This release contains a small change to the DateFormat() function.

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Just a quick note to let folks know that all branches of CFJS (both jQuery and non-jQuery) have been updated with a bug fix for two of the list functions, namely ListContains() and ListContainsNoCase().

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I've successfully added HTMLCodeFormat() and HTMLEditFormat() functions to CFJS and have checked the new code into the repository as version 1.1.10.

But I've got more to do. Looking through some old notes, I found that I still needed to add the following:

• NumberFormat()
• ArrayAverage()
• ArrayClear()
• ArrayDeleteAt()
• ArrayInsertAt()

I will of course, still be working on a demo page as well.

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As of May 3rd, Open BlueDragon has finally been released into the wild, and is available in a variety of formats from their download page. Two versions are available now, and others are coming soon!

Let's start putting this thing to some good use! And when you've got a site running on OpenBD be sure to tell everyone on the OpenBD mailing list!

I caught this on CF-Talk today, and immediately jumped over to the New Atlanta press release on the subject.

Vince Bonfanti, President of New Atlanta said, "This announcement is in direct response to community and customer feedback, who've seen most other web-scripting languages like JSP, PHP and ASP become commoditized as part of a free and/or open-source portion of various web application stacks."

This is very encouraging! One thing that I really, really dig about the developers of the various CFML engines out there: They listen to their users! And they don't just listen, but take action based upon what we've told them that we want.

According to the FAQ the open source version of BlueDragon will be "...nearly identical to the current commercial Java EE version of BlueDragon..." minus a few third-party commercial technologies which they cannot include. New Atlanta says that these differences will be minor [emphasis added] and will be "clearly published."

Also, according to the FAQ this new open source edition of BlueDragon will be released under the GNU General Public License Version 2 (GPLv2), just like MySQL and other popular open source projects.

I for one, am seriously pumped about this announcement! The small company I work for only uses ColdFusion on our really big projects and even then my boss doesn't like spending the money on it -- but that's his issue. For all of our smaller one-off projects I've been forced to learn a bit of PHP to work on those, and while I'm not afraid of working in PHP, I'm definitely more comfortable in CFML if only for the fact that I rarely have to look anything up! That's all just a matter of how familiar I am with the language, but I still think working with queries in PHP (without any frameworks like Cake and the like) is damn stupid. I just dislike the way they work. I spent almost a half a day once just trying to figure out how sessions worked in PHP! It would have been a lot easier if they had something like application.cfm or application.cfc.

Okay, so this wasn't meant to turn into a tirade on my dislike of PHP, but it's very nice to see a heavy hitter like New Atlanta stepping up and open sourcing their CFML engine.

Let's make sure everyone and their dog knows about this! Let's get some link love happening!

http://www.dzone.com/links/open_source_cfml_engine_on_the_way.html

http://digg.com/software/New_Atlanta_announces_free_open_source_BlueDragon_edition

Hi folks,

Rey Bango just passed along a link to this blog entry of Phill Nacelli's about a security problem in CF7 and CF8. It looks a bit old (November 14, 2007), but I'd never heard of it. Oops!

So, I thought I'd pass along the word in case I'm not the only one who'd never heard of this problem.

Here's Adobe's summary of the problem:

"An error in ColdFusion MX7 and ColdFusion 8 applications could allow an attacker to hijack user sessions. This issue does not apply to customers using J2EE session management."

Here's a link to more information about this problem and how you can make sure that your server is updated. http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb07-19.html

Hi folks,

I'm working on a project where I programmatically fill in government PDF forms. In today's case -- Lien Applications.

Well, the first thing I've got to know about the PDF file is:

1. Is it really an interactive form? (if it's not I'll have to try and add form fields by hand with Adobe Acrobat Pro)
2. If it's already an interactive form, then what's the structure of that form, and what are the names of the form fields?

The client I'm doing this for has stores in nine different states, so that's nine different versions of basically the same form -- but every state is a little different. At first I wrote a really quick and very specific CF program to give me this information. But now that I'm on my second and third form I decided that I'd rather spend a few minutes building a tool which would accept a path to my PDF and upon clicking a button give me the information I needed.

So that's what I did. And here's the code. Improvements could probably be made, and if you like, you're completely welcome to do so. But what's here works perfectly for my purposes.

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If there's one thing that's for certain it's that Ajax is very cool stuff, and everyone it seems is using it. It allows us as developers to provide for that slick desktop app sort of feel inside of a browser.

On the other hand: debugging ajax calls can be a serious pain in the butt! There are tools out there to help us though: Fiddler, FireBug, GreaseMonkey, Venkmen, etc. and those are fine, but Rob Gonda has provided us ColdFusion programmers with even more functionality when it comes to debugging our XMLHttpRequest calls.

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Okay. It's late. Really late. But, I'm back -- I know you're thinkin' who the heck are you? -- and part two of my jQuery + AjaxCFC tutorial is finally here. I've been stressing over not having finished this sooner, but I hope some folks will still find it useful.

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Kalendar is a cool calender framework written using a custom tag and some CFCs. The Kalendar team is running a design contest for this sweet little open source app.

If the UI you design is deemed the best one, you'll win yourself a brand-spankin'-new license to ColdFusion 8 (standard edition).

Details on the contest can be found on TJ Downes' blog.

If only my css skills were up there with the big boys, I'd give it a shot... oh, and there's a matter of having the time ;o)

Good luck to all who enter!

Cheers!

In part one of this tutorial series I noted the mechanism by which I enable/disable log4javascript using the CF variable 'JSIncludeList' along with a boolean 'ShowLog4JS'.

I also made mention of the following helper functions:

I have to admit that I'd not used any of these functions before, but I wanted to at least make everyone aware of their existance. Well, I used the first one on the above list today while helping a friend to debug some code. It turns out that

turns on log4javascript! So, basically I reinvented the wheel, and Rob already had us covered with a mechanism to turn on and off log4javascript.

If I learn anything new between now and when I finally get part two of this tutorial written (probably this weekend), I'll be sure to post another quick errata.

Cheers!

I've recently received a couple of emails from individuals on different mailing lists asking for help using Rob Gonda's AjaxCFC with jQuery. More specifically, what to do with complex data (i.e. a CF query object) once it's come back from the ajax call.

In the case of both the emails I received asking for help, the writers wanted to know (in general) how to update an on-screen table with new records based on the data returned from their AjaxCFC call.

It sounds like a bit of a tutorial is in order, and since I couldn't easily find one on the net, I thought I'd better write one.

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I've been stupid busy at work recently writing code for two client's both of which have deadlines that need to be met, changes to be made, bugs that need fixing... you probably know the drill.

On top of that I've recently been diagnosed with high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes! Sucks to be me, huh? Anyway, the upshot is that I've really not had a lot of time to do all the things that I want to do for the CFJS project. I'm also writing a tutorial about using Rob Gonda's AjaxCFC with jQuery that I promised a few folks I'd get published soon.

So today I received an email from Trent Richardson not only offering to help with the CFJS project, but he put his money where his mouth was... or his code where his mouth was... or something, and wrote the IsValid() function that he was suggesting be added to the library! How cool is that!

This is my first open source project, so it's super cool to me that a) people are using it and b) that someone is willing to help the cause! I'm stoked. Thanks Trent!

Anyway (@Neil), I'm going to try to finish the tutorial and my goal is to get it up tonight. Things have finally calmed down a little with my clients, so hopefully I'll be able to get some work done on these projects (as well as fit in a movie or two ;o).

BTW: I just saw the Transformers movie tonight. It was awesome! And (as the folks in Hollywood are apt to do) they totally left it open for an other movie.

While I'm still struggling to find the time to work on new features for the CFJS libraries (IsValid, ArrayAverage, ArrayClear, ArrayDeleteAt, ArrayInsertAt, ArrayPrepend, and ArraySum), a bug in the DateFormat function had been brought to my attention by user Boyan Kostadinov. He then later pointed me to another DateFormat function written by Steve Levithan.

Steve's DateFormat function is very nice, and since Steve does some ColdFusion programming the syntax is very similar. Steve implemented his function as an extension of the JavaScript date object, but since I've incorporated his function into both branches of the CFJS library this is no longer the case. So the CFJS syntax of the function follows more closely to the syntax of CF's native function.

In Steve's implementation you could write a line of code like this:

Which should return something like, "Today is Thursday". But when using the CFJS implementation to get the same result you'd need to write it like this:

Following is a table of the different metacharacters available to the DateFormat function. (This table is almost a direct rip from Steve's blog post which discusses his function)

The most notable differences are that I've added the 't' and 'T' metacharacters to the function. While, Steve's function allowed for 'AM' or 'am' with TT and tt respectively, he did not allow for 'A' or 'a' which is what 'T' and 't' are used for.

The other major thing to note (if you haven't already) is that this new DateFormat function also handles the formatting of time. This means that there really isn't a reason to have a TimeFormat function. However, since this breaks with CF's dogma, I've written TimeFormat such that it's really just an alias of DateFormat. Someone might use DateFormat() for all their date formatting needs and TimeFormat() for all their time formatting needs, but in reality the two functions work interchangeably.

The nice thing about having one function that handles both date and time formatting is that it replaces two other functions that were quite long, and so the overall size of CFJS just went down by a bit. :o)