By barneyb on December 20, 2011
My first job as a software developer was in 1998, while I was an undergrad at the University of Arizona in Tucson, AZ. The project was simple: build a JavaScript application to front a website that helped people incorporate a new business. This was long before "ajax" became the new hotness, but I'd built full [...]
Posted in development, tools
By barneyb on November 10, 2011
Before you click over this because you know me as a Flash hater, give me two seconds. That's not what this post is about. It's about a larger issue. It's about how awesome it is to be a web developer these days.
Ten years ago, being a web developer sucked. Deployment was easy (rsync to production [...]
Posted in ajax, development, flex, javascript, tools
By barneyb on September 15, 2011
If you use subtasks in JIRA, you've likely had issues with trying to manage them. It's very difficult to get a comprehensive view of subtasks for a ticket all in one screen. Using a little tweak to the JIRA configuration and a small Greasemonkey script, I think I've made the process much easier.
First, you need [...]
Posted in tools
By barneyb on May 2, 2011
If you've used the Outlook Web App in the past, you were likely unimpressed. I was. Until the latest version (number 14), that is. It's not GMail, but it's absolutely above the "usable" threshold, which is awesome. And I might add that I'm using it in Firefox on Linux – not Microsoft's favorite platform. However, [...]
Posted in tools
By barneyb on August 3, 2010
A couple years ago I wrote about using YUI Compressor to do built-time aggregation and compression of static assets. That works well and good if you have a build environment, but that's not always the case. So, still using YUI Compressor, I set up a simple script that'll do runtime aggregation and compression of assets [...]
Posted in cfml, javascript, tools
By barneyb on March 30, 2010
I just made another minor tweak to FB3Lite to fix out-of-the-box ColdFusion 9 compatibility. CF9 added a 'location' built-in function, which means that the function of the same name that FB3Lite provides now generates a compiler error. Fortunately, since functions are real data within CFML, a simple realiasing gets around the issue. This creates a [...]
Posted in coldfusion, fusebox, tools
By barneyb on March 30, 2010
Piggybacking on the change to allow mappings in do/include, you can now use mapping-relative paths in the appSearchPath initialization variable as well. Before you had to use a relative path, which got a little hairy when you had a deeply nested structure:
<cfset appSearchPath = "../../../myApp" />
<cfinclude template="../com/barneyb/fb3lite/index.cfm" />
But now with mappings, you can simplify things, [...]
Posted in fusebox, tools
By barneyb on March 16, 2010
If you've used FB3Lite, you may or may not know that it implicitly supports a Fusebox-like circuit structure. Both do() and include() allow you to invoke fuseactions/templates from other directories within your application, though without the circuit aliasing abstraction layer that Fusebox provides. This is a great way to break down large applications into multiple [...]
Posted in cfml, tools
By barneyb on March 13, 2010
If you've used WordPress, you may have run across shortcodes. They're little directives you type into the editor box which then evaluate dynamically when the content is rendered on the outside of you site. Plugins can register new shortcode handlers, which are implemented as a simple function callback. It's a really simple way to expose [...]
Posted in cfml, tools, wordpress
By barneyb on March 10, 2010
Everyone knows that one of the best ways to increase page performance is to reduce the number of HTTP requests required for related assets. There are a pile of ways to approach this (JS/CSS aggregation, image sprites, caching), but the best (and simplest) is client-side caching. It doesn't help your first-time visitors at all (which [...]
Posted in tools