layers

Now that's magic (quotes)

jp.stacey 15 August 2006

If your web application ensures that all your incoming CGI variables are free of the most common source of malicious site damage, can you stop worrying?

Can't find a hint

jp.stacey 20 September 2006

I couldn’t find this on the Goggle, so: if your Coldfusion template occasionally furnishes you with the unhelpful, lineless error:

can’t load a null

then this might be caused by the following. You may be trying to compile a function using something like this code:

Testing across the CF/Java boundary

jp.stacey 23 November 2006

For reasons of speed I’m currently embedding Java in Coldfusion code. Given Coldfusion is built on Java, and can instantiate Java objects through createObject("java", class_name), you’d think that’d be reasonably easy. But the boundary between Coldfusion and Java is like the gap between two halves of a broken bone: jagged, bleeding-edged and painful when coerced into heavy lifting.

Throw it all away!

jp.stacey 27 November 2006

I’ve recently been experimenting with calling external commands (mplayer and lame, so you might be able to guess what I’ve been doing) from within a scripting language (Python, although it needn’t have been as it turns out). Bizarrely, the external commands—argumentae intactae—worked absolutely fine on their own, chained together by me, by hand. However, when executed in the scripted environment the command that produced large volumes of output was stalling at –86.somethingMB, whereas the other command stalling at 7.737MB of output.

.php? .cgi? .who-cares?

jp.stacey 8 February 2007

Simon makes the case for disambiguated URLs. He’s right, largely. I would say as a proviso, though, that URLs need to be hackable by the developer as well as by the user.

CFJavaXML - a component for cached XML transformations

jp.stacey 9 February 2007

Mark Mandel wrote his own version of Coldfusion’s XmlTransform() function, using the underlying Java transform classes. Although one of his annoyances—that XmlTransform() won’t take any parameters—has been solved in CFMX7, XmlTransform() is nonetheless a slow operation, as the transform engine has to be cranked up, the XSL compiled, the transform effected and then everything garbage-collected, each call to the function, each request.

Taking Drupal to pieces

jp.stacey 17 April 2007

Since listening to Garrett Coakley speak at the first Geek Night on the topic of Drupal, I’ve been sniffing round that open-source CMS. He kindly came to speak to us again, and very inspiring it was too. We’re now having a deeper look at it, seeing what it can do, what are its strengths and weaknesses; that sort of thing.

Image manipulation in the browser

jp.stacey 6 June 2007

While Picnik gradually converts the functionality of desktop image processing software into online tools (in the hope, presumably, of being bought up by one of the big players), Flash has found other, more piecemeal uses in augmenting the image and font functionality of your average browser.

Programming shouldn't be degrading

jp.stacey 19 September 2007

Steve compares “graceful degradation” with “progressive enhancement.” Mostly he takes issue (rightly) with the rhetorical spin that the former applies to the idea of building a website. But I think you can compare them with each other as if they were two different types of crowbar instead: two ways of prising open the task in hand.

Whatever I might have $_REQUESTed, I didn't ask for that

jp.stacey 13 October 2007

Imagine you have a Drupal site: I have several, so that’s easy for me. Say you’ve got an index aggregating lots of your content in a listing, and it spans lots of pages. It’s probably a view created with the views module, slicing through your content in a special way.

Drupal has a core paging module that sorts out links along the lines of:

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