As mentioned previously, I have been actively soliciting user input as to future ColdFusion directions and features. I have received several requests for additional internet protocol tags, including (to access newsgroups), (read and perform DNS lookups), (as its name suggests, and could also return traceroute data in a query), as well as a few others at that same level of operation. The question is, are these tags that you'd actually use? And if so, how would you use them, and how often? Or are these a little off the beaten path? Any thoughts or comments would be greatly appreciated.
Does CF Need Additional Protocol Tags?
26 Comments
Z
zac spitzer
CFIMAP of course!!!!
CFCVS, which would be great for managing production servers programmatically, combined with some CVS support in the IDE's, that must be the most requested feature to date..
CFFILEINFO so you can get a file's date & size without cfdirectory which is disabled on soooo many hosts
A
Andy Jarrett
CFNNTP would be a great feature to add to CF. I personally thought there was a custom tag around for this alread. Actually i though it was over at http://www.fuseware.com/ but there site has been down for ages.
Also for my vote would be CFDNS. Though at the moment i cant see a direct need for it for me.
S
Sam
Totaly agree with CFSOCKET and CFIMAP. CFSOCKET really can not be done with CF/Java combo, need just Java. CFIMAP is long overdue.
DNS and WebDav would be nice haves, particularly reverse dns.
CFPING seems like not that necessary. Probably can be done easily enough with a custom tag around Java objects.
While CVS would be very useful to some (myself especially, I'm cfexecuting the cvs.exe which doesn't seem to work in CFMX), but it's not a standard open protocol and would be better handled by first writing a Java library to interface with CVS and then creating CF wrappers. Maybe a good thing for a DRK.
My $0.02.
Sam
F
Freddys
I have to second the idea of a <CFTELNET> tag... my company is about to pay 15K for a piece of software just to do that..
P
Peter
CFSOCKET (a generic wrapper) would be nice.
Peter
A
Andy R
No, CFSMTP would be different to CFMAIL. Take a look at the email verification at http://www.network-tools.com/ . They're not sending a mail, they're verifying the existence of a mailbox, I think partly by explicitly invoking SMTP commands for that purpose, and partly by beginning to send a mail, but aborting after specifying a "to" address.
J
JHill
WebDAV would be great...
R
Reto Aeberli
Currently I using some cfx to ping, tracing and do ns lookups. Built in tags would be nice.
CFNNTP and CFIMAP I would use if availabe as tags.
B
Ben Forta
Wow, lots of responses.
Kai, yes, you did ask for <CFNNTP>, along with 2 others in the past week.
Andy, <CFSMTP>? Isn't that <CFMAIL>?
<CFSOCKET>, huh?
Keep those suggestions coming!
B
Bastian Konetzny
Please give us CFSOCKET ! ;)
A
Andy R
CFPING and CFDNS both get my vote, and I'd add CFSMTP too. The reason for all of these is the need to validate email addresses entered into our system as far as possible. Otherwise we shall be resorting to Java or a bought-in COM object. E.g. take a look at how far they go validating email addresses here http://www.network-tools.com/ ... you can't do that in CF right now.
P
Paul Wilson
How about <CFDSN> to connect to a database without setting one up in CF Admin.
<CFDSN DBType="SQLServer" ServerName="" Database="">
F
futwick
I currently use CFX tags for Ping and Tracert calls in scheduled tasks that monitor website performance.
I could definitely make use of CFPING.
F
Faser
cfnntp I think it's the most useful, but it's not better to create a generic cfsocket ?
K
kai
<CFNNTP> would be great (wasn't it my proposal ;) to build intranet solutions based on NNTP protocols (message boards, knowledge bases etc).
Personally I don't have a need for <CFDNS> or <CFPING>, interesting would be a <CFFTP>-tag with some attributes for SFTP/SCP.
K
kentaro
<CFDNS> would be cool, we use a custom cfc with Flash Communication Server to do a DNS lookup of people watching the streams. <CFPING> would be cool because we wanted to write a server/router monitor app in CF but decided to go with other technology because making it work in CF was a bit too hard.
personally <CFTELNET> would be cool cause then we could make a flash browser front end to do some real emmulation.(big need in mainframe to web app migration in Japan)
just my five cents worth.
K
Kola Oyedeji
Just a response for some of those who have placed comments. Before anyone goes out and spends $15k I strongly suggest they have a look at the apache commons project. It provides java classes which allow much of the above functionality to be acheived. And could probably be easily accessed from CF.
see
http://www.informit.com/isapi/guide~java/seq_id~21/guide/content.asp
for more info
J
Joao
Well...
it is not a long time I'm inside of the programmation matters, but many of the suggested TAGS sounds like they could be really "attractive" for many people. Especially for people that still have to choose between CF and other languages...
I would love a <cfdsn> and also a <cfsmtp> for e-mail validation.
With all this stuff CF could be really unbeatable and programming even more productive and funny.
M
Marcos Placoná
"No, CFSMTP would be different to CFMAIL. Take a look at the email verification at http://www.network-tools.com/ . They're not sending a mail, they're verifying the existence of a mailbox, I think partly by explicitly invoking SMTP commands for that purpose, and partly by beginning to send a mail, but aborting after specifying a "to" address. "
But they are not testing the mailbox, they are testing the DNS existance, like a "whois" sistem.
regards
A
Andy R
Hi Marcos. You'll find if you select the radio button for 'E-mail Vaildation' that site will validate email addresses and show you the resulting SMTP transcript. You can even figure out the vendor of the COM object that they're using from the transcript.
R
Rogerio
CFIMAP, CFIMAP, CFIMAP!!!! Definitely!
S
Sudhaman Srinivasan
Deployment of CFMX apps: [CFMX on WebLogic 8.1]
1. I have a CF application that accesses some 3rd party jar files via <cfobject>. I would like to deploy the cf application like a J2EE war file because I do NOT want to copy the jar file to the "cf_root/WEB-INF/lib" folder. Is this a possibility?
2. I have seen a number of articles that highlight using JSP customtags, calling servlets etc. from within a cfm template. I would like to do the opposite. Include some tags such as <cfldap>, <cfchart> from within a pure J2EE application, and deploy as a war file in my my J2EE container. How is that possible?
C
Christian Heutger
CFWHOIS would be a really nice feature and CFSMTP as previously defined I would need a CFMAIL with SMTP-AUTH attributes USER and PASS for send out through SMTP-AUTH.
P
Paul Vernon
I have a few tags (free and commercial) that may be of interest to people on this thread....
CFX_IMAP4
CFX_WHOIS
CFX_POP3
A posting only CFX_NNTP is also available but lacks documentation...
All are available from http://www.web-architect.co.uk/downloads.cfm
K
Kevin Hemsley
An NSLOOKUP tag that allows you to specify which nameserver to use for lookups. Most all of the current nslookup tags only use the local server's DNS settings. A powerful tag would be a <CFDIG> tag that provides the functionality of the Unix "dig" tool.
&
<cf_kim>
Okay, 7-year old question, but my two cents anyway...have been looking all over the web today for a solution to accessing server ip from dns. Found reference to a custom tag cf_dnslookup and how to call, but not the custom tag itself, which is apparently on DRK6, but can't find it anywhere. I am involved in Disaster Recovery (DR) testing and servers will be pointing to these new 'DR' servers. To those performing the testing, this should be seamless, but as developers, we need to be sure we are actually on the DR boxes and not still in production. Our plan is to compare the IP with those of the DR boxes and output a stamp on the pages to show which box we are on. This is one instance; often find this type of information, which is not so easily accessible from CF, would be great to have without doing backflips to get it...thanks!