InfoWorld recently published an article titled Top five scripting languages on the JVM. It gives a comparison of Groovy, JRuby, Scala, Fantom, and Jython, and even winds up talking a little about Clojure, JavaFX, and NetRexx there at the end. (Thanks to John Sieber for blogging about the article, that's how I found it.) It gives a nice detailed explanation of each language and lists a few pros and cons, all without getting too technical. It's very informative and unbiased, which is a nice change from the language comparison flame wars that seem to be so prevalent today.

This is a really good article for someone like me, as I know very little about any of those languages. For a while now I've been wanting to add a new language to my utility belt, and I've been saying that I want to learn Java and Groovy. But a recent discussion I had with Sean Corfield about this had me thinking about trying out Scala instead. Now, after reading this InfoWorld article I think I'm probably going to give Scala a try. I don't know when, but when I do get around to learning a new language Scala will be at the top of my list. I still want to learn Java and Groovy, though. :)

Today I was working on parsing through a CSV file, when I came across the all too familiar "ColdFusion ignores blank list elements" situation. This is nothing new, it has been around forever, and there's even an excellent udf on cflib that does a great job of handling this. But, I was feeling a little creative and decided to see if I could tap into Java and accomplish the same thing.

As it turns out, it was actually pretty easy to do.

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This is probably a no-brainer for some of you, but I was playing around with CFML's underlying Java capabilities the other day and thought I would share this little gem. Not that it's all that extraordinary, or even really useful, I've just got some free time and I haven't blogged anything in a couple of weeks so I figured "why not?".

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One of the things I like about ColdFusion is how easy it is to tap into it's underlying Java capabilities. Now I'll be the first to admit that I know virtually nothing about Java, but I have found a few places where tying in to it via CF can be useful. One of the best uses I've found for it (so far) has been working with directories and files.

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