Web Page Performance was one of the big topics at the Ajax Experience in Boston this week. Steve Souders - author of High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites - talked about the top things to look into when analyzing web page performance.

There are a couple of things to note before we begin. First, HTTP Compression is a great way to speed up your Website and lower bandwidth utilization all at the same time. In this example, your ColdFusion server (6.1 and above) will encode CFML output using GZIP and have the browser de...

One of the biggest problems developers face everyday is moving a project along and producing solid code without cutting corners. This typically means a lot of copying, pasting, searching and replacing, and a whole lot of manual editing. At every point the potential for error increases....

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...

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).

This article describes the differences between CVS and Subversion and explains how to install Subversion and migrate an existing CVS repository. It also describes how to configure Subversion in a Windows environment, explains a basic Subversion project structure, and introduces the mai...

Back in the November 2005 issue of CFDJ, we looked at how to create a live map of your Web site visitors using Google Maps and other freely available services.

With ColdFusion MX 7, you can use subreports to show more detailed reporting. A subreport is simply a report embedded or nested inside another report. I refer to the report that contains the subreport as the main report from this point forward. The subreport and main report are typical...

Recently, during a Hal Helms training session, I started to look for ways to automate some of the drudgery of my upcoming application. After Hal talked about mindmaps, he began creating the four circuits and perhaps a dozen fuse files for the application. In 45 minutes, he created the ...

Debugging code is one of those tasks that we hate because it means that something is wrong in the code . Previous versions of ColdFusion have provided tools to assist us in finding problems with our code, but CFMX7 has introduced some new tools and features that make some of our old de...

Several years ago I reviewed DRIA - 'Developing Rich Internet Applications.' At the time it was the first official Macromedia Curriculum course to teach Rich Internet Application development. I thought I'd do a follow-up on that, as things have changed in the past couple of years.

When we last left our two intrepid heroes they had just shown us how to create and run our first CFEverywhere application (including installing and configuring its requisite CFML server, application server, and Web server).

Microsoft and handset manufacturer Flextronics have created a smart phone that can be brought to market very quickly and at a low price.

Think about the last time you bought a car. Did you walk around the vehicle, look under the hood and sit in the driver's seat to get a feel for it? You probably took it for a test-drive before making the final decision.

A two-part series looks at techniques for shifting workload away from the application server and onto the database by using 'extra' database tables. It's just an average search - three full text indexes, ten subselects on many-to-many joins, and a bit of Pythagoras - to find results wi...

Here is the full text of the 'Appeal to the EU Council' made yesterday by Linus Torvalds, Michael Widenius, and Rasmus Lerdorf, in an attempt to persuade the European Union to exclude software from patentability and thereby, as they put it, 'gain a major competitive advantage in the in...

A two-part series looks at techniques for shifting workload away from the application server onto the database by using 'extra' database tables. Most ColdFusion programmers understand that when it comes to bulk inserting into a database, it isn't good practice to loop over text files o...

One of the persistent headaches of Web application development is the developer's inability to control the sequence in which application 'pages' are executed. The back button, refresh, bookmarks, double-clicks, and browsers' inconsistent page-caching behavior all create special problem...

As a ColdFusion developer, you are no doubt frequently asked for Web-based reports on data such as sales, site hits, project metrics, and other important business information. Users often want features such as the ability to filter or sort by any column, to drill down into the data, or...

A big challenge when building Web applications is dealing with scalability and performance. Sometimes these issues are forgotten until after the application is being used by the public and under heavy load. Performance tuning usually happens as an afterthought when all the code is alre...

Why reinvent the wheel when you can easily run your CFML applications on any J2EE server? If your team is considering or being forced to move to J2EE (WebLogic, WebSphere, JBoss, Tomcat, etc.), it may be helpful to know that you don't have to throw away or even rewrite your CFML applic...

Collaborative filtering on the Web has existed for a long time, dating all the way back to the original incarnations of sites like CDNow and Amazon.com. Recommendation systems are a powerful tool for businesses to extract additional value from their e-commerce and customer databases. T...

The proximity principle holds that the best place to deal with something is as close to that something as possible. Applied to the waste industry, it yields policies that promote the management of waste as close to its point of production as possible. The idea is that transporting wast...