Sagar Ganatra's Blog

Today, one of the ColdFusion users asked me a question "Is there anyway I can find out whether a path is a directory or a file? There is no isDirectory() function available in ColdFusion and I don't want to write Java code to do this. Any help?" For a moment I thought really! is there no way that ColdFusion can tell you whether a given path is of a directory or file? But sooner, I came across the function 'getFileInfo' which takes the path as an argument and returns a struct data that contains various metadata properties of the file. The struct includes a key - 'type' whose value can either be a directory or file. The below code shows how you can determine whether the given path is of a directory or file:

I know it's been more than 15 days since the world celebrated new year and every one made some big and small resolutions which they hope they will live up to in this year. I had a fair 2011; there were a few ups and downs but in the end its gone and 2012 is here. Last year I presented ColdFusion Builder 2 at SOTR on the very day it was released to the public (how exciting!!). I was very much excited and nervous at the same time since this was my first talk at a conference. Nevertheless it went well, I have said this before and will say it again, 'Edinburgh is beautiful'.

To measure the time taken for a page to load one can use the Date object in the head section and calculate the time taken for the page to load in window.onload function. However, it calculates the time taken for the page to load after the first bit of JavaScript in the head is executed. This doesn't indicate the time taken by the web server to serve the requested page. The Navigation Timing API introduced in HTML5 provides data that can be used to measure the performance of a website. The API provides a PerformanceTiming interface which contains several attributes that can be used to get end-to-end latency data.

Today I stumbled upon the PageVisibility API introduced in HTML5, which gives developers an opportunity to improve the performance of a web page and to better the user experience. Whenever a user opens a new tab or navigates to another tab, the behavior of the current page from which user navigated can be controlled using this API. Consider a webmail client that is trying to look for new mails every two seconds, if a user opens a new tab or minimizes the browser window then retrieving mails every two seconds would expend resources, whilst the user is not actively viewing the page. Here the PageVisibilty API would come handy and would allow developers to alter the behavior of the web page.

I came across a publisher\subscriber protocol called PubSubHubBub. It is a server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol - an extension to Atom and RSS. Here the parties (servers) get an instant notification when a feed URL, that  they are interested in is updated. Traditionally a subscriber would subscribe to a feed and poll for it at regular intervals, to see if there is an updated feed available. In this protocol rather than polling for a feed, the content is pushed out from the publisher. The theory here is that the subscriber can subscribe to a feed via a 'Hub', which then would inform the subscribers when the feed is updated. How PubSubHubBub works? A Publisher instead of sending an update to every subscriber, it includes a in its feed URL and sends an update to the Hub . A Subscriber sends a subscription request to the Hub with the feed URL that it is interested in. The request also contains a callback URL to which the Hub should send an up...

Today when I woke up and switched on the Television to see what's making the news; I heard about Steve Jobs death. For the first time in my life, I'm feeling very sorry for a tech giant who passed away. Steve was an extraordinary human being. He kissed success not just once but many times. He changed the way we experience technology. His charisma, passion and more importantly desperation to do something great is matchless.

One of the key aspects of building web applications that deliver great user experience is to build applications that are highly responsive. Browser vendors are trying to improve the speed of their JavaScript engines and are enabling the web applications to perform well. Since JavaScript was introduced, there has been no way to execute the code outside of the browser UI thread i.e. it has remained single threaded. The Web Workers API introduced in HTML5 enables web applications to run scripts in the background, independent of the UI thread. The performance of a web application can be greatly improved by using Web Workers since each worker would spawn its own thread. These threads can be used to perform computationally intensive tasks in the background without affecting the performance of the entire application.