This one has bugged me for a long time. ColdFusion allows you to build SQL statements dynamically (using variables, expressions, conditions, and more), but have you ever wanted to know exactly what that final generated SQL was? ColdFusion obviously knows what it is, and if you have debugging turned...
Arguments (parameters) passed to (for UDFs and CFC methods) may be validated using the TYPE attribute which takes a data type as a value. One important type that is missing in CFMX is XML, and we plan to fix this by supporting TYPE="xml" in Blackstone. Oh, and of course itself supports...
Steve Erat posted some important messages pertaining to server stability and troubleshooting on cf-talk, and had the good sense to post the comments to his blog too. See http://www.talkingtree.com/blog/index.cfm?mode=entry&entry=6B5BD222-45A6-2844-74F691ACD0082042 and...
is used to enumerate the variables used in your code, ensuring that they exist, optionally setting default values if they do not, and possibly also validating data types. Placing a series of tags at the start of a page makes it easier to ensure that required variables exist, and that they are of...
Government Computer News (GCN) is running a story about City of Davis, California, using ColdFusion. As per the story, ColdFusion has been used "for the past five years for its citizen-facing and intranet Web applications". Over 25,000 pages, and "most of the stuff that's displayed is database...
Dreamweaver supports the creation and use of ColdFusion Recordsets (essentially tags), listing returned columns as bindings which can subsequently be used in output code. Dreamweaver has been able to do this for a while, generating a single .cfm page containing both the query and the output code....
Washington Technology is running a piece today by S. Michael Gallagher about the need for rapid application development tools. He states that "While Web-based applications solved the problem of how to get applications to users and centrally maintain them, they presented new technical challenges for...
One of my pet peeves with some CFML tags is that they hardcode return value structure names. For example, creates a structure named CFFILE that contains the results of the file operation. And many others tags work this way too. What bugs me about this is that if you need to use a tag multiple times...
The new application event mechanism (planned for Blackstone) provides powerful new functionality to ColdFusion developers. Lots of you have asked about this feature since it was first mentioned in the MAX ColdFusion BOF (and then blogged in my BOF report), and so a basic overview is in order. Here...
The MX Europe site (http://mxeurope.org/) posted this message today: "Regretfully, due to unforeseen problems securing sponsorship, the MX Europe 2005 conference has been cancelled, and therefore postponed until further notice. We thank everyone who showed support for their efforts and hope to be...