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A Look Into ColdFusion's Future: Centaur, Sully?, Link?

Posted by Brad Wood
Sep 17, 2008 22:39:00 UTC
Kristin Schofield released a long-overdue Evangelism Kit PDF on her blog today that is basically marketing information about ColdFusion aimed at the Executive level. I found this timeline from page 6 rather interesting. It shows Centaur being released in 2009, but then it goes on to show what I can only assume to be the next two releases of ColdFusion: "Sully", and "Link" in 2010 and 2011 respectively. (See picture) Most Notably, Link lists a "Pluggable Architecture". Hmmm...

I'm Gainfully Employed Again

Posted by Brad Wood
Sep 17, 2008 22:13:00 UTC
In a weird and monetarily lacking way, I enjoyed the extra free time lately after being laid off. I feel like I have finally gotten out a rut. After a month-long hiatus from full time employment I have accepted a position at a Kansas City company called National Seminars doing ColdFusion and SQL development. We hope to add in some Flex as well soon. My first day was last Friday.

Creating a post-commit hook for Subversion

Posted by Brad Wood
Sep 15, 2008 21:30:00 UTC
I am doing some work with Subversion now so I got a chance to play with some hook functionality. Unfortunately, 99.99993% of all information out there for Subversion seems to be directed towards Linux, but after an appropriate amount of head-banging I got it working. Our dev server has Subversion installed with a repository holding our code. Each developer has installed TortoiseSVN (which is a Windows GUI client for the server) and checked out the code for local development. Then, on the server we also checked out the trunk folder into our wwwroot for IIS. The problem was, ever time we committed code from our local machine and wanted to run it on the dev server, we needed to remote into the server to update the code checked out to the wwwroot folder.

Why can't we all just get along?

Posted by Brad Wood
Sep 14, 2008 12:53:00 UTC
Can anyone tell me why there is no widely adopted protocol for instant Messaging software? Every web browser and web server use HTTP. Want to transfer files with your favorite FTP client? No problem, they all use the same protocol. What about sending and receiving E-mails? There's always POP3 and SMTP. Telnet and SSH are the same story. Sure, there's some different flavors, but most all clients are interchangeable. Why then, must I sign up for AIM, Yahoo, Skype, ICQ, and MSN just to keep in touch with everybody? Trillian sure helps, but I still have to have all those accounts. Why? Why can't we all just get along?

Can you hack your own server?

Posted by Brad Wood
Sep 11, 2008 22:41:00 UTC
I am not just a programmer, but to some extent a sys admin. Because of that responsibility (and the fact I have had servers compromised before) I am always interested in security. I think to stop crackers; you've got to think like them. When was the last time you tried to hack into your own server? If you don't know what your vulnerabilities are, how can you close them?

OO Design Patterns and IBO

Posted by Brad Wood
Sep 10, 2008 23:29:00 UTC
If you missed it, Jeff Chastain put up a very interesting post over at Alagad's Blog. Also good was the "spirited" discussion that followed between Barney and Peter Bell. I don't know how I feel about all of it, but the entire thing is very fascinating.

ColdFusion, CFC Binding, Ajax Proxy and Updater 1

Posted by Brad Wood
Sep 10, 2008 09:05:00 UTC
This week I got a much belated chance to play with some of the CF8 Ajax features I've never gotten around to. I've had CF8 developer's edition on my home PC for a while, but never worked for a place that actually had CF8 in production so I didn't get to play much with the new stuff. I had a big show stopper though. Both my cfgrid bind attribute and my cfajaxproxy tag weren't working. The CFC's I wanted to bind to were web accessible, but there were in a series of subdirectories. ColdFusion, however, kept constructing Ajax code to look in the web root.

ColdFusion, JSON, and Booleans

Posted by Brad Wood
Sep 10, 2008 08:17:00 UTC
Last night I found myself wrestling with the behavior of ColdFusion's JSON serializing where the strings "yes" and "no" are converted to a Boolean and come out the other side as "true" and "false". This happens when variables are passed through SerializeJSON(), or a CFC is called with returnFormat="json". Nathan Mische pointed out not too long ago that 1 and 0 are NOT converted to Booleans, which is interesting. I have a feeling the logic goes something like this: If string can be converted to a number Treat it as a number Else if it can be converted to a Boolean Treat it as a Boolean Else Treat it as a string 1's and 0's probably get picked off early that way. As annoying as it is though, I'm not sure what the better solution would be. Unfortunately, in a loosely typed language the server has to make guesses for you that can be kind of un-forgiving when you translate them to a strictly typed language. In my case, I was passing back a result set to be bound to a cfgrid, so I didn't really have much control of how it displayed once it left the server. I needed it to come back from the server in the correct format. My solution was to add a space before or after each word such as "yes " and "no ". It's not quite optimal, but it works. The results were left as string and made it safely back to the browser. As far as a work-around from Adobe, I had originally thought of adding an additional setting called strictBooleanParsing or something, but what worked for one person would probably never work for someone else. In the end, it might have been best for them to ONLY accept "true" and "false" as Booleans. I don't think that would be too much to ask programmers to do. I mean, it's nice that you can be all loosey-goosey inside of ColdFusion with your data types, but I wouldn't expect that same kind of freedom when I want to convert my data to a less forgiving format. This might never be changed though given the backwards compatibility issue. There is probably code out there now that depends on "yes" and "no" turning Boolean. What would your solution be?

How to axe your transaction log

Posted by Brad Wood
Sep 06, 2008 00:36:00 UTC
If you are using MS SQL Server and ever want to just obliterate your transaction log, you can use the following SQL (where your database name is "foo"): BACKUP LOG foo WITH TRUNCATE_ONLY DBCC SHRINKFILE(foo_log,2) Don't ever do this to a database you care about like, say, production. I wanted this because I am screwing around creating rainbow tables of SHA-1 hashes. The Cartesian product of joining a table to itself on 1=1 is very handy for producing all possible combinations of a set of characters. Inserting a few million records can put a lot of crap in your transaction log though.

ColdFusion SQL Color Coder

Posted by Brad Wood
Sep 03, 2008 21:41:00 UTC
A while back while building a monitoring tool for running processes on SQL Server 2005 I encountered the desire to color code SQL in the same manner of MS Query Analyzer (Or Management Studio) for HTML output. I hit up the CF-Talk list and Google for an existing ColdFusion implementation but got crickets. Not being one to give up, I created my own.

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