Monthly Archives: December 2005

Minor release. The main page can now sort by projects. If you don’t want to see what my wife’s site has wrong with it, you don’t have to.



Also, more importantly (I think) the system now sends emails when status changes. The developer gets an email when a bug is inserted and the bug owner gets an email when I mark a bug fixed.





SQL code



ColdFusion Code

I’ve been slowly pulling out my hair lately going over Paypal’s new (a year I guess) web payments Pro API.



I’ve scoured the ‘net, Googled and then Googled again. Went into experts Exchange, paypal Dev forums, I’ve seen more of the internet this past two weeks then I have in all my time in programming :)



And I just found out that I can’t do what I was tasked to do. For whatever reason decided that the SOAP call to their API had to have a client side SSL cert embedded in it. Well unfornately ColdFusion doesn’t support that. I finally tracked down another developer that had been going down this path a few months ago. He went all the way on this, talked to MACR at all levels, talked to PayPal at all levels.



He got pretty much nowhere. There may someday be a CFX tag set from paypal, but he wasn’t sure when that would be. So for now, the ream of paper I’ve got on PayPals API will be shelved until a later date.



:(

I’ve been reading Joel on Software and was struck by one of the sections. Bug Databases. Joel explains the minimum you need for a bug database, and the absolute need for one.



I was sitting around the house this Christmas weekend and it occured to me,



"I really should have a bug database. "



So I set to work on bugZ



Following what I have learned from Joel, I started with a simple little spec, outlining what I wanted to accomplish, what was in scope, what was out of scope. After that I went to work. Took me a few hours over Saturday/Sunday and Today.



So I present, bugZ, not to be confused with FogBugz, which bugZ will never be. It’s small open source, and likely to only grow as fast as I have free time.



YOu can see some screen shots, here, here and here, and download the SQL code here, and the ColdFusion code here.



I’m calling this V1.0



What it does:

• Allows users to inpout a bug definition (project, phase of project, status, bug description, steps to reproduce, the expected results and the actual results)
• Allows the developer to comment on a bug, and move it to a "fixed" status
• Allows the opener of the bug, or developer to mark a bug as "closed" once the fix has been tested.

What it does not do:

• Email anybody anything at any time
  
• Allow searches of any type on any topic
• allow users to administer any settings or add new projects to the list
• link to any (or even my) project/ time management application

That not to say future versions won’t do these things, in fact I imagine soon this list will be completely gone, but for now, this is what you do and don’t get.

Tom and I have been talking the last few days about CFEclipse and Dreamweaver. It’s kinda nice that he finally gets to flex his brain muscle, out from under Argent. At any rate…



We’ve been taking about our likes and dislikes, thought I’d share. I would post a full review of DW 8, but I’ve got one in the queue at sitepoint, so I won’t.



I’ve been on an open source kick for a little while now. Dumped M$ Office, only use IE for development, and of course have Eclipse installed. (sorry that’s as open source as I get right now)



First Dreamweaver. I know some of you are hard core code nazi’s holding strong on to that old 8mb install file for CF studio or Homesite. More power to you. I like Dreamweaver, I don’t do WYSIWG stuff, so I don’t care about that aspect of DW. For strictly coding, it really is a nice IDE. great features, to help abstract the writing of code a little bit. Yes it’s a bit bloated, what isn’t CFeclipse ain’t too small either ya know.



So features I like.

• I like the dual screen support. Floating panels rock, and the fact that now I can save my specific layout, absolutely rocks.
• Auto complete. Yeah I’m lazy, who isn’t? The auto complete in DW is at least a little smart. When I type a TR tag the closing one doesn’t pop in. I’m free to open my TDs and other tags, Starting the closing tag, DW will do it’s best to close the appropriate tag. It’s not 100% spot on, but better than nothing.
• The coding toolbar is nice. I’ve missed having such handy functions at my fingertips
• The commenting is nice. Highlight some text go to the comment button, select, /* comments, CF comments, and more.
• Highlight a commented out bit of code, click the remove comments button, comments are gone. quite nice.
• I like that I can highlight code and wrap it in any tag I like. Easy to put something into a case or if block.
• THere’s more, this is in no way comprehensive

CFEclipse. I really like this concept. I really like the IDE. Some of the metaphors take some time getting used to. Projects are a bit different than "sites" in Dreamweaver.

• I like that it’s light. Not many extra features I don’t want, cluttering things up. Like WYSIWYG view and such.
• It’s got a neat CFC wizard
• Some of the side panels ( I have no idea what they’re called) are nice like the method view when you have CFCs open.
• I love the snippets. I don’t use CFE enough to get the full hang of it, but they’re hella powerful, I’ve got two that I use all the time. THey’re cool and dynamic
• If I used it more I have no doubt there’d be more features I like!

This is (again) by no means meant to be a review or anything, just wanted to post some thoughts I had had about these two IDEs.