Anyone who's needed JavaScript validation for his or her forms knows how easy it is to use ColdFusion's CFFORM tag. It's a quick and easy way to ensure that the form is filled out properly. However, CFFORM can be as limited as it is useful (see Figure 1).

Not a week goes by without someone asking me why on earth I persist in concentrating on ColdFusion programming instead of honing my skills in Java.?

Stealing credit card numbers and passwords from your site's users is all too easy. Fortunately it's just as easy for you to prevent such theft...by taking a few precautions in your ColdFusion code.

This article has been adapted from the first part of Chapter 13 of ColdFusion 4 Web Application Construction Kit by Ben Forta. Published by permission of Macmillan Publishers Ltd. and the author. Chapter 11 appeared in two parts in the February and March issues of ColdFusion Developer's Journal. Parts 1 and 2 of Chapter 12 appeared in April and May. Part 2 of this article will appear in a forthcoming issue.

Search functionality has become the status quo for all major Web sites. The typical search box/button found on home pages across the Net is considered the ultimate in user-friendly design: users type in what they're looking for and the search engine finds it quickly and easily.

Recently I was tasked with converting a ColdFusion application to run on a ClusterCATS Web server cluster. Many questions that hadn't been addressed in the initial design of the application arose during this process. As I resolved each of the problems, I began thinking that other developers might benefit from my experience if I were to document the process, address the issues and write a 'white paper.' The result is this article, which I hope will assist ColdFusion developers in developing or converting a CF-based application to support 'client state management' (see sidebar) in a clustered server environment.

From my very first line of ColdFusion code I was in heaven. There were lots of powerful tags and functions that made Web site creation a dream. What more could I ask for? User-Defined Functions (UDFs), that's what!

This article has been adapted from the second part of Chapter 12 of ColdFusion 4 Web Application Construction Kit by Ben Forta. Published by permission of Macmillan Publishers Ltd. and the author. Chapter 11 appeared in two parts in the February and March issues of ColdFusion Developer's Journal; Part 1 of this article appeared in April. Chapter 13 will appear in forthcoming issues.

The system I'm currently involved with is used to track samples from several major nuclear facilities. It's a Web-based application that allows the entry, cost bidding by laboratories, tracking, invoicing and final disposition of samples.

I am completely hooked on my new wireless Palm! The Palm Pilot VII has changed the way I access information — I can find it anywhere and any time I need it. With the newest Palm I can check account balances in real time on DLJDirect, buy a book from Amazon.com and — using the popular Starbucks Finder application — find the nearest Starbucks. With so many useful wireless applications available, you might be wondering why you can't create your own with ColdFusion. Well, you can! And after reading this article, you'll be well on the way to writing your own wireless applications for the Palm Pilot VII.

On the one hand DHTML — the combination of HTML, stylesheets and JavaScript — has given us many new options to create low-bandwidth effects to enhance Web pages. And on the other ColdFusion has given us the power to bring database contents to the Web. What's best for us, then, if we want interactive, site-enhancing effects that are data-driven? A combination of the two, of course! But it's never quite that simple.…

Using Forms In the previous two articles (CFDJ, Vol. 2, issues 2 and 3) on 'ColdFusion Basics,' you learned how to create ColdFusion templates that dynamically display data retrieved from ODBC data sources. The A2Z Employees table has just 10 rows, so the data fits easily within a Web browser window.

Using CF structures to store data allows you to access individual records without querying a database. Until now, successfully implementing a scalable, high-volume site has entailed five basic principles: 1. Write tight, efficient code. 2. Use cached queries. 3. Set up a proper network architecture. 4. Use top-of-the-line hardware. 5. Implement a properly designed database.

This article has been adapted from the second part of Chapter 11 of ColdFusion 4 Web Application Construction Kit by Ben Forta. Published by permission of Macmillan Publishers Ltd. and the author. Part 1 appeared in the February issue of ColdFusion Developer's Journal. Adaptations of Chapters 12 and 13 will appear in forthcoming issues. The book can be purchased through Amazon.com or by clicking on www.forta.com/books.

Just about everyone who uses a Windows-based system is familiar with the wizard metaphor. The wizard is a series of screens, each one asking questions and gathering data. The collected data isn't submitted until the final screen, which means the user can go backward or forward through the screens and adjust the data appropriately. Since users are already familiar and comfortable with this metaphor, using wizards can truly increase the usability of your applications.

This article has been adapted from Chapter 11 of ColdFusion 4 Web Application Construction Kit by Ben Forta. Published by permission of Macmillan Publishers Ltd. and the author. Part 2 of Chapter 11 will appear in the March issue of ColdFusion Developer's Journal, to be followed by adaptations of Chapters 12 and 13. The book can be purchased through Amazon.com or by clicking on www.forta.com/books.

Ultimate Components In our previous article in ColdFusion Developer's Journal (Vol. 1, issue 5) we discussed the importance of thinking in terms of components. This article expands on the idea of component-based architectures by showing how to create the road map you'll need when building your applications.

Just over four years ago I completed what I now consider my first 'significant' Web-based application. By significant, I mean the project had a significantly large budget, a significantly large user audience and a significantly high level of complexity.

There once was an emporium that sold the finest treasures in all the world. Their service was second to none, and their prices were more than reasonable. But they had a problem. The problem was that only a few knew where the emporium was, and most didn't even know it existed. Sadly, the emporium failed because their potential customers couldn't find them.

In the August issue of CFDJ we walked through the development of a custom CF_Servlet tag that would allow ColdFusion to access Java functionality on the server side via Java servlets. In subsequent issues of JDJ I developed the Online Ticket Store application for the Java modules. In order to provide self-contained modules for ColdFusion readers, I'd like to set the context for the design of the modules that have been developed in ColdFusion. Before doing that, however, I want to point out some interesting developments at Allaire that have a direct bearing on this article.

Managing and displaying content stored in the Spectra object store will be a major feature of any Spectra project. Content will come from a variety of places: self-service applications, system-generated messages and objects, and externally provided articles and data from a variety of content providers. The latter is called 'syndicated content.' This article demonstrates how one might automate the insertion of syndicated content from an outside news service.

Not Again!Don't you hate creating new scripts every time you need to add tables and queries to a ColdFusion-based application? I do. Enough already! That's why I decided to create a dynamic method of viewing and querying any table in a browser. The second best part? It's pure ColdFusion code. The best part? It's here in this article and I'll take you through it. Read on…

Allaire Spectra is the new standard for application development in ColdFusion. Not only does this product provide powerful, out-of-the-box content and work flow management tools, but its seven core services constitute a powerful application framework that developers can use in many different and creative ways. Because developers will be coding to the same interface - the Content Object API (COAPI) - carefully written projects will be reusable on any Spectra system. A syndication facility will even allow developers to 'beam' their projects to other Spectra servers over HTTP. Such substantial code reuse marks a fundamental turning point in the ColdFusion developer community. As an added bonus, Spectra is a well-coded, open-source application. For many junior (and even senior) programmers, Spectra is a veritable programmers' paradise.

Ever wonder why, when you search for something on the Internet, you normally get about a hundred thousand Web sites that are nowhere near what you're looking for? The reason is that many search engines can index only the words of a Web page, not the meaning.

Developing a data-entry interface for managing pesky lookup tables can be a laborious task for even the most seasoned CF developer. These tables usually include a few simple data fields - an identity column for use as a primary key, a text descriptor and perhaps some ancillary information that needs to be managed through a Web-based data-entry interface

While many experienced CF developers will spurn the notion of creating a production CF application with a back-end database in Access, there are far more developers who for one reason or another proceed to - or simply have to - do so.

The great Victorian novelist Charles Dickens wrote of the time period of the French Revolution: 'It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.' Or, put more sardonically, historic times are best appreciated by historians. In fact, times of great change are times of great dislocation. Our own historic time, the Age of the Internet, is no exception.

In the last issue of CFDJ (Vol. 1, issue 3) I spoke of the problem of complexity and how it threatens our best efforts at software development. With the need for software greatly increasing - especially Web applications - we need to find ways to manage development and tame the complexity monster.

A common function of ColdFusion applications is the query-by-example interface (QBE) that allows end users to select from a list of properties in order to find matching records. It generally involves creating a simple HTML form. Based on end user input into the form, you construct and execute a SQL query on an action page, displaying the results to the user.

Online stores are the new, next-generation, 'revolutionize the world as we see it today' way of doing business. In the context of business transactions, online stores use the global Internet to facilitate the purchase and sale of goods and services. The ability to support online sales is an essential component of the new e-business paradigm for Internet-based businesses today. Putting together an enterprise-level application for an Internet store involves design and integration of various technologies that play specific roles in a distributed computing environment. A distributed topology is a prerequisite for building such Internet applications since the Internet is inherently distributed in nature.

Anyone involved with meeting tight deadlines quickly realizes the power of ColdFusion. When my marketing organization asked me (Leon) to create a system to assist in revision control for new-product launch materials around the world, I wasn't given much time to do it. Getting large numbers of documents from diverse geographic locations to everyone involved in a product launch concerns any corporation whose business is global in nature. One of the main problems in developing such a system is the ramp-up time required to obtain the necessary tools and skills, particularly if this involves learning a new language.

You may not believe this, but you'll probably spend more time maintaining your ColdFusion application once it goes into production than you spent developing it in the first place. Among IT professionals it's well known that the effort required to support applications over time is significantly larger than the effort required to build them. Applications are like children: the effort and dollars required to bring them into the world are sizable, but once they're here you'll support them for years. Thus it behooves you to take measures to minimize the effort required to maintain your applications. But how do you do this? One of the most effective solutions is to develop standard techniques and approaches for handling similar problems.

As a reader of CFDJ, you're probably an experienced programmer. But what exactly is it that you do? What is programming? Bruce Eckel, in his excellent book Thinking in Java, offers this answer: 'At one level, all of programming is about managing complexity.' For many of us this answer resonates deeply. Arguments about which language is 'best' miss the point - that programmers write programs, not benchmarks. And in the real world, the greatest challenge isn't to shave a few machine cycles off accomplishing a discrete task, but to build software that empowers users to do their work and (we hope) delights them in the process. Unfortunately, in this mission we have a foe.

Less than a year ago many corporations' vision of the Internet was confined to marketing and advertising. Today, with the dramatic increase of intranets and extranets, developers are being asked to extend the Web into a virtual, collaborative workspace. Many companies want to set up areas of their network as a secure 'members only' area. The uses for such an area are extensive and include:

For many of us, the necessity of moving away from Access is a forced decision. There are a variety of reasons why this may happen. The path from Access to Microsoft SQL Server is a common one. In fact, Microsoft created a special tool - the upsize wizard - just for this reason. But if running the upsize wizard was all you needed to do, this would be a short article.

Have you ever been off on a trip, away from your home or office computer, and wanted (no, needed!) to check your e-mail? Or have you ever been stuck at a location where firewalls or other network limitations prevented you from accessing your mail or sending mail to others?

This article is the first in a series of three focused on using ColdFusion to replicate client/server application functionality across an intranet, extranet or the Web. It discusses replicating the look and 'feel' of a client/server application from a user interface perspective.

Recently Allaire released its newest version of ColdFusion, their powerful database integration tool. Part of the 4.0 release includes an addition to the Allaire lineup - the Enterprise version. This release hit the public later than planned, but was worth the wait. As I've been involved in this release since its alpha builds, I can attest to the fact that the development team took their time and listened to their control group of testers.

ColdFusion is basically a language that acts as an intermediary between databases and the exciting World Wide Web. As such, it has the marvelous ability to retrieve data from databases (or 'datasources,' as they are defined) and place it on the page in whatever form the developer wishes, whether just a list of clients, a current menu for a restaurant or major applications such as a hotel booking system.

There's little disputing the pace at which the Web has evolved over the past several years. Fueled by graphical interfaces to a suite of early text-based protocols, the leap into the Internet marketplace by providers of previously proprietary content systems and the plunge in street prices of personal computers, growth of the Internet - most notably the World Wide Web - continues at a torrid pace. In conjunction with the sheer growth has been the evolution of the Web from a place to browse information to a real infrastructure for the development of sophisticated applications.