The Personal Blog of Dustin Martin - Latest Comments

Re: Dustin Martin - Goodbye Adobe, Hello Sketch and Pixelmator

Ryan — Tue, 24 Sep 2013 11:15:01 -0000

Hello Dustin -
I'm a die hard Fireworks user. I'm getting ready to move to Sketch. I entered 'Goodbye Adobe, Hello Sketch' into Google and your blog post came up.

Just wanted to say kudos. I can't wait to have zero Adobe products on my machine.
-Ryan

Re: A Domain Specific Language to Describe a Web Application Model

Dustin — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 12:20:22 -0000

You're absolutely right. I haven't worked very much with Ruby / Rails but what I've seen makes it very evident that it allows for some very very powerful DSLs. It's quite remarkable!

And I couldn't agree more about AngularJS being intense. It is very very powerful and has some difficult concepts to understand. It is a lot of fun to use though.

Re: A Domain Specific Language to Describe a Web Application Model

Tech — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 11:59:13 -0000

What your considering seems to very close to the eco system called Ruby on Rails. DSLs are used through out. You might have already explored it, but if not, checkout the website railscasts.com. The learning curve for Rails is every bit as intense as angularjs, but the leverage gained is incredible.

Re: Effective Communication of Software Requirements

Daniel Nelson — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 14:55:54 -0000

On page five of this pdf, there's a useful diagram of the various areas within system development. I'm not suggesting this be shown directly to stakeholders, but it can be repackaged and presented to them. This provides (1) common terms for discussion (2) a high level understanding of all the things which may come up later when they're not discussed up front.

http://www.withallyourequir...

I'm not suggesting big requirements up front, but it's helpful if everyone agrees up front (with the specific areas in view) that there are a lot of things skipped over so we can get right to coding/prototyping.

When stakeholders get frustrated, it's sometimes because they assumed one of those areas was going to be magically handled by the software engineer. When they see it all laid out, it at least gets them thinking about whether they have any preference/needs.And here's the full blown book -> http://www.amazon.com/Softw...

Dan

Re: Monitoring a Form for Changes with jQuery

Darshan Shroff — Sat, 08 Sep 2012 09:25:08 -0000

The original piece of code combined with the snippet provided by 'neerav' has done the trick. Write Less, Do more !!!

Thanks a lot..

Re: Monitoring a Form for Changes with jQuery

Saaa — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 05:21:40 -0000

this code is not working

Re: Getters and Setters in Scala

Hynek Uhlíř — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 19:04:21 -0000

Nice one ;)

Re: Getters and Setters in Scala

Maciej Pilichowski — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 11:48:19 -0000

Thank you. Short, informative, on point. I have one question though -- why do you set setter to Unit? You cannot make a transition assignment in such case (a = b = c).

Re: Scala Named and Default Arguments: A Sticky Situation

Chris — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 07:47:17 -0000

This seems like a good overview over the options / workarounds: http://stackoverflow.com/qu...

Re: Using GitHub Gist to Handle Your Blog’s Source Code

James Fraser — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 23:34:06 -0000

Sure, you should probably mention how to embed the gist reference in your blog.

Re: Monitoring a Form for Changes with jQuery

Ted Stresen-Reuter — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 14:19:58 -0000

If all you're trying to do is determine if the form has changed, you could simply use the serialize() function and compare it to the values presented when the form was loaded. I suspect this is much faster (although we're talking milliseconds). Just a thought...

Re: Thoughts on Event Driven Programming

Dustin — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 01:14:13 -0000

I'm not 100% certain I understand the problem but from what I gather, a user will do something in the system and the system should be able to follow up with some action at a scheduled point in the future. So, for example, if we have a ColdFusion based calendar and a user made an appointment for September 1, the application should send out a reminder on the day of the appointment. Is this (or something similar) what you are describing?

If so, I would investigate ColdFusion scheduled tasks. You can set them up in ColdFusion Administrator. They enable you to run some code at scheduled times. So in your case I would have the system record the date in a database of when a user needs to be sent an email and have a recurring scheduled task that checks the database for due dates that match the current date and then send out the email or do whatever action is necessary.

Does that make sense?

Re: Thoughts on Event Driven Programming

tom bryant — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 00:08:08 -0000

Dustin, Our company has this exact need. We're running Cold Fusion on an extranet application and are in need of functionality that is event driven. Or, in other words, an application logic that will do something as simple as send an email to a person with a link to remind them that a followup is required to a specific internal quality audit finding for compliance to ISO or AS (aerospace) standards. To accomplish this, of course, the calendar has to be integrated logically with the event due date and audit number. My IT manager and I are working on this, but we currently don't have the knowledge to program this functionality. It seems like a basic concept, even Lotus Notes databases commonly have this function, but that is all contained in Lotus Notes, not involving a web extranet secure site interfacing with a db. Maybe our problem is more elementary, than your ponderance above. Seems there should be a plugin code to accomplish this task. It really is a countdown so to speak. If the person entering the event data entry stipulates a followup date at 90 days from the date of data entry, then when the 90 day trigger hits, the app should generate an email notice with a link to the event data for followup....do you know of any way to accomplish this? The db is Oracle based. The website is cold fusion based. I'm just a supply chain guy, not an IT guy. If you've had a breakthrough, or know more now, I'd be happy to know about it.

Re: Scala Named and Default Arguments: A Sticky Situation

Dustin — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 19:38:58 -0000

Wow, I had no idea you could pass in a block like that. Could be very useful. I'm really amazed by what can be done in Scala sometimes. Definitely a fun language to learn.

I know what you mean about the learning curve. It an be tricky at times. The syntax combined with the fact that most of my experience is in dynamically typed languages means it is quite a bit different that what I'm used to. So far I love it though. Unfortunately I've been away from it for a few months but by the end of year or early next year I want to get back into it.

Re: Workflow Systems in ColdFusion

Henry Ho — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 16:51:35 -0000

What's your take on this?
http://stackoverflow.com/qu...

Re: Using a Populate Method to Handle Nulls, Empty Strings, and Numeric Values with CF9 ORM

Dustin — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 22:36:10 -0000

Thanks for the tips! I'll definitely have to look into that. Especially the get() method you mention. Could be very useful.

Re: Workflow Systems in ColdFusion

Dustin — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 22:34:01 -0000

Unfortunately not. I've been unable to work on this much more since this post. I'd recommend you take a look at my code on Github and see if you can use that as a base to start with. I'd love to know if you come up with anything! Perhaps sometime I'll get back to this and if so I'll definitely let you know. Thanks!

Re: Workflow Systems in ColdFusion

Henry Ho — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 17:57:56 -0000

Awesome! Just what I need... any update?

Re: Using a Populate Method to Handle Nulls, Empty Strings, and Numeric Values with CF9 ORM

mcauser — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 22:02:44 -0000

I'd rewrite it to loop over the include list (defaulting to structKeyList(memento)), skipping anything in the exclude list with a continue. That way if you are only setting a single value, you dont need to loop over the entire memento.

Rather than use a populate boolean, i'd simply use a continue to proceed to the next in the loop.

Using listFindNoCase() + len() on each loop iteration is a bit taxing. Lowercase the list, convert to an array and use array.contains(key) for faster lookups.

Also, structs have a get() method which returns nulls when the key does not exist. You could use that instead of javacast()ing. eg. memento.get(key) where key does not exist in the memento, but is in the include list, would give you a java null.

Re: Scala Named and Default Arguments: A Sticky Situation

Samuel Dealey — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 17:44:26 -0000

It may not work in all situations, but in a variety of situations you can probably get away with assigning member variables after the class constructor finishes executing. Some of Scala's syntax sugar makes this relatively easy actually.

For example:
val person = new Person() { firstName = fn; lastName = ln; }

This block will first instantiate an empty person object and then subsequently set the firstname and lastname values on the object. The sugar which allows you to make setter method calls identical to member variable assignments would then overcome the need to rename all your previous references to those member variables. You simply write your setter method like so:

def firstName_=(name: String) { _firstName = name }

Or if you don't want anyone to be able to change that firstName variable, then you would simply do nothing inside that function, effectively ignoring it. With this setup you wouldn't ever use default constructor arguments, which imo it could be argued is preferable, since the default constructor arguments offer no way of mapping the argument name to a different variable name within the instantiated object (a problem that doesn't happen when the constructor is explicitly declared elsewhere within the body of the class definition like in most other languages). Instead of setting defaults in the primary constructor arguments you would instead set default values in var declarations at the top of the main constructor.

p.s. I've spent most of my professional career working with ColdFusion and am just now getting into Scala for the first time. I'm really enjoying it, although I will admit the learning curve is steep. :)

Re: Getters and Setters in Scala

guntiso — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 09:21:08 -0000

In Scala, every var that is a non-private member of some object
implicitly defines a getter and a setter method with it. The getter of a
var x is just named “x”, while its setter is named “x_=”.

Re: Getters and Setters in Scala

guntiso — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 09:20:15 -0000

In Scala, every var that is a non-private member of some object implicitly defines a getter and a setter method with it. The getter of a var x is just named “x”, while its setter is named “x_=”.

Re: Using a Populate Method to Handle Nulls, Empty Strings, and Numeric Values with CF9 ORM

Dustin — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 10:02:01 -0000

I'm glad you find it useful. I was pretty happy to get this working as the populate method can really save time! If you use and think of any improvements, please let me know. Thanks!

Re: Using a Populate Method to Handle Nulls, Empty Strings, and Numeric Values with CF9 ORM

Daniel Schmid — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 07:56:27 -0000

cool! I'm using CB a lot recently with ORM and run excatly into this problem....

Re: Getters and Setters in Scala

Martin Koníček — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 22:33:45 -0000

How does it play with binary compatibility? If you change a field to a pair of getter and setter and ship a binary update, all applications using you library have to be recompiled, right?