On the last day of CFUnited 2005, a group of us were out on the patio having a final drink together. I got into a conversation with Clark Valberg about linguistics. I was a translator in latter half of my time in the military, and Clark was asking if I thought my experience with learning another language had helped me in learning to be a better developer?

I absolutely agreed. I have an aptitude for languages, and always have. It's something I've picked up, and I can generally get to a point where I can effectively communicate (at least on the simplest of terms) within a very short time. Programming isn't much different, if you think about it. When I first got into computing again, after leaving the Army, I was teaching myself ten different programming languages at the same time. I had a lot of catching up to do, being out of the game for so long, so I picked up some books, found online resources, and took to the task of getting up to speed.

Maybe that's why there are so many talented developers outside the US. In the US, we aren't required to learn another language out of necessity, whereas in most other countries of the world (not all, but most) it is very commonplace for people to speak two or more languages.

You can kind of apply this in the reverse, to some degree, as well. Those who only learn one development platform may be limiting themselves. Knowing one programming language inside and out can be a good thing, but learning others can also open a developer to new ways of approaching a challenge. I've known many developers who knew a server-side language (ColdFusion, ASP, PHP, whatever), but never bothered to learn JavaScript, or how to write well formed XHTML. To me, that's limiting. Even crippling.

What are your thoughts?

I've been rather quiet for quite a while now. I have a rather large side project I've been working on, written entirely with an ExtJS front-end and ColdFusion on the back-end. I'm hoping to get that into a QA phase in the next week or two. I also just celebrated my 39^th birthday, my 8^th wedding anniversary, my daughter is the rock star of the 1^st grade (pulling straight A pluses in every category), and the holiday's are coming.

On top of everything else, I'm putting the final touches on Learning Ext JS, to go to press at the end of the week/beginning of next, and due out in December. I've stayed relatively quiet on this, as I wanted to wait until PackT, my publisher, officially released information on the book. Let me start by saying that a few years ago I never would have thought I'd be doing this much client-side development again. And I definitely wouldn't have imagined me contributing to a book about client-side development.

I began looking at ExtJS quite a while back, while contemplating how to "jazz up" and modernize some dated interfaces I was supporting. I thought that ExtJS was an exceptionally well thought out library of rich, consistant components and functionality. While I use JQuery almost exclusively for DOM queries and manipulation, I really didn't find enough consistency in the visual plugins at the time (this has improved with the latest round of the JQuery UI plugins). I began to learn of the real power of ExtJS, and became an even bigger fan when it was announced that Adobe was including it in Scorpio, the codename for ColdFusion 8, Adobe's first implementation of the ColdFusion web application platform since it's acquisition with the Macromedia merger. Sweet! A total win-win for me.

Back in June, PackT contacted me. It seems they had started to develop a book, but the primary author, Shea Frederick, had gotten bogged down in other commitments before being able to complete the project. Some Googling on their part led them to Colin Ramsay and myself, through Cutter's Crossing. So they contacted me to find out if I was interested. The timing on this was awful. I was just starting the previously mentioned side project, my daughter was on her very first summer vacation, and just a lot of things going on. But it was too good to pass up. Aside from the fame and glory (yeah, right!), I knew that there weren't any other books out there on ExtJS, and it would be an excellent book to get out there for all the people trying to learn this exciting library. After talking the pros and cons with Aaron West, and getting sign off from my family, I finally contacted the Jedi himself, Ray Camden, to get some info on the writing process. We talked about time (a lot), commitment (more), and fame (maybe a little) and fortune (nearly none). I finally went ahead and said I would do it.

So, here it is almost six months later. I took on the final three chapters of the book: working with data stores (think like browser cached data table sets), extending Ext objects to build your own custom components, and the book wrap-up, which covers all the little stuff many people miss because they aren't typically visible. Only one chapter has any server-side code (the data stores). PackT originally wanted to convert my ColdFusion examples to PHP, to conform with the rest of the book. This morning the publisher told me that they want to keep my ColdFusion examples, to show that the ExtJS library can work with any server-side technology.

So, they're taking pre-order now, just in time for the holidays. Let me know what you think.

Well, maybe. One of my co-workers, Andy Matthews, has been working on a small app, integrating BlazeDS with ColdFusion to push messages to an HTML/AJAX based AIR application. He and I spent several days configuring the server integration and piecing out the ins-and-outs of how the messaging works (big thanks to Andy Powell on this too). Andy (Matthews), coming from a design background, created this beautiful chromeless HTML interface, with a little JQuery magic thrown in to work with the bridge. That's where this possible bug reared it's ugly head.

The question is whether the bug is in AIR, or within the Flex/AJAX Bridge itself. Basically, if you've defined your transparency setting to true, within your App.xml file, then the load() method of the bridge will not call the function reference.

Andy has submitted the bug to Adobe. He also dropped Christian Cantrell and Ben Forta (hey, it's who he knows...) the following email about the issue:

Christian/Ben...

I believe that I've discovered a bug in AIR and I'm not sure who else to send this to.

I've been working on an HTML/JS based AIR application for my company using BlazeDS. I'd finally gotten everything working in a test environment when I went to port the working code into my already working transparent, custom chrome AIR app. Then it stopped working.

After debugging, I found the reason, or at least part of it. It appears that an AIR app which uses the FDMSBridge.swf provided by Adobe WILL NOT work when the app has transparency.

In my sample app ----------------- 1) I opened my sample code (without transparency), and compiled it. 2) I pushed a message to the gateway and the message was successfully received in the app. 3) I then changed the transparency setting in the App.xml file from false to true and recompiled the app. 4) I pushed another message to the gateway and received nothing.

In the final app --------------------------------------------- 1) Transparency was already set to true, so I compiled the app 2) I pushed a message to the gateway, and received nothing. 3) I then changed transparency to false, recompiled the app 4) Pushed a message and successfully received it.

Further, when the app first loads, it correctly displays the alert window when transparency is set to false, but not when it's set to true. ------------------------ Here's a small code sample:

2007, The Year Of The Scorpio, was a fantastic year to be a ColdFusion developer. The release of ColdFusion 8 marked a new age in web application development, with so many new features and enhancements that should see some truly outstanding next generation applications in the years to come. As a community, the CF crowd has really been flourishing, with new releases in several major frameworks, the introduction of the RIAForge open source repository for Adobe related technologies, widely publicized adjunct technologies like Flex 3 and AIR approaching final release (spawning a new conference in 2008, showcasing all three technologies together), and the premier of our own developer's social networking site, ColdFusion Community. We saw the loss of the CFDJ albatross, while the Fusion Authority Quarterly, introduced at CFUnited 2006, has truly come out as an excellent ColdFusion developer's resource. And we can't forget our very own, ColdFusion specific, blog aggregator, ColdFusion Bloggers, introducing us to so many other great developers willing to share their knowledge and experiences, like the creative, and very colorful, examples provided by Ben Nadel.

I've always felt that a day without learning is a day that your dead from the neck up.I spent quite a bit of time this year learning new things, and sharing most. I've been slowly picking up Flex, put a little research into AIR, adopted JQuery heavily, run series of posts on developing on Apache and utilizing the outstanding components of the ExtJS library (the most trafficed posts on this blog). I tried to share some of the things I had learned about the new functionality of ColdFusion 8, started posting some General Coding Guidelines I've been writing for our company, and even got some first hand experience looking at the Current ColdFusion Job Market.

I look forward to sharing more in the year to come. I always look for, and appreciate, all of the feedback you readers send my way. I think the future for ColdFusion is extremely bright, and I can't wait to see what 2008 holds for us all.

So, it's been awhile. No, I haven't forgotten you, I've just been busy with a lot of things. One of which has been implementing a new ExtJS DataGrid in a project I'm working on. Sure, there's a lot more going on, but that's becoming a nice front end piece. As previously promised, I want to look at a renderer.

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Ok, following up on my last entry, here is the same nested tab set done with the ExtJS UI Library. I went the the "Build Your Own" section within "Downloads" and built a script for JQuery with the ExtJS Core and the TabPanel. I also downloaded the whole library so that I had all of the example scripts, css, and images. After this I included the following files in my document header (notice the pathing changes):

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Ok, there have been some changes, but I'll try to keep it easy, with an example, and there will be an included .zip file. First, you'll need the latest JQuery build, as well as the latest version of the Tabs Plugin. Pay attention to the pathing I have created in my code snippets here.

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A debate rages on across the ColdFusion development community about the inclusion, and use, of the AJAX driven components and accompanying tags that have been included in the Beta Release of ColdFusion 8. Many examples of their use and benefit have already been posted by the likes of Ray Camden, Ben Nadel, and Ben Forta. No surprise there, as they all are huge proponents of the product, and, like so many of us, are very excited about the upcoming release of our favorite web programming platform.

But there are others still that think that the inclusion of these tags and components don't necessarily belong in the core language set of CFML. Many of these folks are also diehard JavaScripters, who took up writing AJAX early in it's infancy, fashioned their own components, or even contribute to open source libraries like JQuery. They argue that maybe the tags should have been separate CFCs available through the Adobe Developer's Exchange, or that the JavaScript rendered by the ColdFusion engine is too fat, taking up unnecessary bandwidth.

Can't we all just get along?

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Alright, rolling right along. Last tutorial (see the bottom of this post for a complete listing) we covered the initial setup of our ColumnModel, which is telling our DataGrid what the basic layout of our grid columns will be and to which fields of our DataStore each column will be mapped to. Now it's time to actually instantiate our grid.

So, the first thing we have to do is create our Grid object and tell it which html element will be our grid within our page. Basically we'll tell the function the ID of the div element, what DataStore object to use, and which ColumnModel object to use.

This is it in it's most basic form. We're going to stay away from any fancy stuff for now, and get to selection models and stuff in a later post. Let's add to it a little bit by stating that the grid may be resizable.

That will make the grid resizable, and should be declared prior to rendering the grid. Rendering the grid is our next step, and way simple.

Can't get much easier than that. Going back to the resizable for a second, don't ask, I don't know. Easiest one for me to figure on sight is the minHeight attribute, but I haven't reviewed the API enough to know what all is going on. If you figure it out before I do then leave a comment. Next we'll need to add the paging tool bar to the footer. We'll get the footer, then add the paging toolbar.

Notice the arguments of the PagingToolbar() function, the footer object, the DataStore object, and a JSON object with attributes of the pageSize (number of records), whether to display data set info, the message of the count, and a message to display should no records be returned.

The final step here is to load the DataStore. Once this is done you will have a complete, basic DataGrid for display.

Notice here the 'params'. These are name/value pairs that are passed, via post, whenever you request the next page of your data, with these values being your initial request (starting at row 0, returning 25 records). If you go back and look at your pagingService.cfm (included in the download) you'll see where these values are used.

So, that's the end of this post. You now have a basic DataGrid. In our next tutorial we'll start to style some things, and show you how to implement a custom 'renderer' for a specific column's data.