Testing is hard work!

I recently found myself in the beta test group for Tunnels of Doom Reboot. My initial thought was that this would be easy. After all, I do write code for a living. I regularly test my code as well as my colleagues' code. I've spent countless hours of my life playing the original; I know it inside and out. How hard could this be?

Enter a world of fantasy where your instincts and imagination determine your chances of survival. Your journey is about to begin—Prepare yourself.
–Tunnels of Doom Manual

When the beta became available to the testers, I downloaded it, fired it up, and quite frankly had a ball. That day I submitted my first 'bug report' which consisted of a 'bug' that I could not reproduce as well as a handful of usability suggestions. Shortly after that the first status report came out, with a number of reported bugs list, most of which I had seen, but not thought to mention.

My big problem was that I was approaching it like a gamer and not like a tester. While I did not have access to the design spec to confirm behavior against like I normally do, several of the bugs that I failed to report, were pretty obvious. For my part, once I realized my mistake, I fired the application back up and have since delivered the type of bug reports that I want to see when folks are testing my code.

The thing is as web developers we are all very aware of the limitations of web-based applications, and it is easy for us to ignore things that are not easy to fix. We cannot, however, let ourselves become complacent. With the help of newer technologies such as Flex, we are in a position to overcome many of the historical limitations of web-based applications. The challenge is weilding these new technologies appropriately, and freeing ourselves from the limitations and thinking of the past.

Labels: Actionscript, Adobe, AJAX, ColdFusion, Flash, Flex, user interface, web 2.0

posted by Luis - 0 comments

FCKeditor can meet your rich text needs.

I realize that FCKeditor is bundled with ColdFusion 8, but those of us running ColdFusion 7, or PHP, or any number of other languages, can also take advantage of this flexibly licensed, powerful, and thanks to included hooks and samples, easy to integrate rich text editor. I should say up front, that I am in no way affiliated with the FCKeditor project, but am simply a satisfied user.

For users of ColdFusion 6 and above it can be as simple as downloading and unzipping the editor, and then calling the included fckeditor.cfc like this:

<cfset editorInstance = createObject('component', 'path.to.fckeditorcfc') />
<cfset editorInstance.instanceName = "formFieldName" />
<cfset editorInstance.basePath = "/path/to/fckeditor/" />
<cfset editorInstance.Create() />

Note: This screenshot does not represent the default button set.

On the back end, the HTML generated by the editor simply comes through as a form field value using the instanceName that you set, making it dead simple to enhance existing forms.

If you've been unsure how to implement rich text editors, or have been struggling with one that doesn't quite meet your needs, I urge you to give FCKeditor a try.

Labels: .NET, Adobe, AJAX, ColdFusion, FCKeditor, PHP

posted by Luis - 0 comments

A legitimate complaint about ColdFusion 8

I spotted this post on MXNA last night that at first appeared to be yet another CF is Dead type post. I'm not sure why I read it, but once I reached the second paragraph, I realized that it contained a legitimate complaint about ColdFusion 8's AJAX implementation. I suspect a good number of folks ignored it due to the title, so I thought I'd give you all a second chance. I don't necessarily agree with all of the complaints, but I do hope that Adobe does address some of this in future versions. Note: I've disabled comments on this post since it's really just a pointer.

Labels: Adobe, AJAX, ColdFusion

posted by Luis