Blog

ColdBox has an online meetup every other week called the ColdBox Connection. Just a note that the next one is this Thursday at noon Central time. I will be talking about LogBox-- the Logging framework that is built into ColdBox and also can be used as a stand-alone logging utility in a legacy app. See you there! http://experts.adobeconnect.com/coldbox-connection/

I am very excited to announce that ColdBox 3.0 has been officially released. After 6 milestone releases and 2 release candidates it is finally complete. I am especially proud to see this since a number of fixes, and code submissions of my own have worked their way into the ColdBox framework, Sample Apps, and Builder Extensions over the past 2 years. A brief list of new features in ColdBox 3.0 includes:

Last Tuesday I presented on the ColdBox Framework to my local Kansas City user group with an emphasis on the new 3.0 features like WireBox. Here is the slide deck I used.


http://slidesix.com/view/KCDevCore-ColdBox-3-WireBox-10-preso

In a recent pissing match between ColdFusion and PHP, Jared Rypka-Hauer was demonstrating the performance of a function that generated prime numbers. The discussion really wasn't about the BEST prime generator as much as it was about how much ColdFusion can kick PHP's puny butt all over town. Never the less, I piped up in the comments to ask Jared to compare a prime number generator that I wrote a while back based on the Sieve of Eratosthene. After Jared asked some good questions about how my code worked I figured it was time I stopped high-jacking the comments of the PHP pooper train. I decided to spin off a new post to highlight some significant performance gains I was able to produce.

When catching an error in a CFC, I've always assumed that the exception object was a locally scoped variable, specific to that method call. Some interesting errors we received from the depths of our ColdBox framework made me start to question that. I concocted a test last night which appears to prove that your exceptions are not thread safe in a CFC stored in a persistent scope. (In CF8, at least)

A brief hiatus today from from the PCI Compliance series to issue a quick public service announcement. I was installing my free copy of SeeFusion today that I netted in the recent give-away WebApper had. Since the target machine was CF7 on a OpenSuse Linux with the JVM upgraded to 1.4.2_11, it was a "manual" install. Pretty easy-- copy a few jar files and edit a few configs. The problem was, SeeFusion wasn't able to connect to my debugging port to capture stack traces and I couldn't figure out why.

As a web developer you have your share of demons you have to face. If your company processes credit cards, chances are your yearly PCI DSS compliance scan is one of those demons. I thought I would do a short series on a few security items I tightened down as a result of our last PCI scan. This is by no means a comprehensive list of everything needed to pass a PCI scan. If you want to know that and have time to read a 74 page PDF you can get a copy of the Spec at www.pcisecuritystandards.org.

I jogged down the stairs, one arm over my head, as I pulled my coat on a sleeve at a time. Fishing the car keys out of my pocket with one hand, I leaned over my computer to tap in my E-mail password with the other. "Wow, 41 unread messages in the CF-Talk folder," I thought. "There must be a hot new topic on the list today." With a click I watched the new thread flow in. "Why i fear ColdFusion is on its last legs" "Oh Geez," I sighed, "Please not with this again!" There wasn't time to read all that right then. I'd have to catch up on this one later in the day when my absorption rate was higher.

I found an interesting little bug in the BlogCFC implementation of ColdFISH today. ColdFISH is a ColdFusion code formatting component that is instantiated once and cached as a singleton in the application scope in BlogCFC. The problem is, ColdFISH looks like it wasn't intended to be used as a singleton. It makes use of the variables scope to store the Java StringBuffer class it uses to gather up your formatted code as well as a number of other variables used to parse the code it is formatting. This means when two or more people hit a BlogCFC entry with larger code samples, race conditions exists.

Our friends at Webapper are giving away free copies of SeeFusion (an awesome ColdFusion server monitoring tool) to the first 100 200 people to take their survey on ColdFusion consulting. Go check out here: http://www.webapper.com/blog/index.php/2009/11/25/coldfusion-survey/ UPDATE: Webapper is now going to give away SeeFusion to the first 200 people to take their survey. Can't beat that!