Newman Zone - Weblog

Saturday, August 31, 2002

Newman Zone Forums 4:27 PM
In response to reader requests, I've added forums to Newman Zone. These forums are organized into three sections: The Joy of Dreamweaver MX, Macromedia, and Programming Languages. Use the first section to post questions about the book. Frequently asked questions, and their solutions, will be moved to the FAQ forum.

I hope people will take advantage of these forums to share information about using Dreamweaver MX, and other Macromedia products, to generate dynamic web applications. If you would like to recommend additional categories or subjects for the Newman Zone Forums, feel free to post your requests to the Help forum (you'll have to register before you can post).

Thursday, August 29, 2002

Microsoft Reader 2:52 PM
This is a bit off-topic, but I just discovered that Microsoft offers a free eBook reader on its web site. Microsoft Reader uses the .LIT format, which is based on the XML-based OEB Publication Standard developed by the Open eBook Forum.

Visit Planet eBook for a list of sites that offer free, downloadable eBooks.

Tuesday, August 20, 2002

A Pet Market with Flash 2:44 PM
Found an interesting article on the O'Reilly Network about Macromedia's Pet Market Blueprint Application: A Pet Market with Flash. Dean Wampler compares Macromedia's application with dueling pet store applications in J2EE and .NET. In the end, Flash is top dog for creating rich Internet applications, and ColdFusion MX gets high marks as a "mature, full-featured, and well-regarded product that can complement or replace J2EE and .NET." If only I could get my hosting provider to install ColdFusion MX :-(

Saturday, August 17, 2002

Utilizing XML and XSLT in ColdFusion MX 1:29 PM
If you complete Jeff Houser's tutorial, Consuming Amazon.com Web Services with ColdFusion MX, you end up with the results of your Amazon query in XML format. In order to present this information in a readable format, you need to learn some of ColdFusion's new XML tags.

Fortunately, Jeff's tutorial links to an excellent article by Nate Weiss: "Utilizing XML and XSLT in ColdFusion MX" (requires Acrobat Reader). Nate's article explains how to use the new XmlParse function, "which accepts any properly formatted XML code as a string, [and returns] a special structure-like item called an XML Document object." Once you create the XML Document object, you can access its properties - e.g., XmlRoot, XmlAttributes, XmlChildren, XmlText - to format the page. XmlChildren is actually an array you can loop through to output all of the nodes in the original XML document.

Nate's tutorial also includes sample code you can download to see all of these new ColdFusion XML tags in action. After working through Nate's tutorial, I was able to apply what I learned to parse the XML returned by the Amazon.com web service. You can even convert the XML to a query object (see "Harnessing XML with Custom Tags or ColdFusion Components" by Rob Brooks-Bilson). Or create an XSLT stylesheet to transform the XML document to HTML. The new XmlTransform function accepts two parameters: XmlString, which is the XML document, and XslString, which is the XSLT stylesheet (you can use the <cffile> tag to read a file on your server and stuff it into a string variable). Sounds like a good subject for a future tutorial.

Tuesday, August 13, 2002

New Preview Image Extension! 4:28 PM
Posted a new extension to the Ingredients section: Preview Image. This behavior is similar to the image preview feature in Chapter 14 of The Joy of Dreamweaver MX, however it previews images without using any server-side code - just JavaScript. Thanks to Massimo Foti, whose Check Image Upload extension inspired this behavior, and to Danilo Celic, for helping me make it Dreamweaver MX-compatible.

Before you apply the behavior, you need to create an HTML form with a file field, a "Preview" button, and two hidden fields to store the width and height of the image. This behavior has been tested on the PC versions of IE 5+, NN 6+, and Opera 6. For more information, read the Help file.

Monday, August 12, 2002

Batch-Deleting Associated Files 12:43 AM
Updated the Batch Deletes Made Simple tutorial to explain how to delete associated files using George Petrov's Pure ASP Upload Add On Pack. It may cost 29 bucks, but it's a lot simpler than hand-coding it yourself.

Sunday, August 11, 2002

Switching from ASP to ColdFusion 1:42 PM
Some readers of The Joy of Dreamweaver MX have remarked that they wish the book's sample code was either all ASP, or all ColdFusion. I have to admit, the book's samples were originally supposed to be ASP/VBScript only, but we felt - with Dreamweaver's tight integration with ColdFusion MX - that this choice would leave a lot of users out in the cold (no pun intended). In a perfect world, The Joy of Dreamweaver MX would have been released in both ASP and ColdFusion versions - like in the "salad days," when the Photoshop Bible was released in Mac and PC versions. Unfortunately, printing two versions is no longer financially viable: the market just isn't what it was during the dot-com boom of the '90s.

Having said this, here's my rationale for interspersing ASP and ColdFusion in the book: ASP is a dying language. Don't get me wrong: newmanzone.com is designed in ASP, as well as most of the data-driven sites I've created for clients. But ASP/VBScript was never designed to handle the sophisticated Internet applications we see on the Web today. This has forced most of us to adopt cumbersome workarounds to implement features such as file uploading, shopping carts, user authentication, and so forth.

Enter ASP.NET and ColdFusion. Both of these languages were designed from the ground up to handle Internet applications. In fact, if you compare ASP.NET and ColdFusion - which has been around longer - you'll see that they have many similarities. For instance, the <asp:repeater> tag is similar to the <cfloop> tag in ColdFusion. In addition, ASP.NET now has built-in support for email and file uploading (via the System.Web.Mail and System.IO namespaces) - features that have been implemented via ColdFusion's <cfmail> and <cffile> tags from the very beginning.

Here's my rationalization for providing the ASP and ColdFusion code side-by-side: If you're an ASP user, like me, this makes it easy to compare the two languages to see how to achieve the same results. As someone who's been working with ASP for years, I was astonished by how much quicker it was, on average, to provide the same functionality in ColdFusion. You'll find ColdFusion MX is a lot easier to learn than VB.NET, and there are few, if any, .NET features that don't have their counterparts in ColdFusion. In fact, most of the hottest Internet technologies - web services, XML, Flash Remoting, etc. - are far easier to implement using ColdFusion. And ColdFusion components (CFCs) enable you to modularize code - keeping it separate from presentation - much the same way as code-behind files work in ASP.NET.

Finally, for those who dismiss ColdFusion as a second-rate scripting language, read "What I think of ColdFusion" by Sean Corfield, a seasoned C++ developer. In my opinion, ColdFusion MX, like Dreamweaver MX, is simply easier and more intuitive than the competition. Whereas ASP.NET is undeniably more powerful than ASP, the tradeoff is the steep learning curve required to master VB.NET or C#. With ColdFusion, the learning curve is much gentler. And outside the world of computer programming, when was the last time you returned a product because it was too easy to use?

Tuesday, August 06, 2002

New Mouth-Watering Recipe! 8:18 PM
Finally finished the DataGrid tutorial. Lots of juicy stuff here, including coverage of DataGrids, DataSets, web controls, and setting up an ASP.NET/VB site in Dreamweaver MX.

Hope you like it.

Monday, August 05, 2002

Flash MX Book 7:53 PM
In the middle of reading a great Flash MX book by another Osborne author: Macromedia Flash MX Developer's Guide by P.S. Woods. This book has everything you could ask for: color theory, typography, ActionScript, 3-D animation, and database interaction using PHP/MySQL. The book is well researched and the writer's intelligence shines through every page. Finally, a book that doesn't talk down to its audience!

Saturday, August 03, 2002

Creating Components and Web Services with ColdFusion MX 1:29 AM
Excellent article by Jeff Houser on Consuming Amazon.com Web Services with ColdFusion MX. Another juicy one is Creating the ColdFusion Components in Pet Market Using Dreamweaver MX by Matt Brown.

Experimenting with the ColdFusion components (CFCs) installed by the Pet Market Blueprint Application and the Trio Sample Application is a great way to become comfortable with the syntax of components and web services. Using the Components panel in Dreamweaver MX, I got the getZip function working in minutes. Once you see these puppies in action, the possibilities seem limitless.

Thursday, August 01, 2002

Validating ASP.NET Pages 11:52 PM
Found a sample chapter from Sams Teach Yourself ASP.NET in 21 Days by Chris Payne called Validating ASP.NET Pages.

Lots of useful information here, especially about using regular expressions in ASP.NET validation controls. Excerpts from five other Sams books are included in their .NET Book Sampler. Not enough hours in the day...