A Language I Love Even More Than ColdFusion?

Yeah, you heard that right…

I never would’ve thought I’d make that statement, but I think I’ve fallen in love with another sexy language – Regular Expressions.

I’ve always known about regular expressions (regex), but lines of code like this SCARE the crap out of me!

\b[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}\b

Pheww! Pretty ugly at first sight, eh?

Then came Ben Nadel. That guy spurred my interest in them. He’s a huge fan of regex and always preaches about them on his blog all the time. I thought, heck, maybe I can learn them too.

After you start investigating regex, and learn how they harness all the power known in this universe, you’ll fall in love with them instantly!

Michael Dinowitz, the Dean of regex, once told me, “You just deal with a regex one piece at a time”, or something like that. And he was right. Once you start learning it one piece at a time, it becomes fun!

I’m still not a regex ninja like those two guys, but I know enough to have fun with them. I think it becomes addictive, trying to see if you can match a pattern.

I have two books on the way from Amazon – Ben Forta’s “Teach Yourself Regular Expressions in Ten Minutes”, and “Mastering Regular Expressions” by Jeffrey Friedl. I’ve heard the best book is Mastering Regular Expressions, so I’m really looking forward to the arrival of these gems. Anything Forta writes, is good to me.

Anyway, just wanted to let you folks know about my new love. You too, can have my new love for the low price of $29.69, at amazon.com. 

What the %*#@ is an Exit Handler?

Let’s talk about exit handlers. When I first came across the mention of exit handlers in the Model Glue docs, I thought, huh?

I Love HostMySite!

I wanted to express my thoughts on hosting.

For the longest time, I used CrystalTech shared hosting. They were great … for a while. Things seemed to change after they were acquired by Newtek Solutions a few years back. Some of the responses to my support requests were hilarious. It was almost like, “ColdFusion? We have that installed on your server?”

Code Scanner Update

Just wanted to let folks know that I’ve added an Access database to the DB folder in the CodeScan ZIP download.

This came from the need to run it as more of a self-contained application, and not rely on MySQL residing on your development machine.

I have not tested it, so please ping me if you run into an issue with Access and the Code Scanner.