yet another coldfusion blog

When ColdFusion connects to MySQL 4/5 databases, the default choice is to use JDBC.  This is all well and fine, but a difference-of-opinion between JDBC Dates and MySQL dates can cause your application fits.  The issue is created when you use an empty string(not a NULL, which is a different bird all together) to update a date field.  MySQL interprets this as '0000-00-00 00:00:00' and stores that value.  JDBC by design does not recognize'0000-00-00 00:00:00' as a valid date and returns an error.

The most common solutions suggested for dealing this are either a work-around or not easily applied.  A little experimentation revealed an ideal solution to this problem.

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Well, CFUnited is over.  It was my first time there, and my first conference in a couple of years.  As usual, it was as unique and interesting an experience as I've come to expect from these types of gatherings, perhaps more so this year because I had a mix of scheduled encounters and unexpected surprises.  Also as usual, I got as much out of the convention outside of the presentations as I did inside.

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I'm currently going through the last day of formal CFUnited sessions (tomorrow is 'favorites repeated'), and I have to say to all the CF'rs out there who have never attended a conference: GO!  Go to expose yourself to new information and ideas, go to talk with fellow developers, go to network, go to have fun, but mostly go to get inspired.

It's the one big thing I always take away from these gatherings is a bag full of excitement for ColdFusion and what's possible.  The sessions expose you to new ideas, there's always a pile of new toys to play with, and the keynotes get you impassioned about your community and your work.

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Coming from a country with two official languages, one request I get a lot is for a website to be multi-lingual, a.k.a. support i18n (a fancy abbreviation for "internationalization").  This is easy if you are using Mura, since its supports multi-lingual content and locales right out of the box (it even has a translations plugin that will allow you to coordinate multiple-language websites).  But what about your own development work?

As is often the case, Mura's framework makes this quite easy.

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I've posted a blog on the company site entitled "design for your customers, not your competition", about experiences with clients who design for their competition, not their customers.  It's an easy trap (we in fact did much the same with our previous company website, getting more caught up in content, SEO and css/xhtml compliance than we did evaluating what the people who were coming to our site actually needed or expected to find).

http://www.clevertechnology.com/go/blog/design-for-your-customers-not-your-competition/

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