Entries tagged "CFML"

Today was the 1st June, and that means it's Regex Day again!

This annual event was started four years ago by Ben Nadel to celebrate this wonderful (yet often misunderstood) technology, and as usual Ben is running a fun regex competition, with prizes, on his blog.

If that's not enough regex goodness for you, here's a couple of projects you should know about.

First up, there's XRegExp, a library by Steven Levithan which augments JavaScript's native regex functionality with new functionality, and ensures cross-browser compatibility.

For CFML developers, there's cfRegex a replacement regex implemenation providing more power and functionality than CFML's native functions, whilst being easier to work with.

Whatever your level of regex skill, both of these tools are definitely worth checking out.

I have just pushed an update of QueryParam Scanner to GitHub, containing various improvements.

This update is on the rc0.7.5 branch, and it'd be nice if people could take it for a spin and make sure there are no issues with it. (There is a zip download for anyone without git.)

The visible changes which you might notice are:

• Added JSON output format, giving an alternative to XML for anyone using qpscanner in a scripted process.
• Added variable for number of potential risk files, and improved related wording in HTML output.
• Fixed bug where identical queries were causing incorrect line numbers.
• Fixed bug where query names were not being detected.
• Fixed bug where blank lines were incorrectly removed.

However, there are also significant under-the-hood changes. I removed my obsolete "Java Regex Utils" library (replacing it with the object part of cfRegex), and made a number of little code clean-ups.

A result of these changes is that qpscanner rc0.7.5 appears to be almost twice as fast as previous versions.

If you have any feedback, please feel free to contact me via GitHub, and similarly if you find any bugs then please raise them on the issue tracker.

It's been over two and a half years since my last "why railo" post, and - despite Railo "only" being 0.3 versions on - there's been a lot of improvements!

In fact, because it's been so long, a few of the things here are not new with v3.3 (though they are all new since the previous article), but are still great features that deserve mentioning!

Read on to find out what my ten favourite new feature are.

If you've ever looked at the CFML related articles on Wikipedia, you can't fail to have noticed that, especially when compared to other programming articles, they're not very good.

When somebody puts "coldfusion" or "cfml" into Google, they will almost certainly see the respective Wikipedia pages amongst the top three results, but when they follow those links they're unlikely to get a very good impression!

Not only could both these pages themselves benefit significantly from being cleaned up and improved, but there are only a few frameworks and tools that even have pages, and most of what does exist are very unencyclopaedic stubs. And this doesn't even consider the generic programming pages that often don't even mention CFML.

Take a look at the CFML category page - does that category contain everything you would expect an encyclopaedia to cover about CFML? Check the pages for the frameworks you are familiar with - do they go into the level of detail you would expect, and tell you everything you'd want to know if you were entirely new to CFML?

If you agree that the CFML presence on Wikipedia can and should be improved, and it's up to the CFML community to do it, then read on to find out how you can help fix it.

The cfRegex project is two things. Firstly, it is a complete regex implementation for CFML, providing more functionality, flexibility, features and power than the existing CFML RE functions. Secondly, it is a drive to encourage people to properly learn and make use of regex.

Regex is a very flexible language for matching patterns within text, and it has the power to greatly simplify certain programming tasks. However, it can also be intimidating to people not experienced with it.

This problem can be compounded by the relatively limited support for regex in CFML, which often means code is written that is more complex than should be necessary.

cfRegex helps to address both these problems. It provides a number of functions and features that help to reduce the amount of code which programmers have to write, whilst also helping to make their code clearer and easier to understand. In addition, the project provides documentation, not just for its own features, but also for regex itself, helping people to understand exactly what their expressions are matching, and how to get the most out of regex.

Whilst cfRegex is still at a relatively early stage, it is currently usable, and if you're a fan of regex it is certainly worth checking out.

It currently runs on CF 9.0.1, OpenBD 2.0, Railo 3.2 and later.
(Support for CF8 and others will be considered if enough people need it.)

The documentation should tell you everything you need to know about using it, but if not then get it touch and say what's missing so it can be fixed!

If you get stuck, there's a mailing list where you can receive answers to any problems or questions you have.