A general collection of odds and sods. Some more ColdFusion framework discussions, some CSS, mobile blogging, some SOAP, PHP and a few interface design considerations.

1. There has been a lot of discussion of the CFDev mailing list over appropriate architectures for developing RIAs, of course all focused also on harnessing the power of CFCs. The bets solution pout forward was to move away form 3 tier applications and look to n-tier applications (items listed after the slash are for Mach-II and typical web applications using HTML templates for the presentation layer):

   1. client (web browser)
   2. presentation tier (Flash UI) / presentation tier (ColdFusion .cfm pages)
   3. business-presentation tier (Flash ActionScript controller) / business-presentation tier (Mach II & listener CFCs)
   4. business-facade tier (ColdFusion CFC / web service facade) / business-facade tier (ColdFusion CFC facade)
   5. business-model tier (ColdFusion CFCs)
   6. integration tier (ColdFusion CFCs &Java)
   7. data tier (Oracle 9i)

   Below are some link with articles that should provide further insight.
   

   1. http://www.15seconds.com/issue/011023.htm
   2. http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/mx/coldfusion/articles/ntier.html
   3. http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/flex/articles/design_patterns02.html
   4. http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/mx/flashcom/articles/scalable02.html
2. The two articles were interesting for a number of reasons. One of course being a showcase of how standards implemented sites could benefit companies. That’s one of the reasons I am jotting this one down, the other he has links to some mobile device emulators… Always come in handy these!
3. how to implement round corners.
4. A little review on the benefits of fixed width design. Much has been said about the benefits of fluid designs, but little so far about fixed width. The bottom line fixed width delivers better readability as the length of the content area is fixed. Studies in the print world have shown that shorter lines are easier to read…
5. Ken Wistin relates his experiences and ideas for developing global websites for local markets without having necessarily the financial backing of a major organisation.
6. More for a friend of mine, but this resources contains all of the information relating to integrating Flash and Video.
7. Brian Kotek provides a brief overview of the Mach-ii framework for ColdFusion. He also provides an links to an overview with examples of using CFCs and Composition and an overview of the MVC design pattern.
8. I put up the CFMX coding guidelines a while back, but here are now the complete set of guidelines from Macromedia for HTML, CFMX, mach-ii and accessibility.
9. One of the few mach-ii related blogs and it also contains a bunch of filters and plug-ins for the framework.
10. A brief article form Sun giving an overview of the current state of play on the mobile blogging front.
11. This site, in the shape of a blog, provides a review of software, hardware and news relating to mobile blogging
12. A directory listing for web developers based in London.
13. As above, another directory listing for us web developers.
14. Hat tip to Brandon Purcell for this one. This site contains a raft of information on setting up a web server on your home broadband connection even if you are using a dynamic IP address. Tones more info…
15. A neat little article highlighting the differences between Arial type and Helvetica and Grotesque. Thanks to Zeldman for that one (incidentally he has re-designed).
16. I had a script running on this now for quite a while that gathers book info based on what section of the site you are in and then displays the book thumbnails. It works, but I have found it very intermittent. So I decided to dig a little deeper and see if I could fix this up a little. Check this site out for a few free scripts.
17. This is a PHP object that allow developers to easily instantiate and consume SOAP requests. DevShed has a set of article on using it with the Amazon Web Service [read part 1 and part 2]