ColdFusion Auction Software?

Was talking recently with fellow developers and discussing that ColdFusion is desperately in need of more open source projects. I am particularly interested in auction sites. I found PhpAuction (www.phpauction.net) which looks like it will fit the bill and then some, but I cant help but wish their was a ColdFusion equivalent, but I suppose this finally gives me reason enough to dig deeper into php development, which I am getting excited about..since this technology definitely has its fare share of open source projects!

However, haven't given up hope yet, if anyone knows of a ColdFusion based Auction software, please shoot me an email. Thank You Or, if the phpauction people would be interested in starting a port of there software into other technologies, that could be interesting as well.

CFHEADER, IE and Firefox Differences with Blank Spaces in Filenames

I came across an issue with differences in the way firefox and ie7 handle cfheader attachments when wanting to download a file using ColdFusion. The problem is firefox will cut off the downloaded file at the first space in the filename. And, IE7 and above will replace spaces with underscores. To alleviate the problem, you must do the following:

cfif CGI.HTTP_USER_AGENT contains("MSIE")
cfset variables.theFilename = URLEncodedFormat(#filename#)
cfelse
cfset variables.theFilename = #filename#
cfif

CFHEADER NAME="Content-Disposition" VALUE="Filename=""#filename#""">

Take note of the urlEncodedFormat which runs if you are using IE. IE will know to replace %20 with spaces in the filename upon download, and the double "" around the variable in the cfheader tag will let Firefox use the entire filename upon saving.

JSMX and Lightbox Modal

I have spent the last few days working on some excellent functionality using JSMX's light weight AJAX utility combined with Lightbox modal dialog boxes. Combining the two gives you the ability to simulate a desktop application via a web page. Albeit, somewhat tricky at first to get a handle on modal, and the pages you call into the modal become part of the current document object model. So, to run forms and additional js validation, I created a modal wrapper which directs the modal window to the src destination in an iframe to handle any forms. Pretty cool stuff.. I'd like to find the time to experiment with other modal, ajax frameworks.

Code Completed!

Well, I just completed a really cool custom Product Review Workflow application that I have been working on for the past couple months. It feels great to get an application behind you in the sense that I can now concentrate on groovy enhancements and maintenance, and best of all, I can begin architecture and design on a new project!

4 Day Work Week

I found this blog post very interesting. Implementing a four day work week and working more effectively.

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fourdayweek

Ethics & Software Development

What not to do..

Hard code credentials so others can gain access, not too smart! duh

read this: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001072.html

ColdFusion App EAR Deployment

Well, I will begin efforts to build an EAR file from a ColdFusion application and deploy it on a J2EE server in the near future. The application is very robust and does a lot with cffile so it will be interesting to see how CF will work with the filesystem when dealing with the J2EE server layer. And, to make things more difficult I will not have any hands on ability to the destination server..so I need to work out all the kinks on a development platform prior to final build to production. I am compiling a list of sites with how-to info on this topic:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/coldfusion/articles/ear.html
http://nil.checksite.co.uk/index.cfm/2008/1/3/ColdFusion-Sourceless-Deployment

If anyone has some good resources or known gotchyas for this type of work, it would be very much appreciated. Thanks.