B and E Blog

Ben Nadel has an interesting question on his blog about including sub-applications from within an existing CF application, and having the relevant sub-level Application.cfc fire off.
This is doable in a fairly simple manner but which relies on a barely-documented feature of ColdFusion, and the fact that the sub-level Application.cfc fires is completely undocumented, and may [...]

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Introduction
Jim over at Ben Nadel’s blog made the assertion that looping a list is faster than looping a struct.  It’s an interesting assertion that looping a list would be faster than looping an array.  I did a test of my own to find out.
Setup
Starting with objects with 1 entry populated, I increased the number of [...]

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An acquaintance of mine has recently graduated from college with a degree in computer science.  Where he went, apparently they stressed theory over practice.  He’s got some C++, Lisp, Java, and MySQL experience, but has never touched web development (neither HTML, nor even viewed source on a web page).
He’s hoping to get a job with [...]

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WebScarab-NG is a really amazing tool that Brian introduced me to a few months back.  It’s essentially a local proxy which you can use to capture the full details of HTTP requests traveling through it.  It listens by default on port 8008 on your local address, and you can configure any software to use that [...]

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I spoke yesterday about Unicode, and the difference between the Unicode character set, and specific encodings of this character set. This post is a follow-up which describes in detail one particular and popular character set - UTF-8.
It’s imortant to understand that encoding is simply a means of representing a Unicode character in terms of [...]

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This is a post in response to a comment at Ben Nadel’s blog by PaulH which I think is an interesting and important discussion, but sufficiently off-topic to the blog entry at hand that I didn’t want to completely derail the on-topic discussion.
Whereas initially BOM (Byte Order Marker U+FEFF) was intended to indicate the order [...]

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Over the past few years, I’ve been engaged in a few projects which have required international support. Via trial and fire, I’ve learned a fair amount about Unicode and character encoding. I now consider this to be essential knowledge for all programmers - web programmers especially. This becomes particularly important when you [...]

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Adobe is opening up the file formats for SWF and FLA, which is major news! SWF is the format run by Flash Player, and FLA is the source format which is used to create SWF’s. With this documentation, anyone will be able to create their own FLA and SWF creation software. Previously [...]

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CFThread is a wonderful addition to ColdFusion 8. It lets you perform parallel actions within your code. However, parallel programming is a complex beast under the best of circumstances.
One of the early things to realize in CF8’s threading support is that it makes a deep copy of the local variables (ala Duplicate()) when [...]

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As you probably know, ColdFusion 8 gave us a long-needed shorthand for creating arrays and structures:

a = “1″,
b = “2″,
c = “3″
}>
“a”,
“b”,
“c”
]>

Unfortunately you couldn’t nest those constructs. With the 8.0.1 updater though, you now can:

a = ["x", "y", "z"],
b = ["s", "t", "u"],
c = ["m", "n", "o"]
}>

This is fantastic when you’re trying to make [...]

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