My experiments with technologies
My two articles on CFMobile are now live on Adobe DevNet site –
1. Build your first mobile app with ColdFusion 11
2. Overview: Mobile application development with ColdFusion 11
Check them out if you want to know how to develop mobile applications using ColdFusion 11 and ColdFusion Builder 3.
-Ram Kulkarni
So far I have posted CFMobile examples that were mostly standalone applications (except a photo application that uploaded image to server). However many mobile applications may need to interact with server, for example to show data from a remote database, to modify data or for many other purposes.
CFMobile features in ColdFusion Splendor make accessing remote CF server very easy. I will demonstrate this using a simple example – I will build a mobile app that displays employee records fetched from a remote CF server. The client side (cfclient) code calls a CFC on the server side which fetches data and returns result to the calling page. You will see that creating and accessing a server side CFC is as easy as it is in a completely server side CFML code – you don’t need to worry about writing code to make AJAX calls. cfclient does that for you transparently. I should mention here that this feature to call server CFCs from cfclient is not limited to mobile application, you can even use it for any web application.
Here is a screenshot of the application –
Continue reading “CFMobile Example – Accessing remote data from mobile application”
In this post I am going to show how easy it is to record audio and play it back in a mobile application using ColdFusion Splendor. If you haven’t already, you can download it from Adobe Labs.
I have tried to keep the application simple. There are two buttons, Record and Play. When you click Record button, the recording starts and the Stop button is displayed. Speak into the phone microphone to record your voice. When done, click Stop button. You can play back the audio by clicking Play button. You can also stop playback any time by clicking Stop button.
Here are the screen shots –
Continue reading “CFMobile Example – Record and playback audio using ColdFusion Splendor”
Though ColdFusion Thunder is the next version of ColdFusion Builder (the last version was 2.0.1), it is like a new IDE because it’s a major re-write. Past versions of ColdFusion Builder were built on top of Aptana. I had noted some of the challenges in implementing ColdFusion Builder a couple of years back, when CFB 2.0.1 was released.
ColdFusion Builder (till version 2.0.1) used a very old version of Aptana. Aptana later re-wrote and improved their IDE and released it as Aptana Studio 3. The integration points in Aptana Studio were changed to such an extent that integrating CFB in it would have meant re-writing it. So we decided not to base ColdFusion Thunder on Aptana and implemented many features that Aptana had contributed earlier – most notably editors for HTML, JavaScript, CSS and XML. This also meant CFML editor had to be re-written because it was based on Aptana APIs to integrate HTML, CSS and JS editors in it.
The task was huge and we, in the ColdFusion team, had been working very hard during the past two years to – first build all (or most) the features of CFB 2.0.1 in Thunder, and then to add some more features. If you have used ColdFusion Builder in the past, then you will see great performance improvements in all the editors in Thunder. Specifically you should see difference when editing large files. The memory footprint is also improved.
Here are some of the new/improved features in Thunder – Continue reading “ColdFusion Thunder – It's all new IDE”
In this post I am going to show you how to create a mobile application using ColdFusion Splendor that can take a picture and upload the picture to CF server. This application uses Camera and File APIs.
The application is very simple – it has two buttons, one to take picture and the other one to set URL where pictures are to be uploaded. You can set URL of the server before taking a picture or after, just before it is to be uploaded. Once the URL is set, it is stored in the localStorage and will be remembered. There is a messages div where the application displays messages about different operations it is performing.
Continue reading “CFMobile Example – Taking picture and uploading to ColdFusion server”
I was going to cover a use-case of taking picture in a mobile app and uploading it to ColdFusion Server in this post, but I found some issues in packaging an app that used Geolocation APIs when helping someone and thought that I would cover geolocation first.
This sample application is very simple – it gets your current location and displays a marker at that location on the Goole Map APIs. Here is how the application looks – Continue reading “CFMobile Example – Using Geolocation APIs in ColdFusion Splendor”
In my previous post, Simplify Mobile Application Development Using ColdFusion, I posted a video that showed how easy it is to create mobile application with CFMobile features of ColdFusion Splendor (Server) and ColdFusion Thunder (IDE). In that video I created a simple app called ‘Simple Expense Tracker’. But the code was not optimal, because the main purpose of the video was to show you features of CFMoible. I also mentioned that I will post a better example of the same app.
So In this post I will show you how to create a database application, where user interface code is separated from the data access code. I will also use JQuery for DOM access and Bootstrap for UI. Continue reading “Creating database mobile application with ColdFusion Splendor”
Public beta of next versions of ColdFusion Server (code named Splendor) and ColdFusion Builder (code named Thunder) were released yesterday on Adobe Labs. I have been closely involved with implementation of some of the features in both Splendor and Thunder, specifically Mobile features in Splendor and editors in Thunder.
Splendor and Thunder together provide a complete workflow to create HTML5 Mobile applications – you can easily develop, test, debug and package applications for mobile. I have created a short video to explain this workflow with a simple example, and this video is available on adobecoldfusion channel on YouTube. Continue reading “Simplify Mobile Application Development Using ColdFusion”
I am presenting a webinar on ColdFusion Builder on Wednesday, 6th June, as part of the ColdFusion Developer Week. I am planning to cover following topics –
Continue reading “Presenting a webinar on ColdFusion Builder – ColdFusion Developer Week”
ColdFusion 10 and ColdFusion Builder 2.0.1 released this week, on 14th May. My article on What’s new in ColdFusion Builder 2.0.1 is published on the Adobe Developer Connection. I have been working on ColdFusion Builder for close to 3.5 years now and the release of updater this week has put me in a mood to reflect on challenges we have faced so far.
Continue reading “Challenges in implementing ColdFusion Builder”