Aaron Johnson Now with 50% less caffeine!

Java Class.forName(String className) and JDBC

A reader asked a question via a comment a couple months ago that I didn’t really have an answer for (and had always kind of wondered the same thing). In the original post (which showed how to use JDBC with ColdFusion), I used the following snippet of code:

Class.forName(”jdbc.DriverXYZ”);
Connection con = DriverManager.getConnection(url,
  ”myLogin”, “myPassword”);

and the reader wanted [...]

ColdFusion MX and java.sql

Last week a reader sent me an interesting problem. When deleting a record from a database using a standard <cfquery> tag you don’t get any indication back that let’s you know whether or not the row or rows in question actually existed, nor do you get back any indication as to how many rows [...]

Using iText PDF & ColdFusion

Mike Steele sent me an email in reference to an article I wrote for the ColdFusion Developer’s Journal a year or so ago. In the email, he mentions that he is trying to use the iText Java-PDF library with ColdFusion MX:

… The getInstance method is static and according to your July 2003 CFDJ article, you [...]

ColdFusion & log4j

The January issue of ColdFusion Developer’s Journal features an article I wrote on how to integrate ColdFusion and log4j entitled “Integrating log4j and CFMX - An open source Java project gives developers new capabilities”. You can read it here.
While not especially interesting for developers writing simple ColdFusion applications, I’m finding that log files [...]

Instant Messenging with ColdFusion, Jabber and Smack

I noticed a couple different people wanting information on instant messenging with ColdFusion and then in another place instant messenging with Jabber and ColdFusion in the last couple days (for reasons beyond me) [first on cfguru, then on my blog, then on the jive software forums]. For those that care I put together a quick [...]

Indexing Database Content with Lucene & ColdFusion

Terry emailed me a couple days ago wondering how he could use ColdFusion and Lucene to index and then search a database table. Since we’re completely socked in here in Boston, I had nothing better to do today that hack together a quick snippet that does just that:

<cfset an = CreateObject(”java”, “org.apache.lucene.analysis.StopAnalyzer”)>
<cfset an.init()>
<cfset writer [...]

Why doesn’t ASP.NET include an <asp:query> tag?

Ray asked a great question a couple weeks ago that I meant to reply to but just never got around to it. He asked why ASP.NET doesn’t include an <asp:query> tag to enable developers to quickly embed SQL queries into an ASP.NET page. The responses seemed to agree with Ray’s assessment that the lack [...]

CFX_Lucene updates

Couple people have written me in the last couple days with updates they’ve done to the Lucene and ColdFusion tags I wrote a couple months ago.
First, Nick Burch from Torchbox updated the CFX tag so that it “… behaves better under error conditions and … the command line debug now works.” I [...]

Fail-Safe Amazon Image… using Java, C# & ColdFusion

Paul of onfocus.com fame (and the fabulous SnapGallery tool) wrote an article for the O’Reilly Network recently that (I think) was an excerpt of his recently released book “Amazon Hacks“. Anyway, he shows how you can check to see if an image exists on amazon.com using ASP, Perl, and PHP and I thought it [...]

Migrating from ColdFusion to ASP.NET

Microsoft has put together an extensive article for developers migrating from CFMX to ASP.NET, including a pretty fair feature comparison chart. Probably the most obvious thing that the feature comparison table lacks is the mention of the close integration of Java with CFMX, in fact it says this:
“It can also access Java class [...]