over these initial stumbling blocks I'm sure everything will run a lot smoother, but I keep sharing these items for a simple reason. I think these little things are the kind of things that trip up a lot of folks when trying to adopt new concepts and frameworks. I myself have let little things like this discourage me and I move on to things that are familiar and comfortable and forget all about the learning that I had done.

A few follow-ups from yesterday's post. First off, Brian noted that his generator will recognize char(35), assume a UUID and generate the code accordingly. This worked perfectly and is definitely appropriate as Brian pointed out to me because since UUID's are fixed length and do not require unicode support.

Another error on my part in that post was pointing out that MG is stricter with datatypes then CF. This is not true. I was passing the entire userBean to the saveuser() function in my service when all I really needed was to pass the fields themselves (which I accomplished by using the beans getMemento() function) as an argument collection. I'm assuming that is an appropriate use of that function since it returns a struct containing each value. Therefore Model-Glue was trying to evaluate my component as a string which obviously don't work ;)

Today I got a little time to hop back on my journey to OO and Model-Glue enlightenment. It's difficult to keep focused on this project because [insert standard I'm really busy excuse here]. Anyhow, I'm a little tripped up and I'm going to lay out my experience here for the sake of documenting my learning.