Ben Forta just finished his quick European trip (UK, Belgium and Netherlands) to present “a sneak peak at ColdFusion’s future”. I was lucky enough to see him twice: the first time at the European Commission in a meeting room packed of 80 developers, the second time in Brussels in front of 45 developers.

Both presentations started with a quick demo of BlazeDS data push and LCDS built-in conflict management: even if I’ve already seen this demo several times, it’s always nice to see the reaction of the audience. Will BlazeDS replace LCDS Express in Centaur ? No words on that yet…

Second part focused on Centaur and Bolt: I really loved the introduction tag line

” Advancing rapid application development
and turning developers into heroes. ”

Now let’s see what has been shown.

ColdFusion Exposed Services Layer (ESL)

This is a feature for non ColdFusion developers: you will be able to access, using your own language (PHP, .NET,…) and via SOAP or AMF,  integrated CF services without writing any CFML code! Those services includes Query Service, Mail, Generation and Manipulation of PDF files, Imaging, Charting etc…  Those ESL will be also available for Flex/AIR developers via CF-ESL.

For me It sounds pretty interesting to use the same services across different applications/languages instead of having to buy 3rd party extensions (when available),  no?

Local/Remote Database Synchronization (CF/AIR)

Centaur will be able to handle data synchronisation between an AIR SQLite DB and a ColdFusion datasource. It will make easier the development of Offline AIR apps using a ColdFusion backend. W00t!

CFScript Enhancements

Here you will find Explicit local scope for private function variables, implicit getters/setters (Yeahh!), Import & New keyword.

After seeing that I was wondering why Adobe did not decide to replace CFScript with ActionScript 3.0? If you were at MAX last year, you have probably seen this demo of server side ActionScript in Centaur… why maintaining another scripting language so close to AS 3.0? It would have made things easier…  Anyone agree with that?

ORM (Hibernate)

Centaur implements Object Relational Mapping via Hibernate: ORM provides Database vendor independence, caching, concurrency via a representation of your relational data in an Object Model. I’m not that comfortable talking about ORM so I will make that one a bit short. I can only tell you that Bolt has full support for ORM and generate all the code for you, even if we only saw a simple example

Bolt

Bolt is the new ColdFusion IDE: it’s an Eclipse plugin like Flex Builder, so people doing Flex development will be happy with the full integration. It has Server management, server monitoring, services introspection, code generation, etc… what is interesting also is that you can create extension for Bolt using CFML code! So you will be able to create plugins to do code generation in your favorite framework

I think that’s almost everything that has been covered. I was really happy to see some many enthusiastic ColdFusion developers… haven’t seen that for  a while And remember that those features are only a small part of what will be available in the release version.

A last thing to finish: if you don’t know yet Claude Englebert, the EMEA ColdFusion Product Specialist, don’t hesitate to get in touch with him for anything related to CF (events, User Group, promotion, support…)!

I know Ben Forta loves when people are playing with photoshop

In my current Flex project I need to create an interface that will replace the email client of the users. Many of them are using Outlook, so I would like to reproduce the same look and behavior. The new advanced datagrid in Flex 3 will come in handy to achieve the task, but there is one specific behavior that I would like to reproduce, it’s the way Outlook is grouping the dates : it creates the following groups :

• Today
• Yesterday
• <NAME OF DAY> - if in the same week as the current date
• Last Week
• Two Weeks ago
• Last Month
• Older

It’s also easily expendable to the Future (Tomorrow, In two days…). So I created an Oracle function which generate the correct group label for a given date.

CREATE OR REPLACE PACKAGE TRIS_UTILS AUTHID CURRENT_USER AS
/*******************************************************************
NAME:      TRIS_UTILS
PURPOSE:   Utilities functions.
REVISION:  Ver        Date            Author          Description
          -----     -------     ---------------  ------------------
           1.0    15/07/2008    Cyril Hanquez    Creation  
*******************************************************************/
 
/* compare a_date with sysdate and return
    the corresponding group label            */  
FUNCTION get_grouping_date_name(a_date IN DATE) RETURN VARCHAR2;
 
END TRIS_UTILS;
/
 
CREATE OR REPLACE PACKAGE BODY TRIS_UTILS AS
/*******************************************************************
NAME:      TRIS_UTILS
PURPOSE:   Utilities functions.
REVISION:  Ver        Date            Author          Description
          -----     -------     ---------------  ------------------
           1.0    15/07/2008    Cyril Hanquez    Creation  
*******************************************************************/
FUNCTION get_grouping_date_name(a_date IN DATE) RETURN VARCHAR2 IS
 
return_var VARCHAR2(50);
 
BEGIN
 
CASE
   /* In Oracle date1-date2 returns a number of days
      It's equivalent to DATEDIFF(day, a_date, getdate()) */
   WHEN TRUNC(SYSDATE - a_date) = 0
       THEN return_var := 'Today';
   /* parameter 'IW' is returning the Week of year
      but we must also verify that we are in a valid period */
   WHEN ((TO_CHAR(SYSDATE,'IW')-TO_CHAR(a_date,'IW')) = 0 AND
            /* between -6 AND +6 would be enough
               7 days a week -1 because today returns 0
               equivalent to ABS(TRUNC(SYSDATE - a_date)) <= 8 */
            TRUNC(SYSDATE - a_date) BETWEEN -8 AND 8)
       THEN
       CASE
          WHEN TRUNC(SYSDATE - a_date) = 1
             THEN return_var := 'Yesterday';
          WHEN TRUNC(SYSDATE - a_date) = -1
             THEN return_var := 'Tomorrow';
          WHEN ABS(SYSDATE - a_date) > 1
             /* We are returning the Name of day here */
             THEN return_var := INITCAP(TO_CHAR(a_date,'DAY'));
       END CASE;
   WHEN ((TO_CHAR(SYSDATE,'IW')-TO_CHAR(a_date,'IW')) = 1 AND
           /* <=13 would be enough */
           ABS(SYSDATE - a_date) <= 15)
      THEN return_var := 'Last Week';
   WHEN ((TO_CHAR(SYSDATE,'IW')-TO_CHAR(a_date,'IW')) = -1 AND
           /* <=13 would be enough */
           ABS(SYSDATE - a_date) <= 15)
      THEN return_var := 'Next Week';
   WHEN ((TO_CHAR(SYSDATE,'IW')-TO_CHAR(a_date,'IW')) = 2 AND
           /* <=20 would be enough */
           ABS(SYSDATE - a_date) <= 22)
      THEN return_var := 'Two Weeks Ago';
   WHEN ((TO_CHAR(SYSDATE,'IW')-TO_CHAR(a_date,'IW')) = -2 AND
           /* <=20 would be enough */
           ABS(SYSDATE - a_date) <= 22)
      THEN return_var := 'In Two Weeks';
   WHEN ((TO_CHAR(SYSDATE,'IW')-TO_CHAR(a_date,'IW')) = 3 AND
           /* <=27 would be enough */
           ABS(SYSDATE - a_date) <= 29)
      THEN return_var := 'Three Weeks Ago' ;
   WHEN ((TO_CHAR(SYSDATE,'IW')-TO_CHAR(a_date,'IW')) = -3 AND
           /* <=27 would be enough */
           ABS(SYSDATE - a_date) <= 29)
      THEN return_var := 'In Three Weeks';
   WHEN ((TO_CHAR(SYSDATE,'MM')-TO_CHAR(a_date,'MM') = 1 AND
           /* current month + 1 month so a maximum of 62 days */
           ABS(SYSDATE - a_date) <= 62))
      THEN return_var := 'Last Month' ;
   WHEN ((TO_CHAR(SYSDATE,'MM')-TO_CHAR(a_date,'MM') = -1 AND
           /* current month + 1 month so a maximum of 62 days */
           ABS(SYSDATE - a_date) <= 62))
      THEN return_var := 'Next Month';
   /* in other cases just check if the date is in the future... */
   WHEN SIGN(SYSDATE - a_date) = -1
      THEN return_var := 'Further';
   /* ...or in the past */
   WHEN SIGN(SYSDATE - a_date) = 1
      THEN return_var := 'Older';
   /* if the date is null, do something */
   ELSE return_var := '---';
END CASE;
 
RETURN return_var;
 
END;
 
END TRIS_UTILS;
/

Now that we have our group labels generated, we should take care about the sorting. Its quite easy in fact, just use the DATEDIFF. To test it just use the following SQL :

SELECT <your_date> AS MY_DATE,
TRIS_UTILS.(get_grouping_date_name,<your_date>) AS GROUP LABEL,
(SYSDATE-<your_date>) AS DATE_SORT
FROM DUAL

In a next blog post I will share the Flex code that I wrote to generate the “Outlook like” interface. Feel free to comment and suggest any enhancement