Welcome to the Tower, my programming and web development blog. Here you will find articles relating to CFML, CSS, HTML, Java, JavaScript and Regular Expressions, plus discussions on the associated tools, technologies, techniques and ideas.
For more general topics, please visit Sorcerer's Isle, where you will find articles on my other interests.
Java RegEx Utilities, or jre-utils, is a CFC which provides a convenient way to access Java's regular expression functionality.
Whilst ColdFusion, Railo, and openBD are all built on Java, and CFML does have regular expression functions, they do not actually use the Java regular expression engine, which supports many useful regex constructs.
The purpose of jre-utils is to provide this extra power to CFML developers in a familiar and easy to use way.
I will shortly be releasing v0.7 of jre-utils, which adds a number of new functions, as well as making things more consistent, so I decided I would give this quick preview of what it contains.
Today, 1st June 2008, has been officially decreed as Regular Expressions Day.
And in honour of this event, there are a couple of regex-oriented competitions happening.
Ben Nadel, nominator of this great day, kicked things off with a handful of prizes for the best comments: June 1st 2008 - National Regular Expression Day!
The deadline for Ben's competition is today - that is, you must post the comment on (or before) RegExp Day, and the winners will be selected tomorrow.
Don't despair if you miss that though, as Steve Levithan also has a regular expression competition running, and the deadline for that is Friday 13th, almost two weeks from now: Regex Day Contest
Happy Reg Ex Day!
I have just released Java RegEx Utilities on RIAForge, which is a CFC enabling easy access to Java Regular Expression functionality, adding to what is available in the standard CFML functions.