Everybody knows that Flash MX and ColdFusion MX are able to communicate with each other via Flash Remoting, right? But where can ColdFusion developers go to learn everything they need to know to begin building Flash applications and Flash front ends to their existing ColdFusion MX appl...

Once they've learned the basics of ColdFusion, one of the first applications many developers will write is an e-mail program. By using CFMAIL and CFPOP, it is easy to create a basic application that will send mail to an SMTP service and retrieve mail from a POP service.

'Actually, it's no one's fault.' This was the conclusion I had come to after a week of working on a nightmare project I had been called in on. The CIO had asked me for a briefing on what I had found so far. 'But how could this be such a mess?' the CIO wanted to know. 'Granted,...

If you've ever generated any type of custom report using ColdFusion, odds are you've fielded this question at some point in time. And while the task may sound rather difficult, it can be made relatively simple with a particular open-source third-party tool.

In the last issue of CFDJ (December 2002), we looked at arrays, those enormously useful creatures that are underused by some developers. We confined ourselves to one-dimensional arrays - those arrays that look like a single row from a spreadsheet.

This article applies to developers and site administrators working in an environment using Macromedia ColdFusion running on a Windows server using Internet Information Server 4.0 or better. Those who work in an intranet environment will be especially interested. It will conclude with i...

I have always considered Ektron's eWebEditPro to be the best, easiest to integrate, and most innovative Web-based WYSIWYG component available. Many software vendors apparently concur with this assessment, for you can find the product embedded in a number of CMS systems ranging from All...

I wanted to write an article that would be useful to the developer community. Since Flash is gaining ground as a powerful development tool, this article will focus on using Flash to create a rich UI hooked up to a ColdFusion component. An effective Web site cannot exist without...

Another ColdFusion Developers Conference has officially come and gone. All in all, this year's conference, held October 27-30 in Orlando, Florida, was a huge success, both in terms of attendance (well over 2,000) and content. I'll begin with my personal view of the conference and then ...

With all of the excitement over the new features of ColdFusion MX, it's easy to skip over some of the basics of ColdFusion. In training developers, I find that the subject of arrays causes a good deal of confusion - so much so that many good coders omit arrays from their code a...

Imagine going to buy a new car. You are down to specifying the options for the vehicle and the salesman says, 'You can have it in any color as long as it's black.' If black is your favorite color that's great; but if it's not, then maybe they have just lost a customer. These days it's ...

ColdFusion developers often include in their applications the functionality to serve up dynamic Microsoft Office documents. The most common technique for doing this is through automation - the process of controlling one application from another. While there have been numerous articles,...

Dreamweaver has been upgraded to include many features familiar to users of CF Studio, and includes other crucial Web-design applications, specifically Fireworks, Flash, and Freehand.

Within the field of computer science, competing products often implement standards differently. Database management systems (DBMSs), with their different syntaxes for SQL queries, are no exception. How can we write queries within our applications that will be compatible with several DB...

Designing Web applications is very different from designing Web sites. Web site design typically consists of finding ways to organize information so that it is clear (hopefully) to the site visitor. An excellent book that deals with Web site design is Steve Krug's Don't Make M...

I was telling my son about my childhood the other day. He's 13 now and no longer willing to believe the stories I used to tell him. Gone are the days when I would recount tales of my pet dinosaur

How often have you worked on a project or piece of code and thought, 'This is something that could save someone a lot of time,' or 'This is something that solves a business problem'?

Currently there are more than 200 commercially available content management systems (CMSs). Each has strengths and weaknesses relative to the others...belying their underlying middleware platform and customer history.

Ah, for the good old days! Only a couple of years ago, one of the biggest problems for developers was the constant blitz of recruiters...

CFhas been rewritten using Java technology, and is much more than just a way for Web pages to interact with databases. You could say that the fax machine revolutionized the business world.

With the advent of ColdFusion MX, CF programmers have the ability to bundle data and functions into a single unit for the first time. Macromedia calls these constructs ColdFusion Components, or CFCs; other languages call them objects. This isn't to say that ColdFusion MX is now an obje...

ColdFusion MX is a complete, from-the-ground-up rewrite of an existing piece of software, shifting its architectural base from a purely interpreted language sitting atop C, its base language, to one that compiles into Java code. That's quite a shift.

This month I hope to shed some light on Oracle's larger datatypes for those of you who like to do things big. Let's go straight to the deep end with stored procedures. They're faster and more secure than standalone queries.

Using opens up a whole range of Oracle functionality. This includes calling your own functions, formatting data ready for your ColdFusion templates, and using Oracle bind variables to reduce the load on your Oracle database.

As I write this, ColdFusion MX is widely available in a preview release and it looks like it's going to be an excellent one. CFMX offers several features to ColdFusion developers, including native support for reading and writing XML, Unicode support, better Flash widgets, and Web servi...

A portal server can be a great addition to the operation of a company and a big plus for commercial Web sites. For one, it can allow employees to access everything through one main page, from the local weather to their Outlook boxes and calendars.

My three-part article on stored procedures (CFDJ, Vol. 3, issues 10, 12, Vol. 4, issue 2) has mushroomed into four, but since I'm sure most of you write perfect code the first time…

Recursion is a wonderfully geeky word that comes from the Latin word recursio, meaning 'to run back.' A recursive procedure (or function, or subroutine) is a procedure that calls itself to do part of the work. The ancients showed the concept of recursion as a snake eating itself.

My first impressions of going to a professional baseball game are still vivid. I was 11 years old and I went to see the greatest team in the world - the New York Yankees - play in Yankee Stadium. I grew up listening to my brothers tell tales of watching Mickey Mantle, the head of the Y...

Most ColdFusion developers have noticed that there are many similarities between each application they write. Most database tables require you to write a data entry screen, a form action page, and at least one SQL query. I can't tell you how many times I've typed in alternating and t...

One of the most common database-driven applications on the Internet is the discussion forum. Internet forums are used for product support, organizational announcements, and corporate discussion areas, and as a place to talk about the theme of a given Web site. They're popular because t...

Finding a good ColdFusion hosting company is a challenge for many ColdFusion developers who don't have access to their own servers. This month, CFDJ interviews CFDynamics partner Jason Egan for the scoop on the company's ColdFusion hosting services.

The merger of Allaire and Macromedia created much speculation in development circles as to the future of ColdFusion and ColdFusion Studio. With the release of ColdFusion 5 UltraDev 4 Studio, Macromedia has committed to providing the best possible development environment for the ColdFus...

I received Mastering ColdFusion 5 two months ago and began using it immediately. Since I had recently upgraded to ColdFusion 5.0, I used this book to learn about some of its new features; I used three of them (query-of-a-query, CFFLUSH, and CFSAVECONTENT) in a single template the first...

Last month in CFDJ (Vol. 4, issue 1) we began building a Fusebox 3 application - a game played at a social club run by Vinny. The game is simple: registered users log in, pick a number, and then place a bet…

For some time, Macromedia has outlined its vision of ColdFusion interoperating seamlessly with Java. In the November issue of CFDJ (Vol. 3, issue 11) John Quarto-vonTivadar and I gave an overview of Fusebox 3. Now, over the next two months I want to walk through building a Fusebox appl...

As the author points out in the introduction: '[Y]ou'll find this book loaded with strategies, hints, tips, and tricks that you can apply to your own projects. I've tried to include all the useful ColdFusion tidbits that I've discovered over the years so that you can benefit from my ex...

The other day I overheard someone say that ColdFusion is 'hot' right now. ColdFusion hot? For years we've all listened as fellow developers hyped each new acronym in Web programming, never knowing the power of ColdFusion. Perhaps now ColdFusion is finally receiving the recognition it d...

For some time, Macromedia has outlined its vision of ColdFusion interoperating seamlessly with Java. This raises some very interesting, exciting possibilities that CFDJ has invited authors to explore this month. My own experience with object-oriented programming is somewhat unusual, as...

Every developer faces the difficulty of maintaining and tracking changes to program source files, regardless of the platform or language. It becomes more challenging when working with a team of developers. Code Co-op by Reliable Software is an incredible product that eases this burden ...