yet another coldfusion blog

Why isn't everything as easy as ColdFusion? It's a loaded and obviously rhetorical question ... loaded because I've been using CF for nearly 15 years (gasp!) and rhetorical for, well, pretty much the same reason.

That might seem an odd way to begin a post on the quandary between using jQuery and ExtJS, two powerful and distinct JavaScript frameworks among the many out there. I've used jQuery for a couple of years now, and ExtJS for about a week, and the differences between the two have painted me into quite a corner, development-wise. And please, don't assume this is another "vs" comparison, because it isn't. I really like jQuery, and in my brief introduction am a bit in awe of ExtJS, but having developed for so long I approach every new framework with a healthy amount of trepidation.

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FW/1 is a great place to start your development from, regardless of the size of your application. That being said, it's no-frills foundation and the fact that it is a very new framework (version 1.1 is just peeking into the sunlight as we speak) means there are scaffolding tools that you may have develop yourself to maximize your productivity.  It also means that some of its best features (like nested layouts) can also work against you if you are not careful.  One of these is the way nested layouts are loaded, and how this can affect <CFHTMLHEAD> calls.

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An important part of the Meld FormBuilder application I'm working on is the Meld DataProvider, a utility which in this case provides lists for multi-choice items for dropdowns, radioboxes, etc.  I want these lists to hold typed and validated data, and to be able to sort on the secondary columns that can be added beyond the "label", but I want to store all the values in a single database table.  The problem that arises is that we also need to be able to sort results on any of the columns, which because of their generic nature are all type "VARCHAR".

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Yesterday was one of those "I need to get this to work, and I can't possibly be the first person to need to do this" type of developer days. In this particular instance, I had a huge data object sitting in JavaScript that I needed to send to a CFC for processing.  JSON to the rescue!

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In my work on the Meld FormBuilder plugin, I've had to learn a lot of jQuery on the fly, and it has been a happy time.  The clumsy and often unfathomable series of JavaScript functions that would normally be required to do even the simplest of tasks has been make relatively painless because of jQuery, from selectors to JSON parsing to AJAX and so, so much more.

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