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Well, now that ColdFusion 9 is officially out the door (it's still hard to believe), have you thought about what you want to ask Santa for CF10? We're going to double digits, baby-- so it'd better be good! Yeah, I know-- who do I think I am? Honestly, I still feel like a kid after Christmas with enough new toys to keep me busy for a while. Even so, I can't help but wonder what's in store. Once again, I have found clues in Adobe's own words via the latest version of the ColdFusion Evangelism Kit.

Tags like CFHTMLHead, CFAjaxProxy, and CFAjaxImport don't output their content into the regular ColdFusion output buffer. Instead they put their contents into a special header buffer which is dumped into the beginning of the output right before the request is sent back to the client. But what if you want control over where their output goes? CFSaveContent doesn't work on these bad boys. And even worse, <cfcontent reset="yes"> doesn't get rid of their output. The other day I got bit when trying to return the HTML of a rendered view via a proxy in ColdBox as a JSON string. The JavaScript output of the CFAjaxProxy tag was being appended to the beginning of the response and causing the result to not be valid JSON.

I've never kept too quiet about my affection for SeeFusion as a ColdFusion monitoring tool. I use it for debugging, performance monitoring, and basic metrics gathering. Here's an old note on the JDBC URL wrappers that I found myself digging up last week. I don't even think you can find this nugget on the official SeeFusion site.

I think the bane of development planning can be those conversations where you personify your framework and start debating about what a service should "know", whose "job" a particular operation is, or what the handler should "care" about. This is one of those sort of questions, but I'll keep it brief since I'm more interested in your opinions than my ramblings.

Here's another UDF I was tinkering with last week. I wanted to be able to count all of the numbers that divided evenly into a given integer. I couldn't find a ColdFusion implementation, so after getting some advice from Stack Overflow I created my own.

Ahh... the quintessential math problem-- finding prime numbers. Last week while tinkering with a math challenge I needed to find all of the primes up to a given number. There was a version on cflib.org, but I thought I could do it in less code, so I dug in myself.

This Wednesday Adobe's Kevin Hoyt spoke in Kansas City to a captive audience of about 75 people including ColdFusion programmers, HTML/CSS builders, and designers. The meeting was great. It also included Jack Stack BBQ and shwag from Uhlig, Emfluence, and Tek Systems to name a few. Kevin didn't drop any bombs I hadn't heard about yet, but there were definitely a few things I learned about Adobe's up-and-coming products. Here's a quick overview of my notes:

If you live in or around Kansas City, Kevin Hoyt is coming to speak about ColdFusion, Bolt, Flex, and Flash Catalyst this Wednesday. I am pretty excited. First of all, to receive some local attention from Adobe. Secondly, to get to hear Kevin (Adobe Platform Evangalist). Thirdly, they are promising BBQ. What else could be better?

Flex 4 (Gumbo) is now in Beta and new training tutorials are available from Trilemetry. There a handful of new articles you can read on Adobe's site and follow along with to learn Flex 4 with ColdFusion!

Today I offer you a question of preference. Should optional method parameters be defaulted to blank and assumed to exist, or should they only be defined if you intend to use them? In the name of code reusability I will find myself writing generic service methods such as userService.loadUser() which have a large list of optional parameters such as lastName, firstName, userName, companyID, userID, password etc. I will reuse this method any time I want to load a user or a list of users. The question is this: is it more correct to default all of the arguments or check for their existence?