Spammers come in many forms - e-mail spammers, search engine spammers, comment spammers, trackback spammers, message board spammers...

It seems as if there is no activity that can be done via the Internet that the lowly spammer is unwilling to intrude upon. Since spamming is a basically a numbers game, spammers spend a lot of time and effort automating the process of getting their spam to the widest possible audience. Using a CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and humans apart) can go a long way toward preventing these automated spam attacks on your site.

In April I wrote a post on how you could easily add Peter Farrell's open source LylaCAPTCHA to Ray Camden's BlogCFC to prevent comment spam (www.remotesynthesis.com/blog/index.cfm/2006/4/24/Adding-OpenSource-LylaCaptcha-to-BlogCFC) and that very simple code ended up being rolled into the recently released BlogCFC v5. In this article, I want to expand upon that concept to show you not only how to integrate LylaCAPTCHA into any form, but also cover how we can use Rob Gonda's ajaxCFC to process the validation before the form is ever submitted.

Getting Started
Obviously the first thing you will need to do is download the appropriate project code from their respective sites. For the purposes of this example, all of my test code is within a folder called "captcha" directly under my site root. If you choose a different location, please be sure to adjust your paths appropriately throughout the example code. (The source code for this article.)

You can download the latest version of LylaCAPTCHA from http://lyla.maestropublishing.com/. The project code consists of two components and an XML configuration file, all of which I have placed within a subfolder called "lylacaptcha" within the example directory discussed previously. The only required change to the configuration XML that you will need is to modify the outputDirectory, which I have set to * for the purposes of our test (i.e., the current directory - to our root example files directory). This configuration tells LylaCAPTCHA where to store the generated images, which will be deleted as soon as they are done displaying anyway. LylaCAPTCHA offers a large set of configuration options that you can also adjust if you choose - just be sure to refer to the provided documentation first. Last, as of the writing of this article, LylaCAPTCHA was at version 0.2Alpha and there was a known bug regarding the setColor method, which you will need to complete the quick fix listed under "Known Bugs or Problems" on the LylaCAPTCHA site.

Next, you'll need to download ajaxCFC, which can be done at www.robgonda.com/blog/projects/ajaxcfc/. I copied the necessary content into a subfolder of our examples directory named "ajaxcfc". The content you'll require includes the two ColdFusion components and the "js" directory that contains a set of six JavaScripts. No further configuration is necessary at this point for ajaxCFC.

Building the Form
In this example, we'll be building an extremely simple form that collects a user's comments and summarily ignores them (sound like any sites you know?). What our form does care about is that you got the CAPTCHA correct, and it verifies this before the form is ever allowed to submit. First things first, let's get our application.cfm out of the way. The application file simply contains our cfapplication tag and our LylaCAPTCHA configuration code that should run only once when the application is initially configured. Obviously, if you are integrating this into your existing application, you simply need to incorporate lines 5 and 6 into your existing application startup code. Essentially, all you need to do is initialize LylaCAPTCHA with the XML file we edited above.

You can see the initialization code necessary for ajaxCFC on lines 17 through 22 of index.cfm. The first portion sets the appropriate component location, in this case ajaxCFC/ajaxCaptcha.cfc, which we'll discuss later, and the location of the JavaScript folder discussed in "Getting Started" above.

Overlooking the JavaScript for the moment, let's look at the form code on lines 49 through 57. There is nothing special to this form, except that there is a hidden form field that passes the hash necessary to decode the CAPTCHA response. We generate this hash per request on line 13 of index.cfm. It's important to note that the CAPTCHA image is actually referencing a cfm file and passing along the hash. The cfm file (showCaptcha.cfm) has only two lines of code. The first line generates the CAPTCHA image from the hash code we just passed, and the second serves this image up via a cfcontent tag that also takes care of removing the file for us as well.

Notice that I have overridden the standard form submission by adding onsubmit="return false;" to the form tag. This is because I call validateCaptcha() when the submit button is clicked, which will use ajaxCFC to verify that you have entered the correct CAPTCHA text by passing the value of the CAPTCHA text and hash form fields. Now let's take a look at the JavaScript necessary to perform the validation. Line 26 of index.cfm performs the ajaxCFC function call, which is invoking the validateCaptcha method on the CFC we defined in the initialization discussed previously (i.e., ajaxCFC/ajaxCaptcha.cfc). It also indicates that when the data is returned from the server, the captchaValidated JavaScript function should be called. Finally, we pass the validateCaptcha ColdFusion function the necessary CAPTCHA text and hash values.

Taking a look at the validateCaptcha function within ajaxCaptcha.cfc (lines 2-10), you'll see that all it does is pass back the value LylaCAPTCHA's validateCaptcha function, which is a boolean. When this value is returned, the captchaValidated JavaScript function is called and passed the result (index.cfm lines 29-36). All captchaValidated does is alert the user if the test was failed or submit the form if the test was passed. Note that on lines 1-11 of index.cfm, I include some dummy form processing code, which does however re-validate the CAPTCHA response in case someone figures out a way to bypass our script. This probably isn't completely necessary, but is simple to do and a good precaution.

Additional Functionality
Essentially, the code discussed above is all that is required. However, anyone who has encountered CAPTCHA knows that sometimes a particular CAPTCHA image may be extraordinarily difficult to read. Even the best CAPTCHA will be difficult to read a small percentage of the time. Well, we could refresh the page and get a new image, but then I might lose what I have typed, plus that seems counterintuitive. Wouldn't it be nice if we could just serve up a new image at the user's request? Well, we can't, so stop asking...wait, scratch that, we can.

What you need in order to generate a new image is a new hash code. We can expand our ajaxCaptcha.cfc with a function that will return a new hash code with all of three lines. The newCaptcha JavaScript function (index.cfm lines 38-40) calls the getNewCaptchaHash ColdFusion function (ajaxCaptcha.cfc lines 12-14), which takes no arguments and simply returns a new CAPTCHA hash reference. When the result is returned, the showNewCaptcha JavaScript function is called, which first sets the CAPTCHA image source to the new CAPTCHA image, and then changes the hidden form field hash reference value. Easy right?...and you said it couldn't be done.

Conclusion
I think at this point it should be obvious how easy it is to integrate either LylaCAPTCHA and ajaxCFC. Obviously, both projects can serve more purposes than we have covered here, and I recommend you check them out in greater detail. When you're wondering whatever happened to the treasurer of the Nigerian government, take a moment to thank the efforts of Peter Farrell and Rob Gonda for not only making superb products, but being generous enough to make them available to the rest of us free and open source. Last, if you are looking for other free and open source ColdFusion projects, check out my ColdFusion open source project list at www.remotesynthesis.com/cfopensourcelist.