Cutter's Crossing

The Sencha guys just keep upping the bar, and Ext JS 4.1 is no exception. I've been reading Loiane Groner's Ext JS 4 First Look, to review it, and continually find new, cool stuff. 4.1, however, takes it even further. While upgrading CFQueryReader, I was working with 4.1 RC2. And, while extending the base classes, I came across a new feature that wasn't fully documented yet: adding metaData to a server-side store response for changing configuration on the fly. Sometimes it would be nice to just...change up. Now that 4.1 is fully released, I had to make sure that this worked in CFQueryReader.

So, last night I sat down and hammered out this functionality. It took a lot more than I realised, and I learned a lot more about the Ext JS internal code, but I think CFQueryReader is better for it. Consider the following ColdFusion method:

I reused my getEntries method, to get my query. Here, I'm creating a metaData object, at the root of the return, to define the dataset. Configuration options that I normally define client side (root, totalProperty, etc) I put in to the metaData key. When the response is received by the client, the reader will pass this metaData in to our app, applying this configuration to our reader, store, model, and so on. In the above method, we let the metaData map our columns to fields, rather than doing it client side (CFQueryReader will automatically skip the column mapping if metaData.fields is present in the response.) Our client side store might now look like this:

A full example of this, in action, can be seen on a demo page of the CFQueryReader site. The full source code, of the example, can be found in the CFQueryReader GitHub repository.

This entry was posted on May 9, 2012 at 10:16 AM and has received 418 views. There are currently 3 comments. Print this entry.

Many moons ago, I wrote a series on My First Ext JS Data Grid. It was very popular. In fact, it got me the gig co-authoring two books on Ext JS and spawned an open source project targeted at integrating Ext JS with ColdFusion. But, I did that series back in 2007, using Ext JS 1.1 (maybe?), and an update is long overdue.

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This entry was posted on May 7, 2012 at 11:00 PM and has received 880 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.

Note: I mistakenly posted this under the wrong title. I must get more sleep ;)

I finally got around to a major overhaul of the CFQueryReader site, including all new demos and documentation of the latest build for Ext JS 4.x.

The new demos for Ext JS 2.x and 3.x include links to legacy API's for both versions of the library. The 3.x version includes an example of using Ext Direct, and the new 4.x demo includes paging data grids.

(Big thanks to Loiane's Ext JS 4 First Look, which showed me very quickly how dead simple Ext JS grids and data stores have become.)

I have not yet tested CFQueryReader with Sencha Touch, but it should work. Any feedback just let me know.

This entry was posted on April 26, 2012 at 1:09 AM and has received 651 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.

Wow! It's been too long. I've been so buried playing with new stuff I haven't had much time to write about it. Time to rectify that.

My position over the last year and a half hasn't required me to use Ext JS. And without a project I really haven't had much time to dive in to Ext JS 4. But, I am reviewing Loiane's Ext JS 4 First Look right now, and decided the simplest way to get in was to apply what she was telling me. I knew some of the basics, but Ext JS 4 is a big change, and Loaine's book quickly helped me to grok differences in the class model, updates to the data api, and more. In no time at all I had completely rewritten CFQueryReader, for parsing the native JSON return of a ColdFusion query object. I need to verify, but I'm fairly certain there are more lines of comments than there are code, in the new file. And it is wicked simple. First, include the js file, then define a record of data:

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This entry was posted on April 23, 2012 at 4:22 PM and has received 762 views. There are currently 2 comments. Print this entry.

Note: Follow the madness here to it's conclusion, to discover yet another "Really? I didn't know that..." IE moment, that may save you heartache and pain.

Is the sarcasm evident in my title? It should be. While Internet Explorer may have been "groundbreaking" when it was released, it has ever been the bain of the web developer's existance. Why, you ask? Because it refuses to adhere to standards, and just operates differently than everyone else. To be fair, Internet Explorer 10 is in the works, and supposedly closes the gap a fair amount (and even wins out in some of the html 5/css 3 support), and 7, 8 and 9 did progressively improve (if slowly). Unfortunately the fact remains that some companies/organizations/governments are stuck on Internet Explorer 6, or maybe even 7. If you are a web developer, and write cross-browser web applications, chances are Internet Explorer has hit you more than once in your career.

It's the dumbest things that hit you too. The most obscure "WTF!?!" moments that drive you crazy. That is a daily experience for me now.

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This entry was posted on February 9, 2012 at 10:51 AM and has received 799 views. There are currently 3 comments. Print this entry.

My, how time flies when you're having fun! It seems like only yesterday that I was welcoming in 2011, and now we're here a year later. So many things have happened in the last year, and rereading that post I see that I missed some things I should've done, but let's take a look in retrospect.

I wrote 27 blog posts in 2011. This is nothing, compared to guys like Ray Camden or Ben Nadel, but for me it was quite a bit, especially when you consider that between March and August I released only one post. Very early in the year, I began a series on creatingmany sites with one codebase. In the process, the series has evolved to contain a fairly detailed primer in ColdFusion application architecture (because of it's importance to this process), has currently spanned 8 separate posts, and was even referenced by Sean Corfield in his great presentations on the same topic. 2012 will see the completion of that CF app discussion, and gradually move it back to the MSOC topic itself, as there is still a ton to talk about there, and a lot of interest in the topic. I also began a series on the jqGrid JQuery plugin. jqGrid is another Data Grid visualization tool (I have now written about three, including Ext JS and DataTables), and is a clear choice for those who must use JQuery. (To be fair, JQueryUI is working on a grid component, but they are still behind the curve, and way behind Sencha.) Finally, one common thread seen in the majority of my posts, is how much I've embraced cfscript. I wrote a lot of things, on a variety of topics, but most of my code examples were pure scripted examples.

Now let's talk about some other departures from the norm for Cutter.

You did not see a lot of content around Ext JS. In fact, I stopped writing Ext JS books. This is not, in any way, a reflection on my feelings for Ext JS. I still believe that Sencha has built one of the best client-side libraries for web application development. In evaluating the overall ROI, I realized that I was writing more for the community than the money, and that my reach was greater through my blog, while giving me flexibility on when and what I deliver from a content standpoint. That said, I didn't have a single project this year that used Ext JS, so had very little time to experiment and write about it. This year, I'm going to expand on a personal project, and get back to some great Ext JS content for my readers.

You, also, did not see me speak at any conferences this past year. Nor at any user group meetings. This wasn't because I didn't want to, but because of some more personal reasons. I'm not going to go in depth here, other than to say that I've had some long standing health issues that required me to have some surgery done on my mouth. (Mark Drew is making a joke right now...) Aside from the fact that this has been very costly (chewing up any conference/travel budget), it also meant that my speech has been affected for a good part of the year. Thankfully this experience is (mostly) over now, and I hope to get back to presenting sometime this year. Any user group looking for a speaker this year, please contact me through the Contact link on this blog.

One group I am hoping to speak to this year is the Northeast Florida CFUG. I have to call Mike back, but he's looking to get things kicked off again, and I want to help it be successful. If you're in or around the Jacksonville area, make sure to keep an eye on the site for upcoming events.

One other thing I'm looking to do is to migrate all of my projects into GitHub. I've been using Git at work, and I am loving it, and I think combining GitHub with RIAForge is a great way to promote the terrific technologies we work with every day. I will make the time, I promise.

This comes to the final discussion of this post, Adobe. I again had the pleasure of being an Adobe Community Professional this past year. Due to my health issues, I didn't get to do everything I would've wanted to this year, but I've tried to be a good supporter. There are some fabulous things coming in ColdFusion Zeus and, by extension, to ColdFusion Builder as well. There has been a lot of hub-bub over Adobe's communications flubs regarding Flash, mobile, and Flex. I've avoided much of the discussion, other than to say "be patient and watch". Flash isn't going away, and neither is Flex. HTML 5 is a beautiful thing, if you aren't developing desktop browser applications (i.e. You're only writing for mobile/tablet development). There, that is my whole contribution to that discussion. Give it a rest.

2012 will be a fantastic year. Set yourself some clear, definable goals. Break them down, step by step, and write the steps down on paper. Each successive step, print out in large letters and place it somewhere where you will see it each and every day. Set yourself up to succeed, and you will. Have a great year, everyone, and I can't wait to hear what you have planned for 2012.

This entry was posted on January 2, 2012 at 11:01 AM and has received 772 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

I get a lot of questions about handling Ajax requests. What are some best practices? How do you format your requests? How do you taylor your functions in ColdFusion? Those sort of questions. We (the ColdFusion community) have embraced Ajax. Many of us spent so much time working mostly server side code on top of simple (and often poorly thought out and formatted) forms, but user habits have changed. And so have we. You have to move with the times to keep up in the digital rat race.

Let's start with the stuff most CFers already know; the server side stuff. When we make an Ajax request, most often we will hit a function within a CFC. We need data. You can hit a .cfm page, and return a bunch of preformatted HTML, but often that's a lot of data transfer when your really only need a few bits of data. HTML code can get heavy, what with all the tags and such. Similarly, you could return data in XML form (WDDX is native in ColdFusion). XML is sometimes a required format, for certain requests, but like HTML it can often be overly verbose. When working with server side requests from the client, you want to minimize data transfer as much as possible. That's why Flash performs best using the AMF format, and why most Ajax applications work with JSON.

When constructing your ColdFusion functions for remote requests, you don't have to write functions that can only be used via Ajax. In fact, that would probably be bad practice, as it would really minimize the code reusability of your functions. Basically, the only true requirement, at the server side, is that you set your function's access attribute to remote.

That's it. Nothing to it. Did you see the required line? The one you need for making a remote request of this function?

Ok, we're off and running. Sort of. "Hey, Cutter, what's with returning a struct? I thought we were working with JSON?" Well, let me explain...

Have you ever worked on some Ajax call, loaded the page up in the browser, and nothing happened? You change variables, do this and that, and get nowhere? Finally you open up Firebug, watch the request, and see that you CF code has errored out for some reason. Instead of data coming back, the browser is getting the thousands of lines of HTML and Javascript that is the ColdFusion error display. In the immortal words of Charlie Brown: AAUUGGHH!

What happens if your user sees this behavior? Some variable isn't getting set when you think it is, or some db guy added or removed a column from your database without your knowledge. An error gets thrown, and you never even realize it. Ouch! Users are quick to abandon you. How can you gracefully handle these things?

Well, how do you deal with error handling within your application? If this answer is "I don't", then you might want to explore another career path. No, just kidding (kind of). If you don't use error handling, this is the perfect scenario to start. There is no reason why you're users should see (or, in this case, not see) these types of issues within your application. By carefully thinking things out, you can provide a better user experience.

Now, there are probably better ways to write your catch statements, but I'm just trying to lay some foundation here. The basic idea is, taylor a message to send back to your users in the event of a failure. "ErrorCode?" Many enterprise products have custom error codes they use to denote that a specific error has occurred (like the above 'RC_000' for no returned records).

So, we have a success key, denoting whether the requested ColdFusion function did what we wanted. We have a data key that we use for returning the data generated by the request. And, we have a message key that we may, or may not, use only in the event of an error. We've also used and errorCode in this scenario, only in the event of an error. "Cutter, something doesn't look right?"

That should be the basics of the server side stuff. But, then the question comes, "What if our model isn't under the web root? What if the model CFC's aren't web accessible?" OK, fair enough. Then you'll need a proxy CFC. Let's regroup a sec, and show what this might look like.

And the remoting proxy...

"Wait a second! I thought you said this post was about Ajax? Where's the JSON? Where's the Javascript?" Well, Ajax is useless without the data, right? Now that you have your CFC's and functions setup, let's look at the Javascript to make our requests. First we'll look at a basic JQuery Ajax call. First, let's set a global JS variable in the page.

Next we'll setup our Ajax call.

Here's the same basic Ajax request, using Sencha's Ext JS.

I'm always surprised at how few CFers know this little bit. In case you missed it, the key piece to your request parameters comes down to one important argument.

When this argument is passed in the Ajax request parameters, ColdFusion will automatically serialize your native ColdFusion response objects into JSON. This is what allows you to set your returnType to a struct in your function definitions.

Most of this stuff has been around for quite a while. Some use it a lot more than others. Some are just afraid of client side stuff in general. There's a ton of material out there on how to do these things. This is my way of working with it. That doesn't make it right, or better than anybody else's. It's just what I've developed as a working pattern over the years. How do you handle it?

This entry was posted on September 26, 2011 at 7:54 AM and has received 2029 views. There are currently 7 comments. Print this entry.

I only have a few minutes, as I am totally buried right now, but I wanted to reach out to everybody to spread the word about Ext JS 4 Beta 1 being released yesterday. Some of you may have been following the Developer Previews on the Sencha Blog, and if you have you already know some of the amazing work coming out of Sencha for this release. If you haven't, well let me give you a really quick recap of some of what you could expect:

• New Class System - slim, trim, efficient, extensible
• New Data Model System - powerful, associations, nesting, HTML5 support
• Drawing and Charting - native, beautiful, charting can tie to data model too
• Theming - easier than ever, now with SASS
• Grids - Best of breed gets even better

There's also an entirely new rendering engine under the hood, new components, and more. You can even run Ext JS 3 & 4 on the same page, if needed. Go to the Sencha site to see some great examples of what you can do. It is still a beta, so the forums are pretty busy with people learning the ropes and filing bugs as they're found, but the foundation has been laid for a truly ground-breaking update to this library.

This entry was posted on March 31, 2011 at 8:46 AM and has received 1590 views. There are currently 3 comments. Print this entry.

I've been pretty busy this year, starting with my new position at work. And, having worked on major side projects the last three years running, I also took my after work time to spend some overdue quality time with my family. But, I did make time to work with Shea, Colin, and new author Nigel White, to work on the second edition of our Ext JS book, now titled Learning Ext JS 3.2. Released last Monday by Packt Publishing, our latest book brings Ext JS developers up to date in working with the 3.x framework, updating the content to cover many changes to the library as well as introducing several new chapters on key bits about Menus and Buttons, Plugins, Charting, and Ext.Direct.

Sencha (formerly Ext LLC) released Ext JS 3.3 on the same day that Learning Ext JS 3.2 shipped from Packt. There are several new and exciting features added in 3.3, but the core content of the book still aligns with the core of the framework itself, giving developers the tools and information they need to get off the ground running. There were several important changes to the framework between the last book (finalized just before the release of 2.2) and this one, and it was important to get that information out to those ready to learn. In the new chapter about Ext.Direct, I dissect the ColdFusion Server-side Stack, written by Sencha's Aaron Conran, to give the bare bones info needed for writing one's own server-side data marshalling services, going through the pieces step-by-step. Changes to the Data package were just one of the reasons to write this book. I know that Colin, Nigel, Shea, and myself, hope that everyone enjoys our latest work.

This entry was posted on October 18, 2010 at 11:56 PM and has received 3129 views. There are currently 6 comments. Print this entry.

Great things are coming. Great things are here!

On June 14^th, Ext JS LLC rebranded as part of their announced partnership with the principles of the JQTouch and Raphael projects, creating Sencha. The Ext JS library is still one of their major offerings, but they have also created Sencha Labs as a repository of various Open Source Projects under the MIT License (Like JQTouch, Raphael, and Ext Core). Great things were on the way!

Having David Kaneda (JQTouch) and Dmitry Baranovskiy (Raphael) join forces with the Ext JS crew is huge, and really plays well in understanding a series of recent blog posts around HTML5, CSS3, and what HTML5 means to developers today. But, it gets better.

This morning, Sencha launched their first joint product in public beta, Sencha Touch. Sencha Touch is a cross-platform mobile application framework built to leverage HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. It gives you the same sort of consistent API that you've come to expect from the Ext JS team, with a familiar syntax, great documentation, user forums for support, and many samples included with the download to help you learn. I've had the opportunity to preview this code for a while, and it is outstanding work. There will be some interesting apps to come out of this.

The future looks bright for Sencha, and I can't wait to see what they do next. Judging from their post on the rebranding, my prediction are changes to ExtDesigner (possibly to become SenchaDesigner), that would allow a developer to build both Ext JS and Sencha Touch interfaces from the same tool. My guess. (Man, that would be really cool.)

This entry was posted on June 17, 2010 at 7:31 PM and has received 2857 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.