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Recent Blog Comments By Steve Bryant

• ColdFusion 10 - XmlSearch() And XmlTransform() Now Support XPath 2.0

  Posted on Feb 28, 2012 at 4:05 PM

  That is disappointing omission. Still, I guess some regular expression support is a major improvement over no regular expression support at all.... read more »

• ColdFusion 10 - XmlSearch() And XmlTransform() Now Support XPath 2.0

  Posted on Feb 28, 2012 at 9:59 AM

  It all looked good until you added the part about regular expression support. That really put it over the edge to greatness!... read more »

• Storing Your ColdFusion Scheduled Tasks In The Database

  Posted on Aug 7, 2011 at 10:43 PM

  I have separate tables for tasks and actions (each time any task gets run) and use variables to track things in process as well (an advantage of using a persistent-scoped CFC). This solves a lot of concurrency and error-trapping problems. It also allows for nice reporting on run times and e... read more »

• Storing Your ColdFusion Scheduled Tasks In The Database

  Posted on Aug 5, 2011 at 12:32 PM

  Ben, I do something pretty similar, actually with my Scheduler.cfc component. It doesn't run tasks in parallel, but does ensure that tasks can't be running more than once at the same time an provide pretty good information about exceptions and such. read more »

• Branching Logic vs. Guard Logic When It Comes To Function Control Flow

  Posted on May 17, 2011 at 1:00 PM

  Ben, Like Seb, I have used both styles - probably without quite enough thought going into it. I tend to prefer the "branching" style based on the philosophy that a method should have one and only one exit point. Then I will use the "guard" style only when the branc... read more »

• Aggregating XML Node Text In A ColdFusion XML Document

  Posted on May 6, 2011 at 3:14 PM

  This is really nice! I ran into this problem a while back and totally missed xmlNodes. I bet that would have made things much easier!... read more »

• Using "//" And ".//" Expressions In XPath XML Search Directives In ColdFusion

  Posted on Mar 10, 2011 at 11:33 AM

  That is excellent! I *just* ran into a need for that very syntax.... read more »

• Seven Languages In Seven Weeks: Haskell - Day 1

  Posted on Jan 27, 2011 at 2:56 PM

  Ben, I think Barney said you could use it to implement any language that is included in the JVM. I haven't tried it yet (really should make it a point to do that), though, so I am not sure I understood everything correctly.... read more »

• Seven Languages In Seven Weeks: Haskell - Day 1

  Posted on Jan 27, 2011 at 11:20 AM

  Darren, Absolutely! ColdFusion is great for general-purpose web development. As Ben alluded, the hard part is figuring out when and how to take advantage of other languages (as well as what we can learn from them and apply to ColdFusion or other languages). I certainly haven't s... read more »

• Seven Languages In Seven Weeks: Haskell - Day 1

  Posted on Jan 26, 2011 at 12:18 PM

  Darren, I love ColdFusion as much as the next guy. I think it is *the* best language for web development, but I bet for certain kinds of problems Haskell would be much easier and more concise. In fact, ColdFusion could really benefit from a few of the fundamental functions popular in... read more »

• Thoughts About XDOM For Easier ColdFusion XML Manipulation

  Posted on Nov 16, 2010 at 11:30 AM

  Wow! This looks really nice. I have definitely found a few area where ColdFusion doesn't make XML as nice as it could and it looks like you have really made some nice jumps on that. I have used you getValueList() in the past and really like it. As you mentioned, adding nodes to XML document... read more »

• What ColdFusion Teaches Us About The Ultimate "Roll Your Own" Solution

  Posted on Sep 8, 2010 at 11:03 AM

  Ben, I absolutely agree. One of the nice things about this strategy is that it allows you to change our your underlying libraries if you ever need to do so. ColdFusion, for example, has done this (though not completely transparently) by opening up the option to have CFSEARCH use Solr... read more »

• The Desire To Change Those We Care About

  Posted on Jun 14, 2010 at 3:01 PM

  I think sometimes people aren't changing to change those around them but rather trying to share something that brings them joy. For example, when my wife and I had been married for a while but not yet ready to have kids we would frequently encounter couples with kids who would urge us to ha... read more »

• Experimenting With The jQuery Template Markup Language (JTML)

  Posted on Apr 27, 2010 at 10:04 PM

  Very cool stuff! (I'm really just subscribing to get more updates on this conversation)... read more »

• Thoughts About Salaries And Raises As Motivated By Daniel Pink's Book, Drive

  Posted on Jan 11, 2010 at 5:00 PM

  It seems like some of this gets to how much you want to tie pay to performance. This could be viewed as a sliding scale. Static salaries are on one end of the scale (no merit increases) with work-based pay (or self-employment) at the other. Work-based pay could be pay per racket, or commiss... read more »

• Learning ColdFusion 9: Extending The Query.cfc Service Component

  Posted on Aug 20, 2009 at 1:22 PM

  David, I really like that idea as well. It would make Query.cfc nearly as easy to use as cfquery. Very nice!... read more »

• Learning ColdFusion 9: Extending The Query.cfc Service Component

  Posted on Aug 7, 2009 at 2:55 PM

  I'm a bit disappointed that Query.cfc is currently implemented in such a problematic way (though I share Justice's hope that they will fix it). On the other hand, I really like the ability to extend a built in service. I hadn't seen that before. That could be really handy.... read more »

• RESwitch / RECase ColdFusion Custom Tags For Regular Expression Switch Statements

  Posted on Nov 6, 2008 at 7:49 PM

  That is really nice! I have had a few cases where I wanted to use cfswitch/cfcase, but I needed to check regular expressions instead of strings. I never thought of building a custom tag for it though. I will definitely check this out next time I run into that situation.... read more »

• The Philosophy Of Undocumented ColdFusion Features

  Posted on May 16, 2008 at 11:50 AM

  I think it is easy to say "never do it", but it is also important to recognize that there may be edge cases where undocumented features are the only viable solution. It is important to encapsulate the use of undocumented functions and to wrap them in a try/catch that will return an informat... read more »

• The Philosophy Of Undocumented ColdFusion Features

  Posted on May 16, 2008 at 9:51 AM

  I think the old "encapsulate what changes" adage applies here. I would tend to avoid using undocumented features unless they confer a major advantage. As much as possible, I would recommend encapsulating their use so that you only need to change code in one place if the undocumented code no... read more »