Gary F

Recent Blog Comments By Gary F

• Lessons Learned From Sending 7 Million Emails In 5 Days Using ColdFusion

  Posted on Jan 12, 2024 at 11:28 PM

  It was interesting to read how you handled this task, Ben. I've been sending 3 million emails per month for years (sometimes 200K in an hour) and the biggest problem we have is rare but devastating. It's when a major email provider or a big ISP suddenly flips and bounces our emails as spam. ... read more »

• The 16th Annual Regular Expression Day - June 1st 2023

  Posted on Jun 3, 2023 at 12:21 AM

  I never knew about named pattern groups. Never too old to learn a new trick. Thank you Ben. :-)... read more »

• Hosting Google Fonts Locally For GDPR Compliance

  Posted on May 6, 2023 at 12:57 AM

  This doesn't make much sense for lots of reasons. The regional German court is not the EU court or even the ECHR, so how can it apply to the rest of the EU? The German court said Google Fonts isn't GDPR compliant because it collects IP addresses (without permission). On that basis, every CDN... read more »

• CUID2 For ColdFusion / CFML

  Posted on Jan 20, 2023 at 10:08 PM

  Out of curiosity, what's wrong with CreateUUID, apart from it being 11 chars longer? It's also compatible with SQL's uniqueidentifier datatype (if you insert an extra hyphen). I used it in an application that's been running for 17 years 24x7 and it's never clashed. It was interesting to hear... read more »

• Rediscovering My Love Of ColdFusion And CFML In 2020

  Posted on Apr 15, 2020 at 5:06 PM

  @Scott, @Ben, It's not tidy, can be confusing, and doesn't seem "clean" to switch back and forth between tags and script. My argument for doing it (as much as I dislike it) is cfscript v1.0 is horrible when you want to use functions - it's illogical and inconsistent. Tags are so ... read more »

• Rediscovering My Love Of ColdFusion And CFML In 2020

  Posted on Apr 13, 2020 at 7:17 PM

  Very refreshing to read such a positive post on ColdFusion in 2020. You addressed so many good aspects of CFML. All that weight lifting hasn't turned you into a meat head, Ben! LOL! Adobe should hire you at the official avagenlist. Good work.... read more »

• Proof-of-Concept: InVision Screen Flow In Angular 7.2.7

  Posted on Mar 15, 2019 at 9:31 AM

  You say you're not a designer, but this is a very clean interface with a good layout. I didn't know what InVision is so I had to read up on that before I understood why you created this demo. It seems like a logical and natural feature to add to InVision. One of the first gen HTML design to... read more »

• So Mediocre They Can't Ignore Me

  Posted on Feb 25, 2019 at 9:05 AM

  If you're working in a team then each person is employed because of their strongest individual skill. So the guy working on UI probably has better UI skills than the guy working on back-end code, and so on. That's assuming the boss has allocated the right people to each job! If you're lookin... read more »

• So Mediocre They Can't Ignore Me

  Posted on Feb 23, 2019 at 7:18 PM

  You're being too hard on yourself, Ben. You're a very experienced developer and have been a source of inspiration for many with your excellent blog providing ideas to others, comparing A with B so devs can see which works best... you know how to do things correctly. Don't let others shake yo... read more »

• Vue.js Up And Running By Callum Macrae

  Posted on Dec 30, 2018 at 12:22 PM

  I had just been comparing Vue, React and Angular to decide which one I should learn. But with 10 years of jQuery experience it's not yet clear if Vue is a replacement for all the CSS and DOM manipulation that jQuery does so well. I think I need to understand more before buying a book on a sp... read more »

• OWASP Encoder.cfc - A Java Encoder Proxy For ColdFusion

  Posted on Dec 30, 2015 at 8:35 AM

  Ben, thank you for not only flagging this project up but showing how it can be used. It looks really good! I'm at a crossroads deciding if we should use OWASPs WAF on a Linux firewall (a nightmare to get right if you've looked at the complexity of modsec docs!), Fondeo's FuseGuard on CF, or now your... read more »

• The User Experience (UX) Of Pagination

  Posted on Nov 13, 2015 at 9:02 PM

  Disappointed, Ben! I thought you were working up to revealing a brilliantly clever way of reinventing pagination. :-) If you have a lot of data then it's always best to give users simple data mining tools to help them narrow down what they're looking for. Not just a search tool, but related filters ... read more »

• Parsing, Traversing, And Mutating HTML With ColdFusion And jSoup

  Posted on Feb 1, 2013 at 8:17 AM

  Hi. I'm trying to use jsoup to sanitize user-submitted HTML. Regex just doesn't cut it. When I ask jsoup to add some extra attributes to its whitelist I get this error: "The addAttributes method was not found." The addTags method throws the same error if I give it a string rather than an... read more »

• Parsing, Traversing, And Mutating HTML With ColdFusion And jSoup

  Posted on Feb 1, 2013 at 7:55 AM

  @John, just drop the jar file into the following dir on the server: c:\JRun4\servers\cfusion\cfusion-ear\cfusion-war\WEB-INF\lib\ The path varies on your own CF installation or if you went multi-instance or not. Then you can simply initiate it like this: <cfset jsoup = createObject("java&quo... read more »

• The 5th Annual Regular Expression Day (And Prizes) - June 1st, 2012

  Posted on Jun 4, 2012 at 10:50 AM

  33? That's just not natural! Solving just over 1 per second. You needn't bother owning a computer with that kind of brain power inside your noggin. ;-)... read more »

• The 5th Annual Regular Expression Day (And Prizes) - June 1st, 2012

  Posted on Jun 1, 2012 at 8:21 PM

  Wow, I was lousy at that! It would be nice if it showed which ones I got right at the end after it's insulted me with "you've got 1 right". ;-) Normally we work the other way around trying to create a regex to achieve a goal, so it was fun and proves what a great logical language regexes ... read more »

• How Client-Side Validation Is Changing The Shape Of Server-Side Validation

  Posted on Dec 29, 2011 at 3:40 PM

  @Anna. I think Ben said that using this server-side + XHR approach to post & validate the form you're forcing the users to enable Javascript. Otherwise if it's disabled they can't post the form at all! Therefore invalid data won't end up in your database. What % of users turn off JS? And who ar... read more »

• How Client-Side Validation Is Changing The Shape Of Server-Side Validation

  Posted on Dec 29, 2011 at 1:59 PM

  @Sangar, sorry I don't think I explained myself well. I know that HTML5 has some advanced client-side validation but you must also do server-side validation for security. For consistency it would be useful for the server-side validation to tell the browser what error message to display, especially i... read more »

• How Client-Side Validation Is Changing The Shape Of Server-Side Validation

  Posted on Dec 29, 2011 at 1:01 PM

  @Sagar, HTML5 form validation should still be used in addition to server-side validation, so it won't reduce the work required by developers. Unless it's possible to tell the browser to trigger its built-in validation prompts through JavaScript when the XHR response from CF is returned. e.g. "T... read more »

• How Client-Side Validation Is Changing The Shape Of Server-Side Validation

  Posted on Dec 29, 2011 at 12:07 PM

  I was so fed up having to code form validation twice, once in JavaScript for the client and again in CFML for the server that I too changed to doing it just once on the server via XHR. And you know what, submitting a form for validation via XHR doesn't appear any slower than doing it in JS on the c... read more »