ColdFusion-Talk Roundup #9 : Cookies, Scheduled tasks, SMS and WAV Files

Jul 17, 2008

by Kay Smoljak

Noteworthy threads from the famous ColdFusion-Talk (CF-Talk) List on House of Fusion for the Week of May 24 - June 1, 2008

CFCOOKIE storage (May 26, 2008)

Thread: Where is cfcookie stored?

Richard Steele wanted to know where the browser stores cookies created with the CFCOOKIE tag. Mike Chabot stated that the cookie would be stored in RAM until the browser was closed, and Dave Watts supplied some additional information, namely that unless the EXPIRES attribute was specified, the cookie would not be written to disk. Barney Boisvert suggested that to view the contents of cookies, a browser plugin such as the Web Developer Tool for Firefox might be helpful.

Consecutive scheduled tasks (May 24, 2008)

Thread: Best way to cause scheduled tasks to run consecutively

Rick Faircloth had a series of scheduled tasks, and wanted to make them run consecutively. Mike Kear gave two possible solutions: creating a master task that called each one consecutively, or scheduling the tasks to run at different times with a "safe" interval between each. After further discussion, Rick clarified that the tasks did not depend on one another, but were simply processor-intensive, hence the desire to not have them running at the same time – making the second of Mike's options appropriate.

Sending SMS messages with ColdFusion (May 26, 1008)

Thread: SMS Gateway Questions

Joe Velez had some queries about SMS messages sent from ColdFusion: firstly, whether SMS gateways were available in the Standard edition of ColdFusion, or Enterprise only; what the costs involved were; and where the messages were sent from. Dave Watts confirmed that the gateway is available in the standard edition, but was limited to a single request at a time, and that an account with an SMS service provider was needed. He also provided a link to the entry about short message codes on Wikipedia. Mike Kear provided some more information along the same lines.

Phillip Vector and Wil Genovese provided an alternate solution (available on some US carriers only) where an email can be sent to the user's mobile telephone number at their carrier. This message is then delivered as an SMS message. As Dave Watts pointed out, however, this solution does not scale particularly well, and any application serious about sending SMS messages would more than likely require a gateway, SMS provider and possibly ColdFusion Enterprise.

Nested CFOUTPUT tags (May 28, 2008)

Thread: cfoutput in a cfoutput

Chad Gray was surprised to find that he was able to nest a CFOUTPUT tag pair within another CFOUTPUT tag pair. The code sample he provided was making use of the GROUP attribute, which Andy Matthews pointed out has always been possible (in fact, it's how grouped content is defined). Charlie Griefer and Dave Watts both clarified that since ColdFusion 6, it has also been possible to nest CFOUTPUT tag pairs without an error being thrown, although there is no functional reason for wanting to do so.

ColdFusion IDEs (May 29, 2008)

Thread: Best ColdFusion editor?

Michael Christensen opened a can of worms when he asked the list for opinions on ColdFusion IDEs. To date, 198 messages have been posted in the thread, with most list subscribers recommending CFEclipse, a smaller but vocal minority advocating Dreamweaver, and a smaller group yet still using older releases of HomeSite/ColdFusion Studio.

Determining length of a WAV file (June 1, 2008)

Thread: Get length of WAV file

Dave Philips wanted to return the duration of a WAV file on the server with ColdFusion. In the past, he had used a CFX tag to accomplish this task, but was wondering if it were now possible to do without the CFX overhead. John Burns suggested that a Java function should be able to do this, and Dave was able to find one that did, in fact, solve his problem.

As an aside, Gert Franz pointed out that this functionality was built in to Railo, the alternative CFML engine, using Railo's CFVIDEO tag.

Kay is an all-round web developer who has been developing with ColdFusion since 2000. She runs Clever Starfish with her partner Dave and several very demanding cats, and sits on the committee of the Australian Web Industry Association. She is a regular writer for Fusion Authority and the Fusion Authority Quarterly Update, and a ColdFusion blogger on Sitepoint.com.

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