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Recent Comments
Raymond Camden replied to a post If ColdFusion Had An ImageWriteToBinary() Function
Comment posted December 14, 2025
As an FYI, I do 100% agree CF should have a function to do all of this for us.... read entire comment from Raymond Camden.
Ben Nadel replied to a post If ColdFusion Had An ImageWriteToBinary() Function
Comment posted December 14, 2025
This is all a reminder to me that I know very little about the java.awt.image and javax.imageio packages. It's probably worth me poking around in them a bit. I'm sure there's much gold to be had in them there hills.... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Ben Nadel replied to a post If ColdFusion Had An ImageWriteToBinary() Function
Comment posted December 14, 2025
Ahh, nice, just saw your second comment. Thanks for the follow-up proof-of-concept. I'd still like to wrap it up in a nice abstraction; but, good to know that the abstraction isn't just a wrapper around imageWrite().... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Ben Nadel replied to a post If ColdFusion Had An ImageWriteToBinary() Function
Comment posted December 14, 2025
@Raymond, That's a good point - if you want to dip down into the Java layer to use the underlying buffered image stuff you can side-step the file. But, I think that's the raw data (ie, not the data in a particular format such as PNG or JPG). With the buffered image, I think you would still then have... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Raymond Camden replied to a post If ColdFusion Had An ImageWriteToBinary() Function
Comment posted December 14, 2025
I did some Googling, and came across a solution using the buffered image. This is just scratch code, but it worked: <cfscript> image = imageNew( "", 700, 100, "rgb", "212121" ); image.setAntialiasing( true ); image.setDrawingColor( "ff3366" ); image.drawText( "ColdFusion has FLEX'ibility",... read entire comment from Raymond Camden.
Raymond Camden replied to a post If ColdFusion Had An ImageWriteToBinary() Function
Comment posted December 14, 2025
Are you sure you need to write to disk? What about imageGetBlob or imageGetBufferedImage?... read entire comment from Raymond Camden.
Ben Nadel replied to a post CFInclude Templates Are Parsed Regardless Of File Type
Comment posted December 14, 2025
This is a super old post, but just cross-posting this here because in modern versions of ColdFusion, this behavior can now be configured with a per-Application setting: https://www.bennadel.com/blog/4854-including-non-cfml-files-as-cfml-code-in-coldfusion.htm Meaning, you can configure which file ex... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Ben Nadel replied to a post Including CSS File Content Using CFInclude In ColdFusion
Comment posted December 14, 2025
As a quick follow-up, I did a little more in-depth exploration of how the configuration for this works: https://www.bennadel.com/blog/4854-including-non-cfml-files-as-cfml-code-in-coldfusion.htm... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Ben Nadel replied to a post If ColdFusion Had An ImageWriteToBinary() Function
Comment posted December 14, 2025
I submitted a feature request to the Adobe Tracker: Ticket CF-4229162... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Trevor Finch replied to a post Using ColdFusion For Rapid Application Prototyping
Comment posted December 13, 2025
Hello Ben I do agree - I think there is a role for low-level, low-cost, flexible software. Really small business, not-for-profits, could never afford custom software, but it can really help their productivity And CF is just fantastic for this market... read entire comment from Trevor Finch.
Chris Giminez replied to a post Converting HTTP Header Values To UTF-8 In ColdFusion
Comment posted December 12, 2025
Found it. nice. thanks!... read entire comment from Chris Giminez.
Yusuke replied to a post Converting HTTP Header Values To UTF-8 In ColdFusion
Comment posted December 12, 2025
@Ben Nadel, Thanks for the helpful advice and links. As for bigsexypoems.com, well, I've hardly written any poetry myself and wasn't born in an English-speaking country, so I was a bit confused about how to use it. But I'm sure this piece is "My best suggestion is always just to build something. All... read entire comment from Yusuke.
Ben Nadel replied to a post Converting HTTP Header Values To UTF-8 In ColdFusion
Comment posted December 12, 2025
@Chris, It's in the Free plan, but not enabled by default. You have to go into: Account. Choose a domain (ex, bigsexypoems.com). Rules. Settings. Then there should be a few checkboxes. You have to enable the one called Add visitor location headers. Then, the other HTTP headers should start showing u... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Chris Giminez replied to a post Converting HTTP Header Values To UTF-8 In ColdFusion
Comment posted December 12, 2025
It looks like this is not in the Cloudflare free plan. All I can get is the country value.... read entire comment from Chris Giminez.
Ben Nadel replied to a post Using ColdFusion For Rapid Application Prototyping
Comment posted December 12, 2025
@Trevor, We can make a user-requested change to a single .cfm, that only affects that .cfm, and within hours ask that user 'is this what you mean' This is the mentality that really gets me through the day. A users asks for something and I make it happen with CFML - no fuss. I think in many ways we'v... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Ben Nadel replied to a post Converting HTTP Header Values To UTF-8 In ColdFusion
Comment posted December 12, 2025
@Yusuke, If you're curious to see some CFML code, I have the source code for my Big Sexy Poems application on GitHub: https://github.com/bennadel/app.bigsexypoems.com/ It's an application I am building primarily for myself; and it allows me to try new things - it's where I ran into this HTTP header ... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Yusuke replied to a post Converting HTTP Header Values To UTF-8 In ColdFusion
Comment posted December 12, 2025
Nice to meet you, Ben. Your blog is very helpful and, honestly, it's valuable that it's been going for so long. I've started a few blogs myself over the years, but I usually give up after about a year. btw, I've recently been assigned a project at work using CFML. It's a system running on jQuery + R... read entire comment from Yusuke.
Trevor Finch replied to a post Using ColdFusion For Rapid Application Prototyping
Comment posted December 10, 2025
Hello Ben I very much agree with your 'prototyping' template Our template is similar, with everything unique to a cfm in the cfm itself Only common code used by others in .cfc's We came from desktop apps using MS.Access, and then to CF using the same .MDB data file MS.Access also does layout and cod... read entire comment from Trevor Finch.
spills replied to a post Converting HTTP Header Values To UTF-8 In ColdFusion
Comment posted December 9, 2025
@Ben Nadel, One thing about Cloudflare is that their API is amazing and you could probably do a whole site setup script using their API.... read entire comment from spills.
Ben Nadel replied to a post Converting HTTP Header Values To UTF-8 In ColdFusion
Comment posted December 9, 2025
@Spills, Oh interesting - a good point to raise. That said, I do think there is something nice about having this code in the source control. Since I'm just a single person, I try to keep as much as I can in the code itself so that I don't have to remember where all this logic is the next time I set ... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
spills replied to a post Converting HTTP Header Values To UTF-8 In ColdFusion
Comment posted December 9, 2025
You should be able to create a transform response override in Cloudflare to force the header to utf-8.... read entire comment from spills.
Ben Nadel replied to a post Converting HTTP Header Values To UTF-8 In ColdFusion
Comment posted December 9, 2025
These are the changes that I made to Big Sexy Poems to cast the Latin-1 encoding to UTF-8 encoding: Commit ec5961... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Ben Nadel replied to a post Using ColdFusion For Rapid Application Prototyping
Comment posted December 6, 2025
@Chris, Yeah, the output=true can be great for this kind of stuff. But, it works best in a tag-based context. If you have script-based functions, it still works (I'm 99% sure); but, you'd have to do a bunch of writeOutput() kinds of stuff instead of just having tag-literal syntax. The output attribu... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Mike Peters replied to a post Using ColdFusion For Rapid Application Prototyping
Comment posted December 4, 2025
100% Ben. I have to do a lot of experimentation with a novel architecture, so I use tag-based CFML for rapid prototyping to figure out what works. CFML is the best. Sometimes, the simpler the tool, the easier it is to think, and the faster you get there. 😎... read entire comment from Mike Peters.
Chris G replied to a post Using ColdFusion For Rapid Application Prototyping
Comment posted December 4, 2025
Dang it... I jump through so many hoops to do what output=true solves natively. How did I not know (or had forgotten) that?! Bye bye cfsavecontent, return content variable 🤦... read entire comment from Chris G.
Bill Nourse replied to a post Using ColdFusion For Rapid Application Prototyping
Comment posted December 4, 2025
Hey Ben, Thanks for the post, a nice reminder of the versatility of CFML. A developer can take one single file (such as index.cfm) and throw something together in minutes. You can mix CFML with CSS, HTML, and JS all in one file, pretty darn useful for prototyping. It might not be pretty, but that's ... read entire comment from Bill Nourse.
Igor replied to a post Creating A Marquee Effect With CSS Animations
Comment posted November 27, 2025
Thanks, great example, helped a lot!... read entire comment from Igor.
Ben Nadel replied to a post Keyboard Shortcut For Moving Focus To Form Using Alpine.js
Comment posted November 22, 2025
After writing this, I then moved the x-keyed-focus form the <form> element to the <input> element: See: Commit 967ed6 I think <input x-keyed-focus> is just going to better in the long term for clarity.... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Ben Nadel replied to a post Working On Open Graph Images For Big Sexy Poems In ColdFusion
Comment posted November 21, 2025
As a quick follow-up, these Open Graph images have now been integrated into Big Sexy Poems: https://www.bennadel.com/blog/4848-generating-serving-and-caching-open-graph-images-using-coldfusion.htm... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Ben Nadel replied to a post Using Custom Fonts In CommandBox Docker Image And Windows ColdFusion
Comment posted November 11, 2025
@James, 100% it actually took me a good bit of trial-and-error to figure out what the font-names were. When I ran fc-list, it gave me more than actually worked. So I just kept commenting-out names until I had the list working. I had tried to use a cfide example that I had found; but it was throwing ... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
James Moberg replied to a post Using Custom Fonts In CommandBox Docker Image And Windows ColdFusion
Comment posted November 11, 2025
I've noticed that sometimes the font names registered in ColdFusion are different than what you'd think... so it is good to list them. I previously used cfide.adminiapi.administrator(), logged in, used cfide.adminapi.runtime() and then used the getFonts() method to receive a struct with system, user... read entire comment from James Moberg.
Ben Nadel replied to a post Utilities For Generating "id" / "for" Attributes In ColdFusion
Comment posted November 9, 2025
Here's the commit of my changes on Big Sexy Poems: 8a45e6 . There were a few places I couldn't apply the change since the id values were being referenced outside the scope of the form field (via htmx triggers). But, over all, I think this will make copy-paste-driven development much easier since I w... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Ben Nadel replied to a post What If "Maybe" Was A Core Data Type In ColdFusion
Comment posted November 9, 2025
@Boris, For me, this is kind of the point thought: On the other hand, returning an Option (or Maybe) makes it kind of unclear which type the variable has that is contained. Meaning, you would only use a Maybe if the state of the value was unclear. For data that should always exist, I just return / c... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Boris replied to a post What If "Maybe" Was A Core Data Type In ColdFusion
Comment posted November 8, 2025
Rust solves this with the Option-Enum which has two variants: Some(value) and None. Similarly the Result-Enum is used for handling errors and also has two variants: Ok(value) and Err(errorValue). I wish ColdFusion had Enums. On the other hand, returning an Option (or Maybe) makes it kind of unclear ... read entire comment from Boris.
Ben Nadel replied to a post What If "Maybe" Was A Core Data Type In ColdFusion
Comment posted November 7, 2025
Ha ha. It is he who shall not be named 🙃... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
John Whish replied to a post What If "Maybe" Was A Core Data Type In ColdFusion
Comment posted November 7, 2025
Ha! I'd just about forgotten about CFMX 6 and you had to remind me of it :P... read entire comment from John Whish.
Ben Nadel replied to a post What If "Maybe" Was A Core Data Type In ColdFusion
Comment posted November 7, 2025
@John, Definitely part of me is still having PTSD from CFMX 6 when CFC instantiation was dramatically more expensive. I've never really adjusted my mental model for creating transient CFCs. Still to this day, all of my CFCs are just cached in memory at application-boot. I need to run some speed test... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
John Whish replied to a post What If "Maybe" Was A Core Data Type In ColdFusion
Comment posted November 7, 2025
Calling it becomes public Maybe function maybeGet( required numeric id ) { var results = gateway.getByFilter( id = id ); if ( results.len() ) { return new Maybe( results.first() ); } return new Maybe(); } :D... read entire comment from John Whish.
John Whish replied to a post What If "Maybe" Was A Core Data Type In ColdFusion
Comment posted November 7, 2025
@Ben Nadel, I just don't really like returning structs from things, they start off all nice and simple but then devs over time decide to add extra data to it and soon it's a mess. That's generally why I prefer to return an object. It could do exactly what you have right now, but reading the code I i... read entire comment from John Whish.
Ben Nadel replied to a post What If "Maybe" Was A Core Data Type In ColdFusion
Comment posted November 7, 2025
@John, Exactly, only with muuuuch less ceremony :P I've tried to look at those Java docs before and it always feels like it's trying to solve a much bigger problem-set than I need. I really just want to know if a value is safe to reference. I think the Java/CB one is more geared towards Functional P... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
John Whish replied to a post What If "Maybe" Was A Core Data Type In ColdFusion
Comment posted November 7, 2025
This makes me think about the Optional pattern not quite the same but I think it's trying to solve a similar problem. https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/util/Optional.html ColdBox uses that kind of idea with cbstreams https://github.com/coldbox-modules/cbstreams?tab=readme-ov-file#option... read entire comment from John Whish.
Balamurugan replied to a post Using "pageshow" Event To Re-enable Forms After Back-Button Navigation
Comment posted November 3, 2025
Really helpful. Thank you... read entire comment from Balamurugan.
Ben Nadel replied to a post Normalizing Query Cross Join Data Using Namespaces In ColdFusion
Comment posted November 2, 2025
@Dawesi, What can I say - clearly great minds think alike 🙌 Pulling in data from multiple sources is a whole all ball of complexity. Sometimes, I really want to find a nice abstraction that makes zipping-together code more easy; but, I struggle to find the "right" abstraction; or one with a nice AP... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Ben Nadel replied to a post I Will Not Be Enabling Full Null Support In Adobe ColdFusion 2025
Comment posted November 1, 2025
@James, Yeah. I was just hoping that maybe this would be something that reduced complexity overall. Even if were to enable null-support from the get-go, it still seems like it's just easier to depend on the default "undefined key" / isNull() checking.... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Dawesi replied to a post Normalizing Query Cross Join Data Using Namespaces In ColdFusion
Comment posted November 1, 2025
IMHO you need both techniques, as quite often manipulating data from different sources (db,clickhouse,social media, apis) to combine into one useful data object for presentation layer also. That said i'm enjoying sql 2025 with polybase, and the ease that combination brings from ETL by allowing you t... read entire comment from Dawesi.
Dawesi replied to a post Normalizing Query Cross Join Data Using Namespaces In ColdFusion
Comment posted November 1, 2025
It never ceases to amaze me how much our cfml journeys are parallel. It's almost creepy, and since you started blogging I felt that I never needed to mostly, as you already say what I would have posted anyway, from the time you started until now. That said there is much I should have blogged but did... read entire comment from Dawesi.
James Moberg replied to a post I Will Not Be Enabling Full Null Support In Adobe ColdFusion 2025
Comment posted October 31, 2025
In a complex function, if you need to dynamically determine if this flag is enabled at the application level, you'll need to use getApplicationMetaData(). applicationMetadata = getApplicationMetadata(); isNullSupportEnabled = structkeyexists(applicationMetadata, "ENABLENULLSUPPORT") && yesnoformat(a... read entire comment from James Moberg.
Ben Nadel replied to a post Telling My ColdFusion Connector/J JDBC MySql Connection String To Use UTC
Comment posted October 24, 2025
Now that I have my server running in UTC, I'm change the preserveInstants=true setting to false: preserveInstants=false Even after reading the docs and chatting with the GPT, I still don't fully understand what this means. But, I think it means that the Connector/J won't try to do any timezone-based... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Chris G replied to a post Telling My ColdFusion Connector/J JDBC MySql Connection String To Use UTC
Comment posted October 23, 2025
@Ben Nadel, Yikes! Those have to be related to an environmental difference, right? Good luck!... read entire comment from Chris G.
Ben Nadel replied to a post Telling My ColdFusion Connector/J JDBC MySql Connection String To Use UTC
Comment posted October 23, 2025
@Chris, And, on top of that, I have some bugs that are showing up in production that don't show up in development (unrelated to the date-stuff), which makes debugging even all the harder — yes, I'm debugging in production 😱 I have to figure out why some of my bugs aren't getting logged to my bug-tr... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.