Hover Bike

I am a big fan of hover technology and want to share this break through with a hover bike.

http://gearpatrol.com/blog/2011/06/09/bmw-powered-twin-rotorhoverbike/

It kind of reminds of a speeder bike from Star Wars.

Writing text over an image

I know alot of people have already done this, but I thought I would share writing text over image as well. Only because the first time you do it, it's really cool.

Read in the image

 <cfimage name = "local.image" action="read" source="test.jpg"/>

Turn on anti-aliasing ("softens jagged edges")

<cfset ImageSetAntiAliasing(local.image)/>

Set the text color

<cfset ImageSetDrawingColor(local.image, "000000")/>

Set extra attributes

<cfset local.attrs = {
    Font = 'Arial',
    Size = 36,
    Style = 'bold'
   }/>

Draw over the image (image,text,x-position,y-position,attributes)

<cfset ImageDrawText(local.image, "Hello World!", 10, 10, local.attrs)/>

SQL replace() blank stuff

Will never return 0

select replace('','',0)

Will return zero if the value is ''

select case when '' = '' then 0 else 1 end

SQL Selects ='s

Instead of writing a select in a query like this

select 
[user].id,
 [user].name,
 snowboard.name as snowboard
from [user]
 inner join snowboard on snowboard.id = [user].snowboard_id

try this

select 
 [user].id,
 [user].name,
 snowboard = snowboard.name
from [user]
 inner join snowboard on snowboard.id = [user].snowboard_id

It helps all the columns line up and read nicer.

HQL vs. SQL

I've been playing with HQL for awhile now and want to share my thoughts of it against SQL. Some developers are hesitant to switch to HQL because of the querying. I don't blame them. Writing HQL can be tougher than SQL. After fighting threw some HQL queries I have found that SQL still has its place in an HQL application. Here are some of my findings:

1. List pages and aggregates are faster and easier to write in SQL. Most of the time the data points that list pages and aggregates are going to be displayed are already hashed out and don't need to be changed much.

2. HQL is great for getting and setting simple data quickly. SQL takes too much energy and time to insert or get a piece of data. The SQL queries you write are not going to be flexible enough for the new fields people are going to request.

3. Some routines are more efficient to be ran in SQL. HQL can be slow and it brings back too much data sometimes.

With the above findings I have organized my code to do saves and single entity gets with HQL and lists and routines with SQL. With this combo I have found it to be quick to get and set the data I need. It does take knowledge of both HQL and SQL to do this, but the languages are very similar and the learner curve isn't too bad. Here is an earlier post about the similarities. I hope this brings down the hesitation for the SQL people to try and use HQL for what it's good for.

I would like to hear peoples thoughts on this matter. It seems to come up a lot in HQL conversations, so comment away.

ColdMVC: Quick start now available

After a long wait, ColdMVC finally has a quick start guide. Check it out here: http://www.coldmvc.com/quickstart.

ColdMVC: get an object's parents

Awhile back I posted on flattening an array of objects with Parent-Child relationship (link) and have been using it alot. But one issue I had with it was when I was looping through the array of objects I didn't know who my parents were for the current object I was working with. I already knew how deep thanks to the treeDepth property. I made this function to recursively go up the tree of objects and bring back an array of parent objects for an object.

<cffunction name="getObjectsParents" access="public" output="false" returntype="array">
 <cfargument name="object" required="true"/>
 <cfargument name="result" required="false" default="#[]#"/>
  
 <cfif isObject(arguments.object.parent())>
  <cfset arrayPrepend(arguments.result,arguments.object.parent())/>
  <cfreturn getObjectsParents(arguments.object.parent(),arguments.result)/>
 <cfelse>
  <cfreturn arguments.result/>
 </cfif>

</cffunction>