Blog

I will be presenting at the Melbourne CFUG this October 18th on ColdBox. However, it will be on my 2AM, (thanks Mark!!) So I will have to struggle with sleep deprivation for the presentation. You can find more information on the presentation here.

The POIUtil.cfc by Ben Nadel is a great wrapper to the Apache POI project. I am using it in a current project and have come to certain caveats that I needed to extend the library. I did a post regarding how to read excel dates, this is the second part, how to write dates. This can apply to various types of formatting that could be done on an excel sheet. To come up with all the variations would take a very big big POI coldfusion wrapper. So I am coding to my needs.

Anyways, to sum up the problem

Excel stores dates as numbers therefore the only way to determine if a cell is actually stored as a date is to look at the formatting.

Enter a little digging in the docs and the API and you find the famous HSSFDataFormat class.

This class will help you get the correct formatting for any kind of date, datetime, etc.

This is an open letter to all developers or companies who are hosting with daily razor. They have admitted that they will be blocking the following:

CF tags:

CFCOLLECTION

CFCONTENT

CFEXECUTE

CFLOG

CFOBJECT

CFOBJECTCACHE

CFREGISTRY

CF functions:

SetProfileString

CreateObject(COM)

CreateObject(CORBA)

CreateObject(JAVA)

Not only that, they have given no warning to their customers. I had to email them that a friend of mine told me. So here is the deal where they screw up. Under their terms of service they write:

2. Web Hosting Services

For the term of the agreement as set forth herein DAILYRAZOR agrees to provide web hosting services according the plan selected by you upon activation of your account. DAILYRAZOR reserves the right to change, amend and/or otherwise alter the services provided with equivalent or otherwise equal services without prior notice to you.

The last line says it all:

provided with equivalent or otherwise equal services without prior notice to you.

The fact of the matter is that they will NOT be providing equal services. They will be hindering services and breaking applications. Not only that, the amount of time needed to transfer and recreate the applications and websites in another host will take weeks.

I need legal counsel or should I just seek alternatives and take in the damages?? What do you guys recommend?

I currently have my domains and setups on www.dailyrazor.com hosting. However, it has come to my attention they will disable CreateObject() features, which seems ridiculous. Being preventive, I would like to ask what hosting companies you recommend. One of the requirements I have is that I can be able to host multiple domains under the same account. I can create different domains and subdomains and databases.

Any recommendations?

The POIUtil.cfc by Ben Nadel is a great wrapper to the Apache POI project. I am using it in a current project and have come to certain caveats that I needed to extend the library. Ben, hope you are reading, I sent you an email with the update.

Anyways, to sum up the problem

Excel stores dates as numbers therefore the only way to determine if a cell is actually stored as a date is to look at the formatting.

Enter a little digging in the docs and the API and you find the famous HSSFDateUtil class. This class contains a bundle of static methods for you to check and validate date formatting in excel.

I updated the ColdBox docs api to include ColdBox cache metadata information. It was an easy addition and a great one. Now you can use this to actually document your handlers if you wanted and get the extra ColdBox metadata javadocs style. Below you can see a screenshot.

The project used is CFCDoc and can be found at http://cfcdoc.riaforge.org/. To do the metadata update if you use this great project, you will need to open the doctemplate.cfm found in the templates folder. Look for the following line of code:

Oscar Arevalo has just released an update to his BugLogHQ software which is really awesome for bug tracking. You can find his update by clicking here..

You can see a demo a the following address: http://www.oscararevalo.com/buglogdemo

First of all, I am a big advocate of Transfer, it is totally awesome and TQL totally rocks. I came up today to almost pulling my hair out on a very simple TQL query and thought I should share this so people have a grasp on details.

When using a query with the IN modifier and a list, you cannot just map a parameter with a value, you have to specify that its a list. (Reading the docs might help!!). Adventurous Luis, went ahead without fully reading Mr. Mandel's excellent docs and of course, fell in a cavernous pit of despair.

Here is my sample:

If you have not heard about Railo, then you should. It is an excellent CFML engine and best of all, the pricing on it is awesome. ColdBox is fully supported under the new Railo 2.0 and let me tell you, it FLIES!! Railo on itself is an incredibly fast CFML engine. You add ColdBox to the mix and you have a powerful combination. You can go here and find out more information about Railo & ColdBox.

ColdBox can also be converted into a Railo archive and all the new upcoming releases will include the framework in Railo Archive format. So if you haven't checked out Railo, then do, it is a great CFML alternative.

I have been twiddling with some performance geekness and created a small test to see if direct scoping the variables scope was faster than not scoping it, and I found some very interesting results. Scoping the variables scope was much slower than not doing it. It is shocking but true. Or maybe my test is foolish, judge for yourself and let me know.

Test Results 1:

Iterations: 30

Loops per Iteration: 5000

Avg No variables scope: 20.8333333333 ms

Avg. using variables scope: 43.7333333333 ms

Setup: Windows XP/IIS/CFMX 7.0.2

Test Results 2:

Iterations: 30

Loops per Iteration: 5000

Avg No variables scope: 4.7 ms

Avg. using variables scope: 11.9666666667 ms

Setup: Windows XP/IIS/CFMX 8 GMC

UPDATES:

Test Results 3:

Iterations: 30

Loops per Iteration: 5000

Avg No variables scope: 8.23333333333 ms

Avg. using variables scope: 17.1333333333 ms

Setup: Mac Intel/Apache/CFMX 7.02

Avg No variables scope: #arraySum(records)/iterations# ms



Avg. using variables scope: #arraySum(records2)/iterations# ms