Launched www.FurstPerson.com, Another ColdFusion Web Site

Posted At: January 12, 2009 8:25 PM

Posted By: Stephen Withington

Related Categories: Web Site Projects, ColdFusion

I'm proud to announce the launch of a new ColdFusion web site for FurstPerson. FurstPerson claims to "Drive Hiring Performance Improvement" with their "Call Center Hiring and Assessment Solutions."

The ultra-slick design was courtesy our "beloved" Jaci, who performed her magic using Adobe's Photoshop® and Illustrator®. Using Adobe® ColdFusion® as well as MS SQL, CSS and XHTML, I constructed the site from the designer's image files.

The site features the ability to "Gate" some dynamic content such as case studies, white papers and even video whereby a user may be required to "register" in order to view the material. To deliver streaming video, we partnered with the folks over at Brightcove. I was able to leverage some of their API's to deliver the video dynamically. The site has also been tightly integrated with Eloqua for lead generation as well as some statistical information.

I plan to write a few more posts down the road on how I handled some of the hurdles I faced while building the site, including the ability to allow the client to tie documents, blog/news posts and videos directly to specific products and services through an intuitive back-end administration area.

Congratulations Jeff and everyone else at FurstPerson. This truly was a challenging and rewarding project to be a part of.

Designer: Jaci M. | Developer: Stephen Withington

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Quick Review of "Fundamentals of Object-Oriented Design in UML"

Posted At: January 5, 2009 9:21 AM

Posted By: Stephen Withington

Related Categories: OO, ColdFusion

Before Christmas, I was looking around for some reading material to accompany me on my walk down the yellow brick road to "O-Oz" (yes, I am the one looking for a brain). It just so happened that Hal Helms had his web site redesigned right around the same time and I stumbled across his "Recommended Reading" page. One of the books on his list is "Fundamentals of Object-Oriented Design" by Meilir Page-Jones. Hal rated the "content" 5 out of 5 (best) and the "readability" 5 out of 5 as well. In addition, Hal's recommended audience is "Any developer who's working in Object Orientation." So, I figured, "How could I go wrong?"

After finishing the first 50 pages, only one word comes to mind ... Wow! Seriously. No, seriously. I've learned more about Object-Orientation (OO) in the first chapter of this book than all of the blog posts, columns and articles I've ever read on OO combined.

The writer uses an extremely easy-to-follow and easy-to-understand approach to drive home a solid basis for understanding OO. As most programmers know, OO is often subjective or "in the eye of the designer" so-to-speak. Yet, Meilir Page-Jones cuts right through that with examples that make those found in many other text books (think Java, ActionScript and many others) which attempt to cover OO, but fall significantly short when compared to this book.

The examples used by the author are written in a "non-specific-language" devised by the author himself. If you're wondering, it's actually a blend of four programming languages: C ++, Eiffel, Java and Smalltalk. Ultimately, I find this book and the code itself to be accessible to any programmer from any programming language.

This book is hard to put down and I look forward to the moments when I get to continue my journey through "O-Oz." This book probably won't end up on my bookshelf though … I've found a place on my desk so I can keep it closer to me.

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