Recent Web Log Entries By Ben Nadel
Movies As A Religious Experience
Posted: May 14, 2012 at 10:51 AM by Ben Nadel
Over the weekend, I went to see The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. The story line took a little while to pick up momentum; but, once it sucked me in, it ended up being a truly delightful movie. Definitely one that I would recommend. While watching it, however, I started to think about the relationship between the body and the soul and how the reality... read more »
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Creating Service Objects And Value Objects In A Dependency Injection (DI) Framework
Posted: May 10, 2012 at 11:19 AM by Ben Nadel
For the last couple of months, I've been thinking a lot about my level of programming and my architectural understanding. Currently, I feel like I know enough to get most things "done." But, with the increasing complexity of my applications, especially those that require robust, modular client-side JavaScript, I'm filled with anxiety that I won't ... read more »
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Good APIs Are Transparent In Their Expectations And Dependencies
Posted: May 9, 2012 at 9:38 AM by Ben Nadel
Last week, I read Maintainable JavaScript by Nicholas Zakas . One of the chapters that really struck a chord in me was that on Event Handling in a JavaScript application. Event handling, and the responsibility of event handlers, is a topic that I have struggled with in the past . In his chapter, Zakas outlines two rules for proper event handling... read more »
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Object Calisthenics In JavaScript - My First Attempt
Posted: May 7, 2012 at 2:07 PM by Ben Nadel
Last week, I brought up the topic of Object Calisthenics which is an idea defined by Jeff Bay as an exercise to force people to think in "objects." Object Calisthenics imposes very strict rules that require you to jump through potentially unnecessary hoops. The point of the exercise, as I understand it, is not to use rules that apply in every si... read more »
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Object Calisthenics In JavaScript - An Introduction
Posted: May 4, 2012 at 10:30 AM by Ben Nadel
Several years ago, Brian Kotek introduced me to the concept of Object Calisthenics . Object Calisthenics is an exercise defined by Jeff Bay to help programmers think very critically about their application design choices in an object-oriented context. I attempted this exercise a long time ago; but, I was quickly flustered by my lack of understand... read more »
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Using ImagePunch() And ImageIntersect() With ColdFusion
Posted: May 2, 2012 at 10:36 AM by Ben Nadel
Earlier today, Evagoras Charalambous asked me about cropping a ColdFusion image on a diagonal. Cropping wasn't really what he wanted; but, since ColdFusion's list of native image functions doesn't have some advanced functionality, "cropping" is the terminology we're most comfortable with. What I believe Evagoras really wanted was a way to "punch... read more »
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Best Of ColdFusion 10 Contest Entry - HTML Email Utility
Posted: May 1, 2012 at 9:45 AM by Ben Nadel
As you know, Ray Camden has been hosting the latest "Best Of ColdFusion" contest for the public beta of ColdFusion 10. The point of the contest is to have fun, naturally, but also to showcase one or more of the features added in the latest release of the language. For my entry, I created a single-page application that will take an HTML page wi... read more »
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Maintainable JavaScript By Nicholas C. Zakas
Posted: April 30, 2012 at 10:58 AM by Ben Nadel
Over the weekend, I finished reading the early release edition of Maintainable JavaScript, Writing Readable Code by Nicholas Zakas . To be honest, I had no idea what this book was about before I purchased it; it was by Nicholas Zakas, and that's all I really needed to know before I made my decision. That said, this was book was not exactly what I... read more »
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Overcoming Asynchronous Anxiety By Testing JavaScript's Event Loop
Posted: April 27, 2012 at 9:48 AM by Ben Nadel
JavaScript runs on an event loop. I know this. I've tested this before . I understand race conditions and intervals. And yet, I still find myself harboring anxiety when it comes to asynchronous JavaScript actions in the browser. My latest unfounded and irrational fear comes from monitoring the location Hash of the browser. Specifically, keeping t... read more »
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Mouse vs. Keyboard - Determining Click Initiator Using A jQuery Custom Event
Posted: April 26, 2012 at 10:29 AM by Ben Nadel
When filling out online forms, I love to use my keyword as a means to both provide information as well as to navigate from form field to form field. This works great; but from time to time, an "itchy Tab finger" causes me to accidentally hit "Enter" on an inappropriate form element (such as a Cancel link). Falling victim to this problem the other ... read more »
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JavaScript Method Context With Circular Invocation In Conjunction With Call() Or Apply()
Posted: April 24, 2012 at 10:04 AM by Ben Nadel
In JavaScript, you can change part of the execution context using the call() and apply() methods . These allow you to explicitly define the binding of "this" at the time of method invocation. While I use these functions all the time, I realized recently that I was unsure what would happen if you created a circular invocation chain using an overri... read more »
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ColdFusion 10 - Looping Over Queries Using A For-In Loop In CFScript
Posted: April 19, 2012 at 9:35 AM by Ben Nadel
Yesterday, I campaigned against using ColdFusion 10's dynamic "query" attribute in the CFLoop tag . That said, I am really excited that CFScript now supports FOR-IN looping for queries. This creates complete uniformity in CFScript for looping over queries, arrays, and structs. And, it definitely makes looping over queries in CFScript much easier ... read more »
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ColdFusion 10 - Don't Use Dynamic Query Values In CFLoop
Posted: April 18, 2012 at 10:04 AM by Ben Nadel
As of ColdFusion 10, the "Query" attribute of the CFLoop tag can now be dynamic. That is, it can refer to a dynamic expression rather than a static name (string). At first, this seems like a really cool idea - one that you've probably even wanted over the years; but, don't do it. Using a dynamic query value forces you to, as far as I can tell, use... read more »
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Calculating CSS Selector Specificity Using ColdFusion
Posted: April 17, 2012 at 10:25 AM by Ben Nadel
Yesterday, I was working on merging some CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) rules into an HTML document, converting style sheets into inline "style" attributes. My default approach was to just inject the CSS rules in a top-down manner, which worked for the most part. But, when I was done, I realized that this methodology completely ignores the specifici... read more »
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ColdFusion 10 - Looping Over Function Arguments
Posted: April 16, 2012 at 9:57 AM by Ben Nadel
Since ColdFusion 9.0.1, CFScript has supported using a FOR-IN loop construct for both arrays and structures. In arrays, it loops over the indices; in structures, it loops over the keys. Typically, this is a clear-cut piece of functionality. But, when it comes to the Arguments collection, which exhibits both Array and Struct behavior, the FOR-IN lo... read more »
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Previously Posted
Using A Sandbox To Decouple ColdFusion Components In A Modular Application Architecture - Posted Apr 12, 2012
ColdFusion 10 - Selectively Exposing ColdFusion Component Behaviors - Part II - Posted Apr 12, 2012
ColdFusion 10 - Selectively Exposing ColdFusion Component Behaviors With Closures - Posted Apr 11, 2012
ColdFusion 10 - ColdFusion Query Of Queries vs. Functional Programming - Posted Apr 10, 2012
ColdFusion 10 - Using The Group Attribute With CFLoop To Group Query Rows - Posted Apr 9, 2012
Parsing, Traversing, And Mutating HTML With ColdFusion And jSoup - Posted Apr 6, 2012
Hashing Byte Arrays (Binary Data) With ColdFusion Before ColdFusion 10 - Posted Apr 2, 2012
ColdFusion 10 - Hashing Binary Data And Byte Arrays - Posted Mar 30, 2012
ColdFusion 10 - reEscape() vs. Java Pattern's Quote() Method - Posted Mar 29, 2012
ColdFusion 10 - Script vs. Tags And My Coding Methodology - Posted Mar 28, 2012
ColdFusion 10 - Creating A Simple Expression Evaluator - Posted Mar 23, 2012
ColdFusion 10 - Native WebSocket Filtering And Channel Listeners Are Mutually Exclusive - Posted Mar 22, 2012
ColdFusion 10 - Using WebSockets To Push A Message To A Target User - Posted Mar 20, 2012
ColdFusion 10 - Cross-Linking Standard Session Management To WebSocket Session Management - Posted Mar 16, 2012
ColdFusion 10 - WebSocket Authentication And The onWSAuthenticate() Event Handler - Posted Mar 13, 2012
ColdFusion 10 - Control Flow And Scopes During A WebSocket Request - Posted Mar 12, 2012
ColdFusion 10 - Creating A ColdFusion WebSocket AMD Module For Use With RequireJS - Posted Mar 9, 2012
ColdFusion 10 - Accessing The Call Stack With CallStackGet() - Posted Mar 6, 2012
ColdFusion 10 - An Augmented Virtual File System (VFS) - Posted Mar 5, 2012
ColdFusion 10 - Invoking ColdFusion Closures From Within A Java Context, Part II - Posted Mar 2, 2012
Node For Front-End Developers By Garann Means - Posted Mar 2, 2012
ColdFusion 10 - Invoking ColdFusion Closures From Within A Java Context - Posted Mar 1, 2012
ColdFusion 10 - Parsing Dirty HTML Into Valid XML Documents - Posted Feb 28, 2012
ColdFusion 10 - XmlSearch() And XmlTransform() Now Support XPath 2.0 - Posted Feb 28, 2012
ColdFusion 10 Beta - Generating Hash-Based Message Authentication Codes With Hmac() - Posted Feb 27, 2012
Hostek.com Offering Free ColdFusion 10 Beta Hosting - Posted Feb 24, 2012
ColdFusion 10 Beta - Miscellaneous Parsing Bugs And Oddities - Posted Feb 24, 2012
Join Me At InVision - We're Looking For Another ColdFusion / JavaScript Developer - Posted Feb 23, 2012
ColdFusion 10 Beta - Closures, Function Expressions, And Functional Programming - Posted Feb 23, 2012
ColdFusion 10 Beta - Closures And Components And The THIS Scope - Posted Feb 22, 2012
ColdFusion 10 Beta - Closures And Function Expressions And Threads - Posted Feb 21, 2012
ColdFusion 10 Beta - Critical Bug In Compiling Function Expressions / Closures - Posted Feb 20, 2012
ColdFusion 10 Beta - Closures And Function Expressions - Posted Feb 20, 2012
ColdFusion 10 Beta, Apache Tomcat, And Symbolic Links On Mac OSX - Posted Feb 19, 2012
Building Executable Scripts For The Mac OSX Command Line With Node.js - Posted Feb 14, 2012
Using jQuery.whenSync() For Asynchronous Form Validation And Processing - Posted Feb 13, 2012
Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) AJAX Requests Between jQuery And Node.js - Posted Feb 10, 2012
jQuery.whenSync() Plugin For Chaining Asynchronous Callbacks Using Deferred Objects - Posted Feb 6, 2012
ColdFusion Supports HTTP Verbs PUT And DELETE (As Well As GET And POST) - Posted Feb 3, 2012
REST API Design Rulebook By Mark Masse - Posted Feb 2, 2012
