Archive for November, 2007

EcomSolutions always looking to Hire Senior ColdFusion Developers .

The Senior ColdFusion Application Developer is responsible for assessing client input and creating and building conceptual, compelling and usable web applications, preparing detailed specifications, writing ColdFusion code, designing databases and performing testing/debugging of code to support business processes.  Experience Level: 5 Years.     

1 Make your site focused and relevant
2 Write lots of search engine friendly content
3 Acquire relevant inbound links
4 Ensure that inbound anchor text is relevant
5 Utilize deep linking
6 Use alt tags
7 Create a sitemap
8 Optimize your title tags
9 Write and submit articles and press releases
10 Submit  sitemap of your website to the search engines

I was just on a web site (no, not a ColdFusion powered site, and no I will not name names) browsing for specific content. The URLs used typical name=value query string conventions, and so I changed the value to jump to the page I wanted. And I made a typo and added a character to the numeric value. The result? An invalid SQL error message.That’s bad. Very very bad. It means that I was able to create a SQL statement that was submitted to the database for processing, a SQL statement that was passed to the database as is, unchecked.

You’d think that by now we’d have learned to lock down our code so as to prevent SQL injection attacks, but apparently this is not the case. You do not know what a SQL injection attack is? Well, read on.

Consider the following simple dynamic ColdFusion query: (more…)

The second ColdFusion 8 cumulative hot fix pack has been released. This hot fix contains the 7 fixes from hot fix 1, plus 14 additional fixes.

Thoughts, ideas, tips, musings, and pontifications (not necessarily in that order) by Ben Forta …
NOTE: This is my personal blog, and the opinions and statements voiced here are my own. 

ColdFusion 8 Can Return Identity Values
?
Here’s another ColdFusion 8 goodie that I just learned about yesterday …
If you are using a database table with an identity (auto-increment) field, ColdFusion 8 can automatically return the newly created field value for you, without needing a trigger or a subsequent <CFQUERY>. All you need to do is look in the <CFQUERY> optional RESULT structure, and if available the value will just be there. This feature is very DBMS and driver specific (and unfortunately does not seem to be supported by Apache Derby), and the name of the structure member containing the generated value is different based on the DBMS being used. Here are the ones you should be aware of:

SQL Server: result.IDENTITYCOL
Oracle: result.ROWID
Sybase: result.SYB_IDENTITY
Informix: result.SERIAL_COL
DB2: result.KEY_VALUE
MySQL: result.GENERATED_KEY (MySQL 4 and 5 only, MySQL 3 does not support this feature)
Very nice indeed!

 Ben Forta