“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.” – Ford Prefect
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Sometimes I wonder if my friends and colleagues across the pond in the US realise just how lucky they are? The majority of application languages are set by default to respect US date and time formats and a host of tools exists to work with these dates and times to calculate offsets and time spans and throw them in and out of databases*.
Keynote (Adobe)
Terry Ryan kicked of the first day with an indy themed KeyNote. His initial demo was of a very impressive ColdFusion builder extension. Apptacular is a code generation system that runs natively from within CFBuilder and was demoed as being able to wire up CRUD from a DB (with smart table renaming for your CFCs and methods) and a massive amount of functionality that reduced initial project setup time from a few hours to about 20 seconds. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea given that a lot of CF devs will use a frame work of some sort to speed up the inital development process but Apptacular was certainly an impressive demonstration of CFBuilder’s extensibility and adds massive value to the IDE.
For those of us running on ColdFusion 8, Ben Nadel’s wrapper to the Apache POI classes are still the best way of working with native Excel files.
That said, the POI that ships with CF 8 is old … very old … 2004 old in fact and as such it has to be treated very gently and chokes on the slightest bit of Excel cleverness. The most common example of this that I’ve come across occurs when trying to import a sheet that has Auto Filter / Sort enabled. The Java layer explodes in a mess of unhandled exceptions and steadfastly refuses to read the file.
The following is a log of a recurring issue with our ColdFusion 8 Standard server.
The JRun server is currently crashing every other day with the active thread error (error 1).
If the ColdFusion service is not restarted the system will then proceed to run out of memory (error 2) despite Windows still having 0.5 – 1GB to spare
