Ben & Ryan Show Episode 18In this episode, your hosts, Ben Nadel and Ryan Brown, are joined by longtime ColdFusion developer James Moberg, CTO of Sunstar Media, for a deep-dive into the wild world of user-defined functions (UDFs) and decades of real-world development hacks. From building custom tools that bridge gaps in ColdFusion and Lucee, to mastering performance and security through clever abstraction, the crew shares a treasure trove of lessons learned from the trenches.Key Points• James shares his approach to building reusable ColdFusion UDFs that work across Adobe CF and Lucee.• The crew explores performance wins using command-line tools versus built-in CF tags like CFZip and CFImage.• Strategies are shared for data sanitization, accessibility, and obfuscation using tools like Jsoup and hashing functions.• They discuss how caching, output buffering, and shadow DOM techniques can power dynamic web experiences and secure flows.• Real talk on AI’s limits when it comes to ColdFusion code generation—and why real-world testing still matters.Different kinds of UDFs and how naming collisions and platform differences have influenced his work.• Three main categories of UDFs: logic abstraction, proxying functionality, and UI simplification.• Discusses how CF versions and Lucee differ in function availability and behavior.• Talks about CF Backport as a strategy for extending older ColdFusion versions.A spirited discussion on real-world cross-platform quirks, unscoped variables, and strategies for HTML standardization.• Importance of using scoped variables to prevent unexpected collisions in code.• How ColdFusion's HTML output can be sanitized using Jsoup and AI-assisted validation.• Real-world examples of legacy platform quirks that led to better testing and abstraction strategies.They unpack the use of executables and CFExecute for performance-heavy tasks like PDF generation, image processing, and zipping files.• CFZip and CFImage are shown to be slower than OS-level executables like 7-Zip or GhostScript.• Explains how using external tools avoids Java heap memory issues.• Highlights the benefits of file-based tools for consistency and speed across deployments.James walks through some of his favorite UDFs• hashID: CFML user-defined functions (UDFs) provide a simple mechanism for generating and validating hash-based identifiers.• createShadowHtml: CFML user-defined function (UDF) generates HTML and inline JavaScript to create a dynamic, client-side preview of a given HTML document within a shadow DOM• streamFindNoCase: user-defined function (UDF) searches the currently accumulated output buffer for the presence of a given string, performing a case-insensitive comparison.• generateEmailHashCode: user-defined function (UDF) processes an email address by extracting the domain, sanitizing the username by removing periods (dots) and any part after the first "+", converting both parts to lowercase, and then returning a Java-generated integer hash code of the resulting string.• enableWKHTMLTOPDFForms: user-defined function (UDF) modifies the binary of a non-Adobe-generated PDF file to enable the editing of form fields in Adobe Acrobat. • tempCache: user-defined function (UDF) allows you to temporarily store data in the ColdFusion cache and retrieve it using a generated UUID.• jreEscape: user-defined function (UDF) ensures strings can be safely used in regex patterns by preventing special characters from being interpreted as regex metacharacters. • maskCC: user-defined function (UDF) takes a text string as input, searches for patterns that resemble credit card numbers, attempts to validate these potential numbers using ColdFusion's built-in credit card validation, and then masks the validated numbers by replacing all but the last four digits with asterisks. Helpful Linkshttp://www.mycfml.com/ - James's website showing these functions and more.

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