Making Mario 2 - Let's animate!

When I last left off, I had devised a way to generate pixel sprites using CSS and jQuery. (See the blog post here)

But notably, it didn't _do_ anything.

So, how do we manage animation with divs?

A quick note on ColdFusion configuration, XML files, and dependability

There is a wonderful set of files packaged with ColdFusion that you may or may not be aware of. Heck, you may have never even poked behind the scenes of what makes ColdFusion tick before but, if you haven't, you really should because these files _are_ important and they control a whole lot of settings you use on a day-to-day basis. I'm going to briefly cover what each file is, what it controls, and how you can use these files to do a number of things, from ensuring disaster recover-ability, to environment specific deployments.

So what files are these?

Making Mario - Creating a pixel rendering scheme with CSS and JQuery

I decided to try a fun thought experiment. With the advent of HTML 5 and technologies like canvas and OpenGL, browser based video games are going to become more prevalent. However, what if you want to do a browser based video game without HTML 5 technologies? What about the poor unfortunate souls who are stuck on IE 7? (Feel free to insert tsk tsk sounds here).

Is it possible? Is it easy? Let's find out!

The role of a developer / teammate

I've witnessed a number of development personalities in my tenure but there is one universal thing I've noticed about the really, really good ones: they mentor. They inspire, they teach... they show you the secrets that can turn you (yes you!) into more than a code monkey. These are the individuals who will look over your code, reflect for a moment, and say with certainty: "This is good, but did you know you could do...".

Retrieving a paginated HQL query with total records included

This is going to be more of quick hit post. Many of us have written paginated queries before. (Don't need to pull back the whole database when you only need the first 100 records right ^__^ ) and, as many have discovered, ormExecuteQuery() supports the 'maxrecords' and 'offset' parameters.

This was brought up at work a few days ago (I have a feeling a lot of entries are going to start this way...) where a coworker was trying to write a query that was going to be paginated, but wanted to include the total number of records in the entire result set so that they could display it on the page. (i.e. Records 1-20 of 375, etc...)

The issue is this: HQL doesn't support COUNT() on multiple columns. So how do we get the value?

MXUnit Boiler Plate - Minor update

I had a minor issue where error messages weren't being displayed. Should be good now.

Get it here: mxunitboilerplate.riaforge.com

ORM gotchas - Child Mapping Issues

This is another work use-case example. We had a need to use some of the parent/child inheritance that ORM provides using a discriminator column (adobe's docs on using a subclass with discriminator).

The reasoning, is that there were specific types of children that had specific data attributes (it all revolved around a rule engine where the results had a shared set of data points, but depending on the rule type, the actual result data would change dramatically) and so, to avoid having a bunch of null values in the parent table, we were going to create the child tables appropriately.

Here's where it started to get tricky. We needed to map a relationship from the child object to a different table because, well because that relationship existed. Unfortunately, ORM didn't like that...