Well, now I've done it. If I had not sufficiently alienated both Adobe and the ColdFusion community leaders, I participated in a discussion at the suggestion of my good friend, Clark Valberg.

Having read my blogpost from a few weeks back in which I expressed my concern that ColdFusion was losing its way, Clark decided that it would make for an interesting podcast to have Brian Kotek (as an able proponent of OO in CF orthodoxy), Ben Nadel (as an honest developer looking for answers) and me (as a reluctant heretic) talk about OO in ColdFusion.

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Ben Nadel recently wrote a blog post on his disillusionment in his attempts to "get" OO. His conclusion was that he was going to have to give up on "object purity" and accept a more practical OO approach. Based on the comments on his post, a lot of people are feeling this.

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In my Occasional Newsletter, I want to have my code nicely formatted. And I want to just copy working code to display it. ColdFusion code has those troubling angled brackets that play havoc with browser display. I didn't want to have to swap those for the HTML entity representations. Also, when I indent my code, I use tabs instead of spaces. I didn't want to have to manually replace every tab with non-breaking spaces.

Here's what I came up with:

1. I place my code in a TEXTAREA.
2. I style the TEXTAREA via CSS to remove the borders, provide a light grey background, switch the font, and change the font color.
3. I wrote a little bit of jQuery that...
a. sets the "cols" and "rows" setting of the textarea dynamically
b. replaces all tabs with non-breaking spaces

Here's the jQuery:

Note: This works with HTML pages, but ColdFusion pages will still interpret the code.