2008 Web Log Entries
KinkyTwits Update - "Characters Remaining" Understands Message Type And HTML Entities
Posted: October 7, 2008 at 9:37 AM by Ben Nadel
Just a quick update to KinkyTwits, my ColdFusion, jQuery, and MySQL powered Twitter client . I know that some people have had issues with other twitter clients in that they do not accurately report the number of remaining characters. The problem is that these other clients do not take into account HTML entities that must be escaped. KinkyTwits no... read more »
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Ask Ben: Dynamically Adding File Upload Fields To A Form Using jQuery
Posted: October 6, 2008 at 7:31 PM by Ben Nadel
So seeing as you are on a jQuery kick I have a simple code request from you. Very simple, I want to allow file uploads in a form. I want it to start with 1 file upload option displayed, and then if the user clicks on a link, another one upload is displayed below that one. I want it all to be dynamic and create the html on the fly and use dynamic d... read more »
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KinkyTwits - My ColdFusion And jQuery Powered Twitter Client
Posted: October 6, 2008 at 9:10 AM by Ben Nadel
Last week, I had mentioned on Twitter that I was gonna try to build my own Twitter Client for yucks (trying to attain true Geek status). I came up with " KinkyTwits ". I put a good 12 or 13 hours into this over the weekend and I think I came up with some cool stuff. It's definitely rough and the code really needs to be organized much better, but i... read more »
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Listing All Classes In A Jar File Using ColdFusion And CFZip
Posted: October 3, 2008 at 9:25 AM by Ben Nadel
Last night, I made a quick post about getting all the classes available in a JAR file using ColdFusion . I went about this using a JarInputStream. Thankfully Todd Sharp and Simon Free reminded me that ColdFusion's CFZip tag can read JAR files as well as ZIP archives. Using ColdFusion's CFZip tag actually makes my GetJarClasses() much more sim... read more »
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Listing All Classes In A Jar File Using ColdFusion
Posted: October 2, 2008 at 8:05 PM by Ben Nadel
You'll probably never need to do this, but today, I needed to find out what Java classes were available in a given JAR file using ColdFusion. The reason - I was doing some work on my POI Utility ColdFusion custom tags and I needed to see if the version of the POI JAR that ships with ColdFusion supports certain classes. Turns out, this is a fairl... read more »
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Project HUGE: Trying Out A 4-Exercise Limit
Posted: October 1, 2008 at 4:29 PM by Ben Nadel
When I was younger, the amount of time I spent in the gym was something like a badge of honor. If I told a fellow lifter that I just had a two hour workout blasting out 8 exercises, it was a statement met with a look of appreciation and the obligatory, "gym nod." But that was years ago when my body was a seething pot of testosterone fueled by long... read more »
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Ask Ben: Instantiating Nested Java Classes In ColdFusion
Posted: October 1, 2008 at 9:58 AM by Ben Nadel
I'm trying to create an instance of: java.awt.geom.Point2D.Double in coldfusion: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/java/awt/geom/Point2D.html Point2D.Double is a nested class inside of the abstract class Point2D. I have tried to instantiate the class, but get, "This fails because Coldfusion cannot find the class." And which does not work b... read more »
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Ask Ben: What I Look For In A Potential Employee - Passion
Posted: October 1, 2008 at 9:31 AM by Ben Nadel
I just thought id ask you for your opinion ... If you are looking to hire a CF developer, or any developer for that matter, what do you look for? Do you look for years experience, quality, skill set, job hopping, certifications? I have helped make hiring decisions as both the Chief Technology Officer at my previous company and as the Lead Softwa... read more »
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OOPhoto: Implementing Security In An Object Oriented Application - Round I
Posted: September 30, 2008 at 9:55 PM by Ben Nadel
The latest OOPhoto application can be experienced here . The OOPhoto code for this post can be seen here . Today, I took my initial thoughts on implementing security in an object oriented application and tried to apply them to OOPhoto, my first attempt at learning object oriented programming in ColdFusion. This was definitely a shaky f... read more »
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OOPhoto: Initial Thoughts On Handling Security In An Object Oriented Application
Posted: September 29, 2008 at 9:23 PM by Ben Nadel
The latest OOPhoto application can be experienced here . The latest OOPhoto code can be seen here . As of this moment, OOPhoto - my latest attempt at learning object oriented programming in ColdFusion - has no security. Anyone can create galleries and post photos; anyone can also delete photos and galleries. For my next step, I'd like to a... read more »
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Simon Free Leads The Way
Posted: September 29, 2008 at 9:23 AM by Ben Nadel
I just wanted to take a moment to give a big congratulations to my friend and fellow ColdFusion developer, Simon Free . He has taken a huge initiative at his company, trying to get all of his developers ColdFusion 8 certified. After months of preparing presentations and hosting after-work study sessions, Simon Free has gotten over 90% of his deve... read more »
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Reminder: Duplicate() Does Not Work With ColdFusion Images
Posted: September 26, 2008 at 9:41 AM by Ben Nadel
Someone contacted me this morning needing help debugging an image thumbnailing problem. Part of the issue that they were running into was that the Duplicate() function did not seem to work with ColdFusion image objects. This can be confusing since the documentation seems to indicate that it will work: Task : Create a ColdFusion image from anot... read more »
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Ask Ben: Optimizing Form Inputs For Numeric Keypad Usage
Posted: September 25, 2008 at 9:25 AM by Ben Nadel
I have a question that has me stumped. I am building several data entry forms and our users want a carriage return to move the cursor to the next field. This is for speed - they are using their right hand for number entry and the enter key is easily available - their left hand is holding or keeping place on paper so reaching across for the tab key... read more »
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"Style Bleed" Problem Fixed In POI Utility Tags
Posted: September 24, 2008 at 3:57 PM by Ben Nadel
For those of you using my POI Utility ColdFusion custom tags to produce formatted Excel documents for use with Microsoft Excel 2007, you might have seen documents that looks like this: Here, you can see that style applied to the header row is bleeding into some of the other rows. Nathan ... read more »
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Java Hashtable - An Object-Based-Lookup "Struct" (Thanks Nathan Mische)
Posted: September 24, 2008 at 9:42 AM by Ben Nadel
A little while ago Nathan Mische solved a problem that some people were getting with my POI Utility project in which cell styles were "bleeding" into other cells. The problem, as he discovered, had to do with my reliance on the undocumented .hashCode() method of ColdFusion structs, which apparently was not the most reliable undocumented meth... read more »
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