Coder's Revolution - Java

JVM Args Don't Like Line Breaks

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 23:44:00 -0500

A brief hiatus today from from the PCI Compliance series to issue a quick public service announcement. I was installing my free copy of SeeFusion today that I netted in the recent give-away WebApper had. Since the target machine was CF7 on a OpenSuse Linux with the JVM upgraded to 1.4.2_11, it was a "manual" install. Pretty easy-- copy a few jar files and edit a few configs. The problem was, SeeFusion wasn't able to connect to my debugging port to capture stack traces and I couldn't figure out why. [More]

Taming The Header Output Of CFHTMLHead and CFAjaxProxy

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 22:14:00 -0500

Tags like CFHTMLHead, CFAjaxProxy, and CFAjaxImport don't output their content into the regular ColdFusion output buffer. Instead they put their contents into a special header buffer which is dumped into the beginning of the output right before the request is sent back to the client. But what if you want control over where their output goes? CFSaveContent doesn't work on these bad boys. And even worse, <cfcontent reset="yes"> doesn't get rid of their output. The other day I got bit when trying to return the HTML of a rendered view via a proxy in ColdBox as a JSON string. The JavaScript output of the CFAjaxProxy tag was being appended to the beginning of the response and causing the result to not be valid JSON. [More]

So, I Wrote My First "Hello World" Android App...

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 21:04:00 -0500

My friend John dreams 3 or 4 get-rich schemes every week. Most of them involve technology, and he generally tries to talk me into helping him with them. He can never be dissuaded from the belief that each of his brainstorms are nothing short of an entrepreneurial pot of gold. These revelations, of course, come despite the fact that he has virtually no programming experience and even less start-up capital. Most of his recent ideas have all been centered around the new Google Android phones and the ability to write apps for them. After listening to him babble about Android app development for several weeks straight, I decided to download the Android SDK and play around with it. [More]

ColdFusion's Object Instantiation Penalty: How Bad Is It?

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 06:58:00 -0500

There has been a lot of talk recently about design patterns aimed at circumventing the overhead ColdFusion imposes upon us when creating CFCs. I'm not sure who coined the term "Object Instantiation Penalty", but the first reference to it I can find in the CF community was over at the Dot Matrix blog. Everyone seems to agree that object creation in ColdFusion leaves something to be desired, but I haven't seen anyone really quantify the price yet. I decided some line charts were in order. [More]

Sun's Download Page For Legacy Versions of Java

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 16:42:00 -0500

I can never find this stupid page when I need it, so I am linking to it here so I won't lose it again. Use this when you want to download a specific JDK from Sun's site and don't want to wade through their confusing-as-heck "featured downloads" mess. http://java.sun.com/products/archive/

OO Design Patterns and IBO

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 16:29:00 -0500

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. [More]

Does OOP Encourage RBAR?

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 20:56:00 -0500

I've been staring at my computer monitor trying start this paragraph for about 10 minutes now, so I'm just going to start typing. I've been thinking about system design. Organization versus performance. Design patterns versus efficiency. We adopt some code without thought to its performance because we're talking about milliseconds, and the readability, organization, and structure gains our apps enjoy are well worth it. I'm not sure that is always the case though, and we don't notice it until too late. [More]

Confessions of a speed junky: How I made my code faster

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 01:33:00 -0500

The past couple of days I've been messing around with a couple functions, cleaning them up a bit to blog about them. One of them is for color-coding SQL and the other for highlighting differences in two strings. Both are pretty small, but very repetitive in what they do. Depending on the size of the text you are processing, performance varied. Sometimes the code inside was repeated hundreds of thousands of times given a large enough test. [More]

Put down the keyboard and step away from the computer

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 01:30:00 -0500

Research shows that driving while extremely tired renders the same results as driving drunk. Following that same line of though, is coding while sleep deprived the same as writing your code in a drunken stupor? [More]

No Cookie For You: Second Solution

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 01:06:00 -0500

I have a solution that I have gotten working locally to rid my ColdFusion logs of the annoying "Cannot create cookie" errors. For those of you just joining us, Teeps blogged it, Jochem explained it, I took a stab and it and failed, and now I'm back for round two. I apologize for blogging this so much lately, but once I get a good puzzle in my craw, I just can't let up until I've solved it. [More]

Cookie Reserved Names- Who's to blame?

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 21:35:00 -0500

Teeps started off the fun last month with this blog post about countless errors in his logs about not being able to set cookies. I get the errors too, and they usually look like this:

07/11 15:58:19 error Cannot create cookie: domain = .notingdetails.com
07/11 16:19:01 error Cannot create cookie: domain = .notingdetails.com
07/11 16:39:12 error Cannot create cookie: domain = .notingdetails.com
07/11 16:45:05 error Cannot create cookie: domain = .notingdetails.com

[More]

Java Servlet Filters Part 2: Removing Cookies

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 19:50:00 -0500

As promised, I have written a Java Servlet Filter to remove cookies from a request. If you don't know what a Servlet Filter is, read this blog. Let me start by saying while my filter does function like I wanted it to, it did NOT solve this problem. I'll blog on that next. UPDATE: Here are my findings Given that, I can't really think of a real-world use for this code, but I am always in favor of coding for the sake of learning. [More]

I've created my first Java Servlet Filter!

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 22:35:00 -0500

In the Java world, web requests are handled by servlets loaded within a servlet container. There is a servlet mapping which specifies a servlet class conforming to Sun's Servlet specification which has been part of the J2EE spec since version 2.2. When a request is sent to the servlet container, it is matched to the proper url pattern and passed to the appropriate servlet object via that objects service() method. [More]

Hi, I'm ColdFusion, and so am I. (Is CF Schizophrenic?)

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 16:18:00 -0500

Sometimes I wonder about ColdFusion. Mostly when it gets depressed and locks itself in the bathroom with a box of chocolates. Seriously though, the identity of CF can sometimes be illusive when you listen to what everybody wants all at once. ColdFusion is different than most languages and I think that's a good thing, but what pushes us to request the changes we want? Do we wish CF was easier to pick up for the beginner? Perhaps we want it to behave a bit more like our favorite scripting language for our benefit or to impress our friends. [More]

I think we have an anemic Domain Model

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 09:45:00 -0500

I have been pouring over the latest Fusion Authority Quarterly Update, and particularly liked Sean Cornfield's article "Beans and DAOs and Gateways, Oh My!" I am pretty familiar with the four application layers he describes, but have had difficulty at times reconciling all the diverse ways I see those implemented. (design patterns) I feel I have a good grasp on OOP, but most of my current application is still on a version of Fusebox 4 which was modified to the point of not being easily upgradeable. We have tried to do new development in MachII, but my exposure has been modest. [More]