A colleague asked me today about how he could dump out a jQuery object and find out what was in it.

There are 2 ways I know of right now.

1) AjaxCFC contains a js file call dump.js and dDumper.js include these in your page, then use

The output is appended to the bottom of the HTML in the page, so you may have to scroll down a bit.

2) is download and use the jQuery dump plugin

This plugin looks exactly like a ColdFusion dump table.

I thought this article from InfoQ was worth bringing to your attention, as it was an interesting read for me, about the misconceptions Adobe come across when talking to people about Flex. We are currently a way down the path of getting one of our clients to embrace Flex, and then get the skills to build some things.

We recently did some extensive AJAX work in their application and had to make sure it degraded well, so that the same functions were available with out AJAX. If we had used Flex in this area, then there would have been no extra work to make the functions behave exactly as we needed.

In order to help the adoption of Flex, we have been running some Java script detection on the application to see how many of the users actually have Flash, if so is it v9 or later, if not is it later than v6 and so can be auto updated. Why? because this app operates within the tight SOE of banking and financial institutions.

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During a recent project with a bent on improving UI we decided to take a look at what happened if an over zealous IT administrator in a company decided to disable activeX on his pure Internet Explorer environment. The results were disturbing therefore justifying the mantra that mission critical apps should still be functional without javascript and ajax. (Makes you want to dive into Flex huh? All that environment to do with as you please.)

The good folks over at JQuery believe that IE 7's implementation of native AJAX, i.e. a request that is not reliant on ActiveX such as Firefox, is flawed, so they simply use the ActiveX object. You can see this in the jQuery source

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Recently I discussed how to set up HTTP Compression in IIS 6 using its native gzip support.

Here are a couple of tools you can use to verify your compression is set up correctly. Both tell you pretty much the same information, simply enter your URL and it tells you the result, and how much you have saved.

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By default ajaxCFC includes the JQuery BlockUI plugin to cover the screen and display a message while the ajax request gets processed.

Its default message is "please wait....", so to make it more explanatory we can put a line of code in to help.

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The new version of ajaxCFC that runs on jQuery is excellent and has a bunch of nifty helper functions. I have recently had the need to make the end result less developer friendly and more user friendly.

So here we go - how to catch errors with ajaxCFC without using the default error handler.

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The new release of jQuery is here and 1.2 is huge. Some removal of features will cause a few compatibility headaches but overall the improvements are massive.

Digg it here

And on Sunday the jQuery UI will also be released complete with Draggables, droppables, resizables, shadows, sliders, sortables, tabs, accordions, selectables, trees, and modals.

I had the need today to go through our login history for one of our applications to try and hunt down possible compatibility issues coming from some new jQuery / AJAX related code. The issue in question is in another country and we wont be able to get a tech or developer in front of the problem machine to see it first hand.

As standard we test our apps on Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7 and FireFox 2.x for Windows XP, Internet Explorer 7 on Vista, and Safari, FireFox and Internet Explorer on a Mac Mini.

With our applications we log the username, date and time, ip address and the browser string of that user via CGI.HTTP_USER_AGENT. Its not often all that information comes in useful but today was one of those days.

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I went on the hunt recently for a decent suggest component for ajaxCFC and after starting to build my own I came across this example from Rob Gonda for a single suggest with ajaxCFC.

The issue here was that the code is built only to work for one component on a page. As I am sure many of people also do we had a need to build many on a page. The other difference here was that we didn't actually need to use the key value pair, only the value as we don't always want to directly replace a select box, simply provide some useful suggestions from a large database table.

I fixed a number of things from this example

1. iFrame support for IE6 wasnt working
2. allow multiple suggests on a page
3. the least amount of js on the page to initialise
4. highlight the text that was searched for in the suggestions

The zip of the suggest.js code is available from the download link at the bottom of the entry.

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The ColdFusion 8 ajax debugger is also available for things not exclusively ColdFusion. You are able to send messages in to the inline log reader window, for your own purposes.

Remember that the debug window can be brought up using ?cfdebug on the end of your URL, however it inherits the same settings as regular debugging, so you have to go turn it on in the Administrator and enable your IP Address.

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