By Jeffry Houser  Do you remember January of 2004? Macromedia had just released ColdFusion 6.1 a few months earlier. CFCs finally worked! Fancy JavaScript techniques were not pulled together under the moniker of AJAX. Rich Internet applications were just a casual mention in a Macromedia whitepaper. Ther... Oct. 14, 2007 11:00 AM EDT Reads: 11,705 |
By Jeffry Houser  I'm going to postpone the second part of my RSS aggregator article to tie this column into this Flex-themed issue. Have no fears, though, it will be back in full force in the next issue. Flex, as I'm sure most people know, is a way for programmers (you, me, and us) to create Flash movi... Jul. 17, 2007 02:30 PM EDT Reads: 59,945 Replies: 1 |
By Jeffry Houser  Over the past few years it's gotten a lot harder to write ColdFusion code. That's not to say that CFML has changed significantly. You can still write code today that's much the same as what you wrote five years ago or longer. However, with the introduction of CFCs in CFMX, ColdFusion s... Jun. 10, 2007 01:00 PM EDT Reads: 18,517 Replies: 2 |
By Jeffry Houser  In my previous article I wrote about Data Access Objects. Data Access Objects, or DAOs for short, are a way to separate your insert, select, delete, and update queries from other business logic. This lets you switch from one data storage mechanism to another easily. Whenever people tal... Apr. 22, 2007 11:00 AM EDT Reads: 10,560 |
By Jeffry Houser  It seems that there's a lot of talk in the ColdFusion community about data access objects and data gateway design patterns. Everyone talks about how great they are and why everyone should be using these patterns. Mar. 8, 2007 04:00 PM EST Reads: 12,605 Replies: 1 |
By Jeffry Houser  I'm at my best when I'm challenged. In my consulting business I tend to gravitate towards small businesses with delusions of grandeur. I want to be the one to help them realize their vision and turn their delusion into reality. Looking back, this has been an interesting week. I tho... Nov. 7, 2006 01:00 PM EST Reads: 30,040 |
By Jeffry Houser  I remember a particularly long weekend sitting in a computer lab for 12 hours and trying to write an assembler program on a VAX machine that would read and write files. (A VAX is a big archaic mainframe computer.) Oct. 25, 2006 05:00 PM EDT Reads: 20,350 |
By Jeffry Houser  Two months ago I put together an article about building an RSS aggregator (CFDJ, Vol. 8, issue 5). Before reading this you might want to refresh your mind on the original article. Go over here - http://coldfusion.sys-con.com/read/235976.htm - to read it. Aug. 31, 2006 10:00 AM EDT Reads: 16,212 |
By Jeffry Houser  So often in this column I feel that I'm writing about basic concepts and using trivial examples. It's often up to you, as the reader, to figure out how to apply these concepts to your development. I thought it might be a good idea to take some space to try to bring a lot of the concept... Jun. 28, 2006 04:45 AM EDT Reads: 17,508 Replies: 1 |
By Jeffry Houser  A new project just landed on my desk. This is not a maintenance project; it's brand new, start from scratch, development. The client asked me to build a site in ColdFusion 5. It's my fourth project in the past year that's based on a legacy version of CF. I could have saved the client b... Jun. 3, 2006 05:30 PM EDT Reads: 17,455 Replies: 2 |
By David Stutler  It's not every day that you get the opportunity to pen an article about true love and technology. But in a few cases, true love and technology mix quite well. Apr. 18, 2006 04:15 PM EDT Reads: 23,187 Replies: 6 |
By Jeffry Houser  About a year ago, when I wrote an article on Dreamweaver, I used half of Dreamweaver and half of Homesite. Today, as I write this, half my development is done in CFEclipse and the other half in Dreamweaver. Unfortunately I used Dreamweaver as a really advanced text editor, something it... Apr. 13, 2006 10:15 AM EDT Reads: 27,766 Replies: 4 |
By Jeffry Houser  It is likely that at some point in your development career you had to deal with sensitive data. It might have been credit card numbers in an e-commerce site, or an employee identification number on an intranet. Perhaps you were setting up a security scheme and wanted to protect the pas... Jan. 25, 2006 08:30 PM EST Reads: 42,876 Replies: 5 |
By Jeffry Houser  I haven't left the house in 11 days, yet I'm not on vacation. I spent 3 hours last Friday morning replacing a broken doorknob, yet the clients don't care. They probably didn't even know. Most of the time they don't even know if I'm out of the office. I'm one of the lucky individuals w... Jan. 7, 2006 01:30 PM EST Reads: 20,449 Replies: 2 |
By Jeffry Houser  One of the most popular articles I've ever written was on Amazon.com Web services. The article was written for the Macromedia Developer Center and is located at www.macromedia.com/devnet/coldfusion/articles/wsamazon.html. This article is a bit dated. A few days before it was published,... Nov. 18, 2005 04:00 PM EST Reads: 26,202 |
By Jeffry Houser  This month I will examine the cfif tag and discuss how we can use that tag to make decisions in our code. Along the way I'll talk about Boolean logic, decision operators, and Boolean operators in CFML. Nov. 4, 2005 01:00 AM EST Reads: 58,258 Replies: 7 |
By Jeffry Houser  I just spent four hours debugging an error for a client. The client is an application service provider, and they developed an administrator for internal use. The administrator allows for the user to switch between sites, at whim. The 'site switcher' is a drop menu, which loads up a dif... Oct. 21, 2005 09:15 PM EDT Reads: 27,687 Replies: 1 |
By Jeffry Houser  Most of us are never going to work on a Web site that gets the amount of traffic that Google or Yahoo (or MySpace) gets. Unfortunately, you can get away with bad coding practices on a small site that only gets 100 unique visitors a month and no one will ever know. With such a low visit... Oct. 10, 2005 01:00 PM EDT Reads: 23,707 |
By Jeffry Houser  XML is over 8 years old. How many of you have been using it that long? (Feel free to raise your hand.) I don't see a lot of hands, which doesn't surprise me. However, I bet a lot of you have used XML without even knowing it. Aug. 17, 2005 09:30 AM EDT Reads: 34,607 |
By Jeffry Houser  A few years back, when CF5 was still in the beta stages, a client wanted to be able to fill out PDF forms through their web browser and save, and print, the filled out PDF form. After experimenting with a few free methods, such as the use of FDF files, I stumbled upon the ActivePDF to... Jun. 16, 2005 09:00 AM EDT Reads: 32,582 Replies: 2 |
By Jeffry Houser I open my e-mail this morning to find that one of my clients had sent me a file for import to their database. The file is comma delimited. Importing it into SQL Server is fairly simple with Data Transformation Services (DTS), however there's a catch. May. 18, 2005 12:00 PM EDT Reads: 32,006 |
By Jeffry Houser You won't get very far while building ColdFusion applications without the need for a relational database. Since ColdFusion is so easy to use, many developers come from non-programming based backgrounds, and proper database design remains a mystery. Apr. 13, 2005 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 21,679 |
By Jeffry Houser For as long as I can remember, I've been using ColdFusion Studio to develop my applications. Unfortunately, CF Studio appears to be on its last legs. It is still included with Dreamweaver under the name HomeSite+, but has not gone through any major revisions for quite some time. Feb. 11, 2005 12:00 AM EST Reads: 22,135 |
By Jeffry Houser Knock! Knock! Hey [insert your name here], can you create a report of all the users who have registered on our site? Geography is really important to the sales folk, so make sure you categorize it by state. Oh, and can I have it done today?' Jan. 18, 2005 12:00 AM EST Reads: 27,224 Replies: 2 |
By Jeffry Houser Last month I introduced ColdFusion Components in this column. I wrote about the CFC file extension, the tags that make up components (cfcomponent and cffunction), how to create a component, and how to call methods on that component instance. Dec. 14, 2004 12:00 AM EST Reads: 19,101 |
By Jeffry Houser I'm writing this article a few weeks before MAX takes place. I'll be one of the unfortunate few unable to join everyone for the festivities. I am keeping a close eye on the Blackstone development though, and can't wait to start writing about it in this column. Nov. 24, 2004 12:00 AM EST Reads: 25,905 |
By Jeffry Houser An old friend, whom I hadn't seen in over eight years, recently brought an eBay auction to my attention. After some rough times, someone was selling everything he owned so he could start his life completely from scratch. The seller was located in my home state (Connecticut), was a prog... Oct. 20, 2004 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 24,258 |
By Jeffry Houser For the past month or so, I've had the pleasure of doing some development in Lotus Domino. I worked with Domino a lot when I was just starting out my IT career, so I know it's a powerful development platform for client/server applications. Sep. 15, 2004 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 21,410 |
By Jeffry Houser  Many of my articles in this column have dealt with theoretical concepts and syntax of implementing those concepts in ColdFusion. In this article, I want to concentrate on the implementation steps you might take when building something. Aug. 13, 2004 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 33,093 |
By Jeffry Houser Developers each have their own approach to development. You may not know it, but you have one too. Having a set methodology allows you to sit back down at a project somewhere down the line and know what is going on immediately. Maintenance of the application is more cost effective. Jul. 14, 2004 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 24,842 |
By Jeffry Houser Arrays and structures are complex data types in ColdFusion. It is important to have an understanding not only of how to use them, but also of when it is best to use one over the other. This is the second of a two-part series in which I teach you about structures and arrays. Jun. 22, 2004 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 29,527 |
By Jeffry Houser This is the first of a two-part column in which I'll teach you about structures and arrays, two of the complex data types in ColdFusion. To start, I'll introduce structures and arrays and then go into some details on how to make use of arrays in ColdFusion. May. 11, 2004 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 29,408 Replies: 1 |
By Jeffry Houser Hello and welcome to the second installment of CF101. Last month I talked about variables in ColdFusion and how to create them using the cfset tag. I also showed you how to display the value of a variable using the cfoutput tag and a ColdFusion expression. I decided to leave an in-dep... Mar. 9, 2004 12:00 AM EST Reads: 24,698 |
By Jeffry Houser Welcome to CF101, a new column I'll be writing for ColdFusion Developer's Journal. This column is dedicated to all of you beginners out there, to teach you the basics of ColdFusion development. You don't need to have a prior understanding of programming, HTML, or Web development to rea... Feb. 25, 2004 12:00 AM EST Reads: 20,315 Replies: 1 |