Flex is one of the greatest technologies around. Combine it with ColdFusion and it just gets better. Adobe has made it possible to use Flex 2 efficiently with ColdFusion and easily get data across the server to a Flex front-end.

One task that arises again and again in ColdFusion application development is the need for users to be able to upload multiple files to the Web Server. Back in the stone ages (and by this I mean more than a couple of years ago) we had a limited set of options to be able to do this. Usu...

Errors and bugs: they happen in all code, mostly in development but in production too and perhaps more easily in CFML than in compiled languages. There are several features to help better handle, debug, and test for them, and this article will focus on those.

I just transitioned my blog in two huge ways: (a) I reassigned it to a different domain name, and (b) I changed the blogging engine I was using, which incidentally used a file organization structure that's incompatible with my new engine.

In the 21st century business environment, companies live and die by their fat and bogus enterprise applications. New mega-industry groups have been created not only to develop these applications, but deploy, support, and train.

Two of the most common debugging tasks are displaying variables and identifying bottlenecks. For years I relied on CFDUMP and CFABORT to display variables and getTickCount() to calculate processing time and identify slow-running code.

I last attended CFUnited in 2003 when it was called CFUN-03 and it was a far smaller, less professional conference. At the time, there were around 300-350 attendees and the conference was just passing the point in which it felt like a small, developer-organized affair. This year, it ha...

When ColdFusion Developer's Journal was launched eight years ago, it was the first printed periodical exclusively by and for ColdFusion developers. Over the years there have been many changes in format, authors, and publishing/editorial staff. One thing has remained constant, however: ...

With all the noise the Web 2.0 revolutionaries are making, it's easy to ignore another-this time velvet-revolution. E-commerce 2.0 is coming into maturity and getting ready to relieve its now 10+ year old predecessor. It's about time.

I gotta say, I had a lot of fun at the Real-World Flex Seminar SYS-CON put together. Things went, for me, really smoothly. Registration, getting Internet at the booth, and hooking up with my team. Free coffee was readily available, so I was set.

Intergral announces the immediate release of FusionReactor 2.0. FusionReactor is an add-on to Adobe's ColdFusion MX server as well as all other popular J2EE servers such as JBoss and Tomcat. FusionReactor helps to increase application availability and reduce response times by examining...

We are finishing writing our book on RIA with Flex and Java , and the last chapter is called 'Integration with External Applications'. It's sixty five pages of some advanced read. After writing this chapter one of us suggested that it would be easier to re-write Excel from scratch. It...

As a Boston Red Sox fan in New York City, I'm no stranger to being outnumbered, or in the minority opinion. Following this theme, I'll be presenting about Adobe Flex 2.0 at the upcoming AJAXWorld conference October 2nd-4th in Santa Clara. It seems I'll be 1 of only a few speakers givi...

At the first-ever 'Real-World Flex' One-Day Seminar last month, Luis Polanco - Adobe Senior Product Manager - really piqued everyone's interest with his introduction to Apollo: Adobe's Next Generation Client. Although people came to this Flex Seminar already quite aware of what Flex is...

Christophe Coenraets chairs and Mike Nimer, James Ward, Luis Polanco, Andrew Oliver, Mansour Raad, Boris Kabisher and Manish Jiandani will all be giving sessions when the one-day Flex Track kicks off next month at AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2006 in the Santa Clara Convention Center, S...

During a recent conversation between Mike Britton, Brian Kotek, and myself, we were discussing the features that we'd like to see in ColdFusion 8. (A podcast of this discussion can be found at helmsandpeters.com.) I'd like to share with you some thoughts on the topic. Much that follows...

Way back when ColdFusion 4.5 was released, the concept of structures (associative arrays to some of you) was introduced. Never one to be receptive to change - not to mention having no background in other programming languages - I shunned structures for the most part and kept on my merr...

Two months ago I put together an article about building an RSS aggregator (CFDJ, Vol. 8, issue 5). Before reading this you might want to refresh your mind on the original article. Go over here - http://coldfusion.sys-con.com/read/235976.htm - to read it.

I remember sitting at a ColdFusion conferences (probably CFUN) back when CFMX 7 was still in its pre-beta stage and watching as Ben Forta revealed some of the new features. There was a mixed reaction when he talked about event gateways.

When you set out to write your first Flex application you'll have to choose what tool you'll use to write it with. Currently the most popular tool to use is the free Eclipse IDE. If you don't have Eclipse installed go to http://www.eclipse.org/ to install it. You'll need to install Ecl...

As ColdFusion programmers or system administrators, there are times when we go through the CF Admin interface to try and optimize the server. A particular section located within the standalone version of the ColdFusion Administrator is simply called Java and JVM. When you reach this se...

Recently I worked on a project using Flex to create a front-end for Java-based Web Services. I ran into a favorite in the Java world: Transfer Objects/Value Objects. Early in the project, I was a bit skeptical of the transfer object model but, later on, I came to respect the value that...

How does a bank justify using over $200 million in shareholder funds to its shareholders? That's the million-dollar question that CEOs of banks in Nigeria were trying to answer in the aftermath of the forced capitalization imposed on them by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).

Let's face it, the web is a frequently changing landscape - more so now than it has been since its inception. When the term 'Web 2.0' first set the industry on fire, I have to admit, I was not terribly excited.

Marcel Boucher is the Product Manager in the Technical Marketing Team for the Adobe Enterprise and Developer Business Unit (whatever that means!). In practice, he's a hardcore techie who has been with Adobe for a decade or so, has been involved with LiveCycle for years, is a Java-head ...

It's been more than half a year now since Macromedia and Adobe combined, and during this time we've been hard at work leveraging the strengths of each of these companies to forge the new Adobe. One of Macromedia's greatest strengths was its user community and the resultant relationship...

With the proliferation of many respected developers in the ColdFusion community sharing their experiences and knowledge by blogging, we've seen quite a huge jump in both information sharing as well as the discussion of best practices in software development.

In just a few years long-distance learning, or Electronic Learning (e-learning), has become a reality. The problem with distance and having to be in a certain place at a certain time has been eliminated with the use of the personal computer and the Web.

'If we can imagine it, we can now build it.' That, in a single sentence, is what - according to Dave Wolf, VP of Consulting at Cynergy Systems - characterizes the disruptive moment of opportunity that Flex has arrived right in the middle of. In his session, intriguingly titled 'Front t...

In this tutorial, you will learn how to build a completely functional pop-up menu using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) without knowing how to write any code at all! Below is an example of such a menu;

Registration opened yesterday - at the 'Real-World Flex' One-Day Seminar being held by SYS-CON Events - for the New York Flex User Group. The group will serve as a central meeting place to exchange ideas, solutions and network with other Flex developers.

With its free features, such as the Flex SDK, Flex 2 uses Adobe's ubiquitous Flash Player as its runtime, which is why Adobe can confidently predict millions of users and 1,000,000 developers. That, according to Flex Product Manager Eric Anderson, is the key to understanding the potent...

The historic Grand Ballroom of The Roosevelt Hotel in midtown Manhattan again looks fantastic and Adobe's Dave Mendels (pictured) is keynoting which is certain to be a huge hit with the audience because he'll incorporate live demos etc.

Creating a user interface is just like making a floor plan. You have your 'room,' which is the screen, and you have the 'furniture,' which is your user interface elements. This article describes many of the ways to position those elements on the screen using XML tags (which we call MXM...

It seems that not a week goes by without another story of a major organization inadvertently leaking private data. In one recent week, representatives of a Rhode Island government agency reported that tens of thousands of credit card transactions on a government-run site had been stole...

The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the enterprise applications that I developed using the ColdFusion MX 7.1 product suite. Currently I am the only ColdFusion developer on contract at the Ft. Stewart Department of Information Management (DOIM). Ft. Stewart, the lar...

If you've been to Adobe Labs lately or keep up with the blogosphere you've probably heard the buzz about Spry. It's a new AJAX framework from Adobe. It lets designers build rich Internet applications with little or no programming. The Adobe-Macromedia combine has been pushing RIAs for ...

I was really busy for several weeks prior to CFUnited and am back on the road again... but there's a silver lining. I'm basically done with my first round of SAM docs and I will be making those available very soon; I have the code and stories/advice to post as well - I just haven't had...

Adobe's new 'Apollo' product and strategy will be the focus of a session to be presented by Luis Polanco at the Real-World Flex Seminar, to be produced by SYS-CON Events at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York on August 14. The Apollo session is just one of a diverse, comprehensive Flex pro...

For those of who know of Flex 2, Adobe's tool for programmers to create Rich Internet Applications, it has this one feature that sets it apart from Flash, and incidentally, its brother Spry shares. It allows you to put a variable surrounded by curly brackets, and at runtime, anytime th...