Charlie Arehart @ COLDFUSION DEVELOPER'S JOURNAL

Charlie Arehart

A veteran ColdFusion developer since 1997, Charlie Arehart is a long-time contributor to the community and a recognized Adobe Community Expert. He's a certified Advanced CF Developer and Instructor for CF 4/5/6/7 and served as tech editor of CFDJ until 2003. Now an independent contractor (carehart.org) living in Alpharetta, GA, Charlie provides high-level troubleshooting/tuning assistance and training/mentoring for CF teams. He helps run the Online ColdFusion Meetup (coldfusionmeetup.com, an online CF user group), is a contributor to the CF8 WACK books by Ben Forta, and is frequently invited to speak at developer conferences and user groups worldwide.

Monitoring Your ColdFusion Environment With the Free Log Parser Toolkit

By Charlie Arehart

There are many resources we should analyze to ensure optimal ColdFusion operation or to help diagnose problems. Fortunately, there's an awesome free tool that comes to our aid to turn voluminous data into useful information.

Nov. 14, 2006 02:30 PM Reads: 22,001 Replies: 4

FusionDebug Tips, Tricks, and Traps

By Charlie Arehart

FusionDebug is an easy straightforward tool, but if you leverage the experience of others, you can be even more productive.

Oct. 28, 2006 05:00 PM Reads: 16,281

Errors in Your Code

By Charlie Arehart

Errors and bugs: they happen in all code, mostly in development but in production too and perhaps more easily in CFML than in compiled languages. There are several features to help better handle, debug, and test for them, and this article will focus on those.

Oct. 8, 2006 12:00 PM Reads: 15,515

Profiling CFML at the Tag Level, Finally!

By Charlie Arehart

The ability to view tag-level execution profiling (the amount of time spent on each tag in a request) is no longer a dream, and it opens up powerful new forms of debugging and performance tuning.

Sep. 24, 2005 03:00 PM Reads: 14,936

Getting Started Integrating CFML with Java & .NET

By Charlie Arehart

It's great to have a whole issue of CFDJ focused on integrating CFML with Java. The process is a lot easier than many might think, as the articles in this issue will show.

May. 18, 2005 01:00 PM Reads: 13,601

CFML on J2EE: Easy as 1-2-3

By Charlie Arehart

Why reinvent the wheel when you can easily run your CFML applications on any J2EE server? If your team is considering or being forced to move to J2EE (WebLogic, WebSphere, JBoss, Tomcat, etc.), it may be helpful to know that you don't have to throw away or even rewrite your CFML applic...

Jun. 22, 2004 12:00 AM Reads: 18,929

CFUN-04: Who, What, When, Why?

By Charlie Arehart

There are many excellent conferences and user groups for CFML developers, and one that consistently gets great reviews is Michael Smith's CFUN event, which will be held in the Washington, DC, area June 26-27. This preview gives you the 4-1-1 on the event.

Apr. 13, 2004 12:00 AM Reads: 13,435

Making the Case for CFML on J2EE

By Charlie Arehart

Do you really know what it means to run CFML applications on a J2EE server? How does it work, and why would you bother? There are many benefits you may never have considered. In this article, the first of a series, I'll answer these questions.

Apr. 13, 2004 12:00 AM Reads: 20,822

CFDEBUGGER

By Charlie Arehart

Have you ever wanted to see what lines of code are being executed in your template? If you looked for CFTRACE to do that, you were likely disappointed.

Nov. 11, 2003 11:13 AM Reads: 12,936

Ready for the Leap Year?

By Charlie Arehart

While we all made it through the new year, there is still at least one more date issue to contend with. Many systems may not properly recognize that this year, 2000, is a leap year.

Sep. 23, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 8,058

Allaire Developer's Conference

By Charlie Arehart

For a first-time event, the 1999 Allaire Developer's Conference provided a jam-packed two days of information and socializing for the more than 1,000 developers in attendance.

Sep. 18, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 6,690

New CFERROR Feature Allows Greater Control

By Charlie Arehart

One of the great new features in 4.5 is a new form of global exception handling. Whereas 4.0 introduced CFTRY/CFCATCH to wrap around a segment of code to be tested and acted upon in case of error, we were still limited to the aged CFERROR tag to trap general errors.

Sep. 18, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 7,644

Free, Limited Functionality Version of ColdFusion

By Charlie Arehart

It seems that many, especially newcomers, are not aware that Allaire created a free, limited functionality version of ColdFusion.

Sep. 18, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 7,194

Considering Advanced Security

By Charlie Arehart

Advanced Security is a set of features that came out in 4.0 of ColdFusion Server, and it offers several very interesting improvements on security, both in terms of how authentication is done, and what can be secured.

Sep. 18, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 6,963

CF Advisor Interviews Allaire's Adam Berrey

By Charlie Arehart; Phillip D. Chonigman

CF Advisor learns more about ColdFusion 4.5, in the first installment of a two-part interview with Allaire Corp.'s Product Marketing Director.

Sep. 18, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 8,659

CF Advisor Interviews Allaire Corp.'s Jeremy Allaire and Adam Berrey

By Charlie Arehart; Phillip D. Chonigman

In the second installment of an exclusive two-part CF Advisor interview, Allaire's Vice President of Technology Strategy, Jeremy Allaire, joined Product Marketing Director Adam Berrey in mapping out Allaire's multiple programming language strategies for ColdFusion, Spectra, WDDX, Java,...

Sep. 18, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 7,711

DC ColdFusion Conference, 1999

By Charlie Arehart

On Saturday, June 26 in Bethesda, Maryland, several hundred CF developers gathered for the first annual DC ColdFusion User Conference. Created and organized by TeraTech, which sponsors the Maryland CFUG, and co-sponsored by several other notable CF firms including Fig Leaf Software, In...

Sep. 18, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 7,826

Testing Against Many Values in a CFIF

By Charlie Arehart

If you have to test a condition against many values in a CFIF, you may be tempted to write out a very long condition, such as:

Sep. 17, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 7,928

Saving Files Where Expected in Studio

By Charlie Arehart

Studio has an interesting (and to some, annoying) mechanism for determining where to save newly created files. If you're not aware of this approach, you can be left feeling that Studio has made a mistake in deciding where to save a file—if you even notice it's not where you ...

Sep. 17, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 7,092

Whither The Studio Query Builder

By Charlie Arehart

Did you know that Studio has a built-in SQL query builder? It provides a drag-and-drop SQL query building interface (much like that used in MS Access) that can be performed against any of your available datasources, including Access, SQL Server, and the rest.

Sep. 17, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 6,160

Updated Studio Documentation

By Charlie Arehart

If you've longed for more documentation on how to get the most from the ColdFusion Studio editing tool, Allaire has heard you. There have been two recent updates to the documentation that you may have missed.

Sep. 17, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 7,078

Automatically Close Quotes, Pounds, and Comments in Studio

By Charlie Arehart

Did you know that you can have Studio automatically close quotes, pounds, and comments when you enter an opening one?

Sep. 17, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 6,216

Doing IF Tests Within CFMAIL

By Charlie Arehart

You've probably noticed that CF leaves white space in HTML pages where CF tags existed before the page was processed.

Sep. 17, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 6,435

TIPS

By Charlie Arehart

Let's say you want to create a dynamic SQL query -- that is, a CFQUERY that looks up different fields depending on circumstances. Why would this be useful? Let's say you're creating an employee roster application.

Sep. 17, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 9,096

Quick Access to Tag Help

By Charlie Arehart

Did you know that in Studio you can place the cursor on a tag and press F1, to view the help file for that tag?

Sep. 17, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 6,705

Be Careful in Placement of Database Files

By Charlie Arehart

If you're using Microsoft Access as the datasource for a CF application, you should be very careful about the placement of that database file (the .mdb file) on your web server.

Sep. 17, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 5,840

Datasource Name Case Sensitivity

By Charlie Arehart

It may be hard to believe, but there are times when you should pay careful attention to case (use of upper and lower case letters) when spelling the datasource name in a CFQUERY tag.

Sep. 17, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 6,219

Using the SQL Built in the Studio Query Builder

By Charlie Arehart

After you've built some SQL in the tool, you have the option of either copying the SQL you build to the clipboard-to paste into your CFML template-or 'saving' the query for later use.

Sep. 17, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 5,714

Using Saved Queries in the Query Builder

By Charlie Arehart

If you 'save' the query instead (either by using the left-most icon at the top of the query builder or by simply closing the query builder...

Sep. 17, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 4,885

Tips

By Charlie Arehart

We've all been taught that, when we have a choice to take all we can of something, we should instead take only what we need.

Sep. 17, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 7,937

Handling Errors in Studio Query Building or Debugging Tools

By Charlie Arehart

The query building and interactive debugging tools in Studio each work in conjunction with the RDS (remote development services) feature, whether you're working with databases or templates that are stored locally or against a remote server.

Sep. 17, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 6,584

Easier Insertion of Dates with CFINSERT/CFUPDATE

By Charlie Arehart

When you're inserting date/time values into a database, you want to be careful about deciding whether the date should be hardcoded into the form (perhaps as a hidden field) or whether it should be computed at the time of the data entry.

Sep. 17, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 8,526 Replies: 1

Be Careful in Multi-conditioned CFIF's

By Charlie Arehart

When performing a CFIF testing multiple conditions, be careful when testing against a value that could equate to a Boolean true or false (0 or 1, yes or no, etc.).

Sep. 17, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 7,529

Using Extended Find and Replace in Studio

By Charlie Arehart

Ever had to find all the references to a given string among all the files in your application? And how about in all the files in any of several subdirectories, perhaps in your web root?

Sep. 16, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 5,995

The "Studio" Route to CF's Many Powerful Functions

By Charlie Arehart

ColdFusion provides us with an incredible wealth of functions for performing everything from string and date manipulation to array and list processing.

Sep. 16, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 5,321

Setting Up Your Development Server with ColdFusion 5, MX, and BlueDragon

By Charlie Arehart; Jeffry Houser

The world of ColdFusion application servers is quite interesting at the moment. Macromedia's recent update to CFMX 6.1 promises to add a lot of stability and speed to the product. BlueDragon, New Atlanta's alternate CFML runtime engine continues to gain momentum. Yet despite these ...

Sep. 11, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 29,676 Replies: 3

Browsing Within CF Studio/HomeSite+

By Charlie Arehart

Do you know how to use the internal browse capability in CF Studio/ HomeSite+? Did you know that you don't need to use the RDS feature to be able to do so? And that you can use it to browse not only CFML templates running on both ColdFusion and BlueDragon, but also JSP, ASP, PHP, a...

Aug. 12, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 16,630 Replies: 2

The Secret Powers of Includes

By Charlie Arehart

You've probably been told for years that CFINCLUDE is like a compile-time directive that 'pulls code' from another file into your template for reuse. That's wrong. I'll prove it to you. Indeed, have you ever tried to include something other than a CF template? You can. Wonder what incl...

Jul. 11, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 15,022 Replies: 7

Getting into HomeSite+

By Charlie Arehart

Fans of ColdFusion Studio may lament that Macromedia no longer sells the product, but take heart. It really does continue to exist in the guise of HomeSite+, which is basically the same thing and then some. What's more - if you own Dreamweaver MX, you can install HomeSite+ free. Have y...

Jun. 16, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 18,474

CFMX Updaters 1-2-3

By Charlie Arehart

Is your CFMX server running with the latest set of fixes? Macromedia now uses 'Updaters' as a means to apply patches and extensions. There have been three so far. Are you running the latest, or any at all? How would you know? And why should you bother?

May. 1, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 14,972 Replies: 2