Recent Web Log Entries By Ben Nadel
Using Base64 Canvas Data In jQuery To Create ColdFusion Images
Posted: March 10, 2010 at 9:49 AM by Ben Nadel
Last week, I explored the HTML Canvas element for the first time. In that exploration, I created a "finger painting" demo for the iPhone that would post drawing commands to the server where the image would be re-created as a PNG in ColdFusion. That was a nice approach because it gave me some flexibility in how the ColdFusion image was created (u... read more »
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Translating Global jQuery Event Coordinates To A Local Context
Posted: March 9, 2010 at 9:31 AM by Ben Nadel
When you use jQuery to capture mouse events (mousedown, mouseup, click, etc.), the jQuery Event object contains the X and Y coordinates of the mouse position at the time the event was triggered. These coordinates, while somewhat different in each browser, have been standardized by jQuery to be available in the pageX and pageY properties . No matt... read more »
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The Boondock Saints: Back In The Theaters March 11th
Posted: March 8, 2010 at 10:11 AM by Ben Nadel
In honor of its ten-year anniversary, The Boondock Saints (the original) is going to be back in the movie theaters for one night on March 11th (this Thursday) as a Fathom Events screening. I love this movie and I never got the chance to see it on the big screen. The first time I ever saw it, I think I purchased it on a whim for $1.99 in a Virgin R... read more »
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jQuery Mouse Events: PageX/Y vs. ClientX/Y
Posted: March 8, 2010 at 9:19 AM by Ben Nadel
When I first starting playing with jQuery events, a lot of what I learned about the jQuery Event object was through trial and error. While I could be remembering incorrectly, I used to find that the jQuery documentation was good at describing the event handlers, but not so good at describing the event object; as such, while I knew that the jQuery ... read more »
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URL Rewriting And ColdFusion's WriteToBrowser Image Functionality (CFFileServlet)
Posted: March 5, 2010 at 9:38 AM by Ben Nadel
Yesterday, as I was experimenting with drawing on an HTML canvas element with jQuery , I was using ColdFusion to render temporary images to the browser. Specifically, I was using the CFImage tag's "WriteToBrowser" action to create a temporary PNG file to be served up by ColdFusion's CFFileServlet. This action creates a image file with the given t... read more »
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Drawing On The iPhone Canvas With jQuery And ColdFusion
Posted: March 5, 2010 at 8:44 AM by Ben Nadel
The HTML Canvas element is something that I've known about for a long time but never actually looked at until yesterday. The Canvas element is just what it sounds like - a surface on which we can programmatically render graphics and shapes. After seeing some really cool canvas-based demos floating around on Twitter, I decided that it was finally t... read more »
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FLEX On jQuery: Turning HTML Links Into Standard UI Elements
Posted: March 3, 2010 at 8:39 PM by Ben Nadel
In my first "FLEX on jQuery" blog post yesterday , I talked with Javier Julio about some of the similarities and differences between FLEX applications and rich jQuery applications. As we talked, one of the patterns that I began to see was the significant difference in the inherent power of "link" elements in the two different technologies. I sa... read more »
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FLEX On jQuery: The Relative Power Of Link Elements
Posted: March 3, 2010 at 10:17 AM by Ben Nadel
Mentally, I am still very much in the web application world of the traditional client-server request-response life cycle. I think in terms of page requests and view rendering; and, as my ability to code complex jQuery applications increases, I fear that my understanding of client-side architecture "best practices" is not keeping up. After a lot of... read more »
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Experimenting With jQuery's Queue() And Dequeue() Methods
Posted: March 2, 2010 at 9:10 AM by Ben Nadel
jQuery comes with a number of built-in animation methods like slideUp() and slideDown(). While these appear to be packaged in their own methods, many of them are powered internally by the animate() method. And while the animate() method handles many of the effects, a string of sequential animations is controlled internally by jQuery's queuing mech... read more »
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Using A State Machine To Parse Tokenized Data In ColdFusion
Posted: March 1, 2010 at 10:16 AM by Ben Nadel
I have always been fascinated by the concept of parsing. I know nothing about it, which is probably why it seems to mystical to me. I've taken stabs at the parsing game before, using various approaches to try and color-code my blog code samples. But, nothing has ever really seemed completely satisfactory. After reading Ray Camden's blog post on t... read more »
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Be Careful When Including Images In jQuery Auto-Suggest
Posted: February 26, 2010 at 10:20 AM by Ben Nadel
Yesterday at work, we ran into a very interesting problem involving a jQuery auto-suggest feature on one of our client sites. We had implemented auto-suggest on this particular site several times before and it had always proved to be very zippy and responsive. This time, however, the "suggest" page requests were taking 5, 6, sometimes 8 seconds to... read more »
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Ask Ben: Replacing A String That Is Not Inside Of Another String
Posted: February 25, 2010 at 9:42 AM by Ben Nadel
I can't remember where it was exactly (maybe Twitter), but the other day, someone asked me a question about replacing a string that was not contained within another string. It was something like, "I want to replace all apostrophes in a string. But, I don't want to do that if they are inside HTML comments." While this might seem like a simple quest... read more »
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Using Appropriate Status Codes With Each API Response
Posted: February 24, 2010 at 10:11 AM by Ben Nadel
For a long time, I have thought about API request failures as falling into just two distinct categories: failure to communicate (ie. the server was down) or bad data (ie. invalid parameters). Failures to communicate with the server were out of my hands; as such, there was nothing I could do with those from a server standpoint. Requests with bad da... read more »
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Executing A Recursive CFThread In ColdFusion 9
Posted: February 23, 2010 at 9:50 AM by Ben Nadel
Earlier this morning, I explored the fact that ColdFusion CFThread tag bodies are executed as function calls . While I didn't see any practical value to knowing this (yet), it did present a few more opportunities for exploration. Any time there is a function, there is an opportunity to play with one of computer science's greatest achievements: re... read more »
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ColdFusion CFThread Tag Body Executes As A Function Call
Posted: February 23, 2010 at 8:44 AM by Ben Nadel
A few years ago at CFUNITED, I was talking to Rupesh Kumar about the new CFThread features he built into ColdFusion 8. In the conversation (which may have been a presentation), Rupesh mentioned that the CFThread tag body actually executes as a function call. At the time, I didn't put much thought into that; but, with ColdFusion 9's new implicit ... read more »
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Previously Posted
Project HUGE: Hit A New Years Resolution - Deadlifts At 405lbs - Posted Feb 20, 2010
Using jQuery's Animate() Step Callback Function To Create Custom Animations - Posted Feb 19, 2010
ColdFusion's Application.cfc Session Events Are Not Session-Specific - Posted Feb 18, 2010
Traversal vs. Collection Filtering In jQuery - Posted Feb 17, 2010
Posting XML SOAP Requests With jQuery - Posted Feb 16, 2010
jQuery forEach() Experiment For Branch-Wise Implicit Iteration - Posted Feb 15, 2010
Selecting The Closest Parent On Multiple Nodes With The jQuery Plugin ClosestParents() - Posted Feb 15, 2010
jQuery 1.4 Reference Guide By Karl Swedberg And Jonathan Chaffer - Posted Feb 14, 2010
BenNadel.com Gets Its First Valentine! - Posted Feb 14, 2010
My DZone Interview With Dan Wilson: Creating Software Simulations Using Interface-Driven Architecture - Posted Feb 12, 2010
Explicitly Ending A ColdFusion Session - Posted Feb 12, 2010
Clearing The Session Scope Does Not End Your ColdFusion Session - Posted Feb 11, 2010
Making Sure Your ColdFusion Applications Are Uniquely Named - Posted Feb 9, 2010
Making Sure Scheduled Tasks Don't Overlap In ColdFusion - Posted Feb 9, 2010
How To Create GStrings In Javascript By Extending Core Data Types - Posted Feb 8, 2010
What Happens When A ColdFusion CFLock Timeout Is Exceeded Without Error? - Posted Feb 8, 2010
Programmatically Uploading Images To JING At ScreenCast.com Using ColdFusion - Posted Feb 5, 2010
Update: jQuery Photo Tagger Plugin For Flickr-Style Photo Tagging - Posted Feb 5, 2010
jQuery Photo Tagger Plugin For Flickr-Style Photo Tagging - Posted Feb 4, 2010
Wrapping The Window Object In A jQuery Wrapper - Posted Feb 2, 2010
Creating Flickr-Style Photo Tagging With jQuery - Posted Feb 2, 2010
Calling jQuery's Data() Method Without Arguments - Posted Feb 1, 2010
Is Simulating User-Input Events With jQuery Ever A Good Idea? - Posted Jan 30, 2010
Project HUGE: Deadlifts At 385lbs And Natural Hamstring Raises - Posted Jan 29, 2010
Converting An IP Address To An Integer Using MySQL (Thanks Julian Halliwell) - Posted Jan 29, 2010
Putting Your Geolocation iPhone Photos On A Google Map Using ColdFusion And jQuery - Posted Jan 28, 2010
Delaying ColdFusion Session Persistence Until User Logs In - Posted Jan 27, 2010
Converting IP Addresses To And From Integer Values With ColdFusion - Posted Jan 26, 2010
Script Tags, jQuery, And Html(), Text() And Contents() - Posted Jan 26, 2010
ColdFusion 9 CFScript Comments Handle Name-Spaces... And Just About Anything - Posted Jan 26, 2010
Using jQuery's SlideUp() and SlideDown() Methods With Bottom-Positioned Elements - Posted Jan 25, 2010
Java Matcher's QuoteReplacement() And Java 6 vs. Java 1.4.2 - Posted Jan 25, 2010
Project HUGE: Trying Barbell Front Box Squats For The First Time - Posted Jan 22, 2010
Creating An Image Zoom And Clip Effect With jQuery And ColdFusion - Posted Jan 22, 2010
Creating An Image Zoom And Clip Effect With jQuery - Posted Jan 21, 2010
Learning jQuery 1.4: Remove() vs. Detach() - Posted Jan 20, 2010
Creating UI Elements With Low-Coupling And Conditional Event Handling - Posted Jan 19, 2010
Maintaining ColdFusion Query Data Type Integrity Throughout The Serialization Life Cycle - Posted Jan 19, 2010
JSON Files As Temporary File Storage In ColdFusion Applications - Posted Jan 18, 2010
Project HUGE: Barbell Deadlifts - 365x5 With A Concentration On Form - Posted Jan 17, 2010
