ColdFusion Development | ColdFusion Developer

ColdFusion Product

2009-07-02T21:27:00.000-07:00

ColdFusion, from Allaire, provides an application development platform suitable for network software. Although it's not as glamorous as, say, cold fusion nuclear energy, ColdFusion does include some exciting technology in its own right.

In a nutshell, ColdFusion provides components that enable the creation of dynamic, database-powered Web applications. By "Web applications," I mean software applications and services built with Web technologies -- both public Internet and intranet software. Examples of potential ColdFusion Applications on the intranet in particular include business process automation, training, content management, and bulletin board conferencing. On the Internet, ColdFusion can play a role in ecommerce sites just to name one example.

ColdFusion possesses a number of features that make it potentially appealing for Web development. It offers a high-level programming model not drastically different from the HTML files and editors that many Webmasters already know. It has been designed to allow for the integration of custom modules -- important for organizations looking to tailor software to fit their specific needs. And it supports connectivity to databases.

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ColdFusion Memory Usage

2009-07-01T21:27:00.000-07:00

When trying to judge expected behavior from potentially problematic behavior, looking at memory behavior often is a place ColdFusion Administrators will start.

Even though the standard amount of RAM continues to increase, a close examination of an application's use of system memory remains a critical part of the Q&A process.

Fortunately for the developer, a variety of memory tracking abilities exist to troubleshoot an application's use of system memory. Unfortunately for the developer, the multitude of metrics to choose from increases the chances of making the wrong choice and tracking the incorrect data set.

This article will describe some of the available metrics for tracking memory usage in Microsoft's Windows NT/Windows 2000, Sun Microsystems' Solaris, and Linux.

Windows NT and Windows 2000

When monitoring ColdFusion memory usage in Windows NT or 2000, many developers use the "Mem Usage" statistic in the Task Manager. This statistic measures the working set size. Working set size roughly translates into how much of the ColdFusion process is being kept in RAM. Keep in mind, "Mem Usage" is NOT a measure of overall memory usage.

If overall memory usage needs to be checked periodically, use the "VM Size" column in the Task Manager. To view the "VM Size" column, make sure "Processes" is selected. Click on the "View" menu and choose "Select Columns". A dialog box will appear in which "VM Size" will be an option.

To monitor memory usage and log it over time, Performance Monitor will need to be used. In order to enable Performance Monitor to log memory usage statistics properly, "Pdlcnfig.exe" will need to be executed. Assuming that the system has Microsoft's Resource Kit installed, "Pdlcnfig.exe" will be located in the \WinNT\system32 directory.

This installs the performance logging service and launches the configuration window. To use the counter for ColdFusion memory logging, follow these steps:

Select "Process" in the "Performance Object" drop-down box.
Select "cfserver" from the "Instances" list.
Select "Private Bytes" from the "Performance Counters" list.
Click on "Add."

Set the log file name, and select the "Comma Separated Value" (CSV) file format if Excel charting is desired with the data. (CSVs can be opened directly in Excel.) Set the sampling interval (i.e., every 10 minutes) and start the performance logging service by clicking "start" or starting it via the control panel. If you get an error trying to start the service, reboot and try again.

If Windows is doing its job correctly, expect to see Mem Usage rise as ColdFusion runs. This just means more of ColdFusion is being stored in RAM and less is left out on disk while virtual memory is waiting to be paged in.

Remember, "Private Bytes" is the total virtual memory size of the cfserver process and equates to the "VM Size" metric inside Task Manage.

Neither of the statistics provided by the Task Manager or Performance Monitor will show memory being returned. That's because ColdFusion 4.5 incorporates the latest version of SmartHeap, which no longer returns unused memory to NT. Instead, memory is held, assuming ColdFusion may reuse it in the near future. While this method is faster and more efficient, SmartHeap can lead to confusion when looking at memory statistics on NT.

ColdFusion Development, ColdFusion Developer, ColdFusion Programming

Coldfusion Components

2009-06-30T21:23:00.000-07:00

Coldfusion Components also known as CFC's. A lot of people program Coldfusion and not use CFC's have; it's too hard to learn! It's too hard to learn?? No way!!

It's very easy to learn. It's just an other way of thinking than you're used to. You must see CFC's as building blocks. By constructing "building blocks" you're code is much cleaner and far more reusable, thus quicker to build your application. Most (if not every) ColdFusion Developer knows UDF's (User Defined Functions) and Custom Tags. CFC's are almost the same as Custom Tags, but have some differences:

Custom Tags have a single entry point; CFC's can have multiple entry points. This makes it possible to create a single component that does many related actions. (To do that with custom tags you would need multiple tags or cumbersome switch processing.)
Custom Tags have no formalized parameters passing and validation mechanism; CFC's do. In other words unlike custom tags, CFC's can validate passed data, enforce data types, check for required parameters, and optionally assign default values.
Custom Tags cannot persist; CFC's can. Custom Tags are blocks of code that are executed as is, while CFC's are objects and can be treated as such.
Custom Tags are designed to contain code; CFC's are designed to contain both code and data.
Custom Tags are accessible only by Coldfusion and only locally; CFC's can be accessed as web services, opening up a whole new world of reuse possibilities.

To sum it up, CFC’s and Custom Tags are quite different. Although their functionality does overlap a little, they really do not solve the same problems at all. So to learn the basics of CFC's while head right on it and start with some sample "spaghetti code" and transform it to a structured and reusable way; a CFC. Please note that this article only covers the basics of CFC's and does not handle any advanced topics.

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Looping in Coldfusion

2009-06-29T21:44:00.000-07:00

Looping is a programming technique that repeats a set of instructions or displays output repeatedly until one or more conditions are met.

The first thing that we need to do it to query a database

This tag supports the following types of loops:

cfloop: index loop
cfloop: conditional loop
cfloop: looping over a date or time range
cfloop: looping over a query
cfloop: looping over a list, a file, or an array

cfloop: index loop

An index loop repeats for a number of times that is determined by a numeric value. An index loop is also known as a FOR loop.

Syntax

Example
The loop index is #LoopCount#.

cfloop: conditional loop

A conditional loop iterates over a set of instructions as long as a condition is True. To use this type of loop correctly, the instructions must change the condition every time the loop iterates, until the condition is False. Conditional loops are known as WHILE loops, as in, "loop WHILE this condition is true."

Syntax

Example
The following example increments CountVar from 1 to 5.

cfloop: looping over a date or time range

Loops over the date or time range specified by the from and to attributes. By default, the step is 1 day, but you can change the step by creating a timespan. The cfloop tag loops over tags that cannot be used within a cfoutput tag.

Syntax

Example

The following example loops from today's date to today's date plus 30 days, stepping by 7 days at a time and displaying the date:

cfloop: looping over a query

A loop over a query executes for each record in a query record set. The results are similar to those of the cfoutput tag. During each iteration, the columns of the current row are available for output. The cfloop tag loops over tags that cannot be used within a cfoutput tag.

Syntax

Example

cfloop: looping over a list, a file, or an array

Looping over a list steps through elements contained in any of these entities:

A variable
A value that is returned from an expression
An array
A file
Looping over a file does not open the entire file in memory.

Syntax

Example

This loop displays four names:

You can put more than one character in the delimiters attribute, in any order. For example, this loop processes commas, colons, and slashes as list delimiters:

ColdFusion skips the second and subsequent consecutive delimiters between list elements. Thus, in the example, the two colons between "George" and "Ringo" are processed as one delimiter.

To loop over each line of a file, use the tag as follows:

To read a specified number of characters from a text file during each iteration of the loop, use the tag as follows:

To loop over an array, you can do the following:

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Challenges Facing by Coldfusion in 2009

2009-06-28T21:55:00.000-07:00

A year ago, I challenged the community to evangelize ColdFusion and convert new developers from other technologies. It was part of a blog post that examined and rebuffed several common arguments that often arise within the community as to why ColdFusion is not more popular. Most of those arguments focus on what people think Adobe should do to make ColdFusion more popular. A lot has happened in the last year since that blog post so I want to revisit the arguments and see where we stand today.

ColdFusion needs to be taught in schools. I argued that many programmers don’t use the languages they learn in school and, of course, almost all CFers are using a language they learned after leaving school! In 2008, Adobe announced that ColdFusion 8 would be made available for free to all students and faculty for teaching purposes and Adobe also committed to working on course curriculum materials to help push ColdFusion into schools. It’ll be interesting to see how successful this is but it will take several years before we can judge the results. +1 to Adobe.

ColdFusion needs to be free and/or open source. I argued that cost was a bit of a red herring because folks need to look at “total cost of ownership”. See the ColdFusion Evangelist Kit Adobe have produced for more information on that. So what about “free and/or open source”? Well, Open BlueDragon was released as open source in 2008, based on BlueDragon 7 so it’s a solid, well-established product. Railo released their 3.0 Community Edition which is free for production use and it’s also very full-featured (and very fast). Railo will be releasing their product as open source in early 2009, under the jboss.org umbrella, part of the Red Hat group. So now you have both free and open source options. Oh, and there’s also free hosting now for ColdFusion! +1 to OpenBD and Railo.

Adobe needs to provide more ColdFusion evangelists. I argued that other popular technologies (PHP, Ruby on Rails, Groovy/Grails, Python etc) have no paid evangelists, just the community. The economy makes it hard for any company to support extensive evangelism and makes it almost impossible to increase the amount of paid evangelism. At MAX, Adobe talked about their drive to support and increase the user group community however and launched an official hub for their rapidly growing number of user groups. They also provided the ColdFusion Evangelist Kit (mentioned above) to help every community member become a better evangelist. +1 to Adobe.

And what’s your challenge for 2009?

Same as 2008 - convert a non-CF developer to CF. Just one. C’mon, you have 349 days left. If all of you - all 500,000 of you - convert just one developer this year, we’ll double the community. You believe in ColdFusion - make someone else believe in it too!

This Article Written by :- Sean Corfield

About The Author
Sean is currently Chief Technology Officer for Railo Technologies US. He has worked in IT for over twenty five years, starting out writing database systems and compilers then moving into mobile telecoms and finally into web development in 1997. Along the way, he worked on the ISO and ANSI C++ Standards committees for eight years and is a staunch advocate of software standards and best practice. Sean has championed and contributed to a number of CFML frameworks and was lead developer on Fusebox for two years.

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Why use ColdFusion for Development

2009-06-26T22:26:00.000-07:00

Cold Fusion was created as a commercial product by the Allaire Corporation. As a commercial product it has some features different from other Server Side Scripting Languages. The first major difference is that Cold Fusion scripts do not have to display their source code like every other scripting language, it is possible to run encrypted versions of the scripts.

This allows for individuals to sell their own scripts without fear of piracy, however it has the side effect of stemming the flow of free open source CF scripts for use by the learning webmaster.

The second major difference is that Cold Fusion costs money. A server side scripting language works with an interpreter. Depending on the extension of the filename to be served, .php .asp or .cfm, the server will first send the file to an interpreter which is what dynamically generates your page. So to use these languages you need to install them on your server.

PHP is free, ASP is free, but CF costs money, and that may be the reason why it is growing only slowly. However most NT hosting packages do already include Cold Fusion so for the person who does not own their own server this pricing difference will not have much affect.

As to the language itself, I have worked with both ASP and PHP before and it is my opinion that Cold Fusion is the easiest to learn and use.

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ColdFusion Development in Web Aplication

2009-06-25T21:33:00.000-07:00

ColdFusion is a web application server and software development framework. Cold Fusion is a scripting language used by our developers to create dynamic websites. A dynamic website can change depending on outside factors like data, user preferences or changes in back end database. Cold Fusion is a rapid scripting environment server for creating Rich Internet Applications.

Cold Fusion is a programming language and Cold Fusion Markup Language (CFML) is an easy-to-learn tag-based scripting language on the same page as HTML.

Semaphore Software is one of pioneers in the area of Cold Fusion centric application development services in different application development frameworks like and ColdFusion Application Development , Application development outsourcing.

Our global presence, process oriented methodologies and efficient delivery models enable us to provide an integrated and highly flexible mix of on site, off site, near shore and offshore delivery options. We have built an impeccable reputation for providing professional software solutions that are delivered on time and within budgets.

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CFUnited 2009

2009-06-24T22:06:00.000-07:00

The countdown is on! CFUnited is just a mere 49 days away, and the excitement is building. I think everyone has great anticipation for Centaur this year--I know I do! I think the sessions are going to be absolutely great as well. I've never seen a lineup this good.

I'm also looking forward to speaking for the first time at a major ColdFusion conference. It's a little nerve-wracking, but I'm glad to not be alone. Aaron and I make a great team, and our presentation is going to be awesome! If you haven't checked it out, see all about it at CFUnited's site : http://cfunited.com/2009/topics/237

We're covering error handling with ColdFusion--a very hot topic and a highly popular request by the community. We're looking forward to sharing our experiences and knowledge gained through the years on this important subject. Hope to see you there!

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Application Development in Coldfusion

2009-06-23T21:22:00.000-07:00

Semaphore Software is Expert in the field of Coldfusion Application Development. We have successfully integrated a variety of databases technologies with the applications and our Versed in Team of software professionals dedicated to provide reliable range of ColdFusion Services.

Client and server cache management
File indexing and searching service based on Verity K2
XML parsing, querying, and validation
Server clustering
GUI administration

Our team follows strict object oriented approach for application development in coldfusion. ColdFusion Application services are a set of built-in services that extend the capabilities of the ColdFusion scripting environment. Out team of ColdFusion programmers are also working for maintenance of existing ColdFusion applications developing the software in structured and planned process.

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ColdFusion is not Java

2009-06-22T21:24:00.000-07:00

ColdFusion is not Java. It is an abstraction layer of Java for programming web sites and hiding Java’s complexities… period, the end. It’s not an enterprise level language like Java and .Net are, yes it can work with both, but that doesn’t make it an enterprise level language. Because ColdFusion is a abstraction layer of Java, you can take the ColdFusion markup and smack on top of another language, say .Net (What do you think BlueDragon is, the ColdFusion markup on top of .Net). A better analogy for describing what ColdFusion is, would be to say that ColdFusion is like jQuery. jQuery is an abstraction layer of JavaScript, it make JavaScript easier by hiding it complexities.

However, it’s very feasible that your could take the jQuery markup and ideas and put them on top of another language, say Python. The design patterns that we’re all going crazy trying to utilize were written for enterprise level languages for a good reason. A lot of these enterprise level languages interface with many different systems and grab data from a variety of different places. As such Service Layers, IOC, Business Objects and numerous other design patterns were implemented because it does make it easier to manage and maintain.

However that doesn’t mean that the web sites we write warrant the use of all or any of these ideas into it, nor should we feel that we have to be implementing these ideas into our web sites. In closing, remember that ColdFusion was built to hide the complexities of the Java language and make it faster and easier for us to work with. Why are we trying to bring those complexities back in is anyone’s guess.

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About Adobe Coldfusion 8

2009-06-21T21:25:00.000-07:00

The Journey of ColdFusion from Macromedia to Adobe adds scalability in the performance of web application development. As a part of the Adobe family, ColdFusion 8 offers unique solutions to internet applications in the web world. As its extensive features of simplicity to code and short span of time with high quality service makes ColdFusion Consultants the best option for web application development solutions. Now it comes with the best features among the existing web tools available in the market.

Apart from the other features, ColdFusion 8 provides some of the best known features in ColdFusion Programming:

ColdFusion 8 introduces the new server monitor and Multiserver monitor. Developers can able to utilize the memory and able to get the information from the server like requesting, queries, errors and other important services to reduce the defects while interacting with users.
ColdFusion 8 offers dynamically interaction with PDF forms or documents.
ColdFusion 8 allows accessing the large volume of library of Ajax user interface components with introducing new simple tags.
Able to access Microsoft .Net assemble classes as CFML objects.
ColdFusion 8 introduces new tags to interact with Microsoft exchange servers.
Now it expands its platform supports to Mac OS X on Intel, JBoss, JDK 1.5, JDK 1.6, Microsoft Virtual Server and 64-bit support on Solaris.
ColdFusion 8 improves interaction with Database.
It comes with strong encryption libraries.

These all advance features of ColdFusion 8 becomes a powerful tools in the ColdFusion Development life cycle. Now ColdFusion consultant is able to provide day to day challenging of internet application development. With all the broad features of ColdFusion, offshore providers are ready to provide offshore ColdFusion development works at feasible price along with attained quality works.

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CFClasses Directory Gettting Bigger

2009-06-01T04:35:00.000-07:00

This is probably obvious to most of you out there but, just in case you missed it there is a setting in the CF Admin panel that will help keep your cfclasses directory from getting huge.

On the "Caching" page of CF Admin there is a checkbox titled "Save class files" if you are in development you should seriously keep that UNCHECKED.

Here's an example to illustrate why that is a good idea. We are working on a semi-complicated CF app using Model-Glue and Coldspring. When the site is first hit, after starting CF server, 3,002 .class files are generated and placed in the cfclasses directory. Now, imagine you are editing and revisiting some of those files (or flushing the entire MG cache). That number keeps on growing and growing. Eventually, something will go wrong and you'll want to delete some .class files to make sure you are seeing the latest code. However, because your cfclasses directory is so huge you won't even be able to "cd" into it. Your system will appear to hang. Trying to delete the directories contents will take a long, long time.

What do you do? Well you just uncheck that damn box. That will prevent a huge backlog of files from building up in the cfclasses directory in the first place.

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7 Habits of Effective ColdFusion Developers

2009-05-29T03:52:00.000-07:00

This article will focus on practical ideas and habits that, when consistently applied, will allow you to develop and create better ColdFusion Applications – regardless of which CF version you use, the hardware you run on, or the methodology you employ – as well as make your development easier.

-> Know the Database

Many ColdFusion developers do not take advantage of the power and features of their database, often trying to solve problems in ColdFusion that are better solved through the use of SQL and or specific features in their database.

The main reason for this is that many CF developers feel the need for more than an understanding of SQL syntax and basic relational database theory. As a CF developer you need to understand that each RDBMS has specific strengths and weaknesses, and powerful tools and features that can make your life easier and your application more scalable and robust. The database may also have features that, if not understood, can make development more difficult.

Make sure you have read up on your particular DB and are at least aware of what it can do for your application. For example, many developers try to port code developed for MS SQL to Oracle, and find their join statements throw exceptions, never realizing that while their SQL is correct in the generic sense, Oracle does not support the Join statement and requires you to use the symbolic representation for a join rather than the literal statement.

When building applications, try to build your data model and data access routines independently of your application code. In Web application projects, it can be impractical to totally abstract the data layer from your code, but even in smaller projects you can write many of your queries independently of your ColdFusion code and use literals in the place of variables. In larger applications, and depending on your architecture, creating CFCs, CF custom tags, or templates that you later include into other code that contains your data access and manipulation code, makes a lot of sense. It allows you to test your SQL, reducing the amount of redundant code written, and increasing code reuse. Finally, it also allows you to use database tools to help analyze your SQL to increase performance and find bottlenecks.

-> Style, Code Standards, and Readability

Developers tend to think about how to solve a particular problem in the most efficient or interesting way. They tend to forget that the most important thing in building an application that will be used and supported is maintainability.
The first thing you should always do when building any app is select or create style and coding guidelines. If you do not have one, Macromedia’s internal Web development group has published their ColdFusion Coding Guidelines at http://livedocs.macromedia.com/wtg/public/coding_standards/contents.html. Regardless of what you choose, you need to make sure everyone in your development team adheres to it. Also remember that nothing ever stays in stasis and at times it makes sense to change your guidelines. When you do, be extra rigorous to make sure that people switch to the new guidelines.

Creating clean and understandable code is an art in itself and in most Web applications is far more important than creating the most efficient code. The reason for this is that with almost all Web applications, performance problems can be dealt with at a hardware and networking level, as long as your code and database are reasonably well designed (also, in my experience most performance issues reside at the database level). It is almost always easier to solve performance issues with more hardware than it is to try to rewrite your code to be more efficient. Also, hardware is a fixed capital cost, but labor isn’t. In almost every project, labor associated with development is the single largest expense.

Furthermore, as applications grow and change over time, the underlying code often needs to be changed. Having code that does not conform to a documented standard makes it harder to collaborate and support any system regardless if it’s ColdFusion or COBOL. While rigorous documentation can add to your development time, sometimes it actually speeds up development dramatically in that you actually know what you need to do when you sit down in front of your computer. Regardless, it's more than worth the effort to document your system to make it easier to support in the future.

-> Think Before You Code

Before you ever write a line of code you should have a clear understanding of what you’re about to do. There are many approaches to creating requirements, modeling systems, developing methodologies, etc. However, CF allows for such ease of development that many people start coding without clearly thinking about what the application needs to do. What’s worse they tend to come back at a later date and slap on more code to create new features, without planning or thinking through what effects those changes will have on the system as a whole.

Before you start to work on your application you should create wireframe diagrams, logical flowcharts, and plainly written descriptions of what the application needs to do. You also need to document what your user is expected or required to do at each point in the processes that require user interaction. There is a large variety of methodologies for describing software systems, and some are very intense and demanding, such as the Universal Modeling Language and Unified Process. Others are much more flexible and easy to use, such as those described as Extreme Programming. Regardless of what you use, you should adopt some method of designing and describing your application and follow it all the time.

Most important, don't reinvent the wheel. If you're working on a problem and think it's something that people must have run into before, you're probably right. Make sure to use the tag libraries, your local user group e-mail list, and resources like CFCzone.org, CFlib.org, CFComet.com, Macromedia Dev Center, etc. Good programmers will always use or reuse good code when possible so they can focus on developing the application as a whole.

-> Exception Handling

People have different definitions of what exception handling is, and often make it synonymous with error trapping. In this article I will differentiate between simple trapping errors with CFTRY/CATCH blocks versus actually dealing with unexpected or unforeseen events, and creating a process to deal with those events. You can break down exception handling into several distinct categories: trapping, notification, and logging.
Trapping

This is what most people confuse with exception handling, which is the catching or trapping of errors, usually through a CFTRY/CFCATCH block and/or a CFTHROW command. You should use CFTRY/CFCATCH blocks in your code where an error or exception may occur, such as a CFQUERY, in that numerous unexpected things can happen in a query from a query failure to the database being down. Once you have trapped your error, you need to do something with it. The first thing you need to do is logically decide if the error needs to be dealt with in some way such as attempting to retry the failing process or notifying a system administrator.

Notification
Notifying a user of an error or a problem is often a good idea, but sometimes it can be a bad one. Many developers use e-mail to notify administrators of every exception that happens in an application – a classic mistake of beginning developers. In your planning stage you should think through what exceptions you need to notify a user about, or if you need to notify a user based on a threshold.

For example, you may have implemented a site-wide error-trapping system that e-mails a user whenever there is an exception. One day some new code is integrated that causes an exception every time a user comes to the site. Imagine if you have 70,000 users in an hour. You can easily see how this might bring your mail server to its knees, cause huge performance slowdowns in your server, and generally annoy everyone who is on the receiving end of the notification e-mail.

This is why you need to think through your notification and exception-handling strategy, and in this particular case, you may want to implement a threshold strategy where notification is sent based on severity and frequency. In addition, many errors should first be handled by the system and, if possible, the user should never know a problem has occurred. At the very minimum you can define site-wide error handling in the ColdFusion administrator and refer the user back to the home page. Users should never see a "raw" error message not only because it makes them uncomfortable, but also because it can expose information about the system that then creates a security risk. Many "crackers" purposely try to create exceptions in Web applications so that they can try to gather information that they can exploit to get access to the system.

Logging
Many CF developers confuse logging with notification and assume that since CF logs errors, and they have been notified by an error, that is all they need to do. In general, you want to think about what kind of exceptions the system might generate and what you are concerned about, and then log them when they are created. This can help you go back and reduce bottlenecks in your application and find hard-to-reproduce bugs, as well as look for hack attempts at your system. CFMX now makes use of CFLOG, which allows you to easily log your own information about any event you like and is a great way to log additional information about an exception when you trap it.

-> Testing Your Code

Most ColdFusion Developers never really test their code, but would rather build their applications and work on a trial-and-error basis until the users are happy. This often leads to never-ending development cycles as well as bugs that appear after the project has been completed. Testing is a lot more than just making sure that the code runs, or changing features until the client is happy. Good testing can actually allow you to increase the speed with which you develop applications, reduce your frustration level, and increase the long-term maintainability of an application.

Testing forces you to think about the application and what you want your code to do beforehand, by forcing you to write your tests before or in parallel to your application code. If you cannot create a test for your code it often means you don’t have enough information about what you need to develop, and should revisit your design and documentation.

Recently, the concept of unit testing and "test to code" practices have become more popular with ColdFusion, and now there are several useful tools. One of these is CFUnit, which is based on JUnit. It’s available on the Macromedia DevNet Resource Kit (DRK) Volume 3,www.macromedia.com/devnet/mx/coldfusion/articles/cfunit.html. Also, Steve Nelson of Fusebox fame has developed a testing harness for Fusebox developers at www.secretagents.com/index.cfm?&fuseaction=tools.listtools. Finally, there’s an open source ColdFusion testing initiative called ColdUnit, which shows great promise: http://sourceforge.net/projects/coldunit/.

-> Keep Learning

No matter what your level, you need to keep learning and pushing the envelope of your knowledge. Paradigms and practices in software development are always changing just like in any other discipline, and it’s up to you to keep pace. Good programmers are always monitoring best practices, discussing problems with their peers, and learning new programming languages and technologies. One of the great things about ColdFusion is how easy it is to integrate Java, .NET, and XML. Other technologies and many problems that are extremely difficult to deal with using ColdFusion only are trivial when you use another language, but you won’t know that if all you do is focus on ColdFusion. Another great way to learn is to contribute to online discussions, and better yet, to contribute to your local ColdFusion or Macromedia user groups. If you want to learn a topic or really see if you know it, try teaching it to others.

-> Always Use Source Control

Most ColdFusion Developers never use source control – even on large projects! While most ColdFusion developers may not think they need to use source control because their project is small, using source control can save you development time, allow you to track your work efforts, provide valuable backups, and allow you to easily manage many similar projects. This also applies to projects that you’re doing yourself or at home. You’ll save yourself a huge amount of frustration knowing that you can always revert to an earlier version of your code; also, the best time to build these habits is when you’re working on your own. There’s no good reason not to use source control and once you get into the habit, you’ll find it takes no more time to use it than to not use it.

There are many excellent source control products out there, like Borland’s StarTeam product, which is also a great tool for collaborative project development. Make sure to look also at Concurrent Version Control, which is the standard for concurrent version control and is available as a free open source tool from www.cvshome.org/. Windows versions are also available. If you’re not using source control or version control, start now!

Conclusion
Probably the most important point of this whole article, and what differentiates good programmers from average ones, is that good programmers make all the above strategies habits! Many of us apply some or all of the techniques described above in a haphazard manner, and use them when it’s convenient or when there is no pressure. Really good ColdFusion Programmers do them as a matter of habit no matter what the pressures or time constraints are. The best way to improve as a developer is to always apply the same standards in development no matter the size of the project, even if you’re just coding for fun.

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Excellent Coldfusion Development services being offered by Semaphore's Coldfusion Developers Team

2009-05-27T02:35:00.000-07:00

Semaphore Software has been developing ColdFusion applications — e-commerce websites and online content management solutions. There has not been even a single instance of project failure during this triumphant phase of ColdFusion web development. But why web development with ColdFusion and not with some other programming or scripting language such as PHP, Ruby on rails or Python? ColdFusion is so fast, Sometimes it seems like magic. It is a language specifically evolved for enterprise level solutions, although it can be easily used — without resorting to an overkill — for smaller websites and applications too. In fact you can use ColdFusion for static web sites too but it is rarely done. It can be easily integrated with any platform from Java to .Net and it supports all Web 2.0 web development features and enhancements such as Ajax and user generated content management. Most of the online content and document management applications are developed using ColdFusion because of its unmatched features.

The web development methodologies at Semaphore Software are time-tested as well as innovative; sometimes we strictly follow the rules and sometimes we define our own rules in order to deliver the maximum benefit to our clients. As a first step towards delivering world-class online application solutions we have only been focusing on programming in ColdFusion. Other than that our strict quality control mechanism is a self-regulatory system that is set in motion as soon as a new project initiates.

We employ highly modular web development techniques while developing solutions for our customers. Due to a very high efficiency level we are able to minimize the time spent on web development and maximize the output and hence charge a very reasonable rate from our clients. Of course ColdFusion has a great part in it because when you work in ColdFusion coding efficiency is handled by its environment automatically.

Our web development activities are mostly centered around developing highly advanced e-commerce and online content publishing solutions for our clients from all over the world. You can easily say that when it comes to developing e-commerce and online publishing applications we have developed an incomparable expertise. We have left no stone unturned trying to understand all the aspects of this great niche.

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Outsourcing ColdFusion Development in India

2009-05-24T23:27:00.000-07:00

Today, outsourcing has almost become the order of the day. So why are global organizations choosing outsourcing to India ? More and more global companies are choosing to outsource today for a number of reasons, such as, cost-effective services, increased efficiency, increased productivity, shared risks, reduced operating costs, increased quality, better services and more time to focus on core competencies.

ColdFusion is the hottest way to create dynamic webpages that link to just about any database. ColdFusion is a programming language based on standard HTML that is used to write dynamic webpages.

ColdFusion is an application development language of choice. ColdFusion is a web application server and software development framework. ColdFusion lets you create pages on the fly. Creating an application with ColdFusion is as straightforward as creating a static Web site.

The main unique feature of ColdFusion is that web pages have the server–side ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) in addition to HTML. CFML gives you the ability to control the behavior of your applications, integrate a wide range of server technologies, and dynamically generate the content that is returned to the Web browser.

If you have Coldfusion project to be developed and have limited budget and cannot compromise on quality, then you can Outsource ColdFusion development to India.

Outsourcing to India can give your organization a competitive edge. The following are a list of reasons why companies outsource to India.

1. Cost-effective services
2. High-quality services
3. Time Zone Advantages
4. India’s stable government
5. Global organizations’ most preferred choice

At present, India is emerging as one of the popular offshore outsourcing locations to offer cost effective software solutions. The contribution of India in Software Outsourcing India is remarkable. As stated above, the prime reason for choosing India, as an offshore development partner in offshore IT Outsourcing business is the availability of enormous pool of educated manpower combined with world-class quality offerings. Beside this, India has many speakers of English language, which further aids them to work with or for any part of the world.

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CFML Landscape

2009-05-06T05:38:00.000-07:00

I had been meaning to publish this for a while but I decided to sit on it and wait for some of the dust to settle. I was eager to see exactly how many people would join the new Broadchoice Railo.

Now that Railo has finally opened up I think it is high time we take stock in the CFML landscape. What follows is how I view it with (of course) my personal twist/insight in each engine. I've tried to keep my personal commentary to a minimum, or at least hold it off till the end.

Open BlueDragon is GPLv3. It is the most open system with the most open development, though I think we could improve some. Anything that comes from OpenBD is GPLv3 or compatible. It is extensible but currently does not offer any store or other automated mechanism to add the extensions to the engine (though it is not hard and it is documented). So long as a commercial extension does not try to package and distribute the entire engine there are not problems with commercial extensions. Open BlueDragon is backed by a AW2, not New Atlanta. AW2's business model does not rely (primarily) on the CFML engine, though they do leverage it in some of their work from what I understand. When OpenBD was announced the project tried to gain confidence from the community by include some high profile names in the project steering committee (personal observation: BlueDragon had a bad name due to some old NA bad blood with Adobe and many were skeptical).

Railo is LGPL (sorry I can not remember the version I think 2 but maybe 3). It is mostly open. The core offers compelling compatibility and an astounding set of functionality. It is extensible via an app store type model where modules can be added onto the engine (I have not done enough looking to see if this is still manual or automated through the admin). Railo itself plans to make some functionality for pay. Railo the engine is backed by Railo the company and the business model s structure entirely around the Railo engine (services and product sales). Railo has positioned themselves inside the CF community as a competitor to Adobe by sponsoring CF centric events and hiring prominent figures in the CFML community.

ColdFusion is currently the most closed (in terms of source and openness to talk about what is being worked on). It is commercial and when you pay you get the whole kit and caboodle. ColdFusion can be extended through a couple of different means but not quite as tightly integrated as Railo or OpenBD at this point (the main extension point at the Java level is through CFX tags). ColdFusion is the original engine to use CFML and has gone through 2 acuisitions. It's a steady income for Adobe, they care about the CF community and do their part to keep it alive and happy (it is after all steady income for them).

To Adam Lehman's credit I think the information about CF9 has been much more open than previous releases. Don't take this comment too lightly this is a large shift for a large corporation. This comes from some one involved in many previous releases of ColdFusion and I personally see a huge difference in this release. The last couple of releases of ColdFusion have been driven heavily by the community. This is good but at the same time, the community is not full of big thinkers and typically we ask for functionality we need right now. This has resulted in stagnation of the ColdFusion platform, sure it has kept up but it has not PUSH forward much. Let's face it while Adobe (and Macromedia before them) have done a stellar job developing a great product the whole platform itself has sort of dwindled as they have focused on the language too much (not saying the platform has not grown it has but more evolutionary than revolutionary). The innovation seems to have slipped away and as a direct result we have multiple engines available to us now.

Ok now that I got my little side bar tangent out, which engine is right for you? I'm not going to make that decision for you, what is important (in Open BlueDragon team's eyes) is you have an option. We see that as possibly the most important part of being available, you have options. Each engine has compelling reasons to consider it for use. For me personally, in my development, I like the fact that I have complete control over the source code if I need/want it. I like that and that drives me towards OpenBD. For my company, we like a solid platform backed by a single entity and ColdFusion offers that to us.

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ColdFusion Programming Development | Semaphore Software

2009-04-30T04:05:00.000-07:00

ColdFusion as one of the server side scripting language has many advantages over its competeting languages and helps to build power web applications and services. ColdFusion is being utilized in small & large business and also for some advanced personal use but it is hosting especially for business website.

The language used in ColdFusion Programming is ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML). It comprises of tags similar to HTML for querying databases, interaction with different services and outputting text. The basic components of ColdFusion programming are ColdFusion Server and Studio. Here ColdFusion server is the application that processes the CFML code and the ColdFusion Studio is being used in ColdFusion Development if programmers develop their application locally and move to the ColdFusion Studio, when it is fully ready to process.

The major benitis of using ColdFusion Consultant is its easiest ways in developing websites among other available web tools in the market like ASP, PHP or JSP. Within a short period of time, web developers can code ColdFusion Programming rapidly because of its simplicity as well as its supportive qualities with other platforms like Apache, IIS, NSAPI based web servers, Solaris, HP-UX and Windows.

It also works with Dream weaver, Flash, Fireworks and Freehand of Macromedia as ColdFusion once was acquired by Macromedia. The new version ColdFusion 8 is come with extra features such as it can now dynamically generate and interact with PDF documents, features of a Multiserver Monitor to gain insight on all servers in a cluster, using simple tags to access a large library of pre built Ajax user interface components, able to specify any .NET object either local or remote and use it in any ColdFusion applications and more features which boost to its popularity in ColdFusion programming and among all other web clients world wide.

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ColdFusion Project Server Integration

2009-04-29T03:44:00.000-07:00

Most people are familiar with Microsoft Project - project management software that allows you to manage many aspects of projects including tasks, due dates, progress, and people assigned to specific tasks.

Microsoft Project Server is an enterprise storage product that facilitates sharing project plans created with Microsoft Project with other people in a company, especially other project managers. Project Server enables you to manage a workforce by tracking all projects in common and giving you a view of all projects that an individual may be assigned to. Chances are that any large organization will have more than one project manager and using a centralized storage point allows for better group management of projects. In this kind of environment, Project Server acts as the central repository and Microsoft Project acts as a client to access that information. Project Server also provides a Web interface for viewing the status of projects.

The principal (recommended) way to integrate with Microsoft Project is by using the integrated Project Data Service (PDS) that's included with Microsoft Project Server. PDS is a SOAP Web service that translates incoming requests and manages their entry into the system. The most common integration pieces are external user management, timesheet systems, and ticketing systems. The PDS exposes pieces of the puzzle that allow you to integrate with these external systems and to integrate all the parts of your organizational project systems.

The PDS will allow you to create projects, tasks, resources, as well as log time against projects and run administrative reports on information in the system. Granted, for most integration you'll want to use the Microsoft hooks into other Microsoft products. For example, Project Server boasts excellent integration with Microsoft's Outlook Exchange, Active Directory, and Sharepoint. If those are your only integration points, any work you would need to do is done by Microsoft, but if you need to work with a non-Microsoft product, read on.

Often times the largest integration obstacle is simply learning how a product works, and that can easily be the case with Microsoft Project. The initial learning curve of Microsoft Project may be steep but it's worth the hurdle to reach familiarization with the application before and during your implementation.

Read More ...

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Installing CFX tag in ColdFusion 8 Multi-server Configuration

2009-04-27T02:59:00.000-07:00

Recently I was asked to install a java CFX tag in the ColdFusion 8 Multi-server Configuration. I figured this would be an easy task, as I had done this many times before in the standalone server configuration. I went into the ColdFusion Administrator and installed the CFX tag as normal. However, when I called the CFX tag from the code I received an error that I had never seen before. The error was 500 com/allaire/cfx/CustomTag.

After trying everything I could think of, I decided to compare the java class paths between the stand alone configuration and the multi-server configuration. I found that the cfx.jar file was missing from the java class path in the multi-server configuration. ColdFusion therefore could not load com.allaire.cfx.CustomTag class. So, I decided to add the cfx.jar file to the java classpath and see if that would solve my error. To add the cfx.jar file to the classpath in the ColdFusion multi-server edition you must follow these steps.

Open the jvm.config file located at
{application.home}/bin
Add
{application.home}/servers/cfusion/cfusion-ear/cfusion-war/WEB-INF/libto the section java.class.path"
Save the jvm.config file
Restart the ColdFusion service.

After restarting the ColdFusion service, login to the CF administrator and go to the settings summary. Confirm that the cfx.jar file is in the java classpath. It was there, and I was able to call the CustomTag from my code.

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ColdFusion Unit Testing Frameworks

2009-04-23T01:57:00.000-07:00

I am starting from scratch, putting in a unit testing framework, and working within the existing organization's culture to introduce enough of the tool’s benefits without burdening the organization with too many of the downsides. Everything has a downside, a cost, or whatever you wish to call it. There is no free lunch.

The first steps were to gage the organization's desire for the possible benefits of a unit testing framework, and their willingness to commit to moving forward, and accepting the cost. Having been in an "extreme" programming environment, which was only "extreme" in the sense that projects were "extremely" haphazard and "extremely" mismanaged, making sure that people are clear on what can be expected from implementing some test automation for unit testing and regression testing. Automated does not mean that you do nothing, and the machine does everything. It is difficult to know what people have been sold by the trade journals, and blogs, and common terms are often misappropriated.

The current environment is Flex/Actionscript and HTML, with a ColdFusion backend, with a ColdSpring framework.

The goals are:

1) Automated testing with Ant, with performance metrics logged in a database, and pass/fail results e-mailed nightly to interested parties. (Thorough regression testing and reporting is key).

2) Eclipse Integration or reasonably nice Unit Runner, with easy ability to select individual tests, or test suites. (Easy sell to the engineers is key)

3) Mock Objects, automated test generation, anything to minimize the time impact on engineering, while maximizing the benefit, and keeping the program moving.

Sean Corfield had mentioned MXUnit fairly recently, so it seemed worth a look. Given the higher volume of activity on MXUnit, when compared to CFCUnit and CFUnit, it seemed like a reasonable way to go, for the best of all worlds for future itegrated add-ons. The first downside I will mention is that *MXUnit’s Eclipse Integration is Not Flex Builder 2.01 Compatible, or rather, not compatible with the version of Eclipse (3.11) that ships with Flex Builder 2.01* This wasn’t super clear from the MXUnit website, so it’s possible for an engineer to go through the installation instructions, and end up with a failing plug in. This might not be a problem for some organizations, but may be for others. Most of the team has not yet upgraded to FB 3, so it could be an issue at the moment.

MXUnit's Eclipse integration isn't quite finished, or at least that's how it felt for me. It "worked", but was lacking a few things that I thought were important. An html or Flex based unit runner will do the trick though, so it's not a huge problem.

The things which make the integrated unit runner a little less than usable, for me, are:

1) It seems to have no memory of past tests, so I would have to go through the selection process for the unit test every time; some way to save the available test cases/test suites would be desireable/required,

2) The test case selection process was awkward; I found myself unable to select a Test Case which I knew was present on more than one occasion; This could be forgiven more easily, if it would remember the test cases I had selected in the past, but I was required to select/find the test case with each restart of Eclipse, or any time I wanted to switch tests

On the plus side, the ant unit runner does a great job, and it is clear how to modify the ant task. The availability of the different test result formats, allows me to feed the results into a variety of destinations with ease. The key item was logging test results and performance metrics, and not just logging into a text file, but logging into a database table, so it could be consulted for history. I was able to hack this item in really easily using the cfquery output format for the testResults.

I should at least mention that CFUnit and CFCUnit are both seemingly capable frameworks. I was able to set up integrated Eclipse (with Flex Builder 2.01!) unit tests, and test suites. But the availability of the test Result Formats, and the volume of project activity, were enough to convince me. That does not mean that I am right, nor does it mean it is the best choice for everyone. But the software selection is but one small piece of the puzzlement.

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Coldfusion Optimization

2009-04-19T23:37:00.000-07:00

This ColdFusion Optimization guide is a work in progress document based on research and experience.

Boolean variables will only work reliably in conditional statements if their value equals "true", "false", 1, or 0. Type coercision from 1 or 0 is not consistent, so check against "not false" or "GT 0" explicitly.

Use cfswitch instead of cfelseif branches

Use cflocation with a reference to a serialized data file or URL parameters to pass data from an action file to a display file instead of cfinclude. This will redirect the browser and append the action page to the browser history. This prevents multiple attempts to update to the database if the user refreshes the display page, which would occur if a cfinclude was used.

Immediately read, parse, and delete uploaded files after inserting validated data into the database to prevent DOS attacks

Use to suppress whitespace, since nothing gets into the output except what’s between a cfoutput tag, plus it is automatically applied throughout the codebase, and can be turned off without deleting or commenting an end tag

Do not add a trailing slash in the definition of the configuration parameter in application.cfm such as the document root or a base URL, since it is easier and more readable to use a slash after referencing the variable, and will prevent double slashes from causing path not found errors.

Use Len(CGI.xyz) GT 0 instead of IsDefined("CGI.xyz") to check whether the length of a CGI parameter is greater than 0 instead of checking for its existence, since different Web servers support different CGI environment variables, and CGI.xxx is always defined, regardless of its value

Limit concurrent updates to the database using CFTRANSACTION, not CFLOCK. CFTRANSACTION
will affect all accesses to the data being updated, not just those occurring in your ColdFusion code.

Use IsNumeric to distinguish between the number zero and an empty string for type checking conditional statements

Use a blank onrequestend.cfm to pair with application.cfm and speed up processing

Put cfoutput tags outside of loops to avoid unnecessary processing overhead

Use the maxrows attribute in cfquery tags when retrieving a known number of rows

Use init methods for components to pass in default values for public parameters that will be used in multiple methods

Use cfscript to initialize a group of variables instead of multiple cfset statements

Use the length function instead of isdefined to check for existence

Check for existence to avoid initializing variables more than once

Always use cfargument in component definitions and specify whether the required attribute is true or false unless a default value is expected

Use structKeyExists(arguments, "arg_name") to test for the defined arguments with no default or required value

Always define an init method for components and set var scope for cfc variables

Include the encoding description at the top of each page

Use compareNoCase(string1, string2) NEQ 0 instead of string1 IS NOT/NEQ string2

Use listFind instead of the OR operator

Use len or isdefined with a scope specified to check for the existence of variables

Put series of string or numeric data in an array instead of a list for operations other than loops

Always use cfqueryparam and blockFactor(calculated by: 3200/ total byte size of one row) in cfquery tags

Never use the evaluate, incrementValue, or iif functions

Use struct[key] instead of structFind(struct, key)

Use the val() function to ensure the validity of a number before inserting it into a database

Use the trim() funtion to remove whitespace from a string before inserting it into a database

Use a cfc, cfimport, cfinclude, or custom tag instead of the cfmodule tag

Use cfsavecontent instead of the cfcache tag to cache dynamic content

Use XML, SOAP, REST or XSL instead of wddx

Use cookies and URL parameters instead of passing local variables to check the state

Never use pound symbols on variables inside of a cfset, cfif, or cfscript tag

Use query of queries to loop or join cached queries. This enables pagination without multiple database queries. Check session or cookie authorization when accessing cached data

Use cflock when setting application or session variables

Use session-scoped locks for session variables and named locks for application and server variables.

Initialize global component objects once as application variables using the Singleton pattern instead of creating new instances for each part of the application

Use custom tags for reusable UI widgets, closures, and recursive code that generates dynamic content

Use cfincludes for page specific code that needs to reference application and local scope parameters implicitly

Use components for secure domain specific data, web services, encapsulating business logic, and sharing common functions through a single library

Use user defined functions for complex algorithms and procedures that can be used in multiple instances. Read More...

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Why Using ColdFusion ?

2009-04-14T04:50:00.000-07:00

The license of Coldfusion is, and should be, a very small part of any business budget, especially if you happen to be in a country where bandwidth is more expensive than average, like Australia. Also, Coldfusion 8 has Developer(from memory, limited to 1 IP) and Trial editions(from memory, 30-day trial unlimited IP), which are free. So you can start learning or developing immediately.

A big advantage of coldfusion has is its development time, it was first developed as Rapid Application Development Platform/Framework, and still is very quick to develop and deploy in.The time spent on development is considerably less, even if it saves 1 developer 1 min a day, and who worked about 230 days a year, divide the number of your developers by the licensing fee per year. Same reason why software developers and/or software development companies don’t mind paying for good development tools.

Another is its tie in to Flex, and it will be the defect o choice due to integration with Flash. Thought that may change in the future, since Flex is going opensource and PHP will probably have extensions written for Flex integration. I can’t imagine the .Net platform supporting Flex too much, as it may undermine MS own Silverlight product.

One additional point is that Coldfusion is largely backwards compatible, the last rewrite was CF 6 when CF went to a JRun/JVM backend, after which very few functions/tags have been dropped. Which is something Adobe had the sense to maintain so far in both CF and Flash environment.

Over the next few days, you will see a fair number of people grumbling about the pricing of CF 8, which has not increased dramatically (besides R&D isn’t free, and the software engineers need their paycheck!). But no other web application platform today can offer what Coldfusion out of the box, from image manipulation, PDF integration, Flex integration, Exchange Server integration, dynamic presentaions on the fly, etc.

Coldfusion has lots of features but there is a business case for each,

e.g. PHP will do the job for most companies public facing websites why pay more than you need to ? PHP also has numerous framework and CMS, many of which are opensource. ASP.Net has loads of exposure in Higher Education Institutions, so it should be easier to find suitable staff, and tie-ins to Microsoft’s CRM and Sharepoint products.

A brief summary (As my experiences so far) between Coldfusion, PHP and ASP.


	Coldfusion	PHP	ASP.Net
Costs	High, comes with a lot standard	Free to High, Free version is well Free, but there are numerous *commercial* packages/add-ons like file compression, dynamic caching, advanced server monitoring/management	Included if you have a Windows Server License.
Comparation	Faster comparatively	Fairly Fast but falls somewhere between CF and .Net most of the time, catches up with commercial packages/addons	Longer than the other two
Speed	Fast, with proper setup of JVM, even faster. Scales well with size and load	Fast though may have problem scaling without addons	Decent, sometimes rather slow.
Integration with other languages	JAVA, Flex/Flash	non-native(non that i know of)	.Net, Silverlight, C#
Developer Community	Not as big as PHP or ASP.Net, but still a decent presence is expected in most major cities.	Big, anyone can pickup PHP, tend to have a large spectrum of skill level	Big pool from Higher Education Institutes. Well supported and backed by MS

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ColdFusion CMS with MySQL

2009-04-11T04:06:00.000-07:00

This tutorial lays out the basics for creating a content management system in ColdFusion and MySQL. The System leverages hierarchical data to automatically build breadcrumb lists, a side navigation menu, as well as a site map. The goal of this tutorial is to provide a framework upon which to build a content management system that is easy to customize and maintain, leaving the web author more time to create content than maintain code.

Introduction:

These days everyone has a web site or wants one. Unless you want to crack open a book and learn a lot of interesting HTML, you need to get some sort of program or content management system. Content management systems allow you to add and update pages without any other programs to edit the HTML.

The content management system I will describe and walk through will be built in ColdFusion with a MySQL database in the background storing the pages. Along with the ability to add, modify and delete pages, there will also be a self-generating breadcrumb list at the top of the page as well as self-generating menus and a site map. All of this is designed so that there is minimal maintenance, so you can spend more time generating content and less time worrying about coding.

A couple of notes about this system: I will not be adding any sort of browser-based HTML editor in this tutorial. My preference is to code the HTML myself. Just be aware however, that it is easy to add whichever in-line editor you wish. Also, if you are going to use this on the Internet, you will have to tie in a system to verify who you are (Log in and out) so you can have the administrative links show on the page if you are logged in.

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Programming in ColdFusion

2009-04-08T06:00:00.000-07:00

ColdFusion as one of the server side scripting language has many benefits over its rival and helps to build power web applications and services. ColdFusion is being utilized in small & large business and also for some advanced personal use. It is hosting especially for business website. The language used in ColdFusion Programming is ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML). It comprises of tags for querying databases, interaction with different services and outputting text.

The basic components of ColdFusion Programming are ColdFusion Server and ColdFusion Studio. Here ColdFusion server is the application that processes the CFML code and the ColdFusion Studio is being used in ColdFusion Development if programmers develop their application locally and move to the ColdFusion Studio, when it is fully ready to process.

The major advantageous of using ColdFusion Consultant is its simplicity in developing websites among other available web tools in the market like ASP, PHP or JSP. Within a short span of time, web developers can code ColdFusion Programming rapidly because of its simplicity as well as its supportive qualities with other platforms like Apache, IIS, NSAPI based web servers, Solaris, HP-UX and Windows. Apart from this, it works with Dream weaver, Flash, Fireworks and Freehand of Macromedia as ColdFusion once was acquired by Macromedia.

The new version ColdFusion 8 is come with additional features such as it can now dynamically generate and interact with PDF documents, features of a Multiserver Monitor to gain insight on all servers in a cluster, using simple tags to access a large library of pre built Ajax user interface components, able to specify any .NET object either local or remote and use it in any ColdFusion applications and more features which boost to its popularity in ColdFusion programming and among all other web clients world wide.

Although to set up a Coldfusion server and engine seem to be more expensive than UNIX and windows hosting, its advanced features along with availability of ColdFusion Server lead to develop powerful web application and services.

More Information visit ColdFusion Development Services.

ColdFusion Programming -cfquery with javascript

2009-04-06T05:14:00.000-07:00

Sample of using CFQUERY with JavaScript. The code allows the creation of an array of the CFQUERY. This array can then be manipulated by other JavaScript functions for searching a value in the array. Example of its use is doing a search for existing user name, if user enter a name that already exists, it will not post the submission. This will cut down the number of postings between server and client.

Example Of Coding.

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JSON(JavaScript Object Notation) in ColdFusion

2009-04-02T04:34:00.000-07:00

Pretty excited these days about JSON... I've used it sporadically in many applications, but every month there appears to be new uses for it. I particularly enjoyed one use where we stored some interface preferences as a small JSON cookie. I also LOVE being able to call a CF webservice and auto-magically return JSON (covered in depth at Ben Nadel's blog here: JSON part II) - it's saved us a couple times.

Anyways, I saw a blog post today about the release of JSONUtil - very cool. It's a nice way to serialize and deserialize JSON in CF 7, and is based on CFJSON code.

In my main contract, we've been arguing a bit about returning JSON in the header vs. in the body. We are leaning heavily towards starting to return JSON in the response body, but we're a bit worried about the META tag that CF returns when working in development mode.

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Hire ColdFusion Developer

2009-03-31T02:18:00.000-07:00

Using mature programming language for your business website development is better alternative! However IT is in continuous process of producing various software programming languages for the website development but still it requires professional expertise to use appropriately for the optimum utilization. Professional understanding of using programming languages for website development according to nature of business is essential factor in the success of online business, in other words giving this thought more clarity is perfect match of programming language in website development with nature of business. Web Development companies use to offer web developers on hire basis having great expertise and experience in using software development languages appropriately according to demands of business.

Development of dynamic websites for growth of online business is highly based on perfect use of software programming languages prevailing in the field of information and technology, such as there are some popular software programming languages like Microsoft ASP.NET, Java Server Pages or PHP have set mile stones for better presentation in the online business. Along with other software programming languages used for internet application development ColdFusion was first application server software programming language for development of dynamic websites to develop the online business.

Decision of hiring ColdFusion Developers from web developing companies providing web development services is best option to make your business visual online perfectly through dynamic website. Utilization of all cold fusion features perfectly is essential for making the website vibrant.

Cold fusion is having its proven track record in the field of website development; ColdFusion was introduced in year 1995 by JJ Allaire. The latest version is Adobe ColdFusion 8.0.1 and there are twelve versions prior to it, so using this mature programming language requires great professional expertise and knowledge of development steps in each version to produce productive results.

Hire ColdFusion developer for development of your business website from web development companies is best choice to get maximum benefits of it.

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Adobe ColdFusion warming to 64-bit OSes

2009-03-28T06:00:00.000-07:00

Adobe Systems plans to update its ColdFusion 8 technology within the next month with additional 64-bit platform support before launching a full-scale upgrade codenamed "Centaur" in 2009.

ColdFusion is a server platform for deploying Web applications based on Java. Applications are deployed as Java files. CFML (ColdFusion Markup Language) tags are turned into Java byte code. "It's basically a way to very rapidly deploy high-performance, highly scalable Java applications," said Ben Forta, Adobe director of evangelism.

With a free update due this quarter known as "Gemini," Adobe extends 64-bit support to Windows Server 2008, Mac OS X Leopard, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Suse Linux 10. This improves application performance, given the ability to address larger amounts of memory in 64-bit systems.

ColdFusion applications currently will run on those platforms only in 32-bit mode. "With the 'updater,' your code will run as is, but it will be a native 64-bit application now," Forta said. ColdFusion 8 already supported the 64-bit Solaris OS platform.

Work also is under way on the planned Centaur release of ColdFusion, featuring continued integration with other Adobe technologies as well as productivity enhancements.

ColdFusion is positioned against other server-side platforms, including PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor), ASP.Net, and JavaServer Pages. A benefit of ColdFusion as opposed to those rivals is the ability to generate applications with just a few lines of code, Forta said.

A user of ColdFusion, Jeff Mitchell, CTO at Voeveo.com, which runs an online marketplace for content for mobile devices, said he believes ColdFusion offers better performance than PHP. Mitchell said he has worked with PHP.

But PHP does offer an advantage over ColdFusion as far as price, Mitchell said. "The price would be my only complaint in comparison to something like PHP, which is essentially free," he said. Voeveo.com has paid about $6,000 as a one-time license fee for ColdFusion, said Mitchell.

Sixty-four-bit support for Linux would be a plus for Voeveo.com, which runs a flavor of Red Hat's Linux, Mitchell said. "We'll definitely give that a test once it comes out because our servers actually are 64-bit architecture at the moment, but it's running in 32-bit [mode]," said Mitchell. Voeveo.com basically runs its whole site on ColdFusion, which serves as an application server, Mitchell said.

Originally based on C and C++, ColdFusion was rewritten in Java several years ago to leverage the growing importance of Java on the server and to add capabilities like server monitoring, said Forta.

Meanwhile, ColdFusion, which Adobe acquired when it merged with Macromedia in December 2005, has been holding its own revenue-wise. "Under Adobe, we saw the strongest quarters we've seen yet with ColdFusion since the acquisition," said Kristen Schofield, senior product manager for Adobe ColdFusion. She could not comment on actual revenue figures for ColdFusion.

Adobe officials cited analyst estimates of 400,000 developers using ColdFusion.

More Information visit ColdFusion Development Services.

ColdFusion - Web Development Language

2009-03-26T04:52:00.000-07:00

ColdFusion was Launched by a developer JJ Allaire in 1995, ColdFusion has assumed tremendous popularity as a preferred programming platform for web development within a rather short span of time. From JJ Allaire to Macromedia and now Adobe Systems in 2005, exchanging hands between brand names of repute speak about its viability and latent talent as a web development programming language and an application server. Statistics reveal its extensive deployment across the world in over ten thousand organizations, translating into over1,20,0000 plus servers, including but not restricted to over 75% of the Fortune 100 companies.

To introduce, ColdFusion is a Rapid Application Development (RAD) language that facilitates quick creation of strong and compelling websites. As indicated earlier, ColdFusion is both an application server and a language. ColdFusion is built on a certified Java J2EE platform, rendering it fast, scalable and portable that in turn has amounted to its global popularity and prevalent use.

ColdFusion as a language is compatible with various application servers, including J2EE application servers, to be used on top of them as an alternative simplified (HTML like) scripting syntax. ColdFusion server also supports various web servers on different platforms. To quote a few examples, ColdFusion supports Apache, IIS and NSAPI based web servers and Solaris, HP-UX and Windows for platforms. ColdFusion also supports additional programming languages like server-side Actionscript.

Unlike PHP and ASP, ColdFusion is a commercial product that sports many integrated services not available otherwise. The attractive features of ColdFusion include business graphing, full text search and file upload handling utilities. ColdFusion also brilliantly incorporates Macromedia Flash, rendering it further ideal for web development. It is usually preferred among (data-driven) intranets worldwide.

Another highlight of ColdFusion is its capability to handle asynchronous events. ColdFusion MX 7 Enterprise Edition can handle events like SMS and instant messaging via its gateway interface, providing a web developer a dynamic tool in his/ her hands. Other exceptional value added services of ColdFusion include its capability to concert HTML to PDF, Graphic User Interface (GUI) widgets, database querying using ODBC or JDBC irrespective of the platform, client and server cache management, management of session, client and application et al.

Macromedia ColdFusion MX 7 is the latest release of ColdFusion in the market at present. Awaited is the release of its version 8 in the second half of this year. As demonstrated at CFUnited 2006, MAX conferences and CFDevCon 2006 at UK, the future version will integrate with Adobe PDF forms, live Macromedia Breeze presentations and Microsoft .Net.

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Make SE Friendly URL with ColdFusion

2009-03-24T01:32:00.000-07:00

How to make Search Engine Friendly URLs with ColdFusion ?

Have you ever tried to make Search Engine Friendly URL in ColdFusion ?

I have a client that has a site in coldfusion and I need to made their URL’s Search Engine Friendly. I don’t have access to the server so I needed a coldfusion solution. What I wanted was to make it so there were no ?, &, or = signs in the URL and convert them to /’s. I also wanted to 301 redirect the old URL’s to the new URL’s. Here is what I came up with.

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RSS Feeds With ColdFusion

2009-03-21T00:55:00.000-07:00

Written By Ben Cortese

ColdFusion doesn't seem to get the respect it deserves amongst the dedicated Java or .NET or even PHP development circles, but having worked in all of those environments, I'd like to state for the record, that completing a large scale development project AHEAD of schedule, keeping your Business Managers and Projects Managers happy, and let's not forget the most important of all...

THE CLIENT...Well, that's priceless. Well worth any investment made towards ColdFusion.

Web services, RSS, XML, SOAP to name several, are all welcomed friends to the ColdFusion web development language. This article will focus on the likes of RSS and XML.

Definition: RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content, such as blogs, news feeds or podcasts. Consumers of RSS content use special browsers called aggregators to watch for new content in dozens or even hundreds of web feeds. The initials "RSS" are variously used to refer to the following standards:

Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0) Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0) RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0) RSS formats are specified in XML (a generic specification for data formats). RSS delivers its information as an XML file called an "RSS feed", "webfeed", "RSS stream", or "RSS channel".

That's the Wikipedia definition for an RSS feed. What's not mentioned is that developers are able to take advantage of the content provided by these RSS feeds to display current and changing data on their websites, which adds value to the website and hopefully bring return visitors for more of the information that you provide.

Consuming an RSS feed in ColdFusion can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be. There are several ways or more, to do this in ColdFusion. Parsing through array elements and defining the parent elements to children and testing for grandchildren elements, and recursive behaviors etc. But this article is not for the experienced ColdFusion developer. This article is for someone who might like to see some of the "ease of operation" of ColdFusion and how it relates to a popular web practice known as RSS.

We'll look at a fun and popular feed from RollingStone Magazine. Located here http://www.rollingstone.com/rssxml/album_reviews.xml as of the time of this article. It's a feed that I have implemented on several of my websites. Now it's important to note that you should select feeds that are relevant to your website, I have several music based websites and thus having an "Album Review" feed was appropriate. Ok, so now what do we do with this feed you ask? Well, basically there are only 3 steps to consuming and parsing an XML/RSS feed.

1. Read the Feed in
2. Loop through the elements of the feed
3. Display the feed

Am I simplifying things a bit? Not really, the purpose here is to show how ColdFusion can do much of the 'heavy lifting' as it pertains to application development making many day to day programming tasks much less tedious.

Here's an example:

In ColdFusion we read the feed in like this.

What this does is utilize the CFHTTP tag in ColdFusion which has many many uses, in this case it performs the request for the XML document on the server. The second line defines a variable called "album_reviews_xml" and gives it the value of the http response. Using the built in function "XMLParse()" in ColdFusion takes the http response and delivers it to your browser in XML format or as an XML Object for you OOP guys.

If you would like to have ColdFusion show you a 'pretty' presentation of the XML you can simply add a cfdump statement to your document and you will see a nicely rendered and easy to read xml structure.

The next step is parsing or looping through the elements of the XML Object.

You do that like this:

Title: #album_reviews_xml.rss.channel.item[x].title.xmlText#
Link: {a href="#album_reviews_xml.rss.channel.item
[x].link.xmlText#"}click here
Description:#album_reviews_xml.rss.channel.item[x].description.xmlText#

This loop as shown, iterates through all of the elements of the document and displays the most common items in an RSS feed which are the TITLE, LINK and DESCRIPTION. Some feeds aren't formed entirely to standard and may have other elements designs, and of course this is not all of the data that you can get from an RSS feed, again it's just the most common and standard elements returned through RSS. But if the document provided by the RSS feed generator is to standard and well formed, you will see these 3 elements in most every RSS feed.

As you can see displaying an RSS feed in ColdFusion is easy and provides real time up to date information that you can provide to your visitors on your website. You can apply style sheets and html formatting to your feeds and present the information in a pleasant looking way that visitors will enjoy reading.

An example where I use these feeds can be seen in action here http://www.news-junkie.net. This is a personal site that I had developed a while ago that is a simple news aggregation website with a number of different topics. I found it fun to develop and good practice working with xml and ColdFusion. The information is constantly updated and visitors to my site see fresh new articles everyday, and all I have to do now that it is built, is keep the domain name active and maybe switch around a few of my affiliate links which hopefully provide a little income to pay for the hosting of the site.

More Information visit ColdFusion Development Services.

ColdFusion Outsourcing Consultancy

2009-03-17T04:32:00.000-07:00

Role of ColdFusion Outsourcing Consultancy in IT Fields.

Vendors who provide Coldfusion Outsourcing and ColdFusion Application Development Consultancy services from India are referred to as coldfusion outsourcing consultants. These outsourcing consultants help companies experience significant cost savings by utilizing the cheap labor pool of low cost destinations like India. Since Outsourcing is a recent phenomenon; few companies have in é˜²ouse competencies with regard to outsourcing of processes to low cost locations. Even today, most companies shy away from outsourcing their business processes due to lack of support in this space. In the process, a lot of value remains to be unlocked in the Outsourcing space.

Companies who decide to outsource their core development or ancillary staff functions require guidance regarding the choice of an offshore partner. Once the offshore vendor is selected, the parent country has to initiate a smooth knowledge transfer process, which requires specialized skills. Organizations also require guidance with respect to risk management and control issues also. Offshore IT outsourcing consultants help organizations take such crucial decisions by providing their knowledge and expertise. Offshore IT Outsourcing Consultants help organizations conduct a risk-return analysis by which the viability of an outsourcing arrangement can be judged. Before awarding an outsourcing contract to an offshore vendor, an estimate has to be made whether the diversion of available resources would earn a higher return or not. Only when it is conclusively proved that the offshore vendor can provide work of similar quality at a low cost should the project go ahead. Off-shore IT outsourcing consultants help companies overcome all these obstacles by providing their expert advice and guidance.

Professionals, who works for Offshore IT Outsourcing firms have decades of experience in the Offshore IT outsourcing space. These professionals play the role of effective knowledge transfer agents as they help in seamless transition of knowledge from the parent to the offshore vendor. Through these offshore, IT outsourcing consultants even, the parent company gains knowledge about local business practices and regulations. These professionals help managers in dealing with control issues also. If an offshore vendor wishes to sub contract a part of his job to local vendors then these consulting outfits will help you with that also. Once a workable offshore outsourcing model has been established, the benefits of outsourcing begin to surface. Companies experience real improvements in productivity as the top management can concentrate on core functions like business development, trouble shooting and strategic planning.

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ColdFusion for Beginners

2009-03-12T03:26:00.000-07:00

From where to start learning ColdFusion?

Installation of ColdFusion
To install ColdFusion, You can pick a web server to use or the one that ColdFusion will install when you install ColdFusion. There are several webservers like IIS, Apache which can be use while installing ColdFusion. will not discuss how to install a web server there are lots of websites who can teach you how to install ColdFusion. OR Adobe.com has ColdFusion for download. During the install when you get to the serial number you can simply choose Developer and it will let you install a full working version of ColdFusion that will work for you locally with the limitations being the number of IP’s that can access it. There are plenty of websites you can find that will tell you detailed instructions on installing ColdFusion including Adobe’s own website.

Which Tool should be used to write code?

Dreamweaver (Dreamweaver is not open source.)

CFEclipse (CFEclipse is opensource.)

I have used both of these and I don't know which one is better. Sometimes CFEclipse has issues and forces me to use Dreamweaver. However some great features of CFEclipse which I really like. If you can't afford to purchase Dreamweaver then I guess you would use CFEclipse since it's free.

What type of learning am I, The Student or The Expert?
Before some times I read an article describing different styles of learning. I really found it to be very insightful. The Student is someone who reads all of the instructions and the books about something before attempting it. The pros of someone like this are that they tend to know a lot about a subject when they are done with very few holes of knowledge to fill in. The cons of someone like this are that they take a long time to get started getting anything done. The Experimenter is someone who jumps right in and start working to solve a problem. The pros of someone like this are that they can get to solving problems and sometimes find answers rather quickly. The cons of someone like this are that they may have holes in their knowledge that takes a while to fill in. I feel that I am the Experimenter. I can jump in and solve problems on code that I barely understand. I do not have to understand everything an application to discover an issue. Since I am an Experimenter I tend to think all programmers are like me. So if I lose you then let me know how I can update my articles to help you be the Student you are. I will teach mostly by examples of code.

Now What ?

First you need to create the simple ColdFusion page and test that ColdFusion is working on your site.

<cfset message="Hello"><><><>ColdFusion Hello World< /title >< /head ><><cfoutput>#Message#</cfoutput>< /body >< /html >

Save the above code to a file and browse to it so you can verify that ColdFusion is installed and working correctly.

What is next?

While learning ColdFusion there is a lot of things you will hear about like Object Oriented Programming, Procedural Programming, Frameworks, MVC, AJAX, Project Management, Comparing ColdFusion to other languages and much more. We will start from the beginner’s viewpoint so we might not get to these subjects for a while. I want to lead you through several steps and try to help you but not teaching Advanced Ideas before you have learning the basics.

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ColdFusion Unit Testing

2009-03-07T03:32:00.000-08:00

To be honest I've not really seen much written detailing good (or even standard) ways of unit testing private methods without making their scope less restrictive than private. Thus I'll detail the way a co-worker a technique a co-worker and I came up with that seems like it will work pretty well. If you see any potential problems with this approach please just let me know in the comments.

The approach is fairly simple. We create a helper class that extends and "wraps" our class to be tested. This helper class then has simple methods in it that expose the private methods via a wrapper. So let's say we had a class, MoneyLender, with the private method of computeInterest(). Let's ignore whether that method should be private or not for arguments sake. We would create a MoneyLenderTestHelper class with a method in it called computerInterestWrapper() which actually just returns the private computeInterest method.

Right off the bat I have one potential concern and that is will the other private things (methods, member variables, etc) still be exposed to the private method that is being returned? I haven't tested this out yet so I don't know.

Anyway, my test would then instantiate the MoneyLenderTestHelper class, and call the computeInterestWrapper() method to get a reference to the private method to be tested. Then I could execute the method and perform the test. If the test needed to analyze the state of any private member variables I could create a helper method in MoneyLenderTestHelper that would inspect the private variable.

The main reason for returning a reference to the method in the helper class, instead of calling the helper method there, was so that I don't have to maintain the method signature in both the class being tested and in the helper class. My test obviously has to know the signature but overall this seems more maintainable.

What do you think? I'll post more as I muck around with the approach and let you know how well it all works. We've already implemented the idea on a few test cases but the private methods don't actually touch any private member variables; however, in the cases we have tried it with the technique has worked out well.

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Advantages and Disadvantages of ColdFusion

2009-03-04T03:09:00.000-08:00

ColdFusion is a rapid application development language for the web, developed by Macromedia. It's not free, but many people say that it's more important to them to have the development speed that ColdFusion offers – and you can download a free 'developer version' to experiment with before you commit to anything.

No Need for a Test Server

One of the nicer features of ColdFusion is that it comes with a whole application to help you write it the language. While it can be used with Apache or IIS once you're finished, this application effectively acts as your test server while you're writing your scripts, saving you quite a lot of trouble.

As a downside, though, ColdFusion on the web can sometimes be unreliable and slow, mainly because it runs on a Java framework. Its Java support does, however, make it capable of running on many more operating systems than it otherwise would be – for most purposes, having written a page in ColdFusion is as good as having used Java for it, but much less difficult. Since ColdFusion also uses the ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) standard instead of tying itself down to one database, this gives you a lot of choices.

In other words, you're sacrificing some of your website's speed in exchange for more choices and compatibility, and quicker development time.

Easy to Learn

One of the things that make ColdFusion easy to learn is that it isn't all that different from normal HTML: it acts more like a set of extension tags for HTML than like trying to get a programming language to do things and output HTML afterwards. This is because it was designed from scratch for the web – it's not just a normal language trying to be web-compatible.

Once you get used to thinking in tags, it starts to feel quite natural: ColdFusion just feels more HTML-like than other languages do.

Despite its simplicity, though, ColdFusion is considered to compete more with languages like JSP and ASP.Net than it does with PHP.

CFScript

Unfortunately, trying to write dynamic web pages with nothing but tags can start to feel restrictive quite quickly, especially if you want to do something complicated – you end up with a hard-to-read mass of tags, reminiscent of trying to do a page's layout with tables. To solve this problem, Macromedia introduced CFScript, a Javascript-like language that you can use by putting it between "" tags. If you're a experience ColdFusion Programmer, you may find CFScript easier to work with than 'real' ColdFusion code.

Java

One ColdFusion strength is that it doesn't just run on top of Java – it can also call Java classes using its createObject function and use any methods it needs to, with the results being put in ColdFusion variables. This will be very useful to you if you have existing Java code or know of Java code that you'd like to make use of – you'll get access to all the J2EE libraries as well as ColdFusion's own. It's this fact that has led Macromedia to market ColdFusion as "a scripting layer for J2EE". Of course, whether or not that excites you is a matter of personal preferences.

Integration with Other Macromedia Products

If you already design your pages in Dreamweaver, it can be good to do the scripting in ColdFusion, as you get the advantages that integration between the two gives you. You can insert ColdFusion code into Dreamweaver files quickly and easily, and you can even use its built-in editor to edit the code however you want without messing up Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG view.

ColdFusion also integrates surprisingly well with Macromedia's flagship product, Flash – but don't let that lead you into developing nothing but ColdFusion-scripted websites with fancy Flash interfaces, whatever you do.

More Information visit ColdFusion Development Services.

Interactions of ColdFusion with Java & .Net

2009-02-26T04:04:00.000-08:00

As we all know, ColdFusion has lots of features for website development and it also flexible. So, we can use it with other Programming Languages like Java & .Net. Here are some information about how ColdFusion interacts with them.

ColdFusion Interacts with Java

The standard ColdFusion installation allows the operation of ColdFusion as a WAR file or EAR file for operate to standalone application servers, such as Macromedia JRun, and IBM WebSphere. ColdFusion can also be deployed to servlet containers such as Apache Tomcat and Mortbay Jetty, but because these platforms do not support ColdFusion officially, they leave many of its features inaccessible.

Because ColdFusion is a Java EE application, ColdFusion code can be mixed with Java classes to create a variety of applications and utilize existing Java libraries. ColdFusion has access to all underlying Java classes, supports JSP custom tag libraries, and can access JSP functions after retrieving the JSP page context (GetPageContext()).

Prior to ColdFusion 7.0.1, ColdFusion components could only be used by Java or .NET by declaring them as web services. However, beginning in ColdFusion MX 7.0.1, ColdFusion components can now be utilized directly within Java classes using the CFCProxy class.
Recently, there has been much interest in Java development using alternate languages such as Jython, Groovy and JRuby. ColdFusion was one of the first scripting platforms to allow this style of Java development.

Although These facilities provided by ColdFusion. It has also some limitations to ColdFusion's ability to offer Java scripting:

ColdFusion MX 6.1 did not support usage of null value method parameters
Lack of Bean Scripting Framework plugin support
one cannot extend Java classes in ColdFusion

ColdFusion Interacts with .Net

ColdFusion 8 natively supports .NET within the (ColdFusion MarkUp Language)CFML syntax. ColdFusion developers can simply call any .NET assembly without needing to recompile or alter the assemblies in any way. Data types are automatically translated between ColdFusion and .NET (example: .NET DataTable → ColdFusion Query).

A unique feature for a J2EE vendor, ColdFusion 8 offers the ability to access .NET assemblies remotely through proxy (without the use of .NET Remoting). This allows ColdFusion users to leverage .NET without having to be installed on a Windows operating system.

The move to include .NET support in addition to the existing support for Java, CORBA and COM is a continuation of Adobe ColdFusion's agnostic approach to the technology stack. ColdFusion can not only bring together disparate technologies within the enterprise, but can make those technologies available to a number of clients beyond the web browser including, but not limited to, the Flash Player, Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), Mobile devices (SMS), Acrobat Reader (PDF) and IM gateways.

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Several Steps for ColdFusion Developers

2009-02-23T02:54:00.000-08:00

While developing any software project, you should follow nice project management methods. This will make the programming easier and will help to minimize problems later on. This is also true for developing a project in ColdFus ion.

Summary

It is important to plan things out before you start coding. You should establish the project requirements, flowchart the screens, set up your database, and then add coding. Finally, you test and format the page. You will benefit by shortening the time required to develop the project, as well as maintaining better control over the process.

Major steps as follows :-

Thoroughly define the requirements
Set up your database
Flowchart your screens
State actions for each page and input code
Test and trouble-shoot
Format the pages to look nice
Deliver on the Web

->Thoroughly define the requirements

Your goal is to satisfy the need of your clients or the user. Some projects consist of only one requirement, such as when the company needs a listing of employee records for human resources to administer. That is pretty straightforward. In other cases, the desire is complex-like in the case of e-commerce. In such a situation, you need to outline that objective and its requirements into smaller pieces. For example in e-commerce, steps may be listing the products, using a shopping cart, and purchasing the product. You should define each product as a mini-project with separate specifications.

->Set up your database

ColdFusion usually accesses a server database for information used in populating a page. The database may already be in existence or you will set up your database as part of the coding process. You need to know the names of the tables you will use in your database, as well as the field names. You also need to note the type of fields, because that influences some of the ColdFusion coding punctuation.

Often, it is necessary to break a table into several relational tables. You must also know the primary and foreign keys of relational tables. It is essential to document the names and types of your database tables and fields as an aid for writing your ColdFusion code and SQL instructions.

->Flowchart your screens

Make a flowchart of your screens and state what each function does. For example, if the goal of the project was to provide a way for people to find company employee information online, the screens would be:

Welcome screen with choices of finding employee by name or department.
Department screen with list of employees, with option of selecting one for details.
Employee screen, with option to check for details.
Detail screen for employee.

->Tell what actions are taken in each page

From the flowchart, take each page and tell what actions are taken. For example, the Department screen queries the database for a list of employees in the designated department. Each employee name provides a link to a Details page.

You can then add the code for these specific actions. Doing it in this manner gives you a better picture of what you are to code and minimizes coding errors.

->Test and trouble-shoot

Although you can try to test the whole project, it is often easier to check out each snippet of code, one at a time, to make sure the coding and database access is correct.

->Format the pages to look nice You can format the pages to make them pleasing to use, as well as to confirm to the company look. You can add color, images and such.

->Deliver on the Web

Finally, you must put your database and files on the Web and try them out in the real world. You need to have your Web administrator set up your database for use with a ColdFusion server.

Benefits of All Steps

Following a systematic approach helps you to avoid the wasting of time on trouble-shooting. In a complex project, it is essential to maintain a good overview so that you do not lose control of the coding process.

For More Information visit our ColdFusion Development Services.

ColdFusion Web Development Services

2009-02-19T03:10:00.000-08:00

Semaphore is specialized in ColdFusion Web Development. ColdFusion is our development tool of choice for rapidly deploying web applications, dynamic web sites, intranets or e-commerce sites.

Semaphore has been offering quality ColdFusion Development services. Our ColdFusion Developers consistently push the envelope of ColdFusion Programming to create robust solutions that are fast, modular, stable, easy to use and easy to upgrade. Our consultants can tackle any ColdFusion problem - from the most minor of updates, to the most complex ColdFusion enterprise applications. We are well versed in the full spectrum of ColdFusion technologies, including ColdFusion versions 3 through MX 7, Rich Internet Applications, the ColdFusion API.

Semaphore's ColdFusion Development Services:

Conversion from HTML to PDF and FlashPaper
Client-side code generation, especially for form widgets and validation
Platform-independent database querying via ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) or JDBC (Java Database Connectivity).
Data retrieval from common enterprise systems such as Active Directory, LDAP (Light Weight Directory Access Protocol), POP (Post Office Protocol), HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol), FTP (File Transfer Protocol), Microsoft Exchange Server
Client and server cache management
Session, client, and application management
File indexing and searching service based on Verity K2
XML parsing, querying, and validation
Server clustering
GUI administration
Task scheduling

For More Information visit our ColdFusion Development Services.

ColdFusion Programming Tips for ColdFusion Developers

2009-02-17T02:18:00.000-08:00

Know the rules for naming variables.

The golden rule concerning naming variables in your ColdFusion applications is simple:

Variable names must begin with a letter and can contain only letters, numbers, and the underscore character.

In addition to these two rules, there are several additional guidelines that you should follow to minimize potential problems in your applications:

Variable names are not case sensitive. In the interest of good style and readability, however, you should keep the case of your variable names consistent.
Always try to use descriptive terms for your variables. It might seem like a pain, but you will be grateful when it comes time to debug or add a new feature later on down the road.#
Avoid using variable names that may be reserved words in SQL. Words such as Time, Date, and Order may cause errors when querying databases.
Avoid using variable names that are the same as ColdFusion variable scopes. Names such as Application, Attribute, Caller, CGI, Client, Cookie, Form, Variable, Request, Server, Session, URL, and Query.
Avoid choosing variable names that end in _date, _eurodate, _float, _integer, _range, _required, or _time. These are reserved suffixes for server-side form validation variables and can cause naming conflicts.
Use ColdFusion variable names that match the corresponding fields in the database. If your application interacts with a database, this makes your code clearer.

Scope your variable.

ColdFusion supports a number of different variable scopes, where scope refers to the context in which the variable exists within an application. The scope encompasses where the variable came from (such as a form field, a URL, etc.), how it can be used, and how long it persists. When you refer to a variable in your code, you can refer to it using just the variable's simple name (MyVar) or by its fully scoped name (Scope.MyVar).

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Because ColdFusion supports different variable scopes, the potential exists for having like-named variables of different scopes within an application. ColdFusion allows you to deal with this potential conflict in two ways.

One way to handle potential variable conflicts is to always provide the variable scope when referencing a variable. For example, a URL variable should be referenced as URL.MyVariable, while a form variable should be referenced as Form.MyVariable. Using the variable scope has two additional benefits. First, it makes your code more readable, by identifying the variable scope right along with the variable. That way, when you look through your code, you know in exactly what context a particular variable is used. The second benefit has to do with performance. When ColdFusion encounters a scoped variable, it is able to process the code faster because it does not have to take time to determine the variable's scope.

The second way to deal with potential variable conflicts is to let ColdFusion handle them. When the ColdFusion server encounters an unscoped variable, it attempts to evaluate it in a specific order. Because application, server, session, attribute, caller, and request variables must always be scoped, they are not included in the order of evaluation, which is as follows:

As you might imagine, allowing ColdFusion to resolve potential conflicts can lead to unexpected results. For example, you might refer to a variable thinking that you are getting a URL variable, but ColdFusion resolves it to a local variable that has the same name. Of course, you can avoid this problem by choosing your variable names more carefully. But to make things even clearer, I recommend that you always scope your variables.

Lock all reads/writes of application, session, and server variables.

Because ColdFusion is a multithreaded application server, it is possible for multiple threads to attempt to access the same variable at the same time. For application, session, and server variables, this is an issue. Because each of these persistent variable types is stored in the ColdFusion server's RAM, the potential exists for the memory to become corrupted as multiple threads attempt to access (read or write) the same variable concurrently and end up colliding.

When a collision occurs, all sorts of problems can result. I've heard of everything from users receiving other users' data, to server instability, to crashing the ColdFusion application server. Because memory space is involved, the results of a collision are, at best, unpredictable.

Fortunately, ColdFusion has a mechanism for managing concurrent access to specific variables or chunks of code know as locking. Locking can be broken down into two types, exclusive and read-only. Exclusive locking means that ColdFusion single-threads access to a particular variable or chunk of code:

In this example, the list of field names is output on a single line. Next, a list loop is used to loop over the list of field names and output each one along with its associated value. The value for each form field is obtained using the Evaluate() function. Note that the special validation form fields (i.e., ones that have names that end with _date, _time, etc.) are not present in the Form.FieldNames variable. They are, however, present in the Form structure we discussed in the first method.

This means only one thread at a time is allowed to access code that has been exclusively locked. Any other threads that attempt to access an exclusively locked block of code are queued until the initial request completes. Exclusive locks must be used (notice I say must, and not should) when writing to application, session, and server variables. Because exclusive locks single-thread concurrent requests, they have a negative impact on performance. For this reason, it is important to use them sparingly.

The other type of lock you can use is a read-only lock. When you place a read-only lock around a particular piece of code, ColdFusion does not automatically single-thread access to that code:

What it does do is prevent an exclusive lock from being placed on the code while it is being read from. In other words, if you have a read-only lock placed around a chunk of code that reads a shared persistent variable, multiple threads can read the variable's value, but a concurrent request to write to the variable will not be processed until the read operations complete. Conversely, if an exclusive lock is already in effect, a read-only lock will wait until the exclusive lock is released before proceeding. Because of this, read-only locks do not generally result in degraded performance. Read-only locks should be used anytime you read data from a shared persistent variable.

There is a lot more to locking than presented in this tip. Although I've covered the basics here, a complete discussion can be found in my book Programming ColdFusion (O'Reilly).

Alternate row colors in dynamically generated HTML tables.

On of the most frequently asked questions by those new to ColdFusion development is how to alternate the row colors for dynamically generated HTML tables. There are several ways to do this, however, the easiest is to use the IIF() and DE() functions as shown in the following example:

The row color is alternated by using the IIF() and DE() functions along with the MOD operator to determine whether or not the row number for the current record being output is odd or even. Depending on the outcome of the evaluation, one color or the other (in this case, two shades of gray) is used as the background color for the current row. Because hex color codes are supposed to begin with a pound sign (#), we have to create an escape sequence before we call the IIF() function. This is done by doubling up on the first pound sign.

Obtaining a list of form fields and their values.

One question I see posted over and over again in the ColdFusion Support Forum asks how to obtain a list of all form fields and their associated values submitted by an HTML form using the POST method. This technique is often used to work with dynamically created form fields, in situations where you do not necessarily know the names of the form fields being passed.

There are two ways to obtain a list of form field names and their values:

The first method uses a special ColdFusion structure, named Form (introduced in v4.5) that contains each form field name and its associated value. To obtain a list of all form variables within the Form structure, you could use code like this:

The code uses a collection loop to loop over the Form structure. Each variable name and its associated value are output in an HTML table.

The second method for obtaining a list of every form variable passed to a template involves a special form variable called Form.FieldNames. This variable is automatically available to any ColdFusion template and contains a comma-delimited list of form field names that have been posted to the current template.

In this example, the list of field names is output on a single line. Next, a list loop is used to loop over the list of field names and output each one along with its associated value. The value for each form field is obtained using the Evaluate() function. Note that the special validation form fields (i.e., ones that have names that end with _date, _time, etc.) are not present in the Form.FieldNames variable. They are, however, present in the Form structure we discussed in the first method.

Avoid redirection with CFLOCATION when using cookies.

Due to the way ColdFusion assembles dynamic pages, you should not attempt to use the CFLOCATION tag within a template after a cookie variable has been set. Setting a cookie variable and using CFLOCATION afterward results in the cookie not being set. If you need to redirect to a different template after setting a cookie, consider using the CFHEADER tag instead, as in:

The CFHEADER tag generates a custom HTTP header with a Refresh element that contains the number of seconds to wait before refreshing the page as well as the URL of the page to retrieve when the refresh occurs.

Use stored procedures for database queries whenever possible.

Most enterprise level databases (MS SQL Server, DB2, Oracle, Informix, Sybase) support creating special programs within the database called stored procedures.

Stored procedures allow you to encapsulate SQL and other database-specific functions in a wrapper that can be called from external applications. There are several reasons why you should use stored procedures whenever possible in your applications:

Stored procedures execute faster than identical code passed using the CFQUERY tag because they are precompiled on the database server.
Stored procedures support code reuse. A single procedure only needs to be created once and can be accessed by any number of templates--even different applications and those written in other languages.
Stored procedures allow you to encapsulate complex database manipulation routines--often utilizing database specific functions.
Security is enhanced by keeping all database operations encapsulated within the stored procedure. Because ColdFusion only passes parameters to the stored procedure, there is no way to execute arbitrary SQL commands.
Many enterprise level databases support the return of more than one record set through stored procedures. This simply isn't possible using the CFQUERY tag.

Avoid assigning user-defined functions (UDFs) to persistent variable scopes.

The code for user-defined functions can be written inline, at the beginning of a template, or more commonly, contained in a separate file that is included at the beginning of the template via the CFINCLUDE tag. Advanced developers new to UDFs may be tempted to assign frequently used functions to one of the persistent scopes (Application, Session and Server scope) in an attempt to improve performance. Although this sounds tempting, it should be avoided.

The first problem with this technique has to do with locking. Because reads and writes to persistent variables must always be locked, any time you want to reference a UDF in your code, you'll need to include two extra lines of code to lock the variable. This can get to be a real pain with frequently used functions.

The second reason to avoid this technique is that it wastes RAM. Each function you store in a persisitent variable takes RAM that could probably be put to better use elsewhere in your application. The Server scope is a particularly bad place to put UDFs as Server variables persist until the ColdFusion Application Server is rebooted.

It makes much more sense to keep all of your frequently used UDFs in a single "function library" template that can be included via CFINCLUDE only in the templates where the functions are needed. If you find you use functions from your library throughout your application, you have the option of placing a single CFINCLUDE in your Application.cfm template. The minor overhead of having to include the function library template easily offsets the inconvenience of locking all function calls and wasted server resources of storing the function in a memory resident variable.

Detecting WAP- and WML-enabled devices.

ColdFusion is increasingly being used to deliver content to WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) enabled devices such as cell phones and PDAs. One question I'm frequently asked is how to detect when a request to the server is made by a WAP- and WML- (Wireless Markup Language) enabled device, so that WML content can be delivered to the user instead of HTML. The answer is to use the CGI variable HTTP_ACCEPT to see if the user's browser is capable of receiving content with the MIME type text/vnd.wap.wml. The following code should be placed at the top of any page you want the check to occur on:

<cfif><cflocation url="/wap/index.cfm"></cfif>

If the user's browser does accept the MIME type, we know the user is coming to the site with a WAP- and WML-enabled device, and he or she is rerouted to an appropriate page that generates WML content.

Take advantage of the Verity K2 server in ColdFusion 5.0.

Since version 2.0, ColdFusion has included advanced indexing and searching capabilities using a bundled version of Verity's popular search technology via the VDK (Verity Developer's Kit). In addition to the VDK, ColdFusion 5.0 comes with a restricted version of Verity's enterprise level K2 server. K2 server offers features that appeal to clustered and large-scale sites, such as simultaneous searching of distributed collections, concurrent queries, and an overall performance gain over the VDK engine. Setting up and administering the K2 server takes a bit of work, but is well worth the results. For more information, consult the Advanced ColdFusion Administration book that comes with the official ColdFusion documentation.

For more information visit our ColdFusion Development Services.

Coldfusion Application Elements, Mapping Application into ColdFusion

2009-02-16T03:52:00.000-08:00

Before you develop a ColdFusion application, you must determine how to structure the application and how to handle application-wide needs and issues. In particular, you must consider all of the following:

The overall application framework
Reusable application elements
Shared variables
Application events and the Application.cfc file
Application-level settings and functions
Application security and user identification

The application framework

The application framework is the overall structure of the application and how your directory structure and application pages reflect that structure. You can use a single application framework to structure multiple ColdFusion applications into a single website or Internet application. You can structure a ColdFusion application by using many methodologies. For example, the Fusebox application development methodology is one popular framework for developing ColdFusion web applications. (For more information on Fusebox, see www.fusebox.org.)

This chapter does not provide information on how to use or develop a specific application framework. However, it does discuss the tools that ColdFusion provides for building your framework, including the Application.cfc file, how an application's directory structure affects the application, and how you can map the directory structure. For more information on mapping the application framework, see Structuring an application.

Note: For one example of an application framework, see "ColdFusion Methodologies for Content Management," available at www.adobe.com/devnet/server_archive/articles/cf_methodologies_for_content_mgmt.html..

Reusable application elements

ColdFusion provides a variety of reusable elements that you can use to provide commonly used functionality and extend CFML. These elements include the following:

User-defined functions (UDFs)
CFML custom tags
ColdFusion components (CFCs)
CFX (ColdFusion Extension) tags
Pages that you include using the cfinclude tag

For more information about Coldfusion Application Development please visit our website www.semaphore-software.com

Best Search in Google: how to mapping application into ColdFusion

Bolt, Centaur-ColdFusion Development tools

2009-02-15T20:24:00.000-08:00

I was surfing on net for latest information about ColdFusion and the process of ColdFusion Development, and I came to know this information posted on Adobe Labs, I got it and re-posted here for all my blog readers and subscribers.

What is Bolt?
Bolt is the codename our new Eclipse™ based development tool for building ColdFusion applications. Bolt enables rapid development of ColdFusion applications through powerful new features.

What is Centaur?
Centaur is the codename for the upcoming next major release of ColdFusion from Adobe. Find out more about Centaur.

What features are in Bolt?
Although we have not publicly disclosed the entire feature set of Bolt, we have discussed several features at events. The following information has been disclosed about Bolt.

• Object Relational Mapping auto-configuration
• Application Code Generation
• Server management
• Easily extensible through the Eclipse framework
• CFML, HTML, Javascript, and CSS Syntax Highlighting
• Code assist for tags, functions, variables, and components
• Code folding
• Snippet creation and management
• Outline viewing
• RDS Explorer for files and databases
• Line-level Debugging

More features will be included in this list as we publicly announce them.

When will Bolt be released?
We are currently targeting the commercial release for some time in 2009. However, you can see an early view of Bolt by joining our prerelease program today. If you are interested in joining, please go to http://www.adobe.com/go/boltprerelease and click on "Centaur Prerelease Program" to submit your application for participation in our prerelease program.

Events
In the coming months, more information about Bolt will be presented at various ColdFusion community events. The following are events that Adobe is sponsoring and at which you can learn more about Bolt. Meet your fellow developers, support the community, and learn about Bolt at these conferences.

MAX 2008 Europe Milan, Italy December 1 - 4, 2008

MAX 2008 Japan Tokyo, Japan January 29 - 30, 2009

CF.Objective() Minneapolis, MN May 14-16, 2009

CFUnited Greater Washington DC Area August 10-15, 2009

We’ll be talking about Bolt at more conferences, so check back for an updated list!
Retrieved from "http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Bolt"

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ColdFusion Development

2009-02-12T20:18:00.000-08:00

Semaphore Software is an expert in ColdFusion Application Development and ColdFusion Web Development. Some Companies think that Why use ColdFusion? Rather then the other development technologies like Dot Net, JAVA, PHP and so many But my answer is Coldfusion has power, flexibility and speed these three are the most important for any development platform to develop a successful web site or a web application. And So many companies like www.myspace.com, Neweracap.com , Hasbro.com , Commerceonline.com , Boeing.com and they have achieved success in their business.

Semaphore Software Offers Professional ColdFusion Development, ColdFusion Programming, ColdFusion CMS Development.

For more information visit our ColdFusion Development Services.

About ColdFusion

2009-02-10T20:37:00.000-08:00

ColdFusion

ColdFusion is an application server and software development framework used for the development of computer software in general, and dynamic web sites in particular. In this regard, ColdFusion is a similar product to Microsoft ASP.NET, JavaServer Pages or PHP. ColdFusion was the first amongst these technologies to provide the developer the capability of creating dynamic websites that were attached to a backend database.OverviewThe pimary distinguishing feature of ColdFusion is its associated scripting language, ColdFusion Markup Language(CFML), which compares to JSP, ASP.NET, or PHP and resembles HTML in syntax. ColdFusion is often used synonymously with CFML, but it should be noted that there are additional CFML application servers besides ColdFusion, and that ColdFusion supports programming languages other than CFML, such as serverside Actionscript and embedded scripts that can be written in a JavaScriptlike language, known as CFScript.

Originally a product of Allaire, and released in July, ColdFusion was originally developed by brothers JJ and Jeremy Allaire. In Allaire was acquired by Macromedia, which was in turn acquired by Adobe Systems in. ColdFusion is most often used for datadriven web sites or intranets, but can also be used to generate remote services such as SOAP web services or Flash remoting. It is especially wellsuited as the serverside technology to the clientside Flex.ColdFusion can also handle asynchronous events such as SMS and instant messaging via its gateway interface, available in ColdFusion MX Enterprise Edition.edit Main FeaturesColdFusion provides a number of additional features out of the box. Among them Client and server cache management Clientside code generation, especially for form widgets and validation Conversion from HTML to PDF and FlashPaperData retrieval from common enterprise systems such as Active Directory, LDAP, POP, HTTP, FTP, Microsoft Exchange Server File indexing and searching service based on Verity K GUI administration Platformindependent database querying via ODBC or JDBC Session, client, and application management XML parsing, querying, and validation Server clustering Task schedulingOther implementations of CFML offer similar or enhanced functionality, such as running in a .NET environment or image manipulation.

History of ColdFusion

Early versionsThe first version of ColdFusion then called Cold Fusion was released on July. This first version was written almost entirely by one person, JJ Allaire. Primitive by modern standards, early versions of ColdFusion did little more than database access. All versions of ColdFusion were written using Microsoft Visual C++. This meant that ColdFusion was largely limited to running on Microsoft Windows, although Allaire did successfully port ColdFusion to Sun Solaris starting with version edit Releases Allaire Cold Fusion version .Allaire Cold Fusion version. Allaire Cold Fusion version. Jun Allaire Cold Fusion version .n Allaire Cold Fusion version. Allaire ColdFusion version. space eliminated between Cold and Fusion to make it ColdFusionov Allaire ColdFusion version. Macromedia ColdFusion version .ay Macromedia ColdFusion MX edit ColdFusion MXPrior to, Allaire began a project codenamed Neo, that would rewrite the basis of ColdFusion using Java, which would allow for greater portability among different platforms.

On January, Allaire announced that it would be merging with Macromedia. Shortly after the merger, Macromedia continued with the incremental release of ColdFusion . and in June , Macromedia released Macromedia ColdFusion MX, extending the naming convention of Macromedias line of products. ColdFusion MX was completely rebuilt from the ground up and was based on the Java Enterprise Edition JEE platform. ColdFusion M was also designed to integrate well with Macromedia Flash using Flash Remoting.Starting from the MX . release, ColdFusion is compiled to bytecode, like JSP and ASP.NET. The compiled .class files are readily accessible, and are cached until their source changes, like JSPs.With the release of ColdFusion MX, the CFML language was also extended to support basic OOP.edit ColdFusion MX With the release of ColdFusion, the naming convention was amended, rendering the product name Macromedia ColdFusion MX. CFMX added Flashbased, and XFormsbased, web forms and a report builder that output in Adobe PDF as well as FlashPaper, RTF and Excel. The Adobe PDF output is also available as a wrapper to any HTML page, converting that page to a quality printable document. The enterprise edition also added Gateways. These provide interaction with nonHTTP request services such as IM Services, SMS, Directory Watchers, and an asynchronous execution. XML support was boosted in this version to include native schema checking ColdFusion MX, codenamed Mystic includes advanced features for working with Adobe Flex .

Adobe ColdFusion

On July, Systems released ColdFusion, dropping MX from its name. During beta testing the codename used was Scorpio. More than, developers worldwide were active in the beta process many more testers than the, Adobe Systems originally expected. The ColdFusion development team consisted of developers based in NewtonBoston, Massachusetts and Bangalore, India. Some of the new features are the CFPDFFORM tag, which enables integration with Adobe Acrobat forms, some image manipulation functions, Microsoft .Net integration, and the CFPRESENTATION tag, which allows the creation of dynamic presentations using Adobe Acrobat Connect, the Webbased collaboration solution formerly known as Macromedia Breeze. In addition, the ColdFusion Administrator for the Enterprise version ships with builtin server monitoring. ColdFusion is available on several operating systems including Linux, Mac OS X and Windows Server .

Other additions to ColdFusion are built in AJAX widgets, file archive manipulation CFZIP, Microsoft Exchange server integration CFEXCHANGE, image manipulation including automatic captcha generation CFIMAGE, multithreading, perapplication settings, Atom and RSS feeds, reporting enhancements, stronger encryption libraries, array and structure improvements, improved database interaction, extensive performance improvements, PDF manipulation and merging capabilities CFPDF, interactive debugging, embedded database support with Apache Derby, and a more ECMAScript compliant CFSCRIPT. For development of ColdFusion applications, several tools are available Adobe Dreamweaver CS, Macromedia HomeSite, CFEclipse, Eclipse and others. Tag updates are available for these applications to update their support for the new ColdFusion features.edit Adobe ColdFusion Adobe is currently working on ColdFusion Codename Centaur. There is no release date set, but the list of potential new features include Ability to code User Defined Functions UDFs and ColdFusion Components CFCs entirely in CFScript. An explicit local scope that does not require local variables to be declared at the top of the function.Implicit getterssetters for CFC. Implicit constructors via method called init or method with same name as CFC. New CFFinally tag for Exception handling syntax and CFContinue tag for Control flow. Objectrelational mapping ORM Database integration through Hibernate Java. Server.cfc file with onServerStart and onServerEnd methods. Tighter integration with Adobe AIR.

Features of ColdFusion

Merge arrowIt has been suggested that this article or section be merged into ColdFusion Markup Language. Discussedit Rich formsColdFusion Server includes a subset of its Macromedia Flex technology. Its stated purpose is to allow for rich forms in HTML pages using CFML to generate Flash movies. These Flash forms can be used to implement rich internet applications, but with limited efficacy due to the ActionScript restrictions in place on Flash forms by Macromedia.Flash forms also provide additional widgets for data input, such as date pickers and data grids.n previous versions of ColdFusion, some form validation and additional widgets were available using a combination of Java applets and JavaScript. This option persists for those who do not wish to use Flash, however not all features are supported.An examplecfform formatflash methodpost width height cfinput typetext nameusername labelUsername requiredyes cfinput typepassword namePassword labelPassword requiredyes cfinput typesubmit namesubmit valueSign In fformColdFusion also includes some XForms capability, and the ability to skin forms using XSLT.

PDF and FlashPaper generationColdFusion can generate PDF or FlashPaper documents using standard HTML i.e. no additional coding is needed to generate documents for print. CFML authors simply place HTML and CSS within a pair of cfdocument tags and specify the desired format FlashPaper or PDF. The generated document can then either be saved to disk or sent to the clients browser. ColdFusion has now introduced the cfpdf tag which allows for unprecedented control over PDF documents including PDF forms, and merging of PDFs.edit ColdFusion Components ObjectsColdFusion was originally not an objectoriented programming language, and even today lacks some OO features. ColdFusion falls into the category of OO languages that do not support multiple inheritance along with Java, Smalltalk etc.. With the MX release +, ColdFusion introduced the component language construct which resembles classes in OO languages. Each component may contain any number of properties and methods. One component may also extend another Inheritance. Components only support single inheritance. With the release of ColdFusion , Javastyle interfaces are supported. ColdFusion components use the file extension cfc to differentiate them from ColdFusion templates .cfm.

Remoting

Component methods may be made available as web services with no additional coding and configuration. All that is required is for a methods access to be declared remote. ColdFusion automatically generates a WSDL at the URL for the component thusly httppathtocomponentsComponent.cfc?wsdl. Aside from SOAP, the services are offered in Flash Remoting binary format.Methods which are declared remote may also be invoked via an HTTP GET or POST request. Consider the GET request as hown.httppathtocomponentsComponent.cfc?methodsearch&queryyour+query&modestrict
This will invoke the components search function, passing your query and strict as arguments. This type of invocation is wellsuited for AJAXenabled applications. ColdFusion introduced the ability to serialize ColdFusion data structures to JSON for consumption on the client. The ColdFusion server will automatically generate documentation for a component if you navigate to its URL and insert the appropriate code within the components declarations. This is an application of component introspection, available to developers of ColdFusion components. Access to a components documentation requires a password. A developer can view the documentation for all components known to the ColdFusion server by navigating to the ColdFusion URL. This interface resembles the Javadoc HTML documentation for Java classes.

Custom tagsColdFusion provides several ways to implement custom tags, i.e. those not included in the core ColdFusion language. The traditional and most common way is using CFML. A standard CFML page can be interpreted as a tag, with the tag name corresponding to the file name prefixed with cf_. For example, the file IMAP.cfm can be used as the tag cf_imap. Attributes used within the tag are available in the ATTRIBUTES scope of the tag implementation page. CFML pages are accessible in the same directory as the calling page, via a special directory in the ColdFusion web application, or via a CFIMPORT tag in the calling page. The latter method does not necessarily require the cf_ prefix for the tag name.A second way is the development of CFX tags using Java or C++. CFX tags are prefixed with cfx_, for example cfx_imap. Tags are added to the ColdFusion runtime environment using the ColdFusion administrator, where JAR or DLL files are registered as custom tags.Finally, ColdFusion supports JSP tag libraries from the JSP . language specification. JSP tags are included in CFML pages using the CFIMPORT tag.edit Alternative server environmentsColdFusion originated as proprietary technology based on Web technology industry standards. However, it is becoming a less closed technology through the availability of competing products. Products include Railo, BlueDragon, IgniteFusion, SmithProject and Coral Web Builder.

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Read More

Best Practice Tips for ColdFusion beginners

2009-01-23T02:07:00.000-08:00

ColdFusion web sites are sets of the web pages similar to other Web sites. The main unique feature of it is that web pages in ColdFusion have the server–side ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) in addition to HTML. This facilitates to control the behavior of client web application, incorporate a wide range of server technologies and dynamically create the content that is returned to the Web browser.

1) mainly Learn How To Build interactive and scalable Web applications by using ColdFusion Develop complex scripts and rich Web forms with ColdFusion programming tools.

2) Construct database-driven Web sites with dynamic content Implement error-handling techniques.

3) Write reusable code with user-defined functions, custom tags, and components
Integrate Web services to share information and execute remote code

And one morething ColdFusion is a leading Web development tool that runs on the powerful Java EE infrastructure and integrates with JDBC-compliant databases.

4) Manipulate and retrieve database information, validate and process user input, reuse code and incorporate Web services.

5) Creating and processing Web forms with conditional logic and loops
Performing server- and client-side validation to improve data collection
Querying and updating databases using SQL commands

6) Building maintainable sites with custom tags, components and Web services
Adding search capabilities to Websites

And also some related topics to enhance your coldfusion web development knoledge
Building Dreamweaver Web Applications, JavaScript for Web Development, XML Comprehensive Introduction, Developing Ajax Web 2.0 Applications, Project Management: Skills for Success

For more information visit our ColdFusion Development Services

MAX 2008 Europe	Milan, Italy	December 1 - 4, 2008
MAX 2008 Japan	Tokyo, Japan	January 29 - 30, 2009
CF.Objective()	Minneapolis, MN	May 14-16, 2009
CFUnited	Greater Washington DC Area	August 10-15, 2009