I have recently read MFC Internals (ISBN 9780201407211) and it helped me greatly gain an intimate understanding of how MFC works and increased productivity about 100 fold. I was wondering now that I am into Qt, is there any book or documentation out there like this? I have been having a hard time finding straight-up documentation on Qt, it always seems to be beat-around=the-bush style of documentation (they tell you how to build the house, but not how to cut down the tree) ??
The best way is to try developing your own application. Just start from a basic application like calculator. Add a few widgets to it and code it as you go. For reference use "C++ gui programming with Qt4" mentioned by Zlatomir. I have recently designed a whole GUI using Qt. I drew its screenshots on Inkscape to get a prototype look and afterwards I started working on designer to fulfill each functionality. Then I implemented the code and I repeated the designing and coding steps. Also, the best help will be Qt Assistant - its sufficiently complete, no Internet required so save times and simple to use. Going my way, you will not only learn Qt in short interval after which you can go through the book to know what tips and tricks you might not know, but also it will be interesting so that you may not give up like many others who just fall midway through the reading part. Warning - Doing this way, you will also know about pitfalls/drawbacks of Qt and how to not go that way.
This is one of the links I found last night. I went through 2 pages and found it might make your life a bit easier - http://zetcode.com/gui/qt4/
I have not read the MFC book you mentioned, but the Qt framework i learned by reading from "C++ gui programming with Qt4" (the first edition is available as a free download) and "Foundation of Qt development" and also it's worth mentioning this documentation page, that contains links to the basic concepts of Qt framework.
A project I am working on makes extensive use of CFCHART. We have run into quite a few usage and performance issues with CFCHART, so I have been tasked to look at some third-party solutions to try out and recommend. Anybody have some reviews and recommendations they'd care to share?
Consider outputting the raw data and using JavaScript / Canvas to generate the charts on the fly. The load is the given to the client.
This makes it easier for screenreaders and people who like to save the data to access it as well.
Some JS charting libraries:
http://code.google.com/apis/chart/
http://omnipotent.net/jquery.sparkline/
http://code.google.com/p/flot/
http://codecanyon.net/item/graphup-jquery-plugin/108025?redirect_back=true&ref=1stwebdesigner&clickthrough_id=23945276
http://www.highcharts.com/
Not dependent on your server side technology (e.g. irrelevant to the fact that you're using CF), I have recently started playing around with HighCharts (http://www.highcharts.com/), and have been very impressed.
Bear in mind, it's not free for commercial use, but you didn't specify as to any such restrictions. Although their pricing seems pretty fair (see http://www.highcharts.com/license)
The Wijmo jQuery library has some nice charting widgets. http://wijmo.com/
We use FusionCharts. They have a comprehensive set of chart and widget types (eg sparklines) and have a very slick, professional finish.
ChartDirector is reasonable and is very advanced. It generates image-based graphs and we don't have to worry about whether or not different browsers support various advanced HTML features or Flash. You can download it, install and run it unlicensed and it will only add a little copyright in the bottom-right 20 pixels of the graph. (Licensing is inexpensive.) It comes with 239+ ColdFusion scripts so that you have plenty of sample code. Their support forums is very active and helpful.
http://www.advsofteng.com/cdcoldfusion.html
Check out the gallery. It has some very impressive samples. You can create just about anything.
http://www.advsofteng.com/gallery.html
You can try jqChart as well.
Thank you to everyone for these suggestions! This gives me a good list of applications to work with. Since there is no one "right" answer for a question like this I made sure to note each answer as useful.
We have used Infragistics controls in our applications for years. However, we have always had a hard time getting started using controls, because of the samples and documentation. For those of you that use Infragistics controls, what is the best way you have found to use the samples and documentation? For those of you that do not, what other control packages have you found that have good documentation and are easy to use?
I have to be honest say that we gave up on the Infragistics stuff a few years back.
We flirted with ComponentArt then settled on the TeleRik controls, mainly because of ease of use, flexibility and the documentation is pretty good.
Been working with Infragistics stuff for awhile now. Usually I check out the samples to see what the controls can do, then when I need something specific, if I can't easily find it perusing with the object browser, then I simply ask their support. They are quick to respond and know their stuff like expected.
You can also search their forums but I find it lacks content; maybe because most of their users prefer asking the support staff.
Not sure, if you are still using Infragistics, but the link to their online documentation is here
I've used ComponentArt and they have pretty decent api docs
I am seeing many many different use cases where I could use Markdown in apps that I write, both personal and professional. But from my research so far, I haven't been able to find many options for working with it in ColdFusion. I would certainly like to keep from reinventing the wheel by trying to implement it myself if someone else already has a project that I can use and contribute to, both because of time and not to duplicate efforts.
My preference would be to use an implementation in native coldfusion because that would be the easiest to tweak if it was necessary, but I am open to alternatives in other languages, as long as it is easy enough to implement and maintain. I have looked at the WMD editor, but it doesn't look like it is the whole solution. It would work for outputing the markup, but I would want to store that and then convert it to html as necessary for display.
Does anyone know of any other options?
Update: I do know of the CFX_markdown but I am not sure it is mature enough. If anyone out there has experience with it I would love to hear about it.
Update 2: I have added a bounty to this question. Not to say that the answer that has been given so far isn't a good one or isn't the best one, but I am wanting to see if anyone else has any other information about markdown with CF so we know all of the options.
Update 3: So offering the bounty didn't really work. I will go ahead and let it auto accept the only answer just in case we have any late answers. Thanks to everyone who has contributed.
The Markdown Wiki refers to a Java implementation called MarkdownJ. I've no idea how mature it is, and I know you'd prefer a native ColdFusion implementation, but if you're running ColdfusionMX then a Java module might be a good compromise.
We have a plugin created that does this in ColdFusion already:
http://coldbox.org/forgebox/view/Markdown
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What features should "Tomorrow's" wikis include? How might they incorporate Web 2.0 features like AJAX? What other features are they currently missing? What do you want to see from the next release of your favorite Wiki?
Edit: How might a Wiki be integrated into other products? What "neat uses" could wikis have?
Preview-as-you-type works very nicely indeed here on Stack Overflow. Many wikis don't do that.
Make it really easy to link between pages, eg. that, as you type, the wiki finds likely pages you may be referring to. That way you can make links without having to know the exact title of a target page, and bouncing on the shift key to WriteInCamelCase, or throwing in square brackets. Make it very easy to link to other websites outside the wiki, too (and by "easy" I do not mean like wikisisters, which, if I remember correctly, is like foowiki:ALinkLikeThis).
Similarly, if you can generate links within text automatically, you could, for example, have a mail system that wikifies your email. You create a wiki page, say, for Joel Spolsky, and references to Joel emails in your inbox become links to that page, which you can find by clicking "what links here". (This probably needs something along the lines of Bayesian filtering to prune the stray references to other Joels... your Bayesian Classifier learns that if the context is smart and getting things done, it's Spolsky. If it's flying Viking kittens, it's morely likely Joel Veich).
A variety of RSS feeds for tracking changes would nice, too. (Diffs, full text, changes on pages I've edited, ...)
Wikipedia has grown a fairly colossal categorisation system ("Fictional Cats", anyone?); laying a taxonomy over a wiki's flat namespace could provide another way for users to find their way around. Wikipedia's doing this a little, but in fairly limited ways so far: there are links to the relevant category lists, but you can't, for example, look for a composer called "Smith".
Similarly, wikis give you this big graph of interconnected nodes, of how closely your community sees the relevant concepts as being. Is that interesting? Is that useful? Does anyone who isn't google want to think about this stuff?
PS. If you believe Paul Graham's definition of Web 2.0 as "Democracy, Don't Maltreat Users, and Javascript works now", wikis are two thirds Web 2.0 already.
I am personally already tired of wikis. Wiki as a software is outdated, now it is about wiki as a feature (like my favorite new website, stack overflow).
The main advantage of community wiki — more editing — came into existence when we introduced "Suggested Edits".
With "Suggested Edits", anyone, even an anonymous user, can edit anything — so long as another experienced user reviews and approves their edit.
I'm in the process of choosing a wiki tool, and have looked at numerous packages over the past week. I'm sure there are dozens I haven't even heard of yet, probably good ones. But in general, here's my "beginner's mind" take on the problem.
Wiki markup should be abandoned. A wiki that is limited to wiki markup will only be useful to 'nix hacks and others who get excited about doing things the hard way and insisting that everybody else is stupid. I mean, Morse code is fine with me personally; I don't get what was wrong with a nice, clean dash-dot-dash. Or smoke signals, they were nice, except for the carbon footprint. But times change, and we have to change with them.
Real users (business users, customers, clients) want rich text editing. Period. And when a wiki tries to support both rich text and wiki markup, the results are not pretty. The model is confusing and (apparently) difficult to implement. The fckeditor extension at wikiwiki is a nightmare, for example. It's just not worth it.
Wikis need better access control. The idea that all content should be open to everyone is fine for an open, public, non-profit wiki like this one. But in the business world, that's not how it works. Restricting access is not evil, it's reality. Wiki tools need to do a much better job of providing access control: access to pages and groups of pages based on role or group membership, where groups can be formed by anyone on an ad hoc basis and users can belong to multiple groups and pages can be accessible to multiple groups, at the whim of the page's creator.
Those are the two things that I want, above all else, and I haven't found it in open source, at least not out of the box. Which, of course, is why open source is open source.
There's been some interesting work using wikis for testing and software development. EG, movement towards literate programming -- allowing pages to exist as both code and documentation that is compiled down into one or the other (or, I suppose, both simultaneously).
They have a regular session about this at the annual WikiSym conference.
I think one direction of Wikis is going from open ended collections of documents to an "everyone can edit but with more structure" applications like SO.
Another direction that I've seen is more direct integration with other project support tools, so project planning, issue management, and all that stuff.
Personally, I think the next big direction is going to be some sort of multimedia based Wiki, not just a Wiki where multimedia can be embedded in the text.
I really like MediaWiki. It's widely used and free/Free. The markup syntax is straightforward and allows you to do enough basic styling that you don't need to use custom HTML or to use a WYSIWYG. I assume by "sexy web 2.0" you mean Flash/AJAX, but I like MediaWiki because it works cleanly with basic HTML/Javascript (you don't have to wait for custom widgets to load, etc...).
What makes wikis reach their potential of usefulness is the community that develops around them more than the software itself. You need to find a niche where people are both passionate about (but not criminally insane about) the central topic and have enough technical prowess to log on to a website and edit some text.
"Wiki" is ultimately just a pattern:
Open editing by all/most visitors
Integrated revision tracking and rollback to reduce the cost of mistakes
Simple syntax for cross-linking between articles, and auto-creation of stub articles when referenced
That's not a perfect description, but it's a combination that isn't particularly magic. Successful wikis combine those things with a critical mass of people creating and maintaining content.
The next step, IMO, is less about web 2.0 shininess and more about the integration of better structural information. Adding any metadata beyond "this points to that" is an exercise in brute force hand-markup. Maybe microformats? Maybe the development of more structured knowledgebase software that uses wiki-ish editing UI but a smarter backend? I'm not sure, but I think better handling of the structured data is really the next wave.
Extensibility.
Check out DekiWiki, they are doing an excellent job with this.
DekiWiki extensions
The wiki-of-the-future will be completely editable online, concurrently by everyone. Check out EtherPad for a demo of the techonology.
For me, in terms of Enterprise style uses for a wiki, I have a couple of thoughts;
An effective way to keep and synchronise a central, web based wiki with multiple, offline, desktop style wiki's for people on the go
To move towards wiki as a function as opposed to wiki as a system, so we can integrate the wiki collaborative system into other things