development

Amazon S3 URL Builder for ColdFusion

By barneyb on April 4, 2008

First task for my Amazon move is getting data assets (non-code-managed files) over to S3. I have a variety of types of data assets that need to move and have references updated, most of which require authentication. To make that easier, I wrote a little UDF to take care of building urls with [...]

Posted in amazon, coldfusion, development

New Cyclic Data Structures Utility

By barneyb on March 19, 2008

Back in October I posed a fledgling cycle-safe CFDUMP replacement.Â Today, I had need for that same anti-cycle processing in serializeJson, so I abstracted the processing out into a CFC that handles both breaking cycles (for serialization) as well as restoring them (for deserialization).Â By running a cyclic data structure through the breakCycles method, you [...]

Posted in coldfusion, development

CAPTCHA is the Devil

By barneyb on March 11, 2008

I know, I know. I've said this before. Trying to have a conversation on another blog and the CAPTCHA … oh my god. If you insist on using CAPTCHA (for some unknown reason), follow some rules:

only letters and numbers, and never l, o, I, O, 1, or 0
don't make the comparison [...]

Posted in development

Barney and the Holy Grail

By barneyb on February 11, 2008

Yes, I know it's Lent, but I'm not talking about that Grail – I'm talking about Grails, the web framework for Groovy (the dynamic layer for Java).
I've been looking for a way to ditch CFML for a while now, but nothing has really hit the mark. I keep hoping that Adobe is going [...]

Posted in development, grails, tools

Regular Expression Backreferences and the Non-Greedy Modifier

By barneyb on November 8, 2007

Update: James Allen caught a formatting bug. It seems WordPress doesn't like my coloring, and when present, swaps the double quotes for "smart quotes". I've removed the coloring, and it seem to be fine again.
Someone posted a question on CF-Talk about using backreferences in regular expression search strings. Not the replacement [...]

Posted in coldfusion, development

Enums and ActionScript's Static Initializers

By barneyb on November 2, 2007

I discovered today, while trying to synthesize an Enum type, that AS3 has the concept of a static initializer, which is awesome. In a nutshell, a static initializer is kind of like a constructor, but it's for the class object itself, not instances of the class. It gets invoked during classloading, after all [...]

Posted in development, flex

E4X and Prototype Goodness

By barneyb on October 17, 2007

I got around to trying the E4X-based query structure this morning, and it works like a charm.Â It's now possible to write your queries like this:
Query.execute(
Â <query>
Â Â Â update contact set
Â Â Â Â name = :name,
Â Â Â Â email = :email
Â Â Â where id = :id
Â </query>,
Â {
Â Â Â id: new QueryParam(id, "integer"),
Â Â Â name: new QueryParam(name),
Â Â Â email: new QueryParam(email)
Â }
);
There's [...]

Posted in development, javascript

More Thoughts on Server-Side JS

By barneyb on October 17, 2007

I got a lot of great comments (along with some not-so-great ones) regarding my server-side JS implementation. As expected, quite a few people were very excited about using AS3 on the server instead of JS, and I agree. It got me thinking about how much code reuse you could get within an application. [...]

Posted in development, javascript, tools

Why JavaScript (or really, ECMAScript)?

By barneyb on October 16, 2007

After my last post on CF and JS integration (via Rhino), I got several comments that can be summarized as "why?". I addressed the issue in a rather oblique manner in my last post; here's a more full treatment.
Before I start, I want to make incredibly clear that I'm not talking about a new [...]

Posted in coldfusion, development, javascript, tools

The Rhino Is Coming … to fix CFML