ColdFusion Web Log Entries
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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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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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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ColdFusion's Application.cfc Session Events Are Not Session-Specific
Posted: February 18, 2010 at 10:54 AM by Ben Nadel
Lately, I've been talking a lot about ColdFusion session management. In particular, I've been exploring what works and what does not work in terms of explicitly ending a user's session . The ColdFusion application framework is incredibly dynamic and powerful, which is great; but, with its flexibility comes a need to really test the inherent beh... read more »
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Posting XML SOAP Requests With jQuery
Posted: February 16, 2010 at 10:10 AM by Ben Nadel
In the jQuery 1.4 Reference Guide by Karl Swedberg and Jonathan Chaffer , it is explained that the processData and contentType properties of a jQuery ajax() request can be adjusted to allow for XML document posts. Typically, AJAX data is serialized into a query string; but, if you set the processData property to false, the data property will be p... read more »
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BenNadel.com Gets Its First Valentine!
Posted: February 14, 2010 at 1:20 PM by Ben Nadel
Typically, on holidays like Valentine's Day, I like to make a fun graphic for my website. But today, someone beat me to it! This morning, I was very flattered and excited to wake up to the following email: To Ben, I just wanted to say how much I love your web site. The videos and tutorials you've posted about JQuery have been so helpful!! I have ... read more »
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My DZone Interview With Dan Wilson: Creating Software Simulations Using Interface-Driven Architecture
Posted: February 12, 2010 at 2:00 PM by Ben Nadel
When I was down at the CFinNC ColdFusion and FLEX conference , I had the wonderful opportunity to speak with Dan Wilson at the DZone offices. We got to talk about building rich internet applications (RIA) using design processes like Interface-Driven Architecture and web technologies like jQuery and ColdFusion. I had a lot of fun doing this and ... read more »
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Explicitly Ending A ColdFusion Session
Posted: February 12, 2010 at 9:52 AM by Ben Nadel
Yesterday's post on the misconceptions behind clearing the ColdFusion Session scope sparked some really great conversation in the comments. Not only did I learn a thing or two, it got me thinking about the ways in which we can actually end a user's ColdFusion session. As a follow-up post, I thought it would be good to explore a few different app... read more »
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Clearing The Session Scope Does Not End Your ColdFusion Session
Posted: February 11, 2010 at 10:10 AM by Ben Nadel
The ColdFusion application lifecycle can be a tricky beast to understand because it hinges more on memory space association and less so on what you might traditionally consider a "running" application. As such, the concept of actively "ending" or "killing" a ColdFusion application or user session is not something that lends itself well to ColdFusi... read more »
