Welcome to Sorcerer's Isle, a weblog covering a multitude of topics, ranging from programming to 3D graphics; photography to gadgets; tutorials to tinkering.
Within Sorcerer's Isle are three sub-blogs, which each focus on different aspects:
At Sorcerer's Tower you'll find programming and web dev; Midnight Isle covers photography and digital art; and with 100% Geek you'll find gadgets, gaming, technology, and more.
Articles may appear on just one of the weblogs, or across multiple, but every article posted will always appear on this one.
It's nearly a year on from my last Railo blog post so it is well overdue that I write another - just in case there is anyone still sitting on the fence, unsure if they should use Railo - or indeed, anyone who might be unaware of Railo's very existance!
So to start with, a quick summary of what Railo is:
Find out why Railo is the perfect choice for your next development project.
Version 0.9 of Beehive Forum, probably the greatest forum software there is, has recently been officially released.
Since the previous v0.8.4 there have been a variety of fixes and improvements, particularly to client-side caching and UTF-8. There is also now support for Google Analytics and for displaying optional Google Adsense adverts. For full information on what has changed, you can check the release notes.
Download Beehive Forum 0.9 from SourceForge
Also, Beehive is currently a Finalist in the SourceForge Community Choice Awards!
If you're a fan of Beehive and haven't yet voted, please vote for Beehive now:
There is a lot of competition, with many thousands of votes already having been cast, so please help spread the word to as many other Beehive users as you can, to help vote for Beehive to win, and gain the recognition it deserves!
I have released v0.7 of QueryParam Scanner, which introduces a variety of improvements over v0.6.1:
For more details and download information, visit the project page at Hybridchill.
The following release, v0.8 will have three key features:
The first pre-release version of the qpScanner Eclipse Plugin is now available.
This is the very first Eclipse plugin I have created. It was an interesting experience, and something that I will be writing up in a separate entry as soon as I can collect my thoughts.
It order to use the plugin, you must be using v0.7 or higher of qpScanner - if you do not yet have this, you can download the latest development version of qpScanner, which contains details of the Update Site to use. If for any reason you cannot use the regular Eclipse Update method, you can directly download the qpScanner Eclipse Plugin instead.
Just to be clear, both v0.7 of QueryParam Scanner and v0.1 of the qpScanner Eclipse Plugin are currently considered development releases, and are being made available so that they can be tested and any bugs that might exist can be found - if you are unwilling to use pre-release software you should wait until the official release.
If you do get the Eclipse Plugin, or even just qpScanner on its own, I welcome any and all feedback you might have - whether to report bugs you have found, request new features you would like, or simply to let me know that works with your local setup.
Please send feedback via email to qpscanner_project@hybridchill.com or alternatively add a comment below.
Related websites:
The latest development version of qpScanner is now in SVN at RIAForge.
It would be great if people could test it out and let me know of any issues they encounter.
As before, it is all self-contained, so it can be installed and run with minimal effort.
Note: As this is still the development version, you need to use the zip option at the bottom of the RIAForge page, not the "Download Project" link - the button will only give the old version.
When released, v0.7 will be a significant new version, so I want to give a quick discussion of the new features...
The highly anticapted next major version of Fusebox has finally been released to the website.
Fusebox 5.5 allows you to use the Fusebox applications without using XML, which should please many people.
Instead of fusebox.xml it checks conventional places for your circuits, and instead of circuit.xml it can either use CFCs, where each function is a fuseaction, or just a directory, where each file is a fuseaction.
It also brings support for dynamic do to both xml and non-xml configuration, which is a feature I've really wanted on a couple of occasions.
Get it while it's hot...
http://fusebox.org/go/fusebox-downloads/core-files
The newest version of Beehive Forum has been released today, with a large selection of new features, improvements, and fixes.
It is very much recommended that users of previous versions upgrade to the latest version without delay - upgrade paths are available from both 0.6.* and 0.7.* so there is no excuse!
For those not familiar with Beehive, it is a superb free and open-source discussion forum system which (in addition to its superior interface) exhibits several rare and unique features which make it a joy to use. For example: there is a relationship system which allows you to ignore others users, or their signatures, or give them amusing nicknames that only you see; each user also has an individiual word filter, with a regular expression option for very powerful filtering; there's a flexible polling system with groupable options, public/private ballot, fixed/changable votes; and many other cool things.
To learn more you can look at the Beehive website, or you can go straight to the SourceForge project page to download it now.
The final release of Railo 2.0 is now available for download from the re-vamped Railo website.
If you've already tried Railo, you'll probably be wanting to head straight to the download page.
If you want to know more about what Railo is and why you might be interested, read on...
Lightroom is Adobe's photo management software, which has been available as a public beta for a while now.
Today, Adobe announced that the complete version 1.0 is available, for an introductionary price of �146.88 for the boxed version, or �151.25 to download the 64MB file. (For US users, it's $199.00 - equivalent to �100 - for either method.)
If you've been using the beta, you should know that it will expire in a weeks time.
New additions to the beta include:
The latest version of Railo is now available as a public beta from the Railo customer center, and it brings with it an exciting new feature: Resources.
Resources are a brilliant feature that allows you to perform file actions on virtual filesystems such as in memory, ZIP archives, and FTP sites.