Rob Brooks-Bilson

Recent Blog Comments By Rob Brooks-Bilson

• Understanding Transactions And Database Rollbacks That Involve 3rd Party API Integration

  Posted on Mar 21, 2011 at 3:24 PM

  @Ben, You also might want to read up on JTA: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Java_Transaction_API Hopefully I'm not sending you too far down a new rabbit hole!... read more »

• Understanding Transactions And Database Rollbacks That Involve 3rd Party API Integration

  Posted on Mar 21, 2011 at 3:17 PM

  @Ben, You can definitely implement as part of your API. The main issue, though, is that all of the distributed resources that make up your API (database, web service, etc.) have to support distributed transactions - some commercial products do, and some don't.... read more »

• Understanding Transactions And Database Rollbacks That Involve 3rd Party API Integration

  Posted on Mar 21, 2011 at 2:34 PM

  Ben, you also might want to look into XA, which is a modern implementation of the two-phase commit protocol. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/X/Open_XA... read more »

• Playing With Finite State Machines And ColdFusion Components

  Posted on Dec 23, 2009 at 12:39 PM

  Ben, We use a FSM for any of our apps that require workflow. In our case, the state machine id a CFC and we wire it up to either an xml or db config via ColdSpring. It's completely configurable so that adding new states to the workflow is super simple.... read more »

• Finding The Distance Between Latitude / Longitude Locations In ColdFusion

  Posted on Feb 9, 2009 at 11:36 AM

  Ben, There's also a UDF on cflib that does the distance calculation and returns the results in km (kilometers), sm (statute miles), nm (nautical miles), or radians: http://www.cflib.org/udf/LatLonDist... read more »

• Experimenting With Flat-File ColdFusion CFML Caching

  Posted on Dec 5, 2008 at 5:40 PM

  This is where caching providers like Ehcache come in handy. They let you cache to memory and/or disk. It's possible to configure Ehcache such that it will cache to memory up to a size limit, then spill any overage to disk. Very handy and easy to use. I recently did a session on advanced caching st... read more »

• Random Thought: The Database Bottleneck And Elegance

  Posted on Nov 30, 2008 at 11:24 AM

  I'd agree with Bob 100%. While you should strive to make the DB as efficient as you can, your caching strategy is probably even more important. If you look at any of the large sites operating on the internet (think Flickr, Facebook, etc.), they all have much larger caching farms than they do DB far... read more »

• OOPhoto - Embrace Failure Or Optimize My Domain?

  Posted on Jul 31, 2008 at 1:15 PM

  One thing to remember about scalability here - none of the "big" sites (flickr, facebook, linked-in, etc.) scale because they are particularly well written from an OO perspective. They scale because of caching (especially) and other optimizations, most of which are not reducible to how OO their app... read more »

• Is It True That If You Don't Use It, You Lose It?

  Posted on Feb 8, 2007 at 4:19 PM

  I'm constantly amazed at how much of the content from two books and hundreds of blog posts I've forgotten as well. It used to be that when someone asked me a CF question, I always had the answer on the tip of my tongue. Now I find myself having to crack open a book - that I wrote - to find out wha... read more »

• Creating Excel Documents With ColdFusion And XML - GOTCHA!

  Posted on Jan 9, 2007 at 3:10 PM

  Ben, You would be surprised how people want to us the data. In my use case, we have a customer facing reporting application that pulls from terrabytes of legacy information and delivers the results in either HTML or Excel. We allow users to schedule reports for automatic delivery daily, weekly, o... read more »

• Creating Excel Documents With ColdFusion And XML - GOTCHA!

  Posted on Jan 9, 2007 at 2:50 PM

  Ben, Just a few quick notes based on my experience working with CF/Excel: In versions of Excel prior to 2007, the row limit is 64k, regardless of whether you generate the file using HTML, Excel, or Java. In Excel 2007, the row limit is increased to 1M. Using Java (or COM) to generate Excel files... read more »

• Creating Excel Documents With ColdFusion And XML - GOTCHA!

  Posted on Jan 9, 2007 at 2:49 PM

  Ben, Just a few quick notes based on my experience working with CF/Excel: In versions of Excel prior to 2007, the row limit is 64k, regardless of whether you generate the file using HTML, Excel, or Java. In Excel 2007, the row limit is increased to 1M. Using Java (or COM) to generate Excel files... read more »

• ColdFusion CFQuery BlockFactor Is Not Impressing Me

  Posted on Oct 11, 2006 at 7:24 PM

  Ben, It's been a while, but as I remember it, blockfactor seemed to work best with oracle databases.... read more »