If you’ve been working with Coldfusion ORM, you’ve probably run into this annoying bug when working with collections, or any of the relationship types. Whether you’re using positional or named parameters, code like the example below will result in a Java NullPointerException. See previous blogs by Dan Watt and David Mineer about this.

category = entityLoadByPK("Category", 1);
categoryNews = ormExecuteQuery("FROM News n WHERE ? IN elements(n.categories)", [category]);

My solution was to change the code to something like this instead:

category = entityLoadByPK("Category", 1);
categoryNews = ormExecuteQuery("SELECT n FROM News n JOIN n.categories c WHERE c.id = ?", [category.getId()]);

Hopefully this will save someone some time! If you have figured out how to get the elements() HQL function to work in ormExecuteQuery(), please post in the comments!

Here’s the build system settings I use to run my Node.js projects from Sublime Text 2:

{
    "cmd": ["node", "$file_name"],
    "selector": "source.js",
    "working_dir" : "$file_path"
}

To use this in ST2, go to “Tools” -> “Build System” -> “New Build System…” and paste the above code in to the new window. Save the file as Nodejs.sublime-build. Now hitting CTRL-B when editing a javascript file will automatically launch the file in Node!

OR you can just download the file from the Gist I created here

NOTE Don’t forget to press CTRL-Break or go to “Tools” -> “Cancel Build” to kill the node process when you’re finished testing!

Steve Bryant has declared August 1st “How I Got Started in Coldfusion Day“, which I thought was an awesome idea, so here is my short little story! year Back in ’06 I was working as a PHP developer in a (very) small online marketing company. We ran things like link exchanges, multi level marketing websites, etc. At the time I was actually trying to move away from PHP and get into the new hotness which was Ruby on Rails.

That May my employer, who was an awesome guy, died suddenly from a heart attack. In one morning I lost a friend and also found myself unemployed. I took a few weeks to process things and then sent my resume to every web and software development business in the area. As luck would have it, the current developer at Snap Design was leaving in a month to work as a missionary in Africa. I had read through the company’s website, and already knew they exclusively worked with Macromedia Cold Fusion. I’d never touched Coldfusion, I’d heard it was a “dead” language. I also knew I didn’t want to end up working in a call centre.

I spent my evenings reading and trying the code in the Coldfusion (MX 7 at the time) documentation and the CFWACK books. I practiced by translating code I had written in PHP to CF. While disappointed at the lack of proper scripting support (remedied in Coldfusion 9), I was impressed at how easy it was to learn, and how little code I had to write to accomplish the same things I would do in PHP. I also found a very active and passionate developer community, not something you think you would find with a “dead” language!

To cut a long story short, I managed to secure the job, and 5 years on I still love what I do. Proof that good things can come out of an unfortunate situation!

This is a pretty simple jQuery plugin that will limit the number of words a website user can enter into a form textfield or input. It should work with any version of jQuery, though it’s only been tested with 1.3 and 1.4. An example is included in the package.

Demo

Download Plugin

This is just a quick post, will post a longer one later when I’ve had more time to play.

Before this will work, you’ll need to download and install JRuby, and copy jruby.jar from the installation directory to your Coldfusion classpath. For me those directories were c:\program files (x86)\jruby-1.4.0\lib and c:\Coldfusion9\lib respectively.

Once that’s done, on to the fun!

First, I created a really simple custom tag called ruby.cfm as follows:

    ruby = createObject("java", "org.jruby.embed.ScriptingContainer");
    if (thisTag.ExecutionMode is "end") {
        thisTag.GeneratedContent = ruby.runScriptlet(toString(thisTag.GeneratedContent));
    }

Then, I created my test page, test_ruby.cfm:

    
        def myproc(str)
            "Hello ##{str}!"
        end
        myproc("#name#")
    

When you load up the test page in your browser, you should see:

Hello Bob!

WARNING: Running this code may cause a rip in the space-time continuum.

Installed Windows 7 on my desktop this morning, and ran into a little issue. The installation was taking FOREVER, the install sat at “Setup is Starting…” for at least 10 minutes. A couple of quick tweaks later and I had it fixed. Posting here in case anyone else runs into similar issues.

1. Make sure your SATA drives are plugged into the first available ports. SATA_0 on your motherboard should be your boot drive.
2. If you have an old-ass 3.5″ floppy drive, like I do, try disabling it in the BIOS (or completely unplug it from the system).

Following those two steps fixed the issue for me!

Ray Camden’s Friday Challenge for this week was to take a photo and jumble it into 100 random blocks. Like those puzzles from when you were a kid. My solution written in pure CFScript can be found here.

Matthew Abbott expanded on my code and made the blocks draggable using jQuery here.

Figured this out while I was working on my Coldfusion Twitter API component. I haven’t been able to find any examples elsewhere, so I thought I would post it here for others.

<cfscript>
    myHttp = new Http(url="http://www.google.com", method="get");
    myHttpResult = myHttp.send().getPrefix();
    writeDump(myHttpResult);
</cfscript>