July 2009 Web Log Entries
Learning ColdFusion 9: When Does An ORM-Enabled Object Get Persisted
Posted: July 31, 2009 at 6:53 PM by Ben Nadel
From what I have seen so far, the ColdFusion 9 ORM / Hibernate integration is very interesting. During my exploration of this feature, however, I ran into a persistence behavior that definitely confused me at first. From my initial read of the ORM documentation, I had thought that all matters of persistence were controlled by the EntitySave() meth... read more »
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Win A FREE Ticket To CFUNITED 2009
Posted: July 31, 2009 at 2:06 PM by Ben Nadel
The great people at Adobe have given me a free CFUNITED ticket to give away! If you don't know what CFUNITED is, it's a 4-Day ColdFusion / FLEX / AIR / Technology conference down near Washington, D.C.. This year, it's going to be located at the beautiful Lansdowne Resort in Lansdowne, Virginia. CFUNITED is one of the premiere ColdFusion conferen... read more »
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Learning ColdFusion 9: Refreshing And Rebuilding An ORM Application
Posted: July 31, 2009 at 9:53 AM by Ben Nadel
Disclaimer : I am learning about ColdFusion 9's new ORM features as I go - I am not an authority on this topic by any means. When you use the ORM features in ColdFusion 9, ColdFusion has to create a number of Hibernate configuration files and component mappings. These configurations are created when the application starts up (either running fo... read more »
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Learning ColdFusion 9: Bug Using Implicit Structs Within Nested Function Calls
Posted: July 30, 2009 at 1:40 PM by Ben Nadel
Last night, when I was playing around with ColdFusion 9's new Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) functionality , I think I found a compile-time bug. I say compile-time because the following code throws an error even if I put a CFAbort at the top: <!--- Load the girl object based on the name. ---> <cfset joanna = entityLoad( "Girl", { ... read more »
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Learning ColdFusion 9: Exploring Object-Relational Mapping (ORM)
Posted: July 30, 2009 at 10:31 AM by Ben Nadel
I am calling this post an "Exploration" because I am not an authority on ORM by any means; in fact, this post was my first usage at any ORM framework, built-in or otherwise. As such, please take this entire post with a grain of salt. I am sure there will be many points where I am misunderstanding key concepts or fail to explain what is going on pr... read more »
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Understanding Application And Session Timeouts In ColdFusion
Posted: July 29, 2009 at 5:02 PM by Ben Nadel
Earlier today, I blogged about ColdFusion 9's new ApplicationStop() method which stops the current application, forcing OnApplicationStart() to be called on the next page request. During my exploration of this new method, I found out that the given Application was reset independently of the Session; meaning, while the Application scope was wiped... read more »
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Learning ColdFusion 9: Resetting Applications With ApplicationStop()
Posted: July 29, 2009 at 2:16 PM by Ben Nadel
This morning, as I was starting to learn more about ColdFusion 9's new Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) functionality, I came across a new system function: ApplicationStop(). In the context of ORM, you can call ApplicationStop() to reset the application such that all of the ORM configuration files and settings will be rebuilt. Since these files are... read more »
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Ask Ben: Enforcing An SSL (HTTPS) Connection Based On Request
Posted: July 28, 2009 at 9:24 AM by Ben Nadel
Hey Ben!! I have a question for you that I really need help with. I have developed a website that didn't need to be encrypted. Now I was told that I had to incorporate SSL encryption. The problem is that user have the website http://yoursite.com bookmarked, and now when they come to the website they get a loading error on the website. What I need ... read more »
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The Regular Expression Cookbook By Steven Levithan And Jan Goyvaerts
Posted: July 27, 2009 at 9:35 AM by Ben Nadel
A few weeks ago, I was super excited to learn that regex ninja Steven Levithan coauthored the new O'Reilly book, Regular Expression Cookbook with Jan Goyvaerts. If the name Steve Levithan sounds familiar it's because Steve is a long time participant on this blog, often swooping in to demonstrate his crazy regular expression skills, pointing ou... read more »
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Creating Readable SQL Statements In AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime)
Posted: July 24, 2009 at 5:32 PM by Ben Nadel
Last night, Jason Dean was awesome enough to hold a Connect session with Andy Matthews , Todd Rafferty , and myself in which he demonstrated how to build an HTML and jQuery powered AIR application . It was an awesome presentation and really opened my eyes. Jason has gotten me totally excited about playing with AIR. One thing that I mentioned ... read more »
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Learning ColdFusion 9: CFScript Updates For Tag Operators
Posted: July 24, 2009 at 9:33 AM by Ben Nadel
ColdFusion 9 has made a number of upgrades to CFScript. Yesterday, I explored the CFScript-based updates in ColdFusion Components ; today, I wanted to take a quick look at the other CFScript operators that were added to mimic ColdFusion tag functionality. When it comes to these tag operators, we have two basic kinds: those that have content bodie... read more »
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Learning ColdFusion 9: CFScript Updates For ColdFusion Components
Posted: July 23, 2009 at 10:10 AM by Ben Nadel
I am not a huge fan of CFScript. I prefer to work with tags. I find them have a nicer layout and provide a cleaner interface for defining tag-level properties. But, ColdFusion 9 does have a large number of CFScript updates and a few people have asked me personally to demo these upgrades. The implementation on the CFScript updates in ColdFusion 9 a... read more »
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Learning ColdFusion 9: A Bug With File-Based Object Caching
Posted: July 22, 2009 at 8:58 AM by Ben Nadel
I found a weird bug in ColdFusion 9's new caching system. It seems that when you cache an object that is based on a file, if you delete the file while the object is still in the cache, the cache becomes corrupt. To demonstrate this, I have created a ColdFusion user defined function that simply grabs a reference to itself from the system cache (bas... read more »
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GetMetaData() Is Shared By All Instances Of A Given Class In ColdFusion
Posted: July 21, 2009 at 1:53 PM by Ben Nadel
This is just a minor note, but I found out the other day that the structure returned from ColdFusion's GetMetaData() method is not unique to the instance on which it was called. Rather, the structure seems to be shared among all instances of a given class (component definition). This means that if you update the Meta Data for a given CFC instance,... read more »
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Working With Inconsistent XML Structures In ColdFusion
Posted: July 21, 2009 at 7:58 AM by Ben Nadel
After my recent post on moving XML data into a database , several people have asked me how to best go about working with XML documents in ColdFusion that do not have a consistent structure. While this might sound like an odd scenario, when dealing with 3rd party XML APIs, it's actually quite common. For example, when getting shipping information ... read more »
