Iteration 2 : The Code
The Code Viewer
My journey into Object Oriented Programming (OOP) and ColdFusion is well under way. We have completed Iteration One which was a shot-gun approach to web application development. This iteration is about refactoring and getting the application to work in a cleaner, more efficient way. There will be touches of OOP, but this is more about making the application better now that we have a good sense of usability issues and what we actually want it to do.
As always, this code viewer allows you to look at my progress on this project on a day-by-day basis. See how I am updating individual files. See where new methodologies are getting applied. See how OOP can help you.
Note: The code viewer works better in FireFox (big suprise), but is functional in both FireFox and IE.
The Application
For every code update, I will update the live application. The live application will always have the most recently updated code. Click here to launch the latest version of the application.
Iteration 2 : Code Updates
Download the updated code (ZIP file)
Just a few minor updates that I wanted to post before I moved onto some bigger changes.
Spider Gallery
I have updated the spider_gallery.cfm ColdFusion template to use a CFTry / CFCatch tag set wrapped around the Web Shot CMD CFExecute tag. The Web Shot application is set to have a timeout of 120 seconds. Some sites were causing this to crash (go longer than the timeout). I am not sure what causes that, but I think sites with lots of DHTML and stuff cause the app to get all confused. I don't know... that's one of the down sides to using 3rd party software - you just don't know how to fix it.
Now, it should work fine, just as it did before, but if the executable times out then it just displays a nice error message and the page keeps on processing.
Clean Library
Now that we have a nice video rating system in place, I have added a "Ratings Based Criteria" to the clean_library.cfm ColdFusion template. This allows the user to delete all videos below a given rating. There a few caveats here. Since it is not an inclusive delete, it means that you cannot use this to delete any videos with a rating of "10." But come on, whose gonna do that?!? Also, since all non-rated videos have a default rating of "0" it means that any video that has not been explicitly rated will be deleted regardless of which rating was selected (as a delete criteria). I think this actually works out quite nicely. And, as usual, no video that has been flagged as being a favorite video will be deleted.
Spider Content
I have added a "clear queue" link to the spider.cfm ColdFusion template. This just deletes all records from the queue. Right now, the link just calls the spider.cfm ColdFusion template and passes along the URL "Action" variable set to "clear." Then, during pre-page processing, I check to see if the action is set to "clear" and act accordingly. I am not sure if this is the best way to do it. I don't like that the clear functionality feels like such an after-thought (which it was). We can always move it later when a better place presents itself.
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Iteration Two Updates
Nov 30, 06 Code Update
Nov 21, 06 Code Update
Nov 20, 06 Code Update
Nov 15, 06 Code Update
Nov 14, 06 Code Update
Nov 10, 06 Code Update
Nov 9, 06 Code Update
Nov 6, 06 Code Update
Nov 5, 06 Code Update
Nov 2, 06 Code Update
Oct 31, 06 Code Update
Oct 30, 06 Code Update
Oct 27, 06 Code Update
Oct 25, 06 Code Update
Oct 23, 06 Code Update
