Thought Delimited

A number of folks have already posted about the availability of the new beta version of Dreamweaver (and Fireworks and Soundbooth) on their blogs, but none of the ones I read talked about any of the new features. Even though I use CFEclipse as my main IDE, some of the features in this new version of Dreamweaver sound promising.

I'll quick paraphrase some of the ones I personally found appealing:

• Integrated Subversion support.
• "Live View": you can view your page in a WebKit-powered browser window and make changes to it on the fly.
• "Related View": these days you usually have several pages working in conjunction that produce the final page view. All of those related files are now listed above the top of your document.
• "Code Navigator": shows you all of the code sources that affect the code you're currently working on. What isn't clear is whether that will work with ColdFusion code.

I'm currently working on an application that involves long-term storage of assessment data. Users submit records of their activities and assess their performance, and then reviewers look over those assessments and denote whether they agree or disagree with them. Each assessment database record is related to a reviewer through the unique reviewer id that is part of the assessment record, and I can use that relationship to retrieve the reviewer's name whenever I display the assessment record.

It's a standard example of table normalization. If the reviewer's name was stored within the assessment record itself, and the reviewer changed their name for some reason (marriage, divorce, mid-life crisis, etc.), the application would have to update the name in both the reviewer's record AND the assessment record. But by using the reviewer's id in the assessment record to establish a relationship between the assessment record and the reviewer record, the reviewer's name only needs to be recorded or updated once.

However, this project will entail keeping the assessment data for an undetermined number of years. With the data arrangement I just described, that means I would have to store the assessment records and all of the related reviewer records if I want to be able to keep showing the name of the reviewer when looking at older assessment records. That could result in keeping a lot of extra data about reviewers (addresses, e-mail addresses, logins, passwords, etc.) who are no longer associated with the program simply because we need to keep their name tied to the assessments.

I think this is one of those situations where it makes sense to repeat a little data. Recording the reviewer's name in the assessment records allows me to let the administrative users of the application delete reviewer user accounts without impacting historical data. It means a bit more work in keeping the reviewer's name the same in both records, but in the long run I think it's worth the effort.

"...I correctly write a recursive algorithm involving nested arrays on the first try."

What about you? When do you know you're in a coding groove such that it feels like you're coding by feel/intuition?

As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, the drag-and-drop functions provided by various JavaScript libraries (jQuery, YUI, etc.) won't work in the iPhone/iPod Touch Safari web browser because the dragging gesture is used for scrolling around the web page. That's a big problem for those of us who use drag-and-drop in our web applications to allow our users to reorder the items in a list, but I've come up with an alternative method for rearranging items using the jQuery JavaScript library that works on the iPhone/iPod browser as well as regular browsers. I call it the "Click-to-Click Move" method (CTCM).

Read more...

YouTube announced the release of a new set of APIs today that (from what I've read so far) allow you to use YouTube as a web service. You can use API calls to log into YouTube, upload videos, list videos, edit the metadata about videos, and more.

Flex is obviously well-positioned to make use of these new APIs, given that the videos themselves are done in Flash. I wonder what apps will come out of this new development?

Here's the link to the main YouTube API page:

http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/overview.html