This week I was working on a proof-of-concept for a customer in which we wanted to extract attachments from a fillable PDF form after its submission. After trying the usual CFPDF tags, reading the documentation, and getting nowhere, we decided to try to attempt to use the iText PDF library for Java from within ColdFusion to extract the attachments.
After doing some reading through the JavaDocs for iText, I found that it includes a class called ExtractAttachments that “…lets you extract the attachemnts of a PDF.” Since this is precisely what we wanted to do, I thought for sure this would be a simple affair and I’d be able to finish what I needed to do and turn in early for the evening. Not quite! Read more…
I’ve attached my slides from the my CFinNC session called “ColdSpring: Solution to a Problem You May Not Know You Have”. I’ve also included the example files that I referenced during the presentation.
The slides have been uploaded to SlideSix.com or you can view them below. A PDF version of the slides is also available for download.
Thanks to all those folks that attended my session. Also a huge thanks and a job well done to the conference committee and volunteers that made the conference happen.
Have you ever been curious about building CFML applications using the ModelGlue framework but just not had time to sit down and learn it on your own? If your answer is yes, then October 24th is your lucky day my friend. That’s the date for the BFusion half of the BFusion/BFlex conference in Bloomington, IN.
Dan Wilson will be giving an all-day training session on ModelGlue. Dan is the managing director of the ModelGlue project so you’ll be getting training from one of the main folks responsible for the framework. I have the honor of filling the role of teaching assistant for the class and I am really excited about the event.
Cost for BFusion/BFlex is $10 per person per day so it’s nearly as close to free training as you’re going to find. Registration is not open as of this writing, so be sure to watch the BFusion/BFlex site for more details as they become available.
I’m so looking forward to heading out to the 360|iDev conference in Denver in a couple of weeks (Sept 27-30). This will be my first foray in to the world of Apple Development and I’m really excited.
ColdFusion is the technology that puts a roof over my head and is like that best friend that always makes you feel super comfortable. But, in the last few months, I’ve had this nagging urge to dabble in something different. Call it a mid-programmer-life crisis if you want, but sometimes as I sit at my computer working, the thought crosses my mind that I want to do something new again. “Build something in Flex” my fellow Adobe-centric developer friends might say. I’ve worked a little with Flex in the past and really enjoyed it for the most part (and would really love to get to do some more work on larger projects with it) so that doesn’t really count as something new. I thought about learning Ruby on Rails as that seems to be generating a lot of buzz lately. In the end, however, I felt like something REALLY different from what I do on a daily basis was called for.
I decided on trying my hand at iPhone development for two main reasons. One, I had an idea for an application that would actually be useful to someone besides just me. No, it won’t make me the next iPhone App Store millionaire, but it could potentially generate a few bucks a month that I wouldn’t otherwise have. Secondly, I’ve loved my iPhone immensely since I got my first one over 2 years ago so I thought I’d try to build something that might put teensy-tiny stamp on someone else’s iPhone.
I went to the first ever 360Flex conference that Tom and John put on in San Jose, CA back in March of 2007 and, even as a first event, the content and atmosphere was incredible. They’ve learned a bunch since then with several successive events under their belts so I’m expecting this conference to be great as well. I’m especially looking forward to the entire day of “101″ hands-on stuff on Sunday before the main part of the conference kicks off on Monday. I’ve been reading up some on using the Apple development software and watching some of the iPhone development video content that’s available trying to at least start crawling before the “starting gun” goes off at the event and, I must say, it definitely fits the bill of “different”.
So, if you’re interested in iPhone development and haven’t registered, head on over to the site and get your ticket now before the price goes up again.
For the last few months, I’ve had this idea that I wanted to try a linux desktop machine as my main development computer for a while. With the release of Ubuntu 9.04 in April, I decided to put together a machine and give it a try. Unfortunately, I had to wait a while in order to get a large project completed so I’d have time to do the testing an building.
Finally, in July, the project was completed and I ordered a few hundred dollars worth of new gear to update a desktop machine that I had sitting idle and installed Ubuntu 9.04 64-bit. There are a lot of great things about Ubuntu linux and I was very impressed with the performance of the OS on a quad-core processor with a pile of RAM.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t a Mac. Let me explain what I mean by that. Read more…
