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Recent Blog Comments By Roland Collins

• Using A Sandbox To Decouple ColdFusion Components In A Modular Application Architecture

  Posted on Apr 12, 2012 at 6:51 PM

  Ben, This is interesting as an exercise for playing with the new features, but personally, I'd argue against this practice (at least certain aspects of it). The method injection is actually a pretty neat feature, and runtime method injection is something that a lot of people use and s... read more »

• Performance Of LEFT OUTER JOIN Insert vs. INNER JOIN Delete Statement

  Posted on Aug 20, 2011 at 3:23 PM

  Ben - I'd be curious to see an EXPLAIN on the two different queries. It seems like an indexing issue.... read more »

• Using MySQL's TO_DAYS() Function To Group Same-Day Events

  Posted on Jul 12, 2011 at 5:11 PM

  Also, if anyone's curious, here's likely why the 0 date is 12-30-1899 in CF. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3963617/why-is-1899-12-30... read more »

• Using MySQL's TO_DAYS() Function To Group Same-Day Events

  Posted on Jul 12, 2011 at 5:00 PM

  @Dan That's also a string sort/group vs an integer sort/group if you use that method though (10 byte vs 4 byte). If you're dealing with a decent sized record set, as time-series data tends to be - you'll want them as integers for sorting and grouping, or heavens-forbid comparison. Th... read more »

• Using MySQL's TO_DAYS() Function To Group Same-Day Events

  Posted on Jul 12, 2011 at 1:26 PM

  FYI, here's the MSSQL version if you are working with DATETIME date: FLOOR(CONVERT(FLOAT, dateCreated)) If you haven't modified the default starting datetime in the server settings, you can also do this: SELECT DATEDIFF(d, '1/1/1900', dateCreated) If you're working with DA... read more »

• Printing To The Primary Output Stream From Within A ColdFusion CFThread Tag

  Posted on Jan 3, 2011 at 1:38 PM

  I'm not sure if that OutputStream is thread-safe or not (and I can't find any confirmation via my Google-foo). You may need some locking or syncrhonization around the print() calls. I wonder if you could break it by just spamming a large number of print calls from 2 threads. Again, I... read more »

• Ask Ben: Converting A Parent-Child Data Table Into A Nested XML Document

  Posted on Oct 29, 2010 at 1:15 PM

  Just in case anyone was curious, here's the SQL CTE method of recursion. From here, it's just a straight loop over the query to generate xml. CREATE TABLE #tree (id INT, parentID INT, name VARCHAR(50)) -- Create test data INSERT #tree (id, parentID, name) VALUES (1, NULL, '... read more »

• Experimenting With Multiple Class Inheritance In Javascript

  Posted on Oct 28, 2010 at 1:03 AM

  @Ben, I agree that JavaScript in general (and CF, for that matter) does not lend itself to type checking. But there is one giant elephant in the room that you need to be aware of if you're going to break the type checking facilities in JS - validation. At some point in your tool chai... read more »

• Experimenting With Multiple Class Inheritance In Javascript

  Posted on Oct 21, 2010 at 3:33 PM

  Ben, just an FYI, there is actually a name for the problem you describe: the Diamond Problem. Wikipedia has a pretty decent short list of the dirrefent ways that other langauges address the issue. An interesting and quick read. read more »

• The Integer Division Operator In ColdFusion

  Posted on Oct 12, 2010 at 12:56 PM

  @Ben It's been there since at least version 2.0 (the first version I used). Like some of the other commenters, I discovered it accidentally while working on my first CF app :)... read more »

• Communicating With The Client Whilst Inside A ColdFusion Custom Tag

  Posted on Sep 30, 2010 at 6:14 PM

  @Ben - sorry for the confusion - I didn't mean CF's built-in whitespace management. I meant any post-processing done by the web server or a load balancer, such as compression or whitespace management.... read more »

• Communicating With The Client Whilst Inside A ColdFusion Custom Tag

  Posted on Sep 28, 2010 at 1:13 PM

  I have to agree with Dan here - AJAX updates are the way to go. In particular, because whitespace management and content compression break cfflush.... read more »

• Delaying ColdFusion Session Persistence Until User Logs In

  Posted on Jan 27, 2010 at 5:08 PM

  I guess I mention it becuase of the way that I personally use onSessionStart. In my world, onSessionStart is where I do all of the session setup, but only after a user has been authenticated. If the user isn't authenticated, onSessionStart just gets "skipped" effectively (and we set the session... read more »

• Delaying ColdFusion Session Persistence Until User Logs In

  Posted on Jan 27, 2010 at 4:31 PM

  I like the approach, but you need to be conscious of the security ramifications. As it stands, someone could easily just add a persistSession cookie to their HTTP request and force the onSessionStartDelayed to execute. In order to secure it, you should have some sort of validation routine.... read more »

• Adobe Officially Releases ColdFusion 9 - The Newest, Most Powerful ColdFusion Server (Saucy)

  Posted on Oct 5, 2009 at 4:01 PM

  It's been mentioned elsewhere, but in case people didn't see it, the licensing model is much different for CF9 now too - it's a TON cheaper to deploy. A single license now grants you the rights to deploy a production, staging, backup, and development server. An Enterprise license lets you deplo... read more »

• Groovy Operator Overloading Does Not Work In The ColdFusion Context

  Posted on Sep 18, 2009 at 1:57 PM

  Slightly off-topic, but the operator overloading stories are some of my favorites at thedailywtf.com :) Definitely worth reading if you have some free time.... read more »

• Learning ColdFusion 9: Resetting Applications With ApplicationStop()

  Posted on Jul 29, 2009 at 3:54 PM

  Have you tried setting a reference to an app-scoped value in your session, and seeing what happens to it using your reset two different methods? In application.cfc: onApplicationStart() cfset application.teststruct = StructNew() cfset application.teststruct.initialized = Now... read more »

• Learning ColdFusion 9: CFScript Updates For ColdFusion Components

  Posted on Jul 23, 2009 at 12:10 PM

  @Sean, I'm glad you pointed that out. I'm one of those people that feels very strongly that comments shouldn't be able to affect the meaning of your code, and until you said that, I thought that it was going to be our only option in CF9 (I'm only half way through the docs :) The most frus... read more »

• Adobe Launches ColdFusion 9 And Bolt Public Betas

  Posted on Jul 13, 2009 at 7:20 PM

  Abram, You're not alone. The server side stuff is cool to see, but not really something that I use in my workflow. There's a lot of potential though, and I really hope it gets a lot more polish through the beta program. Here's a list of the stuff I'll be submitting :) Stuff that I... read more »

• Create A Running Average Without Storing Individual Values

  Posted on Jul 9, 2009 at 6:03 PM

  Sorry Ben - last post, I promise. Jody, at no point did I call your solution naive, nor did I riducule you. In fact, I clearly stated that if you're getting the job done, then that's great. I'm sorry if you took offense to anything. My only intent was to suggest that there are other... read more »