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• May 09, 2008
• 14:50

  Object Oriented Data Validation And Error Message Translation

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  Yesterday, I discussed that as I am learning more and more about Object Oriented Programming (OOP) in ColdFusion, one of the biggest mental hurdles seems to be data validation. Well, data validation and the translation of data errors into user-friendly error messages. I talked about how the translation cannot be made in the Model because that would couple the Model too tightly to the rest of the application wh ... Read More »
• May 08, 2008
• 9:13

  More On Data Validation - Translating Error Messages

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  I am still trying to wrap my head around things like MVC (model-view-controller) and OOP (object oriented programming) and cf.Objective() has really brought that back into the spotlight. One of the largest road blocks in my journey to understanding it all is the processing of data validation and reporting errors. I gather that a smart bean will usually have some sort of Validate() method that probably takes so ... Read More »
• May 07, 2008
• 9:47

  CFDirectory Filtering Uses Pipe Character For Multiple Filters (Thanks Steve Withington)

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  After I just posted about how the CFDirectory tag can use the single-character wild card , "?", in its filtering, Steve Withington came in and demonstrated that you can also use the pipe character, "|", to use multiple filters in the same CFDirectory tag. After reading this, I went to the ColdFusion 8 docs but didn't see this listed or mention ... Read More »
• 9:23

  ColdFusion CFMailParam's New "Content" Attribute Is Awesome

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  As part of the ColdFusion 8.0.1 updater, the CFMailParam tag can now attach files to an email using the Content attribute. When using this, the CFMailParam takes a File attribute and the Content attribute. In this case, the File attribute provides the name of the file as it will appear in the mail attachments list, not the path of the file on the server. The content attribute can take any ColdFusion variable that can be converted to binary data. Like the ColdFusion CFContent tag, this conten ... Read More »
• 8:21

  CFDirectory Filtering Uses Single Character Wild Card

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  Minor tip here, but over the weekend, at cf.Objective() , I was watching a presentation (I think it was Mark Mandel ) when I saw that someone was using a ColdFusion CFDirectory filter that had the "?" wild card. I knew that CFDirectory filtering could use the multi-character "*" wild card, but I am pretty sure I didn't know that it could use the single- ... Read More »
• May 06, 2008
• 13:40

  Work At Edit.com - The Website Maintenance Experts

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  My friends at Edit.com are looking for three people to join their team. Recently, I have had a chance to talk with David Ries and it sounds like they are building some really awesome applications over there; elastic clouds, on-demand services, project management systems, remote communication. I am always impressed with Dave's vision and his architectural plans. If you have the chance to work with him, I highly recommend it. Lot to learn, and ... Read More »
• 8:39

  Soft References In ColdFusion

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  At cf.Objective() , Mark Mandel held a presentation on the caching mechanisms and algorithms he uses in his Transfer ORM project . In it, he talked about his use of Soft References. A soft reference, as opposed to a hard reference, is a reference to an object that does not get flagged as a "use" ... Read More »
• May 05, 2008
• 9:24

  cf.Objective() 2008: Walking Among Giants

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  As a child, I remember laying out on hot summer nights and staring up at the sky. I wasn't in a city then, so the stars, unobstructed, would spread out far beyond my periphery in infinite arrangements. The sky seemed so big to me then - so incomprehensibly vast; its endless expanse always made me feel small, but not in a negative way - not small and insignificant. It gave me this feeling in my stomach, a sort of uneasy desire. As a youth, I could only describe this feeling as lust or maybe e ... Read More »
• May 01, 2008
• 9:30

  Updated CFHttpSession.cfc With Spoofed Referer Can Log Into PayPal

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  Yesterday, Steve Stout brought it to my attention that my CFHttpSession.cfc ColdFusion component does not use any Referer spoofing. When I read that, I almost couldn't believe my eyes; I have spent a good amount of my time playing around with CFHttp and CFHttpParam and the fact that I forgot to put in referral spoofing blows my mind a little bit. So, this ... Read More »
• April 30, 2008
• 8:58

  New ColdFusion CFMailParam "Remove" Attribute Makes Deleting Attachments Simple

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  For anyone who has built a web page that has uploaded and sent files (such as sending resumes to the Human Resources department of a law firm), you probably know that one of the most frustrating things about sending mail from ColdFusion is that the mail doesn't get sent out immediately; it gets spooled. This means that your mail file sits in a directory until the mail service finds it and sends it out. Since sending mail is very much a "set it and forget it" function, the point of friction h ... Read More »
• April 29, 2008
• 9:59

  Creating A "Remember Me" Login System In ColdFusion

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  The other day, I was working on a login system that had a "Remember Me" checkbox where, when checked, the user would be automatically logged back into the system upon subsequent visits to the site. I have built systems like this many times before, but for some reasons, I was hitting a mental road block; I was having trouble wrapping my head around certain parts of it, I think because the login system I was working on at the time was a little unique. I tried searching Google, but didn't reall ... Read More »
• April 28, 2008
• 8:08

  Image Manipulation ColdFusion Wrapper Component

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  Back when Pete Freitag came to talk at the New York ColdFusion User Group , Peter Bell asked if there was a way to treat the ColdFusion image object as a more traditional object and call methods on it like Image.GetWidth() and Image.GetHeight(). Technically, you c ... Read More »
• April 25, 2008
• 16:00

  ClearCode Standards Project

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  The ClearCode Standards Project is the development standard that outlines the way in which I code all of my applications. I have talked about my methodology before and since then, it has continued to evolve and become more refined. In this blog post, I intend to keep the most up-to-date outline of the rules and the styles involved. I have chosen to do this as a blog post rather than putting it in my ColdFusion ... Read More »
• April 24, 2008
• 15:07

  Dynamically Evaluating Image Functions In ColdFusion 8

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  I was playing around with some ideas when I came across an odd behavior with ColdFusion's Evaluate() method. Now, let me start by saying that I hate the Evaluate() method with a passion and I cringe at the idea of using it; however, I was doing something that involved dynamic execution of built-in ColdFusion methods and Evaluate() is the only way I know of as to how to make that happen (without manually writing out all the use-cases). So anyway, I went to try to use a ColdFusion 8 ima ... Read More »
• 14:31

  Turning On Multiple Statements In ColdFusion 8 MySQL 4/5 Datasource

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  Lately, I have been doing a lot of work in ColdFusion 8 and MySQL 5. One of the things that I noticed immediately was that MySQL didn't seem to allow multiple statements within one CFQuery tag. I read that this is apparently done to prevent SQL injection attacks, which as a ColdFusion developer seems kind of silly. Anyway, it took just a little bit of digging to figure out how to turn this feature on. Based on a ... Read More »
• 9:18

  ColdFusion Image Manipulation Functions Return Nothing

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  I have been fooling around with some dynamic image method execution when something I already knew suddenly occurred to me in a different way - ColdFusion image manipulation functions return "Nothing". And, I don't mean that they simply don't return the resultant image object - I mean, just as the documentation states, they return "Nothing" - void. When I realized this, I started to look at all the other ColdFusion methods that don't echo back their primary argument and I realized that it is ... Read More »
• April 22, 2008
• 15:07

  Getting Excited For cf.Objective() 2008

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  cf.Objective() 2008 is almost upon us and I've been so busy with work and with the NYCFUG that I've hardly had time to express my excitement. This is my second ever ColdFusion technology conference, so naturally there is a lot of anticipation; but even more than that, I am really looking forward to the smaller venue. As much as I loved my time at CFUNITED and all it had to offer, I'v ... Read More »
• 8:35

  Content Is Not Allowed In Prolog - ColdFusion XML And The Byte-Order-Mark (BOM)

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  The other day, Dustin Chesterman asked me about an XML parsing error he was seeing. He was getting the "Content is not allowed in Prolog" XmlParse() error. I have blogged about this error before - it is an exception that is thrown when you try to parse XML that has data or white space prior to the encoding declaration or root node. This is often caused when ... Read More »
• April 21, 2008
• 8:48

  No More New Fonts May Be Applied In This Workbook

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  Matthew Abbott raised this issue to me a while back and I just haven't had enough time to look into it. Apparently, with my POI ColdFusion Custom Tags , when you have a Microsoft Excel workbook of any legitimate size, Microsoft Excel throws this error when you open the resultant file: No More New Fonts May Be Applied In This Workbook This goes to show you that when you are building fu ... Read More »
• April 18, 2008
• 8:39

  You Cannot Submit Non-Rendered Forms

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  The other night, at Rob Gonda's NYCFUG presentation , we were talking about jQuery and AJAX and I wondered if a non-rendered Form element could be submitted. By that, I mean a Form node that existed in memory but was not actually part of the rendered page's document object model (DOM). See this demo if you are not sure what I mean: <! ... Read More »
• April 17, 2008
• 14:35

  Writing AJAX Return Value Logic On The Server

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  Traditionally, when dealing with AJAX, I have only ever had the server return JSON data or formatted HTML data. Then, in the client, I would take that return value and update the DOM using explicit manipulation. However, last night at the New York ColdFusion User Group , Rob Gonda demonstrated a very interesting idea. I am sure many out there have seen this, but this was new to me (and I ... Read More »
• 9:15

  Rob Gonda Rocks AJAX At The New York City ColdFusion User Group

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  Yesterday, Rob Gonda flew up from Florida to give a presentation on AJAX in ColdFusion applications to the New York City ColdFusion User Group . It was an excellent presentation and one that was particularly useful to me since I am about to start architecting a rather large, AJAX-intensive application. Whil ... Read More »
• 8:36

  Update To MSSQL To MySQL Translation (II)

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  I have updated my MS SQL to MySQL translation post to include the following functions: Update a table using JOINs - MSSQL Delete from a table using JOINs - MSSQL Creating and populating table variables - MSSQL ... Read More »
• April 16, 2008
• 9:33

  Update To MSSQL To MySQL Translation

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  I have started building out my MS SQL to MySQL translation post . I have decided that I am going to tell the whole "story" in MS SQL 2005 before I even try to attempt any of it in MySQL. I feel like this will help me get it done faster - not having to stop all the time to figure out how this is done in MySQL at ever step of the journey. Here is what I have added: Drop Table If It Exists - MSS ... Read More »
• April 15, 2008
• 14:43

  Translate Microsoft SQL (MSSQL) To MySQL

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  This is going to be a post that I update from time to time and I just wanted to kick if off right now. For years, I have been working on Microsoft SQL Server and I have reached what I think is a descent level of competence in it. As of late, however, I have been doing a lot of work in MySQL. While MySQL is a good database server (from what I have heard), I am having trouble translating all of my MSSQL Server knowledge into MySQL scripts (ex. Declaring temporary tables). Below, I will compile ... Read More »
• 8:29

  A Reminder About Interfaces And The User Experience

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  Let's face it, we're programmers - we think about code - wonderful, beautiful, well-tabbed code. The biggest problem that we face is in our applications is that our target users are not programmers and they don't think about code at all. The only thing that they think about is what they can see and feel, which is of course, the user experience. Even when you are using something as powerful as Interface Driven Archi ... Read More »
• April 14, 2008
• 8:56

  Defaulting To The Numeric Keyboard On The iPhone

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  As I have been using my Dig Deep Fitness iPhone fitness application over the last few months, I have noticed a few things that need to be improved; one of the biggest points of friction is the fact that 98% of the text input in the application is numeric and yet, every time I click on an input field, I am presented with the iPhone's Alpha keyboard, which I then have switch over to the numeric keyboard. This adds like 50% more clicki ... Read More »
• April 11, 2008
• 17:25

  I'm Not Dead Yet - But Blogging Might Be Killing Me?

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  No worries, I'm not actually dying; but, I just read this funny / sad article over on the New York Times titled, " In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop ." It talks about the tremendous pressure that professional bloggers feel to pump out blog posts even milliseconds ahead of the competition in order to get the bigger traffic share and therefore the bigger ad revenue share. Now, I believe ... Read More »
• 8:49

  Exception-Driven Multi-Step Dependent Algorithms In ColdFusion

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  Yesterday, I was discussing multi-step algorithms in which each step depended on the successful completion of all of the steps before it. I had put some thoughts down about some sort of ColdFusion custom tag system that would allow you to chain these kinds of logical steps together. In the comments to my post, Bradley Moore suggested that I use ColdFusion exceptions to handle the flow of the algorithm. To be h ... Read More »
• April 10, 2008
• 9:09

  Thoughts On Chained And Dependent Algorithm Steps

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  Not all the time, but enough that it has pained me, I have had an algorithm that has a number of steps in which each step depends on the successful completion of the previous step. Now, I know what you are saying - doesn't every algorithm work that way? I guess, to some degree, yes; but, sometimes, it just feels more obvious. For example, I was working on a data import process yesterday that has the following steps: Upload Excel file Make sure it is upload file in an Excel ... Read More »
• April 09, 2008
• 9:39

  Happy Medium Between Generic Getters / Setters And Property Methods

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  Yesterday, I was reading over on Joe Rinehart's blog about his objections to generic Getter and Setter methods. I don't personally use them since I have not yet gotten too much into Object Oriented Programming (OOP), but I thought I would play around this morning with something that would be a happy medium between the two ends of the spectrum. One of the biggest problems wit ... Read More »
• April 08, 2008
• 8:53

  Compiling Several Linked Files Into One File

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  When I create my Javascript files and Style sheets, I like to break them up into logically cohesive files so that I don't end up editing a CSS files that is four thousand lines long. I will do things like break my CSS up into Content, Meta Content, and Structural files; not only does this allow me to find things quicker, it allows me to easily reuse subsections of my style sheets, for example, including just the content.css file into my XStandard rich text editor. The problem with this techn ... Read More »
• April 07, 2008
• 14:43

  Been Busy, Ready To Be Back

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  For the last month or so, I have been just working like a three headed ox to get out from under a pile of deadlines (I've never seen a three headed ox, but I have to imagine it would be an insanely beasty animal). As a result, I've hardly blogged at all. I feel bad about it, but there was nothing I could do - I was literally drained of all my energy. Anyway, I reached some very important milestones last week and the workload might become a bit more sane. I'm ready to get back on the blogging ... Read More »
• March 28, 2008
• 10:02

  Thoughts On Storing Duplicate / Calculated Data In The Database

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  The other day, I was talking to this girl, Franziska, and all I could think about was how insanely cute she was. Then, as I was walking home later that day, I kept thinking about how cute she was. As I was doing this, I started to think about database design (is it odd that hot girls and databases are easily swapped in my head??). And, it occurred to me that by thinking about how cute Franziska was when she was not right in front of me was really the equivalent of storing duplicate data in a ... Read More »
• March 27, 2008
• 12:56

  Ben Nadel's Easy Tips For Writing Better, More Optimized SQL

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  I was just reading over on Andrew Powell's ColdFusion blog about the problem that server-side developers have with writing SQL. I don't quite agree with what Andy was saying; I think since SQL is such an integral part of web development, all server-side developers should have at least a decent understanding of SQL. They don't need to be experts, but there are ... Read More »
• 9:11

  Pete Freitag At The New York ColdFusion User Group

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  Last night, Pete Freitag came all the way down to the New York ColdFusion User Group (www.nycfug.com) to give us a presentation on Image manipulation in ColdFusion 8. The presentation went quite nicely, and I will see if we can get some of the slides and code up on the NYCFUG site; but, almost more impressive was the fact that his wife, Christine, made the four and half hour journey ... Read More »
• March 25, 2008
• 9:02

  POI ColdFusion Custom Tags First Release

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  I have just posted up a fresh build of my POIUtility.cfc project . Now, the project contains more than just the POIUtility.cfc; it also contains all the ColdFusion custom tags and some additional CSS-based components that can be used to create Microsoft Excel files in ColdFusion. Here is the ColdFusion custom tag read me that I have included in the build: These ColdFusion custom tags allow you to create nativ ... Read More »
• March 24, 2008
• 9:24

  POI ColdFusion Custom Tags Almost There

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  Since I have been quiet for a while, I wanted to just drop a quick note that my POI ColdFusion custom tags (for Excel file creation) are coming along quite nicely. Currently, I can output sheets, rows, and cells with pretty good CSS control. I can format dates and numbers pretty well, although the data formatting needs a lot more exploration - I am not sure what the limitations are just yet. To see what ... Read More »
• March 20, 2008
• 8:00

  Minor CSSRule.cfc ColdFusion CSS Parser Update

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  As part of my ColdFusion custom tag solution for generating Microsoft Excel files , I am going to be using my CSSRule.cfc ColdFusion component to allow users to use CSS-like styling to format the Excel document. To make the CSSRule.cfc more useful, I have added the support of the Color property (not sure how I missed that one before) and I have added three new methods: AppendCSSRule( CSSRule ) Thi ... Read More »
• March 19, 2008
• 10:08

  Been Very Stressed Lately

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  You may have noticed that my blogging has been really scarce lately. I have been super stressed at work and racing for some deadlines that are coming up on me very soon. This stress is not only eating up my free time, it has eaten up my creativity. I can't seem to get the juices flowing knowing that I have so much to do. The whole thing has put a bit of a hamper on my mood. Hopefully, I can just muscle through this and get my work done. But, I have been getting some good stuff done. I ... Read More »
• 9:46

  Strange URL Hash Problem With CFLocation In IE6

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  A little while ago, it was pointed out to me that my Hayden Panettiere Free ColdFusion eCard system was not working in Internet Explorer 6. Because I am working on Windows Vista (and trying every day not to throw the computer out my window), I don't have ready access to IE6. However, since it was working in IE7 and FireFox, I have to admit, I sort of brushed this comment off and didn't pay it much head. However, ... Read More »
• March 13, 2008
• 9:18

  Initial Thoughts On POI Utility ColdFusion Custom Tag Output

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  My POIUtility.cfc ColdFusion component has been around for a while and has made reading and writing Excel files in my ColdFusion applications pretty easy. It has its limitations, but for simple reads and writes, it has really been good at getting the job done. For a long time, I have been wanting to upgrade the way it works, but have had trouble either making it a priority, finding the time, and/or wrapping my hea ... Read More »
• March 12, 2008
• 8:48

  Name vs. Variable In ColdFusion

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  There are a good number of tags in ColdFusion that return a value into a variable defined by one of the tag attributes. While you might not think about it, the attributes that define the return variable (excluding the Result attribute of things like CFHttp and CFFile) fall into one of two main categories: Variable Name Now, as you might know, I try to avoid using intellisense as much as possible. I definitely take pride in remembering as much of the ColdFusion ... Read More »
• March 11, 2008
• 11:57

  ColdFusion Kinky eCards Update

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  Just fixed a small bug in my ColdFusion Kinky eCards Hayden Panettiere demo application . In the OnSessionStart(), I was clearing the session data. However, I was throwing the baby out with the bath water, so to speak, and was actually deleting the CFID and CFTOKEN as well. I am not sure if this was causing any bugs, per say, but I would definitely consider this to be a bad practice. Now, the ... Read More »
• 8:28

  Ask Ben: Extending Application.cfc And OnRequestStart() With SUPER

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  Got one for ya... I'm extending application.cfc with ye ole' proxy.cfc trick. In root/Application.cfc I cfinclude a config.cfm file that has some sitewide variables in the request scope like upload path, dsn, root URL, etc... I do this in onRequestStart(). In my root/sub/Application.cfc that extends the root cfc, how can I get access to the request scope that the root cfc set up??? I must be doing something wrong... again: root/app.cfc sets request.ds in onre ... Read More »
• March 10, 2008
• 15:10

  Never Be Conflicted About Being Nice

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  I know that this is not a technical post, but I don't have much technical to say today so I thought I would drop this in here. If for no other reason, it is a post to remind myself of my own beliefs (and therefore to follow them more closely). I just wanted to say that you should never be conflicted about being nice to someone. I have definitely had moments in my life where I really wanted to do something nice for someone or say something complimentary to them and have been very hesitant to ... Read More »
• March 07, 2008
• 7:17

  Custom User Agents For ColdFusion Debugging

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  Yesterday, I was debugging a page on a live site. This is, of course, not the best practice, but let's face it, sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. The biggest problem with debugging on a live site is that any changes you make to a page can be seen by any other user that is concurrently using that page. To get around this as much as possible, I will do things like CFDump out a variable only if a certain key is in the URL. For example: <!--- Check for deb ... Read More »
• March 06, 2008
• 7:27

  Trouble With My Mail Server

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  Hey all, I just realized I have been having a lot of trouble with my mail server over the last week or so. I have been really busy so didn't notice that I was not getting emails from my site. Sorry if you get a rush of emails out of my spool all of a sudden. ... Read More »
• 6:00

  ColdFusion 8 Image Manipulation Web Service

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  The other day, I was talking to my friend and technology cohort, David Stamm , who was having a development environment issue. Basically, he was doing some work on a ColdFusion 7 box and needed to do some image manipulation. Having been on a ColdFusion 8 box for a while, I felt out of touch with the CF7 world and I didn't even know what to recommend. He ended up going with Rick Root's Image.cfc up on RIAForge.org; but, the whole thing g ... Read More »
• March 05, 2008
• 19:29

  Negative CSS Margins Are Not Cool

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  This is a bit of blanket statement, so clearly it is not going to be true all of the time; but, it is my very strong opinion that if you have any negative margins on an XHTML element, then the code is not cool. I know that every now and then I come out with these very black and white statements like this and get heat for it, but I just feel this so strongly in my gut. Plus, I have spent too much time filling in on projects where, time and time again, negative margins have been breaking layou ... Read More »
• March 04, 2008
• 14:37

  Kinky Calendar Leap Year Update

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  Just a quick update - Peter Bell pointed out to me that my ColdFusion Kinky Calendar system was breaking on my site. I took a quick look, and indeed it was. Oh No! So, I threw on my ColdFusion ninja suit and jumped into action. The problem was a little mysterious to debug, but I finally narrowed it down to a leap year problem. The leap year itself was not causi ... Read More »
• March 03, 2008
• 14:06

  Dig Deep Fitness And Unique Application Usability Testing

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  Over the last couple of days, I have taken Dig Deep Fitness, my iPhone fitness software application , and actually tried using it during real workouts. This was a very interesting experience - it's probably the first time that I have ever truly field-tested an application. In the past, I have tried to mimic what I thought an "end user" would do and I have given demos of software and web applications and I have ... Read More »
• 8:29

  CFHTTPSession.cfc For Multi-CFHttp Requests With Maintained Session

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  There was a chance that I was going to have to write a ColdFusion script that integrated with SalesForce.com. This script would have to login into a SalesForce.com, submit some report criteria, then download an Excel report file. I have done a lot of work with ColdFusion's CFHttp and CFHttpParam tags, so I wasn't too worries about the script; however, I felt that I could come up with a way to make this kind of work easier, not just for SalesForce.com, but for session-oriented CFHttp calls in ... Read More »
• February 29, 2008
• 8:10

  Dig Deep Fitness iPhone Fitness Application Beta

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  I have just released the Beta of Dig Deep Fitness, my iPhone fitness application that allows users to track their workouts over time:        Read More »
• February 27, 2008
• 10:49

  Odd MySql CFQueryParam Truncation Issue (Help)?

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  Can anyone help me out with this? I am used to using Microsoft SQL Server, which I love; recently, however, I have been working on some MySQL 5.0 databases and they seem to have some odd rules. Right now, I am getting a really strange truncation error when using CFQueryParam in a calculated column. Running this code: SELECT <cfqueryparam value="1234567890123456789012345678901234567890" cfsqltype="c ... Read More »
• 8:17

  Trimming An Image Canvas With ImageUtils.cfc ColdFusion Image Component

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  I'm not gonna bother posting the code here, since it's in the ImageUtils.cfc RIA Forge project , but I created two new methods for trimming a ColdFusion image canvas: TrimCanvas( Image, BackgroundColor [, Tolerance ] ) This will take a ColdFusion image object and, given the background color, it will reduce the size of the canvas to the smallest possible rectangle without hurting any of the primary image ... Read More »
• February 26, 2008
• 13:49

  CFModule Works With Non-CFM Files

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  The other day, I was recoding some work that involved ColdFusion files being called using CFModule. I had gotten it to the point where the new code was in place, but was breaking. I had the old code stored as a .BAK file. I wanted to test to see if the new code was breaking or if the old code would have broken also, but I didn't want to rename any files to make this test happen. Just for fun, not so much thinking it would work, I tried to use the .BAK file directly into the CFModule tag as s ... Read More »
• February 25, 2008
• 7:39

  ColdFusion Image Coordinates Are Zero-Based

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  This might not be news to anyone else, but I never actually thought about the coordinates used in ColdFusion image manipulation functions. I am so used to everything in ColdFusion being one-based that I just assumed that ColdFusion image manipulation would work the same way. Well, as I was working on updating the ImageUtils.cfc , I realized that I was way off base (thanks to OutOfBounds errors getting thrown left and right). As it ... Read More »
• February 22, 2008
• 7:54

  Send Hayden Panettiere eCards Using Kinky eCards ColdFusion eCard Application

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  Ever since I created the ColdFusion eCards section of my site, I have gotten periodical requests for the code. It's hard for me to give away portions of my site since the architecture is a bit scattered and highly coupled. However, over the last few days, I have created a very small, extremely light weight ColdFusion eCard application called Kinky eCards. ... Read More »
• February 21, 2008
• 7:53

  Reflecting Images With ImageUtils.cfc ColdFusion Image Component

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  I only have a few minutes before I have to do some real work, so I will keep this very brief. This morning, I added the ability to create an image reflection effect, very much like the one that was popularized by Apple and iTunes, and added it to the ImageUtils.cfc ColdFusion image manipulation component : ReflectImage( Image, Side [, BackgroundColor, Offset, Size, StartingAlpha ] ) Of the listed argume ... Read More »
• February 20, 2008
• 8:12

  CreateGradient() / DrawGradientRect() Added To ImageUtils.cfc

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  I have added two functions to the ImageUtils.cfc ColdFusion image manipulation component . Building on top of the previously added function, CalculateGradient() , I have now added a function, CreateGradient(), that will create a gradient rectangle on its own canvas and DrawGradientRect(), which will draw a gradient rectangle on top of an existing imag ... Read More »
• February 19, 2008
• 7:32

  Creating Colors Gradients With ImageUtils.cfc ColdFusion Component

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  This morning, I updated the ImageUtils.cfc image manipulation component for ColdFusion 8. I gave it the ability to create gradients; well, not really create them just yet, but rather to calculate them. Creating them in rectangles will probably come in the next update. Right now, you can use the CalculateGradient() method to find all the color steps (including the alpha channel) between a From color and a To color over a given numb ... Read More »
• February 18, 2008
• 7:20

  DreamWeaver CS3 Slows Me Down

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  Many of you know that I have had a torrid love affair with HomeSite for last several years. She's one lady that I just can't seem to tear myself away from. Perhaps she has ruined me for other editors? Not sure. I know that every time I want to move on with my life, I just can't seem to find anything better. For the last few weeks, I have been trying to use DreamWeaver CS3 on Windows Vista Home Edition and I have to say that it has added a lot of friction to my development process. Now, I am ... Read More »
• 6:27

  CFSaveContent And THISTAG.GeneratedContent Tip

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  Over the weekend, when I was working on my Dig Deep Fitness prototype , I thought of a neat little trick. I am sure that this has been done by many people, but it had never occurred to me. I was working with a ColdFusion custom tag in which I needed to replace the generated content of the tag. Normally, when I would do something of this nature, I would simply store the new content in a CFSaveContent tag buffer ... Read More »
• 6:00

  Getting RGBA Pixel Data From ColdFusion Images Using GetPixels()

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  This weekend, I added two more user defined functions to the ImageUtils.cfc ColdFusion component for image manipulation: GetPixel() GetPixels() GetPixels() takes a ColdFusion image and returns an array or arrays that contains a structure for each sampled pixel. These structures contain a Red, Green, Blue, Alpha, and Hex key for the Red, Green, Blue, and Alpha channels respectively and the Hex for the ... Read More »
• February 16, 2008
• 15:33

  Ray Camden At The New York ColdFusion User Group

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  This last week, Ray Camden came to talk at our New York ColdFusion User Group about parsing and creating RSS feeds in ColdFusion 8. Unfortunately, we had horrible weather (for the second month in a row) especially for someone coming to us from the Big Easy. Ray gave a great presentation, and if you want to take a look at his sample code, it's ... Read More »
• 14:52

  Dig Deep Fitness iPhone Fitness Application Prototype

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  Last weekend, I put down some initial thoughts and screen ideas for Dig Deep Fitness , my iPhone fitness application. This is basically just a way for me to combine my love of ColdFusion with my love of working out while simultaneously breaking into the mobile device world. Since last weekend, I have taken my rough ideas and fleshed them out into an XHTML and ColdFusion prototype which can be seen at ... Read More »
• February 14, 2008
• 8:26

  Happy Valentine's Day

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
          ... Read More »
• 7:18

  Cleaning High Ascii Values For Web Safeness In ColdFusion

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  On Tuesday, Ray Camden came to speak at the New York ColdFusion User Group about RSS feed parsing and creation. During the presentation, he talked about RSS breaking when ColdFusion hits a high ascii value that it doesn't recognize (and it just skips it or something, which will break the XML). This got me thinking about how to remove high ascii values from a string, or at least to ... Read More »
• February 13, 2008
• 7:25

  Creating A Tiled Image Background With TileImage()

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  I've added a new function, TileImage(), to Ray Camden 's and my ImageUtils.cfc . This new function will completely tile the given graphic onto the given ColdFusion image canvas. Think of this as a repeated background image on a web site or a background pattern on a FireWorks shape. The method looks like this: TileImage( Image, TileImage [, X [, Y ]] ) ... Read More »
• February 12, 2008
• 8:56

  Fusion Authority Quarterly Update - Volume II, Issue III

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  This weekend, I finished reading the latest issue of the Fusion Authority Quarterly Update (FAQu) . It was the "ColdFusion 8 Special Edition". And yet, ironically, the article that hit me hardest had nothing to with ColdFusion at all; it was Hal Helms' article on Javascript. Now, I know you might have noticed that I've been giving Hal a lot of press lately, but honestly, it's all just coincidental - there's no hidde ... Read More »
• February 11, 2008
• 14:29

  What Does It Mean To Be A CSS Class?

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  This last week, I started converting a prototype application into some really clean XHTML and CSS. As I was doing this, I kept finding it hard to choose the most appropriate CSS class names. As I started to get more frustrated, I was reminded of OOP guru, Hal Helms . In the past, both in presentations and in face-to-face conversation, Hal Helms was always talking about, "What does it mean to be an object?" This thought exercise helps one t ... Read More »
• 6:43

  EasyCaptcha() For Multi-Image CAPTCHA Creation

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  I was thinking of functions to add to the imageUtils.cfc ColdFusion image manipulation component , when I started to think about CAPTCHA. CAPTCHA is a cool thing, but one of the problems with it is that in order to fool bots, sometimes you have to make it unreadable even to humans. I wondered if the fact that it is a single image has anything to do with bot's and spider's ability to beat the CAPTCHA. To play around with this idea, ... Read More »
• 6:13

  GetTextDimensions() For Finding ColdFusion Image Text Dimensions

   » ‎ Ben Nadel ColdFusion And Web Development Feed @ BenNadel.com
  I have added a user defined function to the imageUtils.cfc ColdFusion image manipulation component . This function, GetTextDimensions(), takes a string and a font-properties struct and determin