Steve Bryant - ColdFusion

Jason Dean Presents on ColdFusion Security

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 10:45:00-0500

The Tulsa CFUG is proud to host a Connect presentation by Jason Dean on ColdFusion Security today (August 31, 2010) at 12:30 PM central. The details on are the Tulsa CFUG meetings page. Every time I read Jason's blog entries on security, I find it frightening to see just how much I still have to learn on the subject. I'm excited to learn more today. If you are in the Tulsa area, we would love to see you on location where you can pick up some swag and talk to other local ColdFusion programmers. Otherwise, feel free to watch on line. A big "Thank you" to Jason for graciously accepting the invitation to present to our little group. Meeting URL

Another Fun Framework

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 09:15:00-0500

With all of the ColdFusion frameworks that have been released this year, this feels a little like "me to". The fact of the matter, however, is that this framework has been in development for a few years and is being used on a dozens of sites. Moreover, it is different from other ColdFusion frameworks in some pretty significant ways. The framework doesn't have a name yet. I have been calling it "AFF" ("Another Fun Framework" or "Anti-Frameworks Framework") so far, but it needs a better name pretty soon. I'm open to suggestions, of course. I wasn't sure how to approach my first blog entry on the framework, so I decided to just answer the questions that I normally ask when I see a framework. [More]

Barney Boisvert presents on CFGroovy

Mon, 24 May 2010 09:45:00-0500

The Tulsa CFUG is proud to host a Connect presentation by Barney Boisvert on CFGroovy tomorrow (May 25, 2010). The details on are the Tulsa CFUG meetings page. If you are in the Tulsa area, we would love to see you on location where you can pick up some swag and talk to other local ColdFusion programmers. Otherwise, feel free to watch on line. A big "Thank you" to Barney for graciously accepting the invitation to present to our little group.

"Set IIS Root" ColdFusion Builder Extension is Gold

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 14:30:00-0500

Several months ago, I posted my first ColdFusion extension. It allows me to switch the web root on IIS to any folder in ColdFusion Builder. Since my primary development machine is Windows XP, this has proven pretty handy. In the intervening months, I have found that I have used this several times a day. In that time, I haven't needed to change the underlying code at all. So, I am going to go ahead and call it a full 1.0 version. [More]

Dynamically Adding Methods to a CFC

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 13:15:00-0500

When ColdFusion 9 came out, I found that FileMgr.cfc would not work on it. For one function, I had directly copied the DirectoryList UDF by Ray Camden. This allowed me to use cfdirectory recursively in CFMX (the "recurse" attribute not being available natively until ColdFusion 7). This worked great until ColdFusion 9 came out. ColdFusion 9 added a built in function named (you guessed it!), DirectoryList. As a result, the FileMgr.cfc threw an error whenever it was instantiated on the code attempting to create a DirectoryList method. The problem here is that I have a lot of external code using that method, so renaming it would be a bit difficult. I would have to track down and change code in several different sites on several different servers. Not only that, but as FileMgr.cfc is publicly available code, everyone using it would have to do the same. Needless to say, this isn't a desirable outcome. Fortunately, ColdFusion makes it easy for me to maintain my API and still avoid the error telling me that I can't have a function named "DirectoryList". The surprising thing about this is how easy it is. [More]

My First ColdFusion Builder Extension: "Set IIS Root"

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 10:15:00-0500

I had a magic moment this weekend when my wife and both of our babies were all asleep. I thought to myself "What should I do with this free time?". So, of course, I used it to make my first ColdFusion Builder extension, "Set IIS Root". The extension allows me to right-click on any project or folder and set it as the web root in IIS directly from ColdFusion Builder. The functionality to do this was originally written by my friend, Jason Holden. Admittedly this is now only useful on flavors of Windows that have IIS, but don't allow multiple sites (Windows XP Pro, but not Windows 2003 or Vista), but I am in that group so it saves me time. I was a little concerned about how difficult it would be to make an extension for ColdFusion Builder. It turned out to be really easy, taking me about an hour (or less) including the time to learn how to make an extension and to test it out. The ColdFusion Builder development team deserves major kudos here as do the authors of the documentation. [More]

DataMgr is Better than ColdFusion ORM

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 09:00:00-0500

I have been thinking this for some time, but it seemed like hubris (and flame bait) to say it. So be it - it needs to be said. I worry that ColdFusion ORM is being / will be marketed where it isn't appropriate. (What is DataMgr?)

What is Better?

It can't be helped, "better" is a word that only makes sense in the context of goals to be met. After all, it is impossible to tell if a sedan is better than a truck unless you know your goals. Do you need to get to work on low gas mileage or haul cargo? I will use the criteria that Adobe ColdFusion engineer, Rupesh Kumar, has laid out in "ColdFusion ORM - An Evolution in building datacentric application": [More]

OO Principles: Composition (part 2)

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 10:45:00-0500

I don't "do OO" development in ColdFusion. I'm starting with that statement not to spark another debate about whether to use OO in ColdFusion, but rather to clarify that while this post is about a principle of object oriented development, you don't need to "Do OO" in order to learn, use, and benefit from composition. In the last "OO Principles" entry, I introduced composition. The examples that I used were barely complicated enough to show some of the benefits of composition. Much more complicated than that, however, and you can also run into some challenges. While these do not (in my opinion) overcome the advantages of composition, they are still worth considering. [More]

Derby Datasource: Embedded or Client

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 11:00:00-0500

I attended CFUnited 2009 last week and I had a really great time. The last presentation that I attended was "Using Apache Derby, the Open Source Database Embedded in ColdFusion 8" by Charlie Arehart. I went to this presentation partly because I am interested in learning more about Apache Derby and partly because I try to catch at least one Charlie Arehart presentation per ColdFusion conference. As usual for Charlie, the whole presentation was well delivered and packed with useful information. Most significant for me, however, was the difference between the two kinds of Derby datasources. [More]

Which is Faster?

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 09:30:00-0500

In programming, discussions often come up about which approach to solving a problem is faster. Although I think these discussions often miss the point (as other decision factors often trump execution speed), they are still often informative.

I have had a few occassions recently where I wanted to answer these questions myself. It seemed tedious to continue to write code to test that out, so I decided to write a generic "Code Timer" to run code and test for execution times.

[More]

OO Principles: Composition

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 11:15:00-0500

I don't "do OO" development in ColdFusion. I'm starting with that statement not to spark another debate about whether to use OO in ColdFusion, but rather to clarify that while this post is about a principle of object oriented development, you don't need to "Do OO" in order to learn, use, and benefit from composition. In the last "OO Principles" entry, I talked about encapsulating CFCs. The example that I use was the need to have a datasource in a component. It should be clear from that entry that you could pass in more methods as well. [More]

OO Principles: Encapsulating CFCs

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 09:45:00-0500

I don't "do OO" development in ColdFusion. I'm starting with that statement not to spark another debate about whether to use OO in ColdFusion, but rather to clarify that while this post is about a principle of object oriented development, you don't need to "Do OO" in order to learn, use, and benefit from encapsulating CFCs. When I first started using CFCs, I knew that encapsulation and decoupling were important, but this brought up new challenges. For example, if I had a method that queried a database, how would it know what datasource to use? [More]

Filtering Undeclared Arguments

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 10:00:00-0500

One thing I have wanted to do in ColdFusion for some time is to limit the arguments scope in a function to arguments I have declared with cfargument. That feature doesn't exist, but I made the next best thing. [More]

OO? OI? Oy Vay!

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 08:15:00-0500

Clark Valberg recently convinced Hal Helms, Brian Kotek and Ben Nadel to do a recording together discussing OO programming in ColdFusion. The discussion reminded me of an NPR debate I listened to several months ago on whether we should bomb Iran to prevent them from acquiring nuclear weapons (unfortunately, I don't remember the specific wording of the question). The debate had three experts on either side of the question. All six seemed to agree that we would almost certainly never need to bomb Iran because so many better options exist but that we should remove the option from the table (just in case). From there it quickly moved to a semantics debate about the wording of the question on the table. [More]

Method Names for Data Retrieval

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 07:15:00-0500

Ben Nadel recently posted a blog entry about moving queries to service layers (something I am a big fan of). Both the blog entry and the comments that followed were great and well worth the read. I especially liked Hal Helm's comment about differentiating between queries that are necessarily the same and those that are accidentally the same. One thing that came up in this discussion was how to name the methods that retrieve data. One example was "getArticlesByAuthorID()" (I'm just picking one of many that followed this pattern). To me, this is a code smell. The method name describes not only what you want, but how you are going to get it. I would do it differently. [More]