Tom Mollerus' Weblog

I'm getting excited for our next meeting for the Boston CFUG-- we have Gert Franz presenting in person on Railo, a CFML engine that runs on a wide variety of Java servlet engines, and provides a cost-effective, high performance alternative to using Adobe's ColdFusion engine.

With their announcement that they are partnering with JBoss to make their software completely free and open-source, Railo is the latest entrant to the open-source CFML engine category and is getting quite a bit of buzz.

Gert will present an overview of Railo, and what the advantages of using Railo are for CFML developers. He'll also be talking about the upcoming open-source conversion of Railo, and what that means for developers. Gert will have some free versions of the Railo software to hand out, and Brian and I will have some other goodies to give away as well. Make sure to RSVP for the meeting.

I've just come back from an CommonSpot Advanced Developer's Training class, where some people expressed the thought that server-side validation wasn't required as long as you have sufficient client-side validation through JavaScript. Then this morning I read Mark Kruger's excellent (if rather unfortunate) example of why you should always implement server-side data validation in your applications. Always remember that users, whether friendly or malicious, can submit anything they please via form submissions, URL query strings, or even cookies.

For those of you in the Boston area, you'll really enjoy the Boston ColdFusion User Group's meeting tonight at Adobe's offices in Newton. Luis Majano will be presenting his ColdBox framework-- it's a great, easy way to get introduced to OOP programming. Make sure to come!

http://www.bostoncfug.org/index.cfm?event=showMeeting&meetingID=CA04FA80-D61B-FA8C-8A343B03A53B5745

I'm pleased to say that Brian Rinaldi recently offered for me to be his co-manager for the Boston Coldfusion User Group, and I happily (and immediately) accepted. I'll be helping Brian with some of the management activities that he's always wanted to do but hasn't had time for, and I hope that it gives me the chance to meet more people in the community and to spread the word about ColdFusion to new users who are interested in seeing what it's about.

For those of you in the Boston area, we'd love to see you at the meetings. We've got some great ones lined up in the near future!

At work we've been trying to figure out how best to use Eloqua, which is a campaign management and lead-tracking tool. Like many other services, Eloqua offers email and webinar campaign management, but it also adds something of great value-- the ability to track your leads' activities from the email or webinar through your web site. So, not only can you tell just which leads opened your email newsletter and attended your webinar broadcast, but you can see whether they've registered on your site, or downloaded a demo of your product. Many other campaign management tools will send out email campaigns for you, but don't offer that kind of end-to-end user tracking.

So Eloqua is great at tracking unique user behavior.. but it's not very good at aggregate reporting and graphing. The process of making a chart is painfully slow, and you can't choose your time intervals-- you're pretty much limited to showing aggregate activity per day instead of per week or per month. I'm sorry, Eloqua folks; this makes finding trends from your data well nigh impossible.

Around the same time, we started implementing Google Analytics so that we could at least get a look at some aggregate trends. Google produces beautiful reports, but only for web page views, where Google's JavaScript code can be embedded and sent down to the user's browser. This means, on the surface, that you can't track downloads.

Or so I thought. But then I found something in the Google Analytics help docs which made me realize that you can track downloads. And with a little bit of creative thinking, I realized that you could use the same technique not only to track actual requested URLs, but contrived URLs that represented any data you wanted to track.