One of the biggest problems rampant amongst developers is ignoring the standard library and writing your own solution to the same problem because we think it’s faster/smarter/better. I know I’m certainly guilty of this thinking too. Unfortunately this is pretty much always a mistake. I recently stressed this issue quite a lot in my Designing [...]

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Ben Nadel was recently looking at Prototypal Inheritance in ColdFusion, which is incidentally one of the topics I talk about in my I bet you didn’t know you could do that with ColdFusion presentation, which I gave at BFusion 2008 and will be doing an updated version of at CFUnited 2010. </shameless-plug> The code samples [...]

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Recently one of our applications started failing inconsistently with strange errors about certain files not existing. We’d see error emails about things like the /myapplication/views/pages/survey.cfm not existing which didn’t make any sense since /myapplication is a mapping created inside the Application.cfc <cfset this.mappings["/myapplication"] = expandPath(“../”)> See the bug there? ExpandPath() is relative to the requested [...]

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Last night Ben Nadel sent me an email asking if there was any way to get the currently executing function so you could get the metadata from it. <cffunction name=”test” myAttribute=”1″> <— How can we get the myAttribute value? —> </cffunction> The first obvious attempt at this is to use getMetaData(test).myAttribute, and that works fine [...]

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I was working on the new profile picture feature of the registration and CFUnited 2009 website when I ran into an issue where a user uploaded a 2112 x 2816 (2MB) photo. This seemed to cause file locking issues in cfimage which I was told were addressed by CF 8.0.1 Cumulative Hot Fix 1. I [...]

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Just found this bug today…. So CF8 outputs the cfcatch.message into the Reason-Phrase portion of the HTTP Response, however it does not strip new lines (LF or CR). A web server, however, should never send new lines in the Reason-Phrase [1], and should probably be truncating that error message at a certain length. [1] RFC2616, [...]

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While working on the template system used for the conference websites I ran across a problem where I needed the path to the template that called a custom tag. The first thing I tried was getCurrentTemplatePath() thinking that it might return that since the documentation makes no mention of custom tags. Instead, however, the function [...]

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While doing some casual web surfing I came across a rather interesting blog entry about Ruby’s types and looping. I started typing a reply, and then I realized it was really long, so I’m putting it here: One reason I think methods like this are great is that Ruby is intended to be read! Which [...]

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