Object Overhead in ColdFusion
I have been trying to improve the speed of a ColdFusion application. It was written by a part-timer, a Java developer who was new to ColdFusion. He wrote the code almost entirely in cfscript, and he...
View ArticleChecking for date-time conflicts
It seems like I’ve worked on a lot of applications lately that involve time slots: room reservation systems, appointment schedulers, and so on. One thing that tripped me (and some other developers) up...
View ArticleCFFTP Transfers a Zero-Byte File and Throws a Timeout Error
Although I’ve used ColdFusion for 7+ years now, I’ve never used the cfftp tag before. Yesterday, I found a reason to try it out. I figured it would be as simple as cfhttp–and it was, with one exception...
View ArticleOracle stored procedures and ColdFusion
I’ve heard for years that using Oracle’s stored procedures is both more efficient and more secure than writing queries against the database. It turns out, not everyone agrees with that and there is...
View ArticleBalancing Tags in HTML and XHTML Excerpts
It is fairly common to want to take an HTML source of variable length and display an excerpt. Although some formats, such as Atom and RSS, anticipate this and create a separate summary element, we...
View ArticleUsing a lightweight web server to debug requests
I’ve been working a lot with the Canvas API lately. One task was to add communication channels (e-mail addresses) to user accounts. I was able to add them successfully following the documentation’s...
View ArticleSet operations in ColdFusion
Today I needed to get all the elements in one list that were not members of a second list. That may ring a bell — it’s known as a set difference, or a relative complement. Although it would have been...
View ArticleConverting lines to a list in ColdFusion
I’m so used to dealing with comma-delimited lists in ColdFusion that I would sometimes take a data file that had one item per line and replace the newline characters with commas. It’s easy to use the...
View ArticlecreateDateTime is not a valid date format
While transferring an application from a ColdFusion 9 server to a ColdFusion 10 server, it produced the following error: createDateTime is not a valid date format I was able to trace the error to the...
View ArticleColdFusion session fixation and jsessionid
A web application is vulnerable to a session fixation attack if an unauthenticated user’s session ID does not change after authentication. A malicious user could start an unauthenticated session and...
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