Here is a mystery for folks. I’ve updated my parsing engine for coldfusionbloggers.org.

I’m using CFHTTP now so I can check Etag type stuff. I take the result text and save it to a file to be parsed by CFFEED.

But before I do that I check to ensure it’s valid XML. Here is where it gets weird. Charlie Griefer’s blog works with CFFEED directly, but isXML on the result returns false. But - I can xmlParse the string no problem. Simple example:
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A few days ago I blogged about a code review I was doing for another client. Yesterday I found another interesting bug in their code. (It is always easier to find bugs in other people’s code.) (more…)

There are a few ways of persisting XML to a file, each with their pros and cons, that programmers may want to consider.

Brett D. McLaughlin, Sr., of O’Reilly Media, penned a post on XML persistence and ways to accomplish it. “You can do all sorts of interesting things with XML, but if you can’t persist it to a file, it’s all for naught,” he wrote.

Web services and other programming tasks may demand XML store its data someplace. Writing to a file may not be interesting or sexy, but it is necessary. McLaughlin listed three “pretty common mainstream” ways programmers likely accomplish this today:

1. Using the DOM and JDOM APIs and the like directly to write to a file from your XML data structure
2. Using the Transformation API for XML (TrAX) and the identity transformation to persist your XML
3. Using a higher-level API like JAXB to handle persistence (more…)

Not many people know that ColdFusion ships with a HTTP spider that integrates with Verity. Unfortunately, this spider will only work with localhost as a server.

This means if you want to spider multiple sites, you can’t. Well, not without playing with your host headers. (More information on the Verity Spider and ColdFusion may be found here.) (more…)

When is the last time you stopped to think about the health of your feed?

Maybe it’s time to head over to the Feed Validator and ensure it’s in peek performance. (more…)

I’ve blogged before about how xmlFormat() is a bit buggy.

While it will remove most characters, including “high ascii” characters in the range of 128-255, it will gleefully ignore other high ascii characters, for example, character 8220 which is the funky Microsoft Word quote.

Unfortunately it looks like the same code used for xmlFormat is used to escape text when you create feeds with CFFEED. (more…)

Many blogs have the ability to ping different ping-services, such as Ping-o-Matic, Feedburner and Technorati, whenever some content is created or updated. (more…)

While working on some bugs in the CFLib SnipEx server, Mark Drew sent me a great tip on how to clear the cache in CFEclipse.

Right now it is a manual process, but Mark will be adding a refresh option to the UI soon.

So to clear your SnipEx cache, drop down to the command line and….

1. Change to your Eclipse workspace. Mine was at /Users/ray/Documents/workspace

2. Change to .metadata/.plugins/org.cfeclipse.cfml/snipex

3. Delete all XML files

4. Restart Eclipse

That’s it.

During development it makes sense to just keep a window open there so you can do this a bit more quicker. (By development I mean if you are working on your own SnipEx server.)

So CFLib has had some issues with SnipEx, mainly with UDFs that don’t work well in the XML feed.

I’ve been removing the UDFs temporarily and this morning I just removed another another one. (more…)

Someone asked on the Model-Glue mailing list how to keep deal with keeping event handler names and URLs in views consistent, i.e., if they change an event handler name, how can they avoid having to change the string wherever it appears in links in their views.

Fusebox has long had a convention to deal with this known as XFAs - eXit FuseActions. The idea is to abstract the actual fuseaction name into a variable.

You specify all the exit points for a view as XFAs in the XML and refer to the variable in the view instead of hard-coding the fuseaction name. If you need to change the control flow - or the fuseaction name - you just change the XFA in the XML file and your views all pick that up.

Often Fuseboxers set common XFA values in the prefuseaction for the circuit or the global preprocess fuseaction for the application, making it very simple to manage exit points. (more…)

So this is probably a ‘Duh’ type post, but I was curious how Apollo and it’s “open” web browser would handle remote AJAX requests. (more…)