Thoughts from the mountains

I mentioned in a previous post that I want to do a series of posts that breakdown and explain the CfWheels app that I'm working on that I'm calling MyRides. The app allows me to collect the data from the Android phone based MyTracks app that I use while riding my bicycle for exercise and for commuting to work. This is my first attempt at writing an app using CfWheels so I figured that these posts might be a good reference for someone new to the framework or frameworks in general. It might be a bit boring for those of you that have experience with CfWheels or other MVC frameworks, but if those of you can stick with me I would appreciate any feedback you have on how I built the app in the comments of this or proceeding posts. If you are completely new to CfWheels or MVC frameworks I would highly suggest taking the time to read the following link on the CfWheels documentation.

For some time now I've wanted to build a new web application from scratch using one of the many frameworks available for ColdFusion so that I could get a better feel for MVC frameworks in general as well as evaluate the tool to increase my coding productivity. A couple of months ago, I started to use the MyTracks application for Android to record my bicycle riding this season so that I could see all of the rides in one place and see some statistics as the season moved on. Right away, I determined that it would be nice to import the data from MyTracks into my own database and then build a web app for looking at the data and statistics all in one place. After looking at several different frameworks, I decided on CfWheels and started working on my new application.

Today, I was trying to use the cfmap tag in a site with a table based layout. The table that contains the content uses the cellspacing atttribute to create margins around the content. After placing the cfmap tag inside of a table cell, all subsequent data cells no longer contained the cellpading. I created a very simple example that recreates the issue.

While reading the article titled, "Lessons from a lost decade: Developing for a disposable Web", I noticed the mention of ColdFusion at the end of the second paragraph. I found the article to be interesting and made valid points, but again I'm sad to see ColdFusion portrayed as a defunct language in the main stream tech media. Am I defensive or do others feel the same way?

For the last year or so, I had been using cfhttp and rssatom.cfc to read and parse rss feeds so that I could display the content on a site running on ColdFusion 7. I recently upgraded the server to ColdFusion 9, but shortly afterward started to receive the error, "An error occurred while Parsing an XML document. Content is not allowed in prolog". The error was not consistent, but occurred twenty to thirty times a day. I figured it was a good time to move to the more current cffeed tag that became available in ColdFusion 8 and see if it would resolve the issue.