For a couple years I’ve been thinking it might be neat to try producing an app for an Android phone but didn’t have the time or inclination to tackle learning Java, the language used to develop Android applications. Like lots of programmers out there, I’ve had some exposure in college but that was long forgotten and never used as I worked as a ColdFusion programmer the last eight years. But this opens a door for me. If I get hooked creating simple apps, I’ll likely put out the extra effort to get a working knowledge of Java and take it to the next level.

I think this is exactly the sort of thing that could potentially bring lots of new developers into the Android market place. Give them a taste of what they can do with a tool like App Inventor and some will surely take the next step to produce more complex apps. Besides, you never know what a creative person might come up with. Some of the biggest success stories to come out of the mobile app market have been extremely simple tools that were more about a creative idea than complex application development.

There were really only two things I needed to replace Dreamweaver, a CFML tag editor and the concept of a remote site like Dreamweaver has. Eclipse always had spotty FTP support that I could never get working. Not until Aptana 2.x did I find a version of Eclipse that had solid FTP support and the concept of a remote site that supported “upload on save”.

I’ve been using the combination of Aptana Studio and CFEclipse for about three months now and I really don’t miss Dreamweaver at all. Occasionally I wish I had a GUI display for editing like DW has, but that is very rare. In the end I’m very happy with my switch after having used Dreamweaver in various forms from UltraDev to CS4 over the last 8 years. If you are looking for a free option, Aptana and CFEclipse might be for you.

Initially I figured I forgot to add index.cfm to the DirectoryIndex in httpd.conf. I did that and restarted apache and still no execution of index.cfm?? After googling a bit and finding nothing, I examined the only other portion of apache I thought could be responsible. The spot where JRun gets loaded as an Apache module. Sure enough, the following line was at the bottom:

AddHandler jrun-handler .jsp .jws

It was obvious I needed to add .cfm to that list in order to have Apache pass any CFML page along to the module for execution by Coldfusion. So I made the following change:

AddHandler jrun-handler .jsp .jws .cfm

After that, Apache happily referred index.cfm to JRun for processing. Why the installer didn’t get that setup correctly in the first place I don’t know. The Web Server Configuration Tool said everything was great when I set the server up. Something to watch for and hopefully not waste too much time with next time.

Ok, so now my public facing server has a limit of three concurrent IP addresses, not good. I quickly grab my list of Enterprise serial numbers but uh oh, I can’t log in to the administrator because the rest of the world is trying to hit the server! So I must restart CF and refresh my browser over and over until I beat the rest of the planet to acquire one of my three precious IP slots. Lucky for me I get in, re-apply my serial numbers and I’m back in business.

As to why this happens, I have no idea. I googled and didn’t come up with much (or every time I used the phrase “reverts to developer edition” I got entries talking about what happens after a 30 day trial. At any rate, it seems to happen to me about once every 1-2 years. It always annoys but not enough to make me say things like, “I’m switching to .NET or J2EE”. I suppose those servers have their own issues just as CF has, but the spontaneous reversion to developer edition is indeed a bad one because it renders your server useless.

3.1.3 If Licensee purchases one or more Production Software licenses, then Adobe also grants Licensee the right to install and use the Software as Development Software for internal development, testing and staging.

This is great because in the past, we had practiced buying a full license for our development environment even though we only ever hit the server with a dozen or so developers. Occasionally we would perform some load testing and fake lots of users with software, but still it was always on an enterprise server that resided behind the firewall (not accessible by the outside world).

Adobe will surely lose a little money here, but hopefully it attracts more customers with this improved pricing which will make up the difference and then some, not to mention the added benefit of expanding the user base of ColdFusion.

http://www.riaforge.org/

Parsing the FIELDNAMES variable can be a good way to process form data dynamically.  It is especially useful for very long forms or forms that change frequently and keeps you from having to update your action page.  In the following example, we take a standard form and submit to an action page that inserts our form data into a database:

We need our database with a defined table, a form and an action template.  My sample table in MySQL looks like this:

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `bradtest`.`users`;
CREATE TABLE  `bradtest`.`users` (
`id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
`fname` varchar(45) NOT NULL,
`lname` varchar(45) NOT NULL,
`email` varchar(45) NOT NULL,
`password` varchar(45) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY  (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

Remember the column names, as we will use those for our form field names.  This is because for this to work right, you must use your database column names as your form field names.  So create yourself a form, or use mine below.  It doesn’t matter how many form fields you have as long as you have a matching column in your table:

<cfform action=”form_process.cfm” method=”post”>
<table>
<tr>
<td>First Name:</td><td><cfinput type=”text” name=”fname” ></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Last Name:</td><td><cfinput type=”text” name=”lname” ></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Email:</td><td><cfinput type=”text” name=”email” ></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Password:</td><td><cfinput type=”password” name=”password” ></td>
</tr>
<tr><td colspan=”2″><input type=”submit” value=”Submit”></td></tr>
</table>
</cfform>

For the last step, just need only parse our results on the action page.  The first step is only needed if you are going to insert into a database.  I’m going to calculate the number of commas I need seperate items in my SQL statement:

<cfset commas = #ListLen(form.fieldnames)#>

We actually need one less comma than this value, and it doesn’t come into play until later.  Next I’m going to duplicate some code just for the purpose of displaying our results.  We will use this CFLOOP routine again in our CFQUERY tag:

<cfloop from=”1″ to=”#ListLen(form.fieldnames)#” index=”fieldCount”>
<cfoutput>
#ListGetAt(form.fieldnames,fieldCount,”,”)# =
#Evaluate(ListGetAt(form.fieldnames,fieldCount,”,”))#
<br>
</cfoutput>
</cfloop>

Notice we are just displaying the raw value of the fieldname element and then we must EVALUATE the same thing to pull the value from the form field posted to our action page.  In fact, you can run the template at this point and you should see a list of the form fields, and equal symbol followed by the value submitted in said form field.

To insert the record, we just need to loop our results inside a CFQUERY tag like so:

<cfquery name=”qInsert” datasource=”MyDSN”>
insert into users
(<cfloop from=”1″ to=”#ListLen(form.fieldnames)#” index=”fieldCount”>
#ListGetAt(form.fieldnames,fieldCount,”,”)#<cfif fieldCount lt #commas#>,</cfif>
</cfloop>)
values
(<cfloop from=”1″ to=”#ListLen(form.fieldnames)#” index=”fieldCount”>
‘#Evaluate(ListGetAt(form.fieldnames,fieldCount,”,”))#’<cfif fieldCount lt #commas#>,</cfif>
</cfloop>)
</cfquery>

Notice I’m running the loop twice, once for my list of column names (remember we made sure that our table has the same column names as we used for our form field names) and then once for the corresponding values.  Also key here is the CFIF blocks in each loop to determine if we need a comma.  I know I need one less comma than I have form fields so I place one as long as our loop count is less than the number of elements in the FIELDNAMES array.

That’s it, you now have an action form that can process any number of form fields and any changes you make will automatically be accomodated for.  Just remember any changes to your database table must be reflected in your form.  Here is our working sample:

http://brad.melendy.com/projects/coldfusion/fieldnames/form_data.cfm

So, to do this qould require I use some kind of deployable application that can access the local system.  As I searched around, it appeared Java was a good option but I haven’t used Java outside school.  Luckily, I stumbed across Tim Desjardins’ blog entry on the topic.  He had written a java applet to do this very task. 

I ran into one oddity with Windows Vista.  It will produce multiple MAC addresses (for loopback adapters and such) and some will actually contain only spaces.  I used Javascript to clean up the results and got a working demo here:

http://brad.melendy.com/projects/java/macAddress.cfm

You will be prompted to allow the applet to run on your system through a browser security warning.  Once you give consent, the button will display one or more of your MAC addresses in a Javascript alert.  I am capturing this information into a database as a unique identifier for each workstation.  I actually store it in a cookie for the duration of the day, but each morning I collect it anew as staff/visitors enter a particular system.