On the project I am working on we have had an issue whereby many registrants misspell their email address, making some of the information we collect far less valuable since these users can't easily be contacted. Despite confirming their email in a second form element, one of the most common mistakes is a simple typo of the domain name and/or extension on their email (ex. yhoo.com or hotmal.com). While we can't fully prevent this from happening, we can try to help the user avoid this error and cut down on the garbage emails that make it into our system. To accomplish this, I have worked up a proof of concept using ColdFusion and jQuery to offer up autocomplete suggestions for common email domains as you type using Levenshtein distance to try to catch common misspellings.

One new project and four updates this week. I am not too much in the mood for funny quips this week as last Wednesday the wheels off my three day old car were stolen right in front of my home and I am still in the midst of trying to get everything resolved. At this point, I have spent more time on the phone with the shop or the insurance company or whatever than I did with my car.

Over the past week a lot has been said about the Railo open-source announcement. Most of the posts have been gushing about both Railo and how open-source can somehow cure whatever ills face the CFML community. Some posts have been less gushing but still highly supportive. Peter Bell has been discussing some of the reasoning behind his decision to join Railo in a series of thought-provoking posts. Sean has a good overview with some very compelling arguments from a more pragmatic perspective. However, at the risk of getting flamed, let me be the first blogger to express some concerns about the whole deal (at least the first that I have seen). Sean and Peter are great at stirring the pot, but in this case, the proverbial pot is already stirred and I am hoping to stir it a bit in the other direction.

Two new projects and two updates this week. This week included a lot of posts about Railo's recent open-source release which I didn't add here because, as always, this series focuses on projects built with CFML. Anyway, I hope to discuss the Railo announcement more in a future post (and possible CFArgument with Peter Bell). As all of you know I am a supporter of open-source in general but I do have some concerns/misgivings about what this means to the CFML community (and a belief that this is the cure-all for what ails CFML). Anyway, like I said, a post for another day.

Those of you who follow this blog know that I have spent much of my recent time in Flex. However, recently I have had to toy with jQuery (again) for a project. Hopefully this will be the first in a series of tutorial posts regarding jQuery - though there are a plethora of them already out there.

In this example I had a large form displayed and the cancel button would clear the form and return to a prior view. Since you could potentially change information and either forget or inadvertently click the cancel button, I thought it would be best to confirm when you cancel. Still, I don't want to confirm the cancel if you didn't actually change anything. In the end, I used jQuery to easily attach events to my entire form to indicate if you changed anything and jQuery UI to display a friendly warning dialog before proceeding with the cancel process.