Yes there is actually a week 53, it's called a leap week, and happens approximately 71 times in 400 years. More specifically it happens whenever December 31/January 1st land on a Thursday, and a bunch of other cases. It's all part of the ISO 8601 standard. Meaning today is actually the first week of the year. Not a big surprise to anyone I would say or?

Then why was the report not showing the right information?

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The instant messaging expert Carl Tyler has published, what he deems to be, a security hole in IBM's Lotus Sametime instant messaging software on his blog. Apparently IBM doesn't think that what Mr. Tyler claims to be a bug is actually a bug.

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One of the great things about Railo webs is the ability to set regional settings for each of your contexts. That means you can have several different context on the same server all showing different time zones. But you have to be rather careful when using it.

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One of our clients an electronic entertainment company provides movie trailers on their site. They also want to provide their partners with a simple EMBED tag for a flash player similar to what youtube does with it videos. Naturally they want to be able to track how often the movie clip or trailer is viewed on their partners sites by using google analytics, or as yet to be determined tracking methods.

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As I mentioned in my last Groovy post I was going to try and get my head around the concept of Closures, it's not that it is a hard concept it's just different.

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I my post yesterday I said Hello to Groovy and provided a simple helloWorld class as an example of the typical, and required, hello world example that one writes whenever starting to learn a new language.

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I just received a complimentary e-book Groovy In Action from Manning Publications and decided to start working my way through the book.

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In the last few days there have been a rash of attacks seemly targeted at Coldfusion. More specifically older Coldfusion applications/sites that do not make use of parameterized queries

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Everyone says that we should var scope all of our variables and I make a concerted effort to do just that. But for some reason I've never considered the idea of

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There are a lot of articles around about coldfusion components; doing a Google search for the term "coldfusion components" brought back just over 160,000 results, that's an awful lot of information to

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This isn't about how to write queries, or stored procedures. It's also not about relational databases function or how to properly index. It is about being kind to your database and more efficiently communicating with it.

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I've seen some code lately that has prompted me to write this blog entry. The code in question uses cftransactions heavily and in my opinion in completely unnecessary places in addition to the use of serializable isolation levels which are also unnecessary. So what is the cftransaction tag used for, when should I use it and what about that isolation level thing I just mentioned?

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I have been doing some code review lately and am seeing quite a few cases that look something like this:

You have a structure with some information in it and you are looping over the structure and adding the data from the structure into the database. No bid deal right?

Well you probably won't be surprised to find out that having a loop around the cfquery tag forces the Coldfusion server to execute that query N number of times, where N is the size of your array.

So what can you do?

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Sean Corfield has published a recording of an extended version of his Design Patterns talk that he gave at Adobe Max. I attended the talk at the Barcelona MAX and recommend it highly.

You can see the recorded version here

Last week I posted about loading dynamic content into a Spry Tabbed Panel, which as we learned ended up being pretty easy.

The tricky bit comes when your dynamic content is also Spry content. By default when you use the HTMLPanel it doesn't parse any javascript on the page. But you can enable script parsing on pages using two different methods.

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I am continually impressed with how lightweight and simple the spry framework is to work with. It's not a solution for everyone but to do some simple Ajax things it's really quite simple.

I was looking at an idea to do a tabbed dialog box, the content of the dialog boxes should be loaded when the tab is clicked. Simple stuff really but Spry makes it really simple.

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As a, sort of, justification for sending me to Max in Barcelona I have been asked to give a presentation on some of the things that I learned, heard about or otherwise experienced (minus the huge amounts of alcohol I consumed).

The four things that immediately came to mind are: CF8, AIR, Flex 3 and LCDS. Each one of these subjects really deserves their own presentation but I need to fit as much info into as little time as possible and still manage to ignite a fire under certain peoples butts and get them excited about this stuff

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For those of you who like the new Ajax tags of Colfusion 8 the framework, ExtJS, has released the Alpha version of their next major release.

This release is a rather large upgrade to the code base that Coldfusion uses and fully separates its reliance or dependence on other frameworks (yahoo ui toolkit for example).

The host of new features are too many to go into here so you can read about the major and exciting new features here. You can also read more about the general release news on their blog.

All I can say is that Jack Slocum and his crew do a fantastic job and I am continually impressed with the quality and level of their work. Add on top of that the three licensing options (open source, oem/reseller, and commercial) and you end up with a product that everyone can use.

An important thing to note is that this release while extensive has not significantly increased the size of the library. The whole library measures in at 522kb (thats everything you need) and it is possible to reduce that size rather significantly by importing only the library files that you need for a specific task. Though that being said the general practice is to include the ext-all.js file and be done with it.

Happy Coding...