Sagar Ganatra's Blog

The Editor is the most important feature in an IDE and the code assist features in the Editor helps in developing applications quickly and hence help in increasing the productivity. One of features is the 'auto insertion of tag attributes'. Most of the tags in ColdFusion have a mandatory attribute, for example the attribute 'name' is mandatory when using the cffunction tag. In ColdFusion Builder 2, these attributes are auto inserted i.e. when a user types in the cffunction tag and invokes code assist (using CTRL + SPACE) the name attribute is auto inserted. auto insertion also works for function arguments wherein the required arguments are auto inserted. Auto Insertion of Tag attributes As explained above, the mandatory attributes are auto inserted whenever the code assist is invoked for tags such as cffunction : In the above picture, code assist for cffunction is invoked and the tag is selected from the list. This would auto insert the required attribute 'name'...

I had blogged about JavaScript debugging with Chrome Developer Tools  some time back, wherein I have explained how these developer tools can help in debugging javascript code. Today Google Chrome 12 was released and my Chrome browser was updated to this version. As with every release, there have been some improvements made on performance, usability etc,. One feature that stood out for me is the ability to De-obfuscate the javascript code. What is Minification? Minification is the process of removing unnecessary characters such as white spaces, comments, new lines from the source code. These otherwise would be added to make the code more readable. Minifying the source code helps in reducing the file size and thereby reducing the time taken to download the file. This is the reason why most of the popular javascript libraries such as jQuery are minified. A minified jQuery file is of 31 KB in size where as an uncompressed one is about 229 KB. Unfortunately, debugging minified javascript f...

I was working on an online\offline application, wherein I wanted to display a set of records stored in the local database to the user when he goes offline. The only way to determine the network status is to send a XHR request to the server at particular time intervals (polling). If the server responds back with some data it is understood that the user is online. However, I came across two event listeners 'ononline' and 'onoffline' which are triggered when the network status changes.

HTML5 has introduced several semantic tags such as HEADER, FOOTER, SECTION, ARTICLE, ASIDE, NAV etc,. The rationale behind creating these structural tags is to divide the web pages into logical parts with tags that are descriptive of the type of content they contain. Before HTML5 the div tags were used in creating blocks of content in a HTML document. Recently, I was having a conversation with one of my team members from whom I learnt that the CFDIV tag can be used to output these semantic tags. The CFDIV tag has an attribute  'tagname' . This attribute can be used to specify the HTML container tag i.e. one can specify tagname="header" to output the header tag. Similarly the tagname attribute can be used to specify other HTML5 semantic tags. Why should I use CFDIV tag to output the semantic tags? Well, this is an obvious question you are likely to ask yourself before you write the CFDIV tag. It is not so obvious to one who uses CFDIV tag in their day to day de...

I was looking into the Google Maps API the other day and came across some APIs which are really cool. I came up with a use case to show path from the current location to a particular destination entered by the user. I was also trying to achieve that Indiana Jones like effect on the map i.e. to show an animation of the path being drawn on the map. The idea here is to show the moving path until the destination is reached and also to pan the map accordingly. Unable to display content. Adobe Flash is required. As seen in the video, a marker is added to the map specifying my current location (Bangalore, India). The current location data is retrieved using the HTML5’s Geolocation API. Once the latitude and longitude information are available, a marker can be added to the map. You can now enter one of your favorite destinations in the text box provided and click the Submit button to see a path drawn from your current location to the destination. The path is drawn using the Google map...

Last Friday I was having a conversation with Ben Nadel and Jonothan Joyce on Twitter about examining the content of a JavaScript object. While the firebug add-on for Firefox comes in very handy in examining the request\response header and for various other internals, I can’t really debug the JavaScript code by adding breakpoints. I use Google’s Chrome browser for my day to day web application development. Both Chrome and Safari provide ‘Developer tools’ which help the user not only in debugging the JavaScript code but also in examining the content of an object at any point in time by providing watch expressions. What I like about debugging in Chrome is that it is very much similar to how I debug my server-side code using ColdFusion Builder or Eclipse. This certainly reduces the learning curve to understand debugging in a browser. However, Chrome has more to give when it comes to debugging web applications. In this post I’ll explain how Google Chrome can help you debug web applic...

The XmlHttpRequest Level 2 specification adds several enhancements to the XmlHttpRequest object. Last week I had blogged about cross-origin-requests and how it is different from Flash\Silverlight's approach .  With Level 2 specification one can upload the file to the server by passing the file object to the send method. In this post I'll try to explore uploading file using XmlHttpRequest 2 in conjunction with the progress events. I'll also provide a description on the new HTML5 tag -  progress which can be updated while the file is being uploaded to the server. And of course, some ColdFusion code that will show how the file is accepted and stored on the server directory.