ColdFusion Studio's design mode has gotten a rather bad reputation, and one it really does not deserve. Design mode works well as long as it's intent and limitations are understood. Design mode was never intended for use on existing CFM pages, it was intended to be used primarily for initial page...
The less hardcoded your application is, the easier it'll be to reuse, maintain, and deploy. For example, never specify an actual ODBC datasource name in the DATASOURCE attribute - instead define a variable (perhaps in APPLICATION.CFM) which contains the datasource name, and pass that variable to...
Every page on your site should be dynamically generated, but you probably have many pages that change infrequently and would be served quicker if they did not include run-time CF processing. In situations like this consider using the tag which can cache dynamically generated output and serve it...
Using native database drivers? Then you probably have already discovered that you cannot use the ODBC date functions (like CreateODBCDate() and CreateODBCDateTime()). To format dates for native database driver use you must use the DateFormat() and TimeFormat() functions to manually format the date...
ColdFusion features a "trusted cache" mode whereby cached p-code pages are assumed to always be current and checks for newer CFM files are not made. Turning on this option can improve performance slightly, but there is an even more important benefit - with trusted cache enabled developers will not...
ColdFusion developers are familiar with the debug output that can be appended to processed pages. But many don't know that CF4.5 can also show the time to process the page broken down by all the individual pages that were used to compose the final page. This feature is called "Detail View" and it...
ColdFusion caches p-code versions of your CFM files to improve performance. Ideally, the p-code cache should be big enough to contain every single CFM file. While there is no guaranteed formula that you can use to determine what the exact size should be, a good rule of thumb is to allow at least...
ColdFusion 4 introduced a new administrative option called "Enforce Strict Attribute Validation". When enabled ColdFusion can process requests a bit quicker, but in doing so is much stricter in initial attribute validation. Enabling this option on existing servers (with older apps) is risky, you...
Locking is important, and must be used in conjunction with shared code or data. But don't overlock your code - long blocks of unnecessarily locked code will negatively impact application performance. Use locking where needed, but don't overuse it. (Applies to: ColdFusion 4 (or later))
"Nesting" refers to the use of tags within tags - for example, statements within statements, or statements within statements. There are valid reasons to nest your code, but avoid nesting too deeply. Nesting impacts application performance - but worse, it also tends to make your code less...