Recent Web Log Entries By Ben Nadel

Five Months Without Hungarian Notation And I'm Loving It

Posted: November 19, 2009 at 6:58 PM by Ben Nadel

Tags: ColdFusion

About five months ago, I expressed a growing concern that my coding methodology at the time was forcing me to create contradictions within my naming conventions . As such, I decided to completely dump my pseudo Hungarian notation for a while and adopt a more traditional, headless-camel-case approach to see how it felt. That was back in June; now,... read more »

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What Request Data Does ColdFusion Builder Post To Extension Handlers?

Posted: November 19, 2009 at 2:12 PM by Ben Nadel

Tags: ColdFusion

Last night, I started playing around with ColdFusion Builder extensions, creating an extension that could encrypt and decrypt CFM and CFC files . The main reason ColdFusion Builder extensions are so attractive as a means to extend the Eclipse platform is that they are powered by actual ColdFusion files (our bread and butter). When you invoke a Co... read more »

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My First ColdFusion Builder Extension - Encrypting And Decrypting CFM / CFC Files

Posted: November 19, 2009 at 9:13 AM by Ben Nadel

Tags: ColdFusion

After watching Simon Free present on ColdFusion Builder Extensions at RIAUnleashed up in Boston, I felt inspired and wanted to come home and start playing around with my own little extensions (get your mind out of the gutter!). As a "hello world" type introduction to the ColdFusion Builder extension arena, I thought I would try and keep it as si... read more »

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Using Logical Operators To Perform Ternary Operations In Javascript

Posted: November 18, 2009 at 10:13 AM by Ben Nadel

Tags: Javascript / DHTML

Yesterday on Twitter, Cody Lindley pointed out that logical operators in Javascript (&& and ||) don't simply return True or False - they return specific operands used in the logical statement. While I have leveraged this concept in the past with statements like this: // Logical OR in assignment. var options = (options || defaultOptio... read more »

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Using CFParam To Define A Variable Number Of Arguments In ColdFusion (And What ColdFusion 9 Teaches Us)

Posted: November 17, 2009 at 9:05 AM by Ben Nadel

Tags: ColdFusion

Yesterday, I was watching an episode of " Flex and the City " (a female bodybuilding spoof on "Sex and the City") when I started to think about ColdFusion function definitions with a variable number of arguments. Most of the time, when we need to have a variable number of arguments in a method signature, we accomplish this by giving the subsequent... read more »

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Looping Over ColdFusion JSON Queries In jQuery

Posted: November 16, 2009 at 9:45 AM by Ben Nadel

Tags: ColdFusion, Javascript / DHTML

I've talked to people many times about how to loop over ColdFusion queries that have been returned from an AJAX call in JSON format. The serialized format of ColdFusion queries are a bit round-about since they are designed for memory optimization, not necessarily usability. As such, I often wind up telling people that I prefer to convert my querie... read more »

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Track Document-Level Clicks With jQuery MouseDown Events

Posted: November 12, 2009 at 9:25 AM by Ben Nadel

Tags: Javascript / DHTML

The other day, I dicussed jQuery's live() event method and why understanding the mechanics behind it was extremely important; the reason being that the live() event method depends completely on the ability for a given event type to bubble up through the DOM (Document Object Model) tree. That post got me thinking about event bubbling in general a... read more »

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Using EXSLT To Extend XSLT With Custom Functions In ColdFusion

Posted: November 11, 2009 at 10:26 AM by Ben Nadel

Tags: ColdFusion

The other day, I answered a question for a reader about filtering XML nodes against a value list using the XPath function, contains() . In the question, the reader mentioned the EXSLT library; I had not heard of this, so when researching the solution, I looked it up at www.exslt.org. As it turns out, there's a whole mechanism and existing library... read more »

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Tracking Google AdSense Clicks With jQuery And ColdFusion

Posted: November 10, 2009 at 9:36 AM by Ben Nadel

Tags: ColdFusion, Javascript / DHTML

While Google AdSense is in no way a driving force behind my blogging - I just love being a programmer - sometimes, it would be nice to know which pages on my site generated the most Google AdSense clicks. This might be something that I can find out from Google AdSense reporting or from Google Analytics; but, to be honest, I don't know all that m... read more »

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jQuery Live() Method And Event Bubbling

Posted: November 9, 2009 at 8:54 PM by Ben Nadel

Tags: Javascript / DHTML

Recently, there has been a lot of talk in the development community about jQuery's new live() event method. People are just in love with it. If you have not heard of jQuery's live() method, it's an event delegation mechanism that allows you to bind event handlers not just to all existing instances of a given node type, but also to any future insta... read more »

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Ask Ben: Selecting Node Attributes In XSLT Based On List Values In ColdFusion

Posted: November 9, 2009 at 10:02 AM by Ben Nadel

Tags: Ask Ben, ColdFusion

Ben, do you know how to check to see if a xml attribute is in a list? I'm looking at the contains() function, but I'm not sure of the correct syntax or if there is a better way, but I cant seem to get this to work. I don't know how to reference the value of the @system as the second argument of the contains. Can I used something like 'this' (minus... read more »

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How To UN-Unformat Your Code (Like A Pro)

Posted: November 6, 2009 at 4:50 PM by Ben Nadel

Tags: ColdFusion

After my previous post on how to quickly and easily take my style of formatting and strip it out of ColdFusion code , some people suggested that I make a function that goes back the other way (adding my style of formatting into ColdFusion code). While I love this concept, the problem is actually quite a bear! Removing formatting doesn't really re... read more »

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How To Unformat Your Code (Like A Pro)

Posted: November 6, 2009 at 10:04 AM by Ben Nadel

Tags: ColdFusion

At this past CFUNITED, big Dan Vega told me about a little project he wanted to show in the Demo Derby. The conversation went a little something like this (in meaning, not word for word): Ben, I love using your code; but I hate that it takes me 30 minutes to remove all of your freaking formatting. So, I'm trying to create a ColdFusion Builder (... read more »

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Matching Multi-Line Regular Expression Patterns In MULTILINE Mode (?m)

Posted: November 5, 2009 at 2:04 PM by Ben Nadel

Tags: ColdFusion

This morning, I was (and am still) having a problem getting some MULTILINE regular expression patterns to match properly. As such, I wanted to put a quick blog post together as a sanity check for myself. As I have blogged about before , when a Java regular expression is running in multiline mode (as denoted by the "?m" flag), the "^" and "$" expr... read more »

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Tracking Request Volume Based On IP Addresses In ColdFusion

Posted: November 4, 2009 at 2:44 PM by Ben Nadel

Tags: ColdFusion

This much less a "how to" post and much more just a " thinking out loud " post. I don't really know if I even like what I came up with; but, I figured I would put it out here in case it lead to some good conversations. In the wake of some spam comments on my site, I started to think about tracking the IP addresses of requests in ColdFusion in orde... read more »

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November 2009 Entries »

Previously Posted

IIS MOD-Rewrite: R6016 Not Enough Space For Thread Data - Posted Nov 3, 2009
Using IIS URL Rewriting And CGI.PATH_INFO With IIS MOD-Rewrite - Posted Nov 3, 2009
A Moment That Touched Me - The Fountainhead - Posted Nov 2, 2009
Using Regular Expressions In Javascript (A General Overview) - Posted Nov 2, 2009
Learning ColdFusion 9: Iterating Over Pseudo XML Node Wrappers With CFLoop - Posted Oct 31, 2009
Building A Fixed-Position Bottom Menu Bar (ala FaceBook) - Posted Oct 30, 2009
Using PushStack() In jQuery Plugins To Create New Collections - Posted Oct 29, 2009
Caching ColdFusion Component Methods Has Negligible Performance Improvements - Posted Oct 28, 2009
jQuery Powered Mine Sweeper Game - Posted Oct 27, 2009
My BFusion / BFLEX Keynote Address - Posted Oct 24, 2009
Using CSS Fixed Position Elements Across Browsers Without Javascript - Posted Oct 16, 2009
Using CSS Fixed Position Elements Across Browsers - Posted Oct 15, 2009
jQuery In Action By Bear Bibeault And Yehuda Katz - Posted Oct 14, 2009
THIS, Function Context, And Object Literals In Javascript - Posted Oct 13, 2009
jQuery Plugin: From - Filtering A Collection Based On Ancestors - Posted Oct 12, 2009
Building Single-Page Applications Using jQuery And ColdFusion With Ben Nadel (Video Presentation) - Posted Oct 9, 2009
Passing A Function To jQuery's Attr() Method For Implicit Iteration - Posted Oct 7, 2009
jQuery's Closest() Method Returns Only One Ancestor - Posted Oct 6, 2009
Viewing jQuery DOM Event Bindings With FireBug - Posted Oct 5, 2009
Adobe Officially Releases ColdFusion 9 - The Newest, Most Powerful ColdFusion Server (Saucy) - Posted Oct 5, 2009
jQuery's is() Method Checks For Any Matching Elements - Posted Oct 1, 2009
Using Javascript's IN Operator To Test For Object Property Existence - Posted Oct 1, 2009
Parsing Invalid HTML Into XML Using ColdFusion, Groovy, And TagSoup - Posted Sep 30, 2009
Thoroughly Document Your Use Of ColdFusion's CFHTMLHead Tag - Posted Sep 29, 2009
Default To The Numeric, Email, And URL Keyboards On The iPhone - Posted Sep 29, 2009
jQuery's Filter() Method Can Take A Callback Function For Advanced Filtering - Posted Sep 25, 2009
jQuery's Passes Itself As An Argument To The "Ready" Event Callback - Posted Sep 24, 2009
Ask Ben: Displaying A Blog Teaser (Showing The First N Words) - Posted Sep 23, 2009
Ask Ben: Parsing Nested Lists With A Single Delimiter In ColdFusion - Posted Sep 22, 2009
Ask Ben: Excluding Script Tag Content From The jQuery .text() Method - Posted Sep 22, 2009
Ask Ben: Creating ColdFusion Templates On The Fly - Posted Sep 21, 2009
Groovy Operator Overloading Does Not Work In The ColdFusion Context - Posted Sep 18, 2009
jQuery Enlightenment By Cody Lindley - Posted Sep 18, 2009
Instantiating Groovy Classes In The ColdFusion Context - Posted Sep 17, 2009
Returning An Array From jQuery's Map() Utility Function - Posted Sep 16, 2009
jQuery Plugin: Tracing Your Selector Paths - Posted Sep 15, 2009
String Data Type Gotcha When Using CFGroovy - Posted Sep 14, 2009
Ask Ben: Updating Columns In An Existing ColdFusion Query Object - Posted Sep 14, 2009
Running UPDATE And DELETE SQL Statements Using ColdFusion Query Of Queries - Posted Sep 12, 2009
Maintaining ColdFusion Sessions Across SMS Text Message Requests Without Cookies - Posted Sep 10, 2009

Recent Blog Comments
Nov 21, 2009 at 1:13 PM
My First ColdFusion Builder Extension - Encrypting And Decrypting CFM / CFC Files
@Ben, Because I am pedantic, I just want to make sure that everyone knows there is absolutely no encryption going on. There is only encoding and obfuscation. The cfencode tool only obfuscates your C ... read »
Nov 21, 2009 at 12:28 PM
Using ColdFusion Structures To Remove Duplicate List Values
@Jody I can't seem to get your code sample to work. If you are still having problems, try this code out and see if it gets you what you wanted. <!--- Comma delimited list with various duplicates ... read »
Nov 21, 2009 at 11:03 AM
Groovy Operator Overloading Does Not Work In The ColdFusion Context
Hi Ben, Thanks for this informative post. Now I am reading ur old posts too ... read »
Nov 21, 2009 at 10:56 AM
HostMySite.com Has The Best ColdFusion Hosting
@Mehul, Yes very nice people, however several downtimes per day which was not acceptable. Hence we had to move out. I am glad you are having good luck with them so far. ... read »
Nov 20, 2009 at 11:32 PM
Five Months Without Hungarian Notation And I'm Loving It
I've used headless camel case for years for not only ColdFusion variables, but also SQL tables and fields... pretty much everything involving code. I also subscribe to the "don't abbreviate and clea ... read »
Nov 20, 2009 at 11:00 PM
Five Months Without Hungarian Notation And I'm Loving It
@Marcel, Yeah, I always err on the side of longer but more readable variable names. As for the camel casing of CF methods and the headless camel casing of custom items, I get around this by always ... read »
Nov 20, 2009 at 10:56 PM
Five Months Without Hungarian Notation And I'm Loving It
I use the following and love it: my.namespace.MyComponents.functionMethodsOrUDF() CONSTANT_VALUES_OR_PROPERTIES One thing I always try is to CamelCaseBuiltInColdFusionFunctions() so others can tell ... read »