ColdFusion Zone - Comments for "Closing The 404 Gap For Dynamic Page Generation With onMissingTemplate()"

Boyan, all good points. That

atuttle — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 11:03:02 -0400

Boyan, all good points. That said, in some shared hosting environments, people are given the ability to specify custom error pages, but not much else in terms of server config. In that case, running an ISAPI filter may not be an option.

I did assume port 80, but 99 times out of 100, your website will be hit on port 80, and if not, it's easy enough to know that and to account for it, as you pointed out.

ColdFusion supports regular expressions, so that argument doesn't hold much water. In fact, I would argue that a custom ColdFusion 404 error handling script could be more powerful because of all of the options available to you when writing a CF script. You could log, email, and even send yourself an IM or text message if there are errors - none of which you have direct control over with mod_rewrite or an IIS ISAPI filter (to the best of my knowledge).

In the end, I think there are multiple ways to skin this cat -- none of them really wrong. It's all about personal preference.

Adam, a few reasons:It is

boyan — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 10:45:56 -0400

Adam, a few reasons:

It is language independant. I don't think that needs any more details.
It is faster since it hooks right into the web server through a module or dll.
It is easier to manage and maintain. All you have to do to extend and/or change things is edit the .htaccess file (Apache) or the .ini file (IIS)
It is more powerful since it supports regular expression.

Boyan, I don't entirely

atuttle — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 10:35:38 -0400

Boyan, I don't entirely disagree with you, but can you explain why URL rewriting is a better solution?

Neat ColdFusion based

boyan — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 10:11:17 -0400

Neat ColdFusion based solution. However, here are a couple of points to consider:

Your error handler assumes port 80 and probably should pick the port from the CGI scope
Since you have to edit the server config anyway, a better solution would be to use mod_rewrite (for Apache) or Ionic's ISAPI rewrite (for IIS)