Steve Bryant

Recent Blog Comments By Steve Bryant

• Wrapping Database Gateways In A Retriable Proxy For Lock Timeouts In ColdFusion And MySQL

  Posted on Aug 1, 2017 at 4:11 PM

  Ben, I like your solution, especially the increasing back-off duration. In his book, "Release It!" (despite the upbeat title, basically a book of programming horror stories), Michael Nygard argues against retrying queries that have timed out based on the idea that they are unlikely to su... read more »

• Exceptions Are For Exceptional Circumstances Is Not A Value-Add Answer

  Posted on Nov 3, 2014 at 10:03 AM

  Ben, Why do you think that feels "leaky"? It sounds like a good solution to me.... read more »

• Exceptions Are For Exceptional Circumstances Is Not A Value-Add Answer

  Posted on Nov 3, 2014 at 9:37 AM

  Sorry I guess I expressed myself badly. I wasn't trying to criticize the tone (though I do find it a bit frustrating) so much as I was trying to understand the nature of the disagreement. It seems like we are all saying that it is helpful to have exceptions return enough information for us to debug... read more »

• Exceptions Are For Exceptional Circumstances Is Not A Value-Add Answer

  Posted on Nov 1, 2014 at 3:03 PM

  It seems to me that we are all in agreement that exceptions shouldn't make it all the way to the user and that our applications shouldn't crash. Yet the word "stupid" has made it into the conversation and the tone no longer seem friendly. I'm confused by how so much agreement seems to be ... read more »

• Exceptions Are For Exceptional Circumstances Is Not A Value-Add Answer

  Posted on Oct 31, 2014 at 2:34 PM

  I really like this definition! One thing I notice a lot is methods that return a boolean for "success". I can understand how this might be needed in a REST API or something but the rest of the time I would rather have my methods return a meaningful value or nothing at all. I assume it wil... read more »

• 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 errors an... 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. http://www.bryantwebconsulting.com/blog/index.cf... 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 branching leads to... 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 solved the when, bu... 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 Functional pr... 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 instead of Ve... 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 have them.... 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 commission per ... 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 informative and ... read more »