Blog

Hallelujah! According to Kristen Schofield's blog (ColdFusion Product Marketing Manager), the academic version of ColdFusion is now available for educational institutions teaching ColdFusion. http://www.webbschofield.com/index.cfm/2008/9/2/ColdFusion-8-Now-Available-to-Students-and-Educators-for-Free

I've built and consumed SOAP web services. I've consumed REST web services. It wasn't until a couple days ago I got a chance to consume an XML-RPC web service. I'll readily admit, I'm still a little unsure of the exact differences between the two, but the more I Google, the clearer it is becoming.

If you have ever used the iif() (inline if) function in ColdFusion you have probably found yourself using the de() (delay evaluate) function as well. I remember using that function for quite some time without ever really understanding when I needed it and exactly what it did. I found myself explaining it to someone last week and thought it would be an interesting topic to blog.

I installed SQL Server 2005 Express today on my home PC. For the most part it was painless, but there were a couple snags. First, it took me a couple tries to find the right download page. A bunch of the links on Microsoft's site kept redirecting me to the 2008 page. Still other pages wouldn't even mention 2005.

Adobe announced their free academic version of ColdFusion at CFUnited this year that would be available to educational institutions teaching ColdFusion. The release has been plagued by delays, but they promise it is coming soon. During a discussion today on the CF-Talk list about it, the topic of textbooks for teaching ColdFusion came up. I bugged Ben Forta about it and he stated that while they would love to release official teaching materials with it, they haven't received approval for it from the Adobe big cheese yet and he's not holding his breath.

I had a little time tonight to download and install FarCry 5.0.0 to play around. I mainly just wanted to see how it worked and what all you can do with it. It seems a lot of people complain that it is too complicated. I guess I'll see for myself.

It has been mentioned in several places that MySQL 5.0.1 has a NO_BACKSLASH_ESCAPES mode it can be run in to prevent backslashes from being an escape character. Thanks to Azadi Saryev for pointing it out on my blog and Mark Krugers as well. Jake Munson even posted instructions for applying the setting to your SQL server at startup. For the record, you can also use this setting on a specific data source.

I've been staring at my computer monitor trying start this paragraph for about 10 minutes now, so I'm just going to start typing. I've been thinking about system design. Organization versus performance. Design patterns versus efficiency. We adopt some code without thought to its performance because we're talking about milliseconds, and the readability, organization, and structure gains our apps enjoy are well worth it. I'm not sure that is always the case though, and we don't notice it until too late.

Well, after a brief hiatus, the SQL Injection attacks have reconvened with a small change. They have modified the capitalization of a couple words in the URL. "DECLARE" has become "DeCLARE", and "EXEC" has become "ExEC". This is obviously to get around people who employed case-sensitive filtering mechanisms.

On my home PC I have the developer edition of ColdFusion 8 installed along with Apache Web Server and MySQL 5. Apache and MySQL are pretty lightweight, but ColdFusion can get a little bulky when it comes to memory. I don't use my personal Dev sites all the time, so I like to turn it all off when I'm not using it. I only have 1 gig of RAM in this PC after all.