If you are familiar with OOP, you know that there are basically 2 types (scopes) of variables and functions:

• Private: only available within the object itself
• Public: also available to the caller, outside the object

(There are other scopes as well but I leave them out to keep things focused in this article)

To know what's available publicly, we can either read the documentation or use some functions like cfdump in Coldfusion.

But what about the private ones? How can we know what variables and functions are available privately inside the object? I know there are many good reasons for things to remain private and I totally agree that is the good architecture. But there are times I want to know how the internal variables change, what values they are holding at runtime. This is especially useful for debugging purpose. Read full article.

While fixing my cfTrigger framework recently, I realized that I have messed up the scopes of variables inside cfcs seriously! I omitted the var keyword for local variables and used This keyword where it should have been Variables. So before continuing to fix it, I decided to take a step back and learn again in a more proper way what variable scopes are available in Coldfusion cfcs and how to use them correctly. Read full article.

iPad is great for watching movies, except for one annoying issue: the movie app on iPad does not support playlist. That means the movies are played one by one. But you can in fact resolve this by setting your movies as TV Show. Read full article.

Array is a data type that exists in almost any programming languages. Although Coldfusion has provided many useful functions to work with arrays including some quite unique to Coldfusion such as ArrayToList, ArrySort, etc., I find many are still missing. For example, there is no function to remove duplicated items (huh?) and I use this one a lot. What about a function to reverse an array? Guess what, it's not there either (at least not natively in coldfusion). So I went ahead and made my own ones.

In this article, I will show you the 3 functions that I find very useful: ArrayUnique, ArrayReverse and ArrayUnion. Read full article

This article will show you how to install subdomains on Ubuntu (might work with other Unix OS as well). This is the fourth and also the last article of the series "Set up a Railo/Apache/MySQL host on Ubuntu", which is composed of 4 parts:

• Part 1: install Apache and Railo
• Part 2: install MySQL and enable remote access
• Part 3: install FTP server and set up user access
• Part 4: install subdomains

The topics of every article are quite independent. So you don't need to read the first 3 articles if you are only interested in setting up subdomains. Read full article

This article will show you how to install FTP server on Ubuntu (might work with other Unix OS as well) and how to give your users FTP access only to the folders you want them to manage. This is the third article of the series "Set up a Railo/Apache/MySQL host on Ubuntu", which is composed of 4 parts:

• Part 1: install Apache and Railo
• Part 2: install MySQL and enable remote access
• Part 3: install FTP server and set up user access
• Part 4: install subdomains

The topics of every article are quite independent. So you don't need to read the first 2 articles if you are only interested in installing FTP server and set up user access. Read full article

Following up from part 1, this is the second part of the series "Set up a Railo/Apache/MySQL host on Ubuntu", which is composed of 4 parts:

• Part 1: install Apache and Railo
• Part 2: install MySQL and enable remote access (this article)
• Part 3: install FTP server and set up user access permission
• Part 4: install subdomains

In part 1, I showed you how to install Railo and Apache server on Ubuntu. If you would like to follow the series from the beginning, you can read part 1 at Set up a Railo/Apache/MySQL host on Ubuntu - Part 1: install Railo and Apache. However, the topics of these 2 articles are quite independent. So you don't need to read the first article if you are only interested in installing MySQL server.

At the end of every installation step, if necessary I will include a little part called Step verification for you to know if you have completed that step successfully. It's important that you check this as a step depends on the one before it to be completed. So if you could not get one step done successfully, there is chance you will encounter errors at the steps that follow.

If you did read part 1, you would notice that it was quite a long article due to the large number of components that need to be configured along the way. Fortunately, installing MySQL is a lot easier and shorter as I will show you. Read full article