100% Geek The Adventures of Peter Boughton:
Web Development; OSX; Photography.

Greetings, and welcome to my weblog, covering topics ranging from computing to photography; gadgets; gaming; and anything else I think I can make interesting.

For those that don't know me, I am Peter Boughton, a ColdFusion developer, amateur photographer, and a total utter genius.

(For those that do know me, please don't tell anyone the genius bit isn't true.)

If you'd like to contact me, please send an e-mail using a clear subject line to peter:blog.bpsite.net.

The latest development version of qpScanner is now in SVN at RIAForge.

It would be great if people could test it out and let me know of any issues they encounter.
As before, it is all self-contained, so it can be installed and run with minimal effort.

Note: As this is still the development version, you need to use the zip option at the bottom of the RIAForge page, not the "Download Project" link - the button will only give the old version.


When released, v0.7 will be a significant new version, so I want to give a quick discussion of the new features...

read more...

Posted by Peter on 17-August-08 at 00:01 ~ ~ Category: cfml , sql , projects

I've just encountered a very annoying bug with the expandPath function in CF8.

Take the following code:
<cfset MyDir = "."/>

<cfloop index="i" from="1" to="5">
<cfset MyDir = expandPath(MyDir)/>
<cfoutput><br/>#MyDir#</cfoutput>
</cfloop>

Run the code through Railo and you will get exactly the right behaviour, with the current directory output five times:
C:\dev\scratch
C:\dev\scratch
C:\dev\scratch
C:\dev\scratch
C:\dev\scratch

Now go run the same code with CF8 - and this is what you get:
F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch
F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch\F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch\F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch\F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch\F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch\F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch\F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch\F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch\F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch\F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch\F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch

It simply stacks the current directory onto the front each time. Very frustrating.


In order to get round this, I created a regular expression to pull off the last value of any directory containing more than one colon - this will work for Windows machines, but may need to be changed for Linux or MacOSX machines (if the bug affects these).

<cfif isDefined('Server.ColdFusion.ProductName')
AND Server.ColdFusion.ProductName EQ 'ColdFusion Server'
AND ListLen( MyDir ,':') GT 2>
<cfset MyDir = REreplace( MyDir , "^.*([A-Z]:[^:]+)$" , "\1" )/>
</cfif>

Posted by Peter on 16-August-08 at 17:23 ~ ~ Category: cfml

The more observant visitors to this blog may have noticed the badge floating in the corner, indicating that I will be speaking at the cfDevCon developer conference later this year.

CFDevCon 2008 is a UK-based ColdFusion and web development conference, being held this September down in Brighton.
Whilst ColdFusion and CFML are the focus of the conference, the organisers are keen to also cover complementary web development subjects, and there is a good variety of topics on the schedule.

read more...

Posted by Peter on 01-July-08 at 22:48 ~ ~ Category: cfml , web-dev , sql , accessibility

As promised previously, here is a more detailed entry on the announcement to Open Source the Railo CFML engine.

read more...

Posted by Peter on 08-June-08 at 17:59 ~ ~ Category: cfml , web-dev

Well the first day of Scotch '08 is now over, so here is a quick round-up of the sessions I attended.

Day two has ended, and I have updated the main entry with details on today's events.

Scotch on the Rocks 2008 is now unfortunately ended, as before please see the main entry for the final day's summaries.


read more...

Posted by Peter on 06-June-08 at 22:57 ~ ~ Category: cfml , web-dev , sql

Today at the midday Scotch keynote, Gert Franz and Luc Texier made an impressive announcement: Railo is going completely Open Source.

This is an exciting move both for Railo and for the CFML community as a whole, and I'll be writing more details about it later, but for now here some some quick key details...

There will be two editions of Railo, with the Community and Professional editions combining into one, and the Enterprise edition being the other.
The new Community+Professional edition will be Open Source and there will be no limit to the number of web contexts allowed.
The Enterprise edition will have added value features, including tools from Intergral.

The license will be LGPL2, which means you can distribute Railo along with commercial software.

The timeline for release of the source code is mid to late October, around the time that Railo 3.1 is due for release.

The announcement is online at the JBoss website at www.jboss.org/railo


More Information available: Railo goes Open Source with JBoss.org (Update)

Posted by Peter on 05-June-08 at 17:30 ~ ~ Category: cfml , web-dev

I have just published the CFML Engine Wiki, a website to compare and detail the features and differences of the top CFML engines.

There is still a lot of work to be done with it, but with it being a wiki I decided it better to release the URL and allow others to help with doing that.


www.cfml-engines.info

Posted by Peter on 02-June-08 at 09:07 ~ ~ Category: cfml , web-dev

The code for my QueryParam Scanner has been uploaded to RIAForge.

QueryParam Scanner is a simple tool which scans your code for queries and reports back about any variables that are not inside <cfqueryparam/> tags.

Download QueryParam Scanner from RIAForge.

Posted by Peter on 06-April-08 at 17:42 ~ ~ Category: cfml , projects