Show of hands, how many people like CFML? Ok, how many like the ColdFusion Platform? What's the difference, you ask? CFML is a markup language that you do most CF Platform development in. You can use CFSCRIPT (which is ECMAScript-like) for certain things, but CFML is the Platform workhorse. The Platform, on the other hand, is all the stuff that your applications (written in CFML, usually) get because they run on the CF server. Things like datasources, PDF generation, easy file access, etc.

This one has gotten me several times.  With the new structure literal notation in CF8, you have to use equal signs between the key-value pairs.  In other places where you use key-value pairs (like passing named params to a UDF), you can use equals signs or colons, but not so with structure literals. I have to say, I was quite excited for structure and array literals in CF8, but man have I been disappointed.

At our office, we’ve recently moved to a shared workspace instead of individual offices, and part of the deal was that we each got a set of noise canceling headphones (PXC 300 from Sennheiser).  I was skeptical, but figured pumping music directly into my ears coupled with the muffling effect of the actual headphones would be sufficiently “noise canceling”.  Oh, was I in for a surprise. We finally got them today and I am impressed.

On the Fusebox 5 mailing list this evening, Brian Kotek mentioned the inability to CFDUMP the myFusebox object because CFDUMP can’t handle the cyclic nature of the object’s internal data structures. While dumping myFusebox (which is a CFC instance) is probably a “silly” thing to do (Sean Corfield from the same thread: “Mind you, since myFusebox is an *object*, I’m not sure why you’re dumping it?

Getting Slashdotted is a thing of the past, now you can get Dooced: post an entry that causes your feed subscribers to actually visit the site itself, and overwhelm your server.  Note this is definition two for ‘dooced’, the first being “to have posted work-related things on your personal blog and get fired for it.

I was really hoping for (though not really expecting) a nice simple solution to centering text on an image to show up as a result of the Wednesday Contest. Sadly, that wasn’t the case. As you might guess, the contest was based on a real world use case that I had: gracefully handling the image tooling’s inability to generate thumbnails of certain images.

And here’s the extra credit solution: <cfif NOT isDefined("attributes")> <cfset attributes = structNew() /> <cfset structAppend(attributes, form, false) /> <cfset structAppend(attributes, url, false) /> </cfif> <cfparam name="attributes.width" default="100" /> <cfparam name="attributes.height" default="100" /> <cfparam name="attributes.backgroundColor" default="f7f7f7" /> <cfparam name="attributes.

Just had my first occasion to use CFTHREAD in an app, and it’s nice.  As part of rendering an image gallery, I wanted to ensure that the thumbnails (which are generated server-side) exist so that they the user doesn’t have to wait for them to be auto-generated as they’re requested.  Unfortunately, generating the thumbnails is relatively slow, so I didn’t want to do it as part of the page execution.

Since I had a whopping zero takers for my contest, I’m thinking it won’t be a repeat event. Here’s my solution for the first portion of the challenge: <cfif NOT isDefined("attributes")> <cfset attributes = structNew() /> <cfset structAppend(attributes, form, false) /> <cfset structAppend(attributes, url, false) /> </cfif> <cfparam name="attributes.width" default="100" /> <cfparam name="attributes.

For those of you who missed it, I posted a little contest this morning and have gotten a whopping zero submissions!  There is still time to submit a solution, but be quick, as my solution (just the base, not extra credit) will be published tomorrow morning.  I’ll be posting a full solution (with the extra credit) Friday morning.  If you tried and gave up, you’re smart.  ;)  It’s really circuitous for how simple it seems on the surface, and way more effort than it ought to be.