Kevin Hoyt

Ryan Stewart and I are crazy about GPS and geospatial information. We both actually carry a Trackstick device wherever we travel which records our adventures. The data file can be accessed via USB as any number of formats, but it is usually XML-oriented. Of course we’re both building applications that use this data, which is when I ran into the problem of waiting for a server to process several megabytes of XML data. Using Flex I was able to monitor the long-running transaction without unnecessarily delaying the responsiveness of the user interface.
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There’s an old demonstration we used to show for Flex Data Services, now LiveCycle DS, that pushed data from the server to the client to be charted. More modern incarnations of this can still be found as samples included with LiveCycle DS and BlazeDS (Trader Desktop). The original incarnation was great fun to show, but I never really liked the workflow of getting the data feed started and stopped. Old habits die hard, and I used that dislike as an excuse to explore the new CFTHREAD feature of ColdFusion 8 in conjunction with the included LiveCycle DS instance for data push.
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ColdFusion 8 introduced a number of new and impressive Ajax features. The most notable of which is probably the complete Ajax-based forms generation, which uses Ext 1.1. There are a couple drawbacks to the ColdFusion 8 implementation however, most notably that it is Ext 1.1 when the current release is Ext 2.0, and that you have to have ColdFusion 8. Dan Vega has come to the rescue though with a project he calls cfExt. During a pre-release tour user group stop in Cleveland, OH, I had the chance to connect with Dan and get his thoughts on the project, its origins and its direction.
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One of my all-time favorite features in ColdFusion is “query of queries”. I have yet to see this functionality duplicated as thoroughly, or as easily, in any other language outside of SQL itself. Of course the limitation with SQL is that it generally operates on relational data stored in a relational database. The query of queries functionality changes that for ColdFusion developers.
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I love it each and every time I see a company offer an API for their product/service. The list is growing quite long these days, including Amazon, eBay, of course the Macromedia News Aggregator itself, and my personal favorite, Flickr. The Flickr API is really very extensive, allowing access to just about every feature they have to offer. When I ran down the list of “API Kits” I noticed that ColdFusion was not represented among the list of examples. With this in mind, I set out to see exactly what it would take.

The result is that it’s excessively simple to access and work with the Flickr API through ColdFusion.
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I’ll be presenting at a Denver, CO area ColdFusion MX 7 technology day on February 23, 2005. The event is being held at Jillians at the Colorado Mills mall (14500 W. Colfax, Lakewood, CO) and runs from 9:00 AM until 1:00 PM. If you live or work in the area and have an interest in ColdFusion, then you’ll want to be sure to attend.
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I haven’t read any official reports, and can’t make any scientific claims, but one might imagine that the most common resolution for 2005 will be to lose weight. If that’s a goal you have, you might want to check out SportBrain.
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For those of you who are CF’ers and are looking to get more structured access to the Halo RSS feed data, I’ve made available the CF source I used to do so during some of my development trials. There’s two files - feed.cfc, which is the CFC that handles the workload, and feed.cfm, which is an example of how to use the CFC. So why didn’t I use this in my project? Read on…

Note: This code was developed to test out an idea and was not designed with performance in mind. It comes as-is, with no warranty (smile).
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