Sorcerer's Tower :: ColdFusion

CFML on Wikipedia

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 22:08:01 GMT

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.

Introducing the cfRegex Project!

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 22:20:48 GMT

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.

expandPath bug in CF8

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 17:23:42 GMT

I've just encountered a very annoying bug with the expandPath function in CF8.

Take the following code:

<cfset MyDir = "."/>
<cfloop index="i" from="1" to="5">
<cfset MyDir = expandPath(MyDir)/>
<cfoutput><br/>#MyDir#</cfoutput>
</cfloop>

Run the code through Railo and you will get exactly the right behaviour, with the current directory output five times:

C:\dev\scratch
C:\dev\scratch
C:\dev\scratch
C:\dev\scratch
C:\dev\scratch

Now go run the same code with CF8 - and this is what you get:

F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch
F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch\F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch
F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch\F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch\F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch
F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch\F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch\F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch\F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch
F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch\F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch\F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch\F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch\F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch

It simply stacks the current directory onto the front each time. Very frustrating.

In order to get round this, I created a regular expression to pull off the last value of any directory containing more than one colon - this will work for Windows machines, but may need to be changed for Linux or MacOSX machines (if the bug affects these).

<cfif isDefined('Server.ColdFusion.ProductName')
AND Server.ColdFusion.ProductName EQ 'ColdFusion Server'
AND ListLen( MyDir ,':') GT 2>
<cfset MyDir = REreplace( MyDir , "^.*([A-Z]:[^:]+)$" , "\1" )/>
</cfif>

CFML Engine Comparison

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 09:07:15 GMT

I have just published the CFML Engine Wiki, a website to compare and detail the features and differences of the top CFML engines.

There is still a lot of work to be done with it, but with it being a wiki I decided it better to release the URL and allow others to help with doing that.