Recent Web Log Entries By Ben Nadel
ColdFusion Supports HTTP Verbs PUT And DELETE (As Well As GET And POST)
Posted: February 3, 2012 at 10:23 AM by Ben Nadel
Over the weekend, I read an excellent book on building RESTful web services - the REST API Design Rulebook by Mark Masse . In the book, Masse describes how the various HTTP methods (also known as Verbs) are intended to be used to create, access, update, delete, and augment data within a RESTful web service API. As far as HTTP verbs go, I'm extrem... read more »
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Experimenting With GitHub Gist-Based Code Samples For My Blog
Posted: January 16, 2012 at 10:25 AM by Ben Nadel
Last week, I started looking around for a new color-coding solution for my blog's syntax highlighting. For the past couple of years, I've been using my own home-grown algorithm; which worked well for ColdFusion but, quite poorly for everything else. After looking at some of the options out there, I settling on trying to integrate GitHub's Gist hos... read more »
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Experimenting With A JavaScript Gateway To A Remote ColdFusion Persistence API
Posted: December 30, 2011 at 3:48 PM by Ben Nadel
Last week, I was really trying to dig into modular JavaScript application architecture and development using RequireJS . In that exploration, I had an application that had Views and Controllers, but no real sense of a Model. To continue the exploration of JavaScript modularity, I wanted to play around with something that included a Model - one wi... read more »
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How Client-Side Validation Is Changing The Shape Of Server-Side Validation
Posted: December 29, 2011 at 10:30 AM by Ben Nadel
It used to be (and often times, still is) that when a user submitted a form in a web application, the entire page would be submitted to the server where it would be validated. Then, the form would either be re-rendered with user-friendly error messages; or, the user would be forwarded on to a "success" page. With the explosive growth of JavaScript... read more »
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EmailYak.cfc - A ColdFusion Wrapper For The Email Yak API
Posted: December 14, 2011 at 2:02 PM by Ben Nadel
Last week, I started looking at the Email Yak API for creating bidirectional email communication between your web application and your users . In such a workflow, your users communicate with Email Yak using their native email client (GMail, Hotmail, Apple Mail, Yahoo! Mail, Outlook, etc.); your web application communicates with Email Yak using a ... read more »
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Creating An Image Thumbnail Service Using Email Yak Attachments And ColdFusion
Posted: December 9, 2011 at 9:28 AM by Ben Nadel
Yesterday, I started looking at the Email Yak SaaS (Software as a Service) platform for creating bidirectional email communication in web applications . I was really excited by the way email complexities were nicely abstracted behind a JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) API which allowed for seamless communication between a user's email client and... read more »
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Using Email Yak To Provide Bidirectional Email Communication In Your Web Applications
Posted: December 7, 2011 at 10:38 AM by Ben Nadel
Yesterday, I started looking at a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform called Email Yak . Email Yak provides your web application with an SMTP proxy and JSON API that allows you to create bidirectional email-based communication between your web application and your end users. You communicate with Email Yak using HTTP requests, web hooks, and JSO... read more »
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XML Posts Without A UTF-8 Encoding May Lead To 400 Bad Request Errors
Posted: November 28, 2011 at 9:27 AM by Ben Nadel
Last week, Ryan Jeffords and I spent a solid hour debugging some API interactions between ColdFusion and Recurly . The API requests required the posting of XML content using CFHTTP and CFHTTPParam . The API calls worked 99% of the time; however, every now and then, one would come back with a "400 Bad Request" status code response. After bangin... read more »
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Using jQuery's Pipe() Method To Chain Asynchronous Validation Requests
Posted: November 21, 2011 at 11:07 AM by Ben Nadel
The other day, I looked at using Stripe.com to accept PCI-compliant online payments without a merchant account . In that experiment, I performed a cross-domain AJAX request to validate the credit card (using Stripe.com's API) followed by a local AJAX request to validate the rest of the form data. To do this, I put the launch of the second AJAX re... read more »
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Accepting PCI-Compliant Payments Without A Merchant Account Using Stripe And ColdFusion
Posted: November 15, 2011 at 10:55 AM by Ben Nadel
This week, I started looking at simple solutions for collecting online payments without the hassle of obtaining a merchant account. I have a couple of personal projects in mind and I wanted to find a way to charge people a nominal amount of money with ease while adhering to proper PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliance standards. When I asked for... read more »
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Using java.util.Collections To Shuffle A ColdFusion Query Column Corrupts Column Values
Posted: November 8, 2011 at 10:08 AM by Ben Nadel
The other day, I wanted to see if I could use the java.util.Collections class to help shuffle the values in a ColdFusion query. As I've blogged about before, the Collections class presents a shuffle() method which can be used to randomly sort Java collections (ie. ColdFusion arrays) . And, since ColdFusion query objects represent columns as colle... read more »
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ColdFusion ORM: A Guide To Developing Applications Using ColdFusion ORM By John Whish
Posted: October 31, 2011 at 10:05 AM by Ben Nadel
Over the weekend, I finally got to read ColdFusion ORM: A Guide to Developing Applications Using ColdFusion ORM by John Whish . With the release of ColdFusion 9, Adobe has fully integrated Hibernate - the industry leader in Object Relational Mapping (ORM) - into the core language. With the release of the ColdFusion updater - 9.0.1 - a number of... read more »
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Getting Contact, Photos, And Social Media Information Using FullContact.com And An Email Address
Posted: October 12, 2011 at 5:54 PM by Ben Nadel
As the web becomes more socially-focused, it's becoming more important to give our software a social vibe. Often times, this can be accomplished by simply accenting the user interface with photos. Unfortunately, when it comes to users, the only substantial piece of information that we have [in the beginning] is the user's email address. Luckily, c... read more »
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Storing And Retrieving Global Dates And Times In The Database
Posted: September 26, 2011 at 10:34 AM by Ben Nadel
Over the last week, I've been diving deeply into the concept of global times and Daylight Saving Time (DST), exploring the Java Timezone and Calendar classes and seeing how date/time values can be translated around the globe . All of this was set off by my desire to be able to run scheduled tasks based on a given user's local timezone. In order... read more »
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Converting Dates Across Time Zones Using ColdFusion And Java
Posted: September 23, 2011 at 10:54 AM by Ben Nadel
This week has been a very immersive week in world clocks, time zones, and the absurdly inconsistent rules of Daylight Saving Time (DST). After several days of complete befuddlement, I was finally able to gain some understanding of how all this timezone logic fits together. Yesterday, I talked about using Java's java.util.TimeZone and java.util.Gre... read more »
