The micro-conference; I suppose you can call it that, was a lot of fun. I attended some pretty good sessions, including MySQL optimization, Event Gateway programming in ColdFusion, and an introduction to Grails and CouchDB. I must say that CouchDB is particularly interesting, and may find its way into one of my projects in the near future.

That aside here are the couple of measly photos I took at the conference.

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SELECT
	column1,
	column2,
	column3
FROM table1

Now if I am asked to add a column based on some condition it could look like this.

SELECT
	column1,
	column2,
	column3
<cfif someCondition EQ true>, column4</cfif>
FROM table1

So over time I’ve come around to the SQL syntax where you put commas before your column name, making this kind of problem less of an issue.

So in working with old queries I’ve had to convert a few to this syntax just for readability. Here is a little regular expression I cooked up that can help this along. It’s not quite perfect, and doesn’t work in Eclipse (lack of lookahead support perhaps?), but will work in more powerful regex editors (Boxer, for example). It doesn’t catch the last column, and will double up on commas that already at the beginning of the column. Like I said, not perfect, but helpful nonetheless.

(\s*)([a-z0-9\._\(\)\s',]+)(?=,),

Use this regex as your search condition, and the replace text is “$1, $2“, without quotes.

Happy coding!

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In an effort to spur a bit of creativity I have called for a code challenge. All too frequently we as web developers are handed a task to code, a server with TONS of RAM and hard drive space, a big-bad database server, and told “go to town”! If that’s all you know then you’ve never had the pleasure of dealing with coding for embedded systems, or mobile devices, or any other limited hardware device. So here’s the challenge.

I have presented our engineering team a scenario where they have a fictional device with limited memory and disk space. The device has ColdFusion and Apache embedded on it. No SQL database, no fancy Java components, just CF 8 and a web server. ColdFusion is configured to run JRUN at a maximum of 32MB of memory.

The engineer must create an application that allows the user (at a minimum) to view a list of contacts, add a contact, edit a contact, and remove a contact. The data that is stored/tracked must contain the contact’s first name, last name, address, city, state, zip code, phone number, and email address. All pages created must have a display space of 240px x 400px. The final criteria: you only have 32KB of disk space to store your application. Pages, database, components, whatever… 32KB.

Code will be judged on a number of factors. Code must be clean and well organized. It should demonstrate some type of re-usability. No, this is not an excercise in OOP, frameworks, or any other type of design pattern. You can use CFCs, custom tags, or good ole’ functions, as long as the code is organized and thought out. The submission demonstrating that they meet the requirements, as well as creativity in solving the problem wins. Yes, there is a prize, but only if you work on our engineering team. If you don’t I’m not giving you a gift card, so don’t ask.

I have about 5 participants at this time, and hope more are interested. I look forward to submissions! (And yes, I’ve done it already).

Happy coding!

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I had heard of ANT, and had already been curious about getting my hand dirty in it to see what it could do, but have never found the time to do it. After his presentation, however, I went home and decided it was time to at least play with it. I did have a real-world test to try it on. A little contract project I just worked needed a small modification on two of the PHP files, and then I needed to redistribute it to the client. What this involved, however, was more than just zipping it up.

First I had to make the modifications to the code and test it. Simple enough. Then I needed to copy only the PHP and CSS files I needed to a temporary directory, clean out my password information from the XML configuration files and copy THOSE over. THEN I had to regenerate my HTML documentation using the always wonderful Doxygen, copy all THOSE files to the temporary directory, ZIP it all up, and THEN send it to the client. ANT to the rescue!

First things first, create an XML file. Let’s call it example-build.xml. This is the actual script file. The very first things to put in there are the XML header, a project element, and a description. That will look like this.

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project name="Example Application" default="build" basedir=".">
  <description>
    ANT build script for the example application.
  </description>

Now what we want to do is consider what locations we need to work with. Firstly we need to know where our source files are coming from, and also where they are going to. For my needs I opted to have the end result go into a sub-folder named build. Also consider I’m building documentation HTML files using Doxygen, so I’ll need to know where the Doxygen executable is at, as well as the source and target locations for those documents reside. We want a few properties then. Note that your paths will obviously vary, and will need to be changed. That will look like this.

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	<!-- Global properties -->
	<property name="sourceDir" location="C:\code\example-application" />
	<property name="buildDir" location="${sourceDir}\build" />
	<property name="sourceDocDir" location="${sourceDir}\documentation\html" />
	<property name="targetDocDir" location="${buildDir}\documentation" />
	<property name="doxygen" location="C:\doxygen\doxygen-1.5.3.exe" />

In ANT doing some SET of tasks is known as a target. Programmers, think of it as a function, or method. At the simplest level a target has a name, and a series of tasks to execute. Let’s start by defining the target and telling ANT to get a current date and time stamp.

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	<target name="build">
   	<!-- Get a current date/time stamp -->
   	<tstamp />

Now we would like to copy our code and supporting files to the build directory. In my case I wanted all the PHP files EXCEPT for one, all the CSS files, and a clean version of the XML configuration file for our application. The copy task tells ANT to copy files and/or directories. Being versatile you can specify very exacting criteria, and in this example we will have three include patterns, and one exclude. Let’s look at that.

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	<!-- Copy our files to the build folder. -->
	<echo message="Copying files to build folder..." />
	<copy todir="${buildDir}">
  	<fileset dir="${sourceDir}">
    	<include name="*.php" />
    	<include name="*.css" />
    	<include name="baseSettings.xml" />
    	<exclude name="dBug.php" />
  	</fileset>
	</copy>

Note, however, that our application doesn’t read “baseSettings.xml” which was clearly copied to the build directory. It expects “settings.xml”. “baseSettings.xml” is the clean version. What we want to do now is rename the file to “settings.xml” in the build directory.

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	<!-- 
  	Get clean copies of our application configuration files. Basically
  	we have "base" versions, which are clean configuration files without
  	anything but base data in it. We want to copy those to the build
  	directory and then rename them to what they SHOULD be. 
	-->
	<echo message="Building XML configuration files..." />
	<move file="${buildDir}\baseSettings.xml" tofile="${buildDir}\settings.xml" />

Ok, now it’s time to build the documentation. In my source directory I have a doxyfile that tells Doxygen how to build the documentation. Here what we want to do is remove the existing documentation files (if any), make a documentation directory in the build location and have Doxygen build the docs in the source documentation folder. After that is done it needs to copy those files to the target documentation folder.

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	<!-- 
  	Build the application documentation. My PHP apps use the JavaDoc
  	syntax, and a wonderful tool called Dogygen for document generation.
  	Once it is built copy the generated HTML files to the target 
  	documentation directory. 
	-->
	<echo message="Building documentation..." />
	<delete dir="${sourceDocDir}" />
	<mkdir dir="${targetDocDir}" />
	<exec executable="${doxygen}">
   	<arg value="${sourceDir}\example-application.doxyfile" />
	</exec>
 
	<copy todir="${targetDocDir}">
   	<fileset dir="${sourceDocDir}" />
	</copy>

Now that we have all the code and documentation files necessary to give to the client I’d like to ZIP all that up into a nice, neat, date and time stamped file.

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	<!-- Zip up the contents. Date and timestamp the filename. -->
	<echo message="Zipping contents..." />
	<zip destfile="${buildDir}\example-application-${DSTAMP}-${TSTAMP}.zip" basedir="${buildDir}" />

Cool, so we have a ZIP file. Let’s clean up the mess. This involves deleting all the files in the build directory EXCEPT for the ZIP file, and deleting the target documentation directory. We’ll also close off our target and project.

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	<!-- Clean up our mess. -->
	<echo message="Cleaning up..." />
	<delete>
   	<fileset dir="${buildDir}" excludes="*.zip" />
	</delete>
	<delete dir="${targetDocDir}" />
 
</target>
</project>

And that’s the basics of using ANT to automate build and deployment! Following is the script in its entirity.

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project name="Example Application" default="build" basedir=".">
 
   <description>
      ANT build script for the example application.
   </description>
 
   <!-- Global properties -->
   <property name="sourceDir" location="C:\code\example-application" />
   <property name="buildDir" location="${sourceDir}\build" />
   <property name="sourceDocDir" location="${sourceDir}\documentation\html" />
   <property name="targetDocDir" location="${buildDir}\documentation" />
   <property name="doxygen" location="C:\doxygen\doxygen-1.5.3.exe" />
 
   <target name="build">
      <!-- Get a current date/time stamp -->
      <tstamp />
 
      <!-- Copy our files to the build folder. -->
      <echo message="Copying files to build folder..." />
      <copy todir="${buildDir}">
         <fileset dir="${sourceDir}">
            <include name="*.php" />
            <include name="*.css" />
            <include name="baseSettings.xml" />
            <exclude name="dBug.php" />
         </fileset>
 
      </copy>
 
      <!-- 
         Get clean copies of our application configuration files. Basically
         we have "base" versions, which are clean configuration files without
         anything but base data in it. We want to copy those to the build
         directory and then rename them to what they SHOULD be. 
      -->
      <echo message="Building XML configuration files..." />
      <move file="${buildDir}\baseSettings.xml" tofile="${buildDir}\settings.xml" />
 
      <!-- 
         Build the application documentation. My PHP apps use the JavaDoc
         syntax, and a wonderful tool called Dogygen for document generation.
         Once it is built copy the generated HTML files to the target 
         documentation directory. 
      -->
      <echo message="Building documentation..." />
      <delete dir="${sourceDocDir}" />
      <mkdir dir="${targetDocDir}" />
 
      <exec executable="${doxygen}">
         <arg value="${sourceDir}\example-application.doxyfile" />
      </exec>
 
      <copy todir="${targetDocDir}">
         <fileset dir="${sourceDocDir}" />
      </copy>
 
      <!-- Zip up the contents. Date and timestamp the filename. -->
      <echo message="Zipping contents..." />
      <zip destfile="${buildDir}\example-application-${DSTAMP}-${TSTAMP}.zip" basedir="${buildDir}" />
 
      <!-- Clean up our mess. -->
      <echo message="Cleaning up..." />
      <delete>
         <fileset dir="${buildDir}" excludes="*.zip" />
      </delete>
 
      <delete dir="${targetDocDir}" />
 
   </target>
</project>

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