Recent Web Log Entries By Ben Nadel
What ColdFusion Teaches Us About The Ultimate "Roll Your Own" Solution
Posted: September 8, 2010 at 10:14 AM by Ben Nadel
A while back, Rebecca Murphey started posting some interesting thoughts about what enterprise Javascript applications are and how they should be structured. One of her posts that really got me thinking was one titled, " On Rolling Your Own ". In that particular post (with reference to a few others), Rebecca questions the logistics of rolling you... read more »
Comments (8) | Post Comment | Ask Ben | Permalink
Experimenting With Offline Data Synchronization Using jQuery And ColdFusion
Posted: September 7, 2010 at 10:30 AM by Ben Nadel
Modern browsers are making it much easier to build web applications with offline capabilities. Between the application cache manifest and the SQLite databases , the web as a platform can now be used to deploy "native feeling" applications for mobile devices. As I've started to go down this road, the one area that has really remained a complete ... read more »
Comments (6) | Post Comment | Ask Ben | Permalink
Escaping Form Values - Understanding The ColdFusion htmlEditFormat() Life Cycle
Posted: September 3, 2010 at 3:53 PM by Ben Nadel
When users can interact with your website by submitting content, it opens your site up to potential harm. In the worst case scenario, this might provide malicious hackers with a way to execute Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks; in the best "bad" case scenario, it might simply mess up your site's layout and lead to a poor user experience. All of t... read more »
Comments (12) | Post Comment | Ask Ben | Permalink
Scope Behavior When Using CFThread Inside Of ColdFusion Components
Posted: September 2, 2010 at 11:10 AM by Ben Nadel
The other day, I was using CFThread to call a ColdFusion component method asynchronously. Typically, when I use CFThread, I define my CFThread tags in the controller. In this case, however, I was making the asynchronous call from within the context of the component itself. This works very well. But, but there are some minor variances in scope-beha... read more »
Comments (6) | Post Comment | Ask Ben | Permalink
Creating Base64-Encoded Data URLs For Images In ColdFusion
Posted: September 1, 2010 at 10:31 AM by Ben Nadel
Typically, when we want to include an image in a web page, we use an IMG tag with a SRC value that points to a file located on the server (ex. my_image.jpg). Modern browsers, however, allow us to embed images directly in the page markup as Base64-encoded "data urls." For caching and performance reasons, you generally wouldn't want to use data urls... read more »
Comments (15) | Post Comment | Ask Ben | Permalink
Using jQuery's Proxy() Method In Event Binding And Unbinding
Posted: August 31, 2010 at 10:56 AM by Ben Nadel
Yesterday, I explored the use of jQuery's native event management in the creation of object-oriented publication and subscription (pub/sub) functionality . In order to do this, I had to make use of jQuery's new proxy() method that allows function callbacks to be executed in the context of an object instance rather than a DOM node (which is typica... read more »
Comments (4) | Post Comment | Ask Ben | Permalink
Powering Publish And Subscribe Functionality With Native jQuery Event Management
Posted: August 30, 2010 at 9:50 AM by Ben Nadel
Let's face it - jQuery's native event management is straight-up awesome! Between multi-type binding, name-spaced events, proxied callbacks, and function-specific unbinding, there's not much that it can't do (and do well, for that matter). Without a doubt, it's better than any event management that I could write. As such, I wondered if I could use ... read more »
Comments (2) | Post Comment | Ask Ben | Permalink
Reflections On My Client-Side MVC View-Rendering Hackathon
Posted: August 29, 2010 at 1:15 PM by Ben Nadel
Yesterday, I spent about 10 straight hours exploring client-side MVC View-rendering in my first (of many) solo hackathons . I came up with a UI design, broke it out into HTML and CSS, and then coded a thick-client application on top of it; and, I did all of this under the pretense that the project would end up being a complete failure. As I expla... read more »
Comments (8) | Post Comment | Ask Ben | Permalink
Using jQuery To Bind And Trigger Event Handlers On Detached DOM Nodes
Posted: August 27, 2010 at 5:00 PM by Ben Nadel
Often times, we use jQuery to bind event handlers to DOM nodes that are children of the current document tree. When we do this, jQuery stores the event handlers in the given node's "events" collection . These bindings remain in place until they are explicitly unbound or until the DOM nodes are removed from the document ( NOTE : Using .detac... read more »
Comments (4) | Post Comment | Ask Ben | Permalink
Saturday Hackathon: Client-Side MVC - The Wrong Way
Posted: August 27, 2010 at 10:23 AM by Ben Nadel
Over the past week, I've heard a number of people talk about various hackathons, hack days, pitch days, and general all-night coding adventures. I've never attended one of these events and I have to say, hearing about them makes me more than a little bit jealous. I understand that a majority of the fun that people get out of these things is due to... read more »
Comments (4) | Post Comment | Ask Ben | Permalink
jQuery Selectors - The Firebug Plugin Inserts A Hidden DIV Element
Posted: August 27, 2010 at 9:04 AM by Ben Nadel
Last night, I was testing out someone's jQuery queue() and dequeue() code and I had a bug that was just driving me crazy; no matter how simple I made my test, my queued callbacks kept firing twice. To give you some insight into how simple my code was, take a look at this demo: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>Hi... read more »
Comments (14) | Post Comment | Ask Ben | Permalink
AJAX Requests Get And Set Cookies Like Any Other HTTP Request
Posted: August 25, 2010 at 11:03 AM by Ben Nadel
Sometimes, people ask me how to handle session management within an application that makes AJAX requests. A question like this can mean many different things; but often times, after a little discussion, I discover that this question is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what an AJAX request actually is. Because we are so used to the reques... read more »
Comments (6) | Post Comment | Ask Ben | Permalink
Overriding Internal ColdFusion Component Variables With Method Arguments
Posted: August 24, 2010 at 10:30 AM by Ben Nadel
One of the many cool things that Elliott Sprehn talked about in his CFUNITED 2010 presentation was the fact that ColdFusion component variables could be overridden using method arguments. After I saw this, I tried to experiment with this concept on my own. At first, I could not get it work. Elliott's presentations were all done in ColdFusion 9... read more »
Comments (15) | Post Comment | Ask Ben | Permalink
Using Dynamic Keys In ColdFusion 9's Implicit Struct Creation
Posted: August 23, 2010 at 9:54 AM by Ben Nadel
At CFUNITED 2010, I attended Elliott Sprehn 's presentation, " I Bet You Didn't Know You Could Do That With ColdFusion ." In his code samples, I saw something that I had never seen before - he was using quoted-keys in his ColdFusion implicit struct creation. In ColdFusion 8, this definitely causes a parsing error at compile time. But, it looks li... read more »
Comments (10) | Post Comment | Ask Ben | Permalink
THIS Is Just A Locally-Scoped Variable Inside Of ColdFusion User Defined Functions
Posted: August 20, 2010 at 10:14 AM by Ben Nadel
Yesterday, when I was coding my this.jarPaths application-specific URLClassLoader proof-of-concept , I stumbled upon a very interesting feature of ColdFusion. To make the proof-of-concept work, I had to take a user defined function (UDF) located within the Application.cfc component and store a reference to it in the global URL scope. However, eve... read more »
Comments (9) | Post Comment | Ask Ben | Permalink
Previously Posted
Using THIS.jarPaths To Create An Application-Specific URL Class Loader In ColdFusion - Posted Aug 19, 2010
Building A Twitter-Inspired RESTful API Architecture In ColdFusion - Posted Aug 18, 2010
Using Named Callback Functions In Javascript Methods - Posted Aug 16, 2010
Using Named Functions Within Self-Executing Function Blocks In Javascript - Posted Aug 16, 2010
The Girl Who Broke My Heart, And Made Me A Better Person - Posted Aug 15, 2010
Project HUGE: Deadlifting With WSF's Griptech Rubberized Lifting Straps - Posted Aug 14, 2010
Whom Not To Marry: Time-Tested Advice From A Higher Authority By Pat Connor - Posted Aug 13, 2010
What If ColdFusion's CFThread Tag Had An Interval Attribute? - Posted Aug 12, 2010
Bidirectional Data Exchange With ColdFusion's CFThread Tag - Posted Aug 11, 2010
Strange ColdFusion JRUN Stack Overflow Error - Posted Aug 11, 2010
Named Arguments In ColdFusion Depend On The Argument Collection, Not The CFArgument Tags - Posted Aug 11, 2010
ToJava() - A ColdFusion User Defined Function For Complex Java Casting - Posted Aug 10, 2010
Connecting Ruby To Apache On My MacBook Pro Using A VirtualHost - Posted Aug 9, 2010
Connecting Python To Apache On My MacBook Pro Using A VirtualHost - Posted Aug 9, 2010
From Windows To Mac - A Roller-Coaster Of Emotions - Posted Aug 5, 2010
Long Polling Experiment With jQuery And ColdFusion - Posted Aug 3, 2010
Creating A Simple ColdFusion Cache With Java Soft-References - Posted Aug 2, 2010
Experimenting With CSS-Based Animations And Transitions - Posted Jul 26, 2010
Authenticating Twilio Requests Using Basic Authentication, SSL, And ColdFusion - Posted Jul 23, 2010
Bodybuilder Americanus By Samuel Fussell - Posted Jul 22, 2010
Authenticating Twilio Request Signatures Using ColdFusion And HMAC-SHA1 Hashing - Posted Jul 22, 2010
Pusher.cfc - ColdFusion Component For Realtime Notification With HTML5 WebSockets - Posted Jul 21, 2010
Post-Instantiation CFC Method References Don't Show Up In CFDump In ColdFusion 9 - Posted Jul 20, 2010
The Five Love Languages: How To Express Heartfelt Commitment To Your Mate By Gary Chapman - Posted Jul 19, 2010
Cell Phones, SMS, Twilio, Pusher, ColdFusion, And Google Maps == Fun - Posted Jul 18, 2010
Sending SMS Text Messages From Twilio Using ColdFusion - Posted Jul 16, 2010
Creating A Custom Image Upload Service For Tweetie (Twitter For iPhone) Using ColdFusion - Posted Jul 15, 2010
Sending And Receiving SMS Text Messages With Twilio And ColdFusion - Posted Jul 14, 2010
Extending Java Objects With ColdFusion Components - Posted Jul 13, 2010
For Better: The Science Of A Good Marriage By Tara Parker-Pope - Posted Jul 12, 2010
OnApplicationEnd() And OnSessionEnd() Errors Don't Get Logged In ColdFusion - Posted Jul 8, 2010
Holding Hands, The Moment, And The Relationship - Posted Jul 6, 2010
ColdFusion 9's NEW Operator Can Use Dynamic Class Paths - Posted Jul 6, 2010
For Better: The Love Scale Quiz Designed By Dr. Hatkoff - Posted Jul 5, 2010
CreateObject() In ColdFusion 9 No Longer Requires The Type Parameter - Posted Jul 1, 2010
Very Simple Pusher And ColdFusion Powered Chat - Posted Jun 30, 2010
Pushing Base64-Encoded Images Over HTML5 WebSockets With Pusher And ColdFusion - Posted Jun 29, 2010
Using ColdFusion With Pusher - A Notification Service Powered By HTML5 WebSockets - Posted Jun 28, 2010
The ColdFusion Application Server Tagline Contest ($50 Amazon Gift Card) - Posted Jun 26, 2010
JRUN Servlet Error: coldfusion.runtime.CfJspPage.bindImportPath - Posted Jun 25, 2010
