By Simon Horwith  This month, I am pleased to announce that Kevin Kazmierczak is the winner of the contest to develop a polling/survey application. His submission included a simple set-up and script for creating and populating the database (a straight-forward read me file makes installation easy), a sl... Jun. 16, 2005 09:15 AM EDT Reads: 16,514 |
By Simon Horwith  I'm writing this editorial on the exact day that ColdFusion 1.0 was released back in 1995. Looking back over the server's evolution, it's really come a long way from its start as a CGI application (anyone remember DBML?). Though the server has really grown substantially, the things t... Jun. 16, 2005 09:00 AM EDT Reads: 17,947 |
By Simon Horwith  Before describing this month's prize and contest, I would like to thank everyone for their submissions to our first contest (CFDJ vol. 7 issue 3). That contest objective was to modify Ray Camden's blog in any way you choose, and you had to take advantage of at least one new feature in ... May. 18, 2005 12:00 PM EDT Reads: 15,464 |
By Simon Horwith At the time of this writing, Adobe has recently announced its plan to acquire Macromedia in an all-stock trade worth billions ($3.4 billion was the estimate at the time of the announcement). The ColdFusion development community has been abuzz with speculation about how this will affect... May. 18, 2005 12:00 PM EDT Reads: 14,040 |
By Simon Horwith The topic of focus for this month's issue is 'architecture.' Software architecture is the study and practice of the art of planning and developing applications, and it also happens to be my favorite topic and area of expertise. It is the cornerstone of everything we do, and developers ... Apr. 13, 2005 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 15,473 |
By Simon Horwith At the time of this writing, the submission deadline for last month's contest ('Developer's Challenge #1: Create a Blog, Win ColdFusion MX 7') is still pending, so the winning entry will be announced next month. In the meantime, another month means another contest. . . Apr. 13, 2005 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 14,009 |
By Simon Horwith Novice programmers often ask for advice about the best way to learn ColdFusion. Fortunately for them, there is a wealth of curricula, web sites, knowledge bases, books, tutorials, and other materials to help a budding young developer blossom into a decent ColdFusion developer. Apr. 13, 2005 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 11,772 |
By Simon Horwith This is the first instalment of a new column that is designed to challenge developers, show-off their solutions, and give away some cool prizes in the process. Mar. 16, 2005 12:00 AM EST Reads: 13,032 Replies: 1 |
By Simon Horwith It's finally here! ColdFusion MX 7 is the most customer driven release of ColdFusion to date - new features for delivering printable content in the form of portable (FlashPaper or PDF) documents or reports, an event gateway that allows the server to communicate with any system or devic... Mar. 15, 2005 12:00 AM EST Reads: 12,587 |
By Simon Horwith I want to take this opportunity to announce a new service to the development community - 'blog-n-play.' Blog-n-play is a Web site launched by SYS-CON that allows anyone who'd like, to create his or her own blog - and it's free. Your blog is associated with one of the SYS-CON publicatio... Feb. 11, 2005 12:00 AM EST Reads: 18,003 Replies: 1 |
By Simon Horwith ColdFusion Developer's Journal editor-in-chief Simon Horwith writes: 'It's finally here! ColdFusion MX 7 was released about an hour prior to this writing. This release is the most customer driven release of ColdFusion to date.' Feb. 7, 2005 12:00 AM EST Reads: 26,712 Replies: 2 |
By Simon Horwith Recently, a client approached me about adding a new requirement to their software - a hybrid content-management application written in ColdFusion, Java, and Flash. The desired new requirement was the ability to create dynamic Gantt charts on various pages in the Web application. Jan. 18, 2005 12:00 AM EST Reads: 22,125 Replies: 1 |
By Simon Horwith For this month's installment, I thought I'd return the Community column to its original roots ('Tales From the List') and focus on a recent thread in the CFDJ List. Brian Simpson wrote to the List posing the following problem: 'How do I round to the nearest 'x'?' Specifically, Brian ha... Jan. 18, 2005 12:00 AM EST Reads: 8,244 |
By Simon Horwith For several months I've been promising there would be changes in CFDJ in the New Year. Change in the form of offering deep-focused issues. Change in the form of new regular and semi-regular columns. Well, the time has finally come. This month we are focusing on presenting data. A large... Jan. 18, 2005 12:00 AM EST Reads: 15,843 |
By Simon Horwith I'll be honest - I wasn't terribly thrilled with the amount of coverage given to the new features in Blackstone. Don't get me wrong, between a full-day of hands-on sessions, sneak peeks, a couple of features shown off in the keynotes, and a 'Birds of a Feather' one evening, there was p... Dec. 14, 2004 12:00 AM EST Reads: 10,668 |
By Simon Horwith As I write this, I am beginning to box up my belongings and prepare for another move across the Atlantic. I've accepted the position of CIO at AboutWeb - a staff augmentation and software development company based out of Washington, DC. I'm moving back into one of the richest ColdFusio... Dec. 14, 2004 12:00 AM EST Reads: 14,730 |
By Simon Horwith I've just returned to London from MAX 2004...what a conference! The announcement of the availability of Flex 1.5; cool demos of Blackstone, Flex, Flash on mobile devices; and a sneak peek at what's in Flash 8 were among the more notable announcements and content at this year's conferen... Nov. 24, 2004 12:00 AM EST Reads: 15,219 Replies: 1 |
By Simon Horwith At MAX I had the pleasure of sitting around a private table with several members of the Blackstone Development Team to talk about the new features, the development community, and future ColdFusion releases after Blackstone. Nov. 24, 2004 12:00 AM EST Reads: 18,372 Replies: 2 |
By Simon Horwith Beginning with the release of ColdFusion MX, the ColdFusion Application Server now runs on top of an underlying Java engine. Java, as we all know, is an object-oriented language. However, the question of whether CFML is an object-oriented language has been under debate since the ColdFu... Oct. 20, 2004 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 18,006 |
By Simon Horwith Several conferences have been officially announced, most notably: MX Europe 2005 (www.mxeurope.org): Formerly known as 'CF-Europe' the conference now spans three days and includes Macromedia client and server technology session topics. It is the largest conference for Macromedia produc... Oct. 20, 2004 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 7,754 |
By Simon Horwith It's good to experiment - this holds true for any and every endeavor. Last month I tried something different with CFDJ; almost every article in the issue was about one topic - security. I've gotten a lot of feedback from readers and am happy to report that it was all very positive. Man... Oct. 20, 2004 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 14,525 |
By Simon Horwith This marks the first installment of a new monthly column, Community Focus, and the end of a long-running column, Tales from the List. Due to the rapid growth of ColdFusion community news and events and the growing popularity of blogs (Web logs) amongst ColdFusion developers, it no long... Sep. 15, 2004 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 9,520 |
By Simon Horwith Now that I've begun settling in to the role of editor-in-chief of CFDJ, I'm beginning to incorporate some ideas I have for the magazine. The first change you'll note this month is that Tales from the List is gone. That's not because I'm too lazy to both edit the magazine and write a mo... Sep. 15, 2004 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 13,568 |
By Simon Horwith When Robert Diamond asked me to take over his duties as editor-in-chief of ColdFusion Developer's Journal, my initial reaction was shock. Not so much because he'd asked me to do the job, but because his editorial would not be the first thing I'd see the next time I open a copy of CFDJ.... Aug. 13, 2004 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 13,599 Replies: 2 |
By Simon Horwith For whatever reason, there has been a recent increase in posts on the CFDJ List, dealing with looping in CFML. Throughout the month CFDJ members wrote inquiring about how to loop over variable scopes and other structures, lists, Excel spreadsheet data, XML data, and more! Aug. 13, 2004 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 11,452 |
By Simon Horwith Hopefully by now you've heard all about Flex, the most recent addition to the Macromedia server product family. Hot on the tail of its release, Macromedia Training has released 'Fast Track to Flex,' a new course that introduces developers to developing rich Internet applications (RIAs)... Jul. 14, 2004 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 15,460 Replies: 3 |
By Simon Horwith This month, rather than focusing on a more advanced or more obscure task, I'm going to talk about a task which I consider more fundamental - dynamic form variable names and their retrieval on the action page. It seems that not a month goes by without a post to the CFDJ List (or other k... Jul. 14, 2004 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 12,148 |
By Simon Horwith By now you've probably heard about Flex, Macromedia's most recent offering in their line of server-side products. What is Flex? How does it work? Is Flex a replacement for Flash or ColdFusion? Is it something you should be evaluating as a solution? What do you need to begin development... Jun. 22, 2004 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 16,636 Replies: 2 |
By Simon Horwith This month's Tales from the List is all about protecting resources. Specifically, it is about protecting image files. Evik James, a CFDJ-List regular, asked the List for advice on how to protect from 'hot-linking.' Apparently, one of his employer's competitors has been linking to image... Jun. 22, 2004 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 12,411 Replies: 1 |
By Simon Horwith No, this month's title is not an attempt to meet ColdFusion developers of the opposite sex - it's all about building applications that are aware of the people using them. May. 11, 2004 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 10,232 |
By Simon Horwith When Macromedia introduced Query of Queries functionality to the CFML language back in ColdFusion 5, its poor performance quickly became common knowledge. In fact, I personally feel that Query of Queries got a bad rap, and the stigma continues to this day. Mar. 9, 2004 12:00 AM EST Reads: 11,466 Replies: 2 |
By Simon Horwith The last year has shown that Web services are not just another passing fad and their promise of platform-independent distributed applications has been realized. Compared to other application server platforms, ColdFusion MX makes creating and consuming Web services easy. This session w... Feb. 26, 2004 12:00 AM EST Reads: 13,377 |
By Simon Horwith ColdFusion Developer's Journal has been in print for quite a long time... in fact it has now celebrated its fifth birthday. I haven't read every article published in every issue, but I've read a lot of them. One thing I've learned over the years is that the more confident you are that ... Feb. 25, 2004 12:00 AM EST Reads: 8,999 |
By Simon Horwith This month we're talking about Java, Web services, and 'things not CF' - topics that are fast becoming common subjects of discussion among CFers. I'm not going to focus on just one CFDJ List thread, but on several recent threads and examples that illustrate the trend, and a recent new ... Jan. 13, 2004 12:00 AM EST Reads: 10,960 |
By Simon Horwith For those of you who don't know who I am, let me begin by explaining that I am not a designer. I can't make pages or pictures pretty - heck, I haven't even figured out how to use some of the features in PC Paint yet. My expertise is in software architecture, programming, and business l... Jan. 5, 2004 12:00 AM EST Reads: 11,685 |
By Simon Horwith I am writing this month's column while sitting next to my wife Ayesha aboard Virgin Atlantic Flight 22 from Washington Dulles to London Heathrow, on my way home from attending Macromedia's MAX conference in Salt Lake City. In this month's column I will summarize my impression of what M... Dec. 9, 2003 12:00 AM EST Reads: 8,934 |
By Simon Horwith Yes, that's right, components have mommies and daddies. Well, not really, but that statement isn't too far from the truth. This article explains 'component.cfc', a hidden gem in the ColdFusion Component architecture that is part of ColdFusion MX. Nov. 11, 2003 11:07 AM EST Reads: 13,358 |
By Simon Horwith That's right, there's a whole lotta shaking going on - in the IT world, that is. Macromedia's Studio MX 2004 suite of products has now begun shipping, and the reviews are in! Nov. 11, 2003 10:44 AM EST Reads: 10,262 |
By Simon Horwith At the beginning of the third week of August, Mario Cilotta posted a thread to the CFDJ List asking for arguments in favor of upgrading from ColdFusion MX to ColdFusion MX 6.1. There are several reasons that I've chosen to focus this month's article on this thread. Oct. 15, 2003 04:33 PM EDT Reads: 8,812 |
By Simon Horwith Despite what the title of this month's article implies, this installment of Tales From the List is not about a CFDJ-List thread regarding the meaning of life. It's about something much more important: metadata. Sep. 11, 2003 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 11,203 Replies: 1 |
Simon Horwith is the CIO at AboutWeb, LLC, a Washington, DC based company specializing in staff augmentation, consulting, and training. Simon is a Macromedia Certified Master Instructor and is a member of Team Macromedia. He has been using ColdFusion since version 1.5 and specializes in ColdFusion application architecture, including architecting applications that integrate with Java, Flash, Flex, and a myriad of other technologies. In addition to presenting at CFUGs and conferences around the world, he has also been a contributing author of several books and technical papers.
