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Just a couple things I wanted to mention... The first is that the CFML Advisory Committee has been at work drafting their first version of the CFML language spec. Also, while looking through www.opencfml.org I noticed they are using CodexWiki which runs on ColdBox which is pretty cool. Speaking of ColdBox...

I've been following Sean Corfield's nice series, Railo for Dummies on installing Railo, Tomcat and Apache. (Does that make me a dummy?) His latest entry showed the simple steps he followed to convert his blog corfield.org over from Java 1.4 and CF7 to Java 1.6_13 and Railo 3.1.0.009.

I went to add a custom tag path onto my dev server this morning. Feeling a little lazy and not wanting to type in the full path by hand, I clicked the "Browse Server" button. There are similar buttons for adding ColdFusion mappings and searching for file-based databases while adding data sources. The Browse Server page uses an applet to let you choose directories or files off your server. I was greeted with an error message:
Server Error
IO error on server communication

This is a reminder of a great developer resource right here in our community. If you ever find yourself looking for a list of blog aggregators, hosting providers, job listings, code formatters, database tools, cf tools, editors, debuggers, time tracking apps or anything vaguely related to programming, you don't need to look much farther than

A recent thread on CF-Talk brought up this very good topic. It deals with the performance hit you can get when SQL Server implicitly converts your data to nchar and nvarchar for you when you have enabled Unicode support in your data sources. Unicode text cannot be stored in normal char or varchar fields. It must use nchar or nvarchar. These data types use two bytes per character, which means you can only store half as much text in them (limit 4,400 instead of 8,800). The problem is two fold:

1. SQL Server cannot directly compare a varchar and nvarchar value so it must convert one.
2. String manipulation or conversion on an indexed column will render the index useless

I've noticed a theme this past week in CF blogs. More and more people have been commenting on the usefulness and proliferation of ColdFusion and just generally railing against the whole CF is Dead mentality that incessantly dogs us. I'm kind of curious what has gotten us stirred up lately. Whatever it is, I'm enjoying the passion it is revealing in the community.

As of ColdFusion 8 we have been able to pass a struct into a method so it becomes the method's argument collection without knowing the individual keys in the struct. myObject.myMethod(argumentcollection=myStruct); The other day I needed to do this in JavaScript. It took me a short while to figure it out, so I thought I would blog it here for others' benefit.

My busy schedule has kept me away from the blogoshpere the past couple months. I had heard of Adobe's layoffs but I was kind of depressed for a bit last night when I read that they had affected Jason Delmore, former Product Manager of CF. What a blow to the community that was-- and I just had the pleasure of meeting Jason at Adobe Max this year. I'm feeling better now though. As I continued reading, I went on to see that Adam Lehman, who followed in Ben F's footsteps as ColdFusion Evangelist, has stepped up into the role of CF Product Manger. I absolutely loved what he said on his blog. What hit home to me was when he likened the advance of CF to a Revolution.

A couple days ago Ray posted a screen shot from Adam L showing some new cfscript syntax in Bolt. I personally am excited about it. I certainly don't use cfscript for everything I code, but I definitely have gotten to the point where all my business logic is in cfscript. I just think it is cleaner. I have some questions of my own out the new Centaur syntax though. Here is my best stab at what the code in the screen shot looked like:

Here's a quick note concerning a quirk in the newly released ColdBox 2.6.2 that has a small chance at affecting you. We installed the latest version on our dev server yesterday and upon initializing the framework for the first time were greeted with an odd error while attempting to create the ColdBox logging directory.