Over the past year the Dreamweaver product design and development team have been out on the road talking to Web designers and developers (Web pros) about the prospect of using AJAX to build more engaging and interactive Web pages and applications. While many Web pros were excited by wh...

AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is nothing new. The technologies behind AJAX have been around for quite a while. Jesse James Garrett just gave the amalgamation of XML, DOM, and JavaScript a catchy new name. Many CF developers hear buzzwords like AJAX and Web 2.0 and simply tune ...

This is a feature first demonstrated in CT yesterday, a new tag in Scorpio named which does just that, it returns information about databases (and data sources, and tables, and columns, and stored procedures, and more). This first code snippet shows how to obtain a list of tables in a ...

As both a .NET programmer and ColdFusion developer, I always wondered how I could leverage the world of .NET in ColdFusion. Both platforms come with powerful features and using them together might be a wonderful friendship, if one could only make them cooperate. There are two worlds ou...

When it comes to code, less is more. Or to be more precise, less is better. How do you write less code and still write enough code to make your applications function as required? One way is to reuse code: write code once, use that code many times. If the words 'code reuse' evoke though...

For Web developers, form validation is a basic task, and yet one that presents some interesting challenges. Even discounting security issues such as SQL injection attacks and cross-site scripting (XSS), form validation is a critical step in your error handling strategy.

Gateways; you've heard about them. You've read the hype. You've probably created one or two. You've seen applications do wonderful things with them. There have been articles written about them. Don't be fooled. Not everything is always the way it seems. There's a dark side to the gatew...

Many times object-oriented programming (OOP) is billed as the end-all solution to cure the spaghetti code that can come from procedural style applications. After all, you just have to stuff your logic code into a component (big OOP buzzword - encapsulation), and now your code is instan...

One of the Scorpio features that we've been demoing to wide acclaim, is the increased control and flexibility in managing ColdFusion Administrator Access and RDS access. In ColdFusion today, there is a single password for each of these features, and a user with the Administrator passwo...

Yes, you read the title correctly: 'Scorpio,' the highly anticipated eighth major release of ColdFusion is coming soon to a town near you. Even before the release of the highly successful ColdFusion MX 7 two years ago, the ColdFusion team was already hard at work scheming, experimentin...

At one of the usergroup sessions this week someone asked if there was a way to get file information (size, date time, etc.) easily using a function. I said they should use, but afterwards remembered that we did indeed add a new function to Scorpio called GetFileInfo() which returns a s...

I've written in the past about using DataMgr to make sure that the tables and columns you need exist. I have been asked a few times this week about making sure that those newly created tables are automatically loaded with data. If you don't know how to have DataMgr create the tables a...

I realize that DataMgr 2.0 hasn't been out long, but I thought of a few features that I wanted near the end of the 2.0 development cycle. Since they required a fair bit of extra effort, I thought it best to hold them over for a '2.1' release. Although I have been given some good ideas...

'Don't talk to strangers' may sound like the advice your mother used to give you as a child, but as is so often the case, mother knows best. As we'll soon see, 'don't talk to strangers' or 'only talk to your friends' is advice that can apply to programming as well. In programming terms...

I am back from cf.Objective and I finally have a second to write about it. I actually tried to write a review of my whole experience, but that ended up being pretty long, so I decided just to hit some of the highlights. First off, the presentations were all great and I learned a lot. ...

One of the many features available in Flex 2.0 is a ResourceBundle class, which allows for a standardized approach for internationalizing applications. Many recent projects of mine have required that applications be built that can easily be ported to other languages. Traditionally, I'...

Adobe senior product manager Craig Barberick told SYS-CON's Web Developer's & Designer's Journal that 'this is really an extension of the Flash Video ecosystem. Up to this point, we did not have a tool that allows Flash Video players to play on their desktops or offline. (With the Adob...

Several months ago I posted some articles on my blog about Flex 2 components and accessing/modifying their BitmapData. In one example, I sent the BitmapData to the server and saved it as a JPG file, and I've been asked numerous times since... 'How did you do that?' It's surprisingly ea...

JavaOne starts next week, and most of the Java developers will be watching closely what's new and exciting will be announced in the tried, true and aging Java. But my today's column is about books that will be sold at JavaOne. Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex & Java. We spent...

A student recently asked me what he could do to further his career, and inquired as to how I got to the point I am at on my own. This is a subject generally reserved for informal chit-chat among developers at conference social events and after user group meetings, and is one that is ve...

CFDynamics, a ColdFusion Web hosting company, has announced their Spring Server Spectacular. The Spring Server Spectacular is an opportunity for the company to offer top-of-the-line dedicated servers at a discounted cost to encourage customers to expand their services. The Spring Serve...

Adobe has announced that a large portion of the next version of Flex goes open source under Mozilla Public License (MPL). Here's the partial list of what becomes open: mxml, compc, and ActionScript compiler, command line debugger FDB, Flex framework and RPC libraries and testing infras...

Most Flex developers have seen and used the [Bindable] tag but not many know what this tag does or even what it is. [Bindable] is what is known as a metadata tag. Metadata tags are special tags that are inserted in your source code that give the compiler information on how to compile t...

Development and Design are two sides of the same coin in the digital age, and it is very nice to consider in any case how well these two formerly separate worlds have come together over the past two decades. Adobe was at the forefront from the beginning, with its Postscript Fonts. Base...

In my previous article I wrote about Data Access Objects. Data Access Objects, or DAOs for short, are a way to separate your insert, select, delete, and update queries from other business logic. This lets you switch from one data storage mechanism to another easily. Whenever people tal...

Now there is simply no excuse for accidentally buying a DVD I already own. I will soon be entering my entire collection of DVDs into this new Flex 2 DVD library. From now on, I plan to check this library before heading out to the video store. For the final online version of this Web ap...

Small business owners and Web designers alike will benefit from eCart's complete integration into the Adobe platform through Dreamweaver and over-arching ease-of-use. Unlike hosted eCommerce solutions, eCart is easily incorporated into existing site designs for an unmatched personalize...

Already, even in pre-release, Adobe's Spry seemed to catch the imagination of many Web professionals wrestling with how to integrate new AJAX frameworks into existing workflows. Created with designers in mind, Spry uses regular HTML tags, CSS, and JavaScript, and is easy to use - boili...

Total Training(TM), Inc., a pioneer in engaging and innovative video-based training, today announced five new DVD-ROM based training series: Total Training for Adobe(R) Photoshop(R) CS3 Extended: Essentials, Total Training for Adobe Illustrator(R) CS3: Essentials, Total Training for Ad...

A couple of weeks ago I stopped by at our publisher's offices (SYS-CON Media) and they showed me our Flex book with the correct cover, but all pages were blank. Yesterday, I've got an email from them with the words, 'Yakov your book is ready, stop by and pick it up'. The guys from prod...

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq: ADBE) today announced that the first public alpha version of Apollo is now available for developers on Adobe Labs. Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system application runtime that allows web developers to leverage their existing skills i...

Paravue(R) Inc., today announced Turbo Mask(TM), an image masking tool designed for graphic and web designers, photographers, and motion graphic artists that work with Adobe Photoshop CS and Photoshop CS Extended. Most image masking tools rely on skill to get the desired results. Turbo...

Since our last issue, several events have transpired that have significant impact for ColdFusion developers. I have been keeping my eye on several trends and have been evaluating whether or not they deserve focus in ColdFusion Developer's Journal. I've begun blogging about these trends...

ColdFusion, BlueDragon, Coral Web Builder, IgniteFusion, and Railo. All are CFML engines, but none of them support the same implementation of CFML as each other. This, in the long run, is not a good thing. Up front, I am not opposed to other CFML engines. Yes, I use only ColdFusion in...

cf.Objective() has released a Manager's Guide in PDF format for those managers who are not yet sure that they should send their developers to cf.Objective().

Adobe Systems Incorporated has announced the Adobe Creative Suite 3 product line, an offering of tightly integrated design and development tools for every creative workflow. Adobe?s new Creative Suite 3 line-up unites the best of Adobe and Macromedia product innovation to provide desig...

'It takes a village,' said Cynergy VP Dave Wolf this morning at AJAXWorld 2007 East, 'to build an engineering team capable of writing world-class Rich Internet Applications.' You cannot create the right atmosphere in a 'cubicle farm,' he contends. And Cynergy walks the talk, and walks ...

Can a Flex programmatic skin draw text? The short answer is, yes! The longer answer is, it's a little tricky. Let me break it down. First of all, in Flash, the only way to draw text is with a TextField. Flex can't do anything about that, so any Flex class that wants to draw text has to...

You have to love a software product that makes developers, even relatively inexperienced ones, productive quickly and empowers them to do seemingly impossible things. The more I work with and learn about ColdFusion the more it seems as if there are no limits to what can be done with it...

This article describes a basic method for indexing and searching images and digital photographs based on color using ColdFusion and CFImageHistogram (www.leavethatthingalone.com/projects/cfhistogram/). This method indexes and searches color in images quickly using ColdFusion.