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 EST Reads: 31,326 Replies: 5 |
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 EDT Reads: 22,795 |
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 EDT Reads: 24,566 |
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 EDT Reads: 20,953 Replies: 2 |
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 EDT Reads: 23,290 |
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 EDT Reads: 18,653 Replies: 2 |
By Charlie Arehart Amazon.com, the 'earth's biggest selection,' has exposed their entire catalog of products, product reviews and ratings, user-created book lists, and more via Web services. Whether you're new to Web services or not, and even if you don't care so much about accessing Amazon's data, it pr... Apr. 3, 2003 12:00 AM EST Reads: 24,689 Replies: 2 |
By Charlie Arehart Where do you stand in the march of CF developers moving toward implementing Flash interfaces in your Web apps? Are you gung ho? Still on the fence? Dead set against it? Feeling left out? Left behind? Feb. 28, 2003 12:00 AM EST Reads: 16,524 |
By Charlie Arehart There are a lot of powerful new integration points between CFMX and Java, but one that might benefit a lot of people - even those who don't know how to program in Java - is the ability to leverage servlet filters in CFMX. Jan. 31, 2003 12:00 AM EST Reads: 20,353 |
By Charlie Arehart Last month I introduced a precompile 'batch' file that allowed you to manually compile CFMX templates, saving the penalty paid by the first user to browse a CFMX template after it was created or edited. But there will be curious folks (and bit-twiddlers) among you who will wan... Oct. 22, 2002 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 17,789 Replies: 1 |
By Charlie Arehart Most of you have heard by now that ColdFusion MX templates are compiled into Java. Some may wonder what the big deal is. Many more of you may be surprised to learn that you can precompile CFMX templates. Oct. 4, 2002 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 17,641 Replies: 9 |
By Charlie Arehart With each new release of CFMX some features are trumpeted a lot and others seem to fall between the cracks. I call these 'hidden gems,'and in CFMX there are quite a few. Aug. 23, 2002 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 18,116 Replies: 1 |
By Charlie Arehart Tucked away among the press and praise about ColdFusion MX are some new options that could benefit every CF developer. If you've seen them mentioned, they may not have seemed important at first glance, but I hope you'll give them consideration. Jul. 31, 2002 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 26,717 Replies: 3 |
By Charlie Arehart Now that we can talk freely about ColdFusion MX, I want to share something new that you likely won't hear much about… but that I think stands to be an important feature: server-side redirects, or 'forwards.' May. 30, 2002 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 24,205 Replies: 2 |
By Charlie Arehart CFMX, the new release of ColdFusion, will allow us to use JSP custom tags within our ColdFusion programs. Some may say, 'So what?' In this article I hope to show you why it's definitely worth looking into this new possibility. May. 2, 2002 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 20,118 Replies: 4 |
By Charlie Arehart Ever wished you had easy access to Help on non-CF topics such as JavaScript, SQL, and DHTML? Did you know you could easily add such new Help topics to Studio? In this month's Journeyman ColdFusion, I'll show you how easy it is. I'll also point out some existing references you can use t... Jan. 9, 2002 12:00 AM EST Reads: 19,146 Replies: 3 |
By Charlie Arehart  Have you ever wished CFINPUT provided a way to validate an e-mail address? Or were you frustrated that its telephone validation didn't allow parentheses around an area code among other such limitations? Well, your wish has been granted in a new, little-known feature of CF5. Dec. 3, 2001 12:00 AM EST Reads: 45,552 Replies: 2 |
By Charlie Arehart You've probably seen the use of a variable called 'application.dsn' (or 'application.datasource') in code. Perhaps you've even been taught to use the method in a class. Maybe you've even been doing it in your own code. I'm talking about setting this variable in the application.... Jul. 11, 2001 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 23,722 Replies: 3 |
By Charlie Arehart If you've programmed in a modern programming language (Java, C, JavaScript, or even stored procedure languages), you've probably heard of exception handling via try/catch statements. ColdFusion supports the same capability. Jun. 7, 2001 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 22,305 |
By Charlie Arehart I actually look forward to the question, because I enjoy seeing their surprise when I list some of them. I don't have a definitive list, but it's enough to impress most who ask. Apr. 27, 2001 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 22,748 Replies: 2 |
By Charlie Arehart Have you ever wanted to test if a given array element exists? Or when dealing with arrays of structures, if a given key exists? Mar. 30, 2001 12:00 AM EST Reads: 33,256 Replies: 3 |
By Charlie Arehart You may have heard that Release 4 of ColdFusion introduced support for nested and paired custom tags. This offers many possibilities for creating more complex custom tags. Dec. 26, 2000 12:00 AM EST Reads: 19,259 Replies: 1 |
By Charlie Arehart It's fun developing wireless applications in ColdFusion, but if you don't solve several key challenges it'll be more painful than pleasant. In this second part of a series, I'll focus on some common problems encountered by CF/WML developers. Aug. 23, 2000 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 16,440 |
By Charlie Arehart There's a growing buzz around the world of wireless Web applications, that is, Web sites accessible to phones and other wireless devices. You may have read that in ColdFusion 4.5 Allaire added support for something called WAP (Wireless Access Protocol). Jul. 26, 2000 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 13,831 |
By Charlie Arehart Here's a dilemma faced by nearly every developer of Access databases who's got the database stored on a remote CF server. How do you reconfigure the database if you want to add, change or remove columns, tables or indexes? If it's remote, you can't very well use the Access interface to... Jun. 22, 2000 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 19,603 Replies: 1 |
By Charlie Arehart  You visit a Web site that offers a form inviting you to enter some input. No big deal - we see them all the time, right? But do you move your cursor to that first data entry area using the mouse? Or are you, like me, a keyboard maven - in which case you find that often you have to h... May. 25, 2000 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 24,668 Replies: 2 |
By Charlie Arehart In my Journeyman column last month (CFDJ Vol. 2, issue 4) we began looking at how - and why - to call custom tags in different ways. So far, we've learned that the CF_ approach will look first locally, then in the shared \cfusion\customtags directory, while the CFMODULE NAME= approa... Apr. 26, 2000 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 16,744 |
By Charlie Arehart You probably know about custom tags, but are you aware of all the possibilities for controlling who can access them and how? Perhaps you knew that a custom tag could be placed in the cfusion\customtags directory of the CF server to provide shared access by all users on the server, an... Apr. 3, 2000 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 17,397 |
By Charlie Arehart In my work as an Allaire-certified instructor, students often ask questions, and while the courses address most of them, they sometimes have some really interesting ones that I know have been asked and answered before. Mar. 16, 2000 12:00 AM EST Reads: 14,748 Replies: 4 |
By Charlie Arehart Given that most people are now introducing and installing ColdFusion version 4.5, Allaire's latest release of the server and studio software, it may seem strange to read an article on 4.0.1. Jan. 27, 2000 12:00 AM EST Reads: 13,481 |