As the owner and operator of a large entertainment site (nyrock.com), I'm often faced with this problem - my ad broker is unable to sell advertising for a small but steady number of pages.

You've seen it. You've probably done it, too. I'm talking about those Web sites that have a Contact Us link at the bottom of the page with something similar to mailto:us@company.com in the HREF attribute. They're kind of nice…

In the June issue of ColdFusion Developer's Journal (Vol. 1, issue 3), I hinted there might be a way to create subforms using inline frames. This article shows how - using a combination of inline frames, JavaScript, WDDX and, of course, CF.

Welcome to the first of several articles that focuses on the approach rather than the coding of ColdFusion applications. Before you flip to the next article, we encourage you to read on - this topic doesn't have to be dull...instead, it's our intent to help serious ColdFusion developers, like yourself, become more effective at building world-class Web-based applications.

Shockwave Flash is all over the Web. Its eye-catching, interactive animations have found a place on today's Web, and most Web firms use both Flash and its bigger brother on both their own and their clients' Web sites.

My company developed and now maintains an application in ColdFusion that tracks samples from collection to final payment. These samples are used to verify environmental quality and identify hazards on and around a major nuclear facility. If you have any knowledge of history, I'm sure that you would recognize the significance of the Oak Ridge Reservation.

In my 13 years of software development I haven't seen a technology or platform as exciting as the Web. Now we can create truly global applications that can run from any browser anywhere in the world. With this awesome power and reach come security issues. The first question clients ask is, 'If we put our data on the Internet, will it be safe?' Thanks to the security features inherent in ColdFusion, we can answer with a confident 'Yes!' Given the priority placed on security, when you sit down to write an application your first task should be to establish a security framework.

Recently, we've seen a dramatic increase in object-oriented programming languages. The ability to develop a solid piece of code and then reuse it has become the foundation for modern application development. Web applications suffer from a lack of state and continuity. ColdFusion helps developers address both these issues. However, there's no provision for functions or subroutines when building a ColdFusion page. The use of custom tags helps address the issue, but creating functionality modules or libraries is something that has challenged ColdFusion developers since its inception.

Welcome to the first edition of . The concept behind this article is to show you some techniques of ColdFusion by focusing on a small group of CF tags or functions, usually just one or two. After each article, you'll have another trick to add to your bag. Not cheap tricks, mind you, but techniques that help you solve common business requirements for Web sites. Sounds cool, doesn't it? Let's dispense with the rhetoric and get to work.

You're familiar with the rudiments of ColdFusion development. You know how to set and read local, session and client variables. You have input, updated and deleted data from a database. You've created drill-down 'Master/Detail' templates by passing values in a URL string and you've created dynamic, data-driven SELECT boxes. Your forms look spiffy and everything is working fine, just like it did with Microsoft Access...well, almost.

'Load. Display. Click. Load. Display. Click.' Sound like a familiar scenario? If you've been doing any kind of Web development you already know that the Web is a request-based environment. Nothing happens unless you're interacting with the Web server and nothing happens unless the Web server sends something back. This is especially true if you're building the data-driven applications that ColdFusion is famous for.

When choosing the tools for new projects, I must confess that my first inclination usually tends toward a CGI solution. For what has now become several years, I've extolled many of the virtues of CGI. No one is going to argue the sheer numbers. There are just plain more free and low-cost CGI scripts available to do real work than there are ColdFusion templates. The Tag Gallery is one of my favorite haunts, but let's face it: a lot of the free things in CGI-land are complete programs.

ColdFusion is, arguably, the preeminent database middleware for NT-based Web sites. Somewhere around version 3.1 Allaire began calling their product an Application Server, implying it was more than middleware. In fact, ColdFusion 3.1 has a wealth of tags that are not related to database access. In addition, it provides a function library rich enough to remind veteran C programmers of the Standard Library – in design and intention at least, if not quite in breadth and depth.

Setting a cookie on your visitor's computer makes it easier for you to have a fully functional Web site. Using a cookie, you can keep track of your users' visits, their shopping cart and anything you care to record. With server-side programming (read 'ColdFusion') you can customize pages and create order forms – and anything else you care to program. Because there is still resistance to cookies on the part of some Web users, the methods I'll describe are calculated to keep the cookie out of the user's face as much as possible.

Using forms is second nature for most ColdFusion developers. It's the method used to communicate information from the Web to back-end systems and databases. Forms are frequently created from a fixed set of information, as is dictated by functional requirements and business rules.