David Stamm

Member since Dec 11, 2008

Recent Blog Comments By David Stamm

Content Is Not Allowed In Prolog - ColdFusion XML And The Byte-Order-Mark (BOM)

Posted on Apr 22, 2008 at 12:46 PM

Ben, you are wicked smart. :) If anyone is nerd enough to seek further reading, I highly recommend Wikipedia's information on this subject. I just looked up byte order marks and endianness (big-endian vs. little-endian) and I learned a ton.... read more »
Defaulting To The Numeric Keyboard On The iPhone

Posted on Apr 15, 2008 at 8:24 AM

You're crazy! Sorry, couldn't resist. :) I just tried it (changing form field names with JS) and it worked just fine in FF2 and IE6. This approach is still pretty kooky. But what I like about it is that you can develop your interface as you normally would, and then layer on the kooky behavior f... read more »
Defaulting To The Numeric Keyboard On The iPhone

Posted on Apr 14, 2008 at 4:31 PM

What happens when you dynamically change the name attribute of the form field with JavaScript? Does this change the default keyboard as well? If this seriously interferes with usability, you could have JS change the form field names on page load, and then revert them right before page load. I'm n... read more »
Custom User Agents For ColdFusion Debugging

Posted on Mar 7, 2008 at 2:50 PM

Yet another clever hack! Well played, Ben. :) The security concerns that have been raised in the comments could be addressed at least in part by replacing "DEVELOPER" with something relatively impossible to guess. After all, sending along an identifier string with a request is exactly how cookie... read more »
Odd MySql CFQueryParam Truncation Issue (Help)?

Posted on Feb 28, 2008 at 10:48 AM

I'm not sure I understand where the value being passed to cfqueryparam is coming from? Is it calculated in CF or in SQL? Either way, it raises the philosophical question: if you're not passing values directly from the user to the SQL statement, do you really need to use cfqueryparam? The value of... read more »
EasyCaptcha() For Multi-Image CAPTCHA Creation

Posted on Feb 11, 2008 at 11:06 AM

@Todd, I hadn't heard about that scam! You have to admit that's rather clever. If your software can't beat the Turing test, then you just trick some humans into helping you. Could be a great plotline on The Sarah Connor Chronicles! In all seriousness, any individual CAPTCHA technique is only go... read more »
Hank Hill On ColdFusion

Posted on Feb 6, 2008 at 10:16 AM

Wow, that was a hilarious video! I particularly liked the line "Do you actually know CORBA?" I sometimes wish the ColdFusion community had a discernible culture of some sort. The Perl community are so agreeable, with their Perl poetry and plain-old-documentation. Java folks tend to be a little a... read more »
Alf Pedersen On NULL Value Usage In Database Design

Posted on Nov 21, 2007 at 12:29 PM

This is a thoroughly interesting discussion! My thanks to all those doing the thinking and writing. :) It's easy for developers who are contending with deadlines, customers, and uncooperative applications to get impatient with theory. But I think a healthy respect for theory can make you a bette... read more »
Alf Pedersen On NULL Value Usage In Database Design

Posted on Nov 20, 2007 at 11:37 AM

@Ben, Thanks for the link, Benihana! Good to see a DB expert with a sense of humor for a change. :) One system I worked on used NULL values to indicate if a given value had been provided yet. The public-facing application was basically a wizard with many many forms. Users had the option of sav... read more »
Exercise List: Incorporating OOP Style Form Validation

Posted on Nov 19, 2007 at 4:29 PM

@Ben, My bad! I totally misunderstood your excellent code. That hint property should prove most useful for debugging, I imagine. Rock on! While I'm annoying you anyway, have you ever messed around with custom exception handling in ColdFusion? You can throw and catch exceptions with dot-separat... read more »
Exercise List: Incorporating OOP Style Form Validation

Posted on Nov 19, 2007 at 4:09 PM

@Ben, I've noticed that your ErrorCollection CFC treats errors like messages, or strings. Are you concerned about passing an error message directly from your validation logic to your user interface? You're asking service and domain objects to come up with friendly messages for the user interface.... read more »
Exercise List: Rethinking The Domain Model / Object Oriented Approach

Posted on Nov 8, 2007 at 10:13 AM

@Peter, I dig what you're saying. Maintainability is key. Encapsulation, cohesion, coding to interfaces... it all makes sense even with a page request, if your system is complex enough. I guess I've yet to fall in love with ColdFusion's implementation of OO concepts. It feels a little clunky a... read more »
Exercise List: Rethinking The Domain Model / Object Oriented Approach

Posted on Nov 7, 2007 at 3:54 PM

I personally think that OOP and MVC rock the hizzy when it comes to GUIs. Once you've taken the time to model your business logic as objects, you can reuse it with a variety of UIs without any recoding. Does your Employee object care about layout and color schemes? Heck no! But I am still skeptic... read more »
Exercise List: Rethinking The Domain Model / Object Oriented Approach

Posted on Nov 7, 2007 at 1:40 PM

@Ben, Have you ever perused Martin Fowler's catalog of enterprise design patterns? http://www.martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/ I am by no means a design patterns junkie (as so many are in the CF world these days) but I have found this catalog to be a great source of ideas when thinking about web ap... read more »
Splitting And Joining A Binary File In ColdFusion

Posted on Nov 2, 2007 at 10:19 AM

@Ben, I just took a binary variable created with <cffile action="readbinary"> and looked under the hood with my handy getClassInfo() reflection function. The variable is an instance of this Java class: [B WTF? Anyone know what a [B is? Some sort of pointer? The class implements the Seri... read more »
Splitting And Joining A Binary File In ColdFusion

Posted on Nov 1, 2007 at 2:14 PM

I just noticed: your comment for the first CreateObject call says: "Create an instance of the static ByteBuffer class so that we can refer to it multiple times." I think it's more accurate to say you are loading the ByteBuffer class so that you can call its static methods. Static methods are the c... read more »
Splitting And Joining A Binary File In ColdFusion

Posted on Nov 1, 2007 at 2:11 PM

Another excellent example of ColdFusion and Java rocking like it's 1999. Much obliged! Splitting and joining binary files is quite useful when you're uploading or downloading files. You can also build a file one byte at a time with classes like BufferedInputStream, but that's a whole other story.... read more »
Learning ColdFusion 8: OnMissingMethod() Event Handler

Posted on Oct 31, 2007 at 11:47 AM

@Ben, I know it's been two months since the last comment, but I just had to ask: what did you mean when you wrote "I never understand why people get all hot-and-bothered over things like Interfaces". Are you referring to the Java language construct or the general idea of coding to interfaces?... read more »