Welcome to the Tower, my programming and web development blog. Here you will find articles relating to CFML, CSS, HTML, Java, JavaScript and Regular Expressions, plus discussions on the associated tools, technologies, techniques and ideas.
For more general topics, please visit Sorcerer's Isle, where you will find articles on my other interests.
I have just pushed an update of QueryParam Scanner to GitHub, containing various improvements.
This update is on the rc0.7.5 branch, and it'd be nice if people could take it for a spin and make sure there are no issues with it. (There is a zip download for anyone without git.)
The visible changes which you might notice are:
However, there are also significant under-the-hood changes. I removed my obsolete "Java Regex Utils" library (replacing it with the object part of cfRegex), and made a number of little code clean-ups.
A result of these changes is that qpscanner rc0.7.5 appears to be almost twice as fast as previous versions.
If you have any feedback, please feel free to contact me via GitHub, and similarly if you find any bugs then please raise them on the issue tracker.
It's been over two and a half years since my last "why railo" post, and - despite Railo "only" being 0.3 versions on - there's been a lot of improvements!
In fact, because it's been so long, a few of the things here are not new with v3.3 (though they are all new since the previous article), but are still great features that deserve mentioning!
So, what are my ten favourite new features? Read on to find out.
If you've ever looked at the CFML related articles on Wikipedia, you can't fail to have noticed that, especially when compared to other programming articles, they're not very good.
When somebody puts "coldfusion" or "cfml" into Google, they will almost certainly see the respective Wikipedia pages amongst the top three results, but when they follow those links they're unlikely to get a very good impression!
If you agree that the CFML presence on Wikipedia can and should be improved, and it's up to the CFML community to do it, then read on to find out how you can help fix it.
The cfRegex project is two things. Firstly, it is a complete regex implementation for CFML, providing more functionality, flexibility, features and power than the existing CFML RE functions. Secondly, it is a drive to encourage people to properly learn and make use of regex.
Read the rest of this article to find out more.
Tonight, prepare yourself for the beginning of a new era, as one man - and his keyboard - begins his journey in an epic quest to save the world.
It's 1st June 2010 today, and that means we're celebrating for the third time the annual International Regular Expressions Day.
Ben Nadel kicked off this event two years ago, in order to promote the use of Regex, especially amongst those who might consider them something scary and obscure.
As before, Ben is running a contest, this year's prizes being some O'Reily Regex books and IIS Mod-Rewrite Pro licenses.
Entry to the competition requires writing some code, and the deadline is today, so if you're interested then hurry up and read the blog entry to find out more.
It's nearly a year on from my last Railo blog post so it is well overdue that I write another - just in case there is anyone still sitting on the fence, unsure if they should use Railo - or indeed, anyone who might be unaware of Railo's very existance!
So to start with, a quick summary of what Railo is:
Find out why Railo is the perfect choice for your next development project.
I've recently been working on a gallery website for my brother, a brilliant artist and illustrator. The site is still under construction, but he's already got some great examples of his drawings and sculptures on there, and it is definitely worth checking out.
Head over to eldavo.co.uk to take a look, and if you like the work take a look at his blog where he has more of his art.
On the technical side, the main site is pretty simple, so far, with extra complexity coming later on. It runs on Railo and uses jQuery. The (private) admin part of the site was my first opportunity to use cfimage functionality, allowing thumbnails to be generated from uploaded images. I used jCrop for the client-side crop selection.
Version 0.9 of Beehive Forum, probably the greatest forum software there is, has recently been officially released.
Since the previous v0.8.4 there have been a variety of fixes and improvements, particularly to client-side caching and UTF-8. There is also now support for Google Analytics and for displaying optional Google Adsense adverts. For full information on what has changed, you can check the release notes.
Download Beehive Forum 0.9 from SourceForge
Also, Beehive is currently a Finalist in the SourceForge Community Choice Awards!
If you're a fan of Beehive and haven't yet voted, please vote for Beehive now:
There is a lot of competition, with many thousands of votes already having been cast, so please help spread the word to as many other Beehive users as you can, to help vote for Beehive to win, and gain the recognition it deserves!
This is my new and improved weblog, where I will be posting on a large assortment of topics which I hope you will find interesting. All of the old blog messages have been ported across, and re-catalogued into more useful groupings.
For anyone wishing to read posts only on particular areas, there are three sub-blogs available, which filter the messages from this main blog according to their respective focus. Combined with the ability to subscribe to feeds for individual or multiple tags, it should be easy to get at only the content you wish to read. And to follow all the messages, you can simply read just the main blog.
Currently, everything is still rather basic, but over the next few months I will be adding to, extending and improving the various features that are available, and I welcome any feedback you might have.
In the meantime, I hope you enjoy your stay, and please feel free to ask if you have any questions.