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 positiv... (more)

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... (more)

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 writ... (more)

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... (more)

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! This m... (more)

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 ... (more)

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 o... (more)

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 devel... (more)

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 t... (more)

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. ColdFusion is a server-side programming language. Unlike client-side programming languages such as Flash, Co... (more)

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. In this month's column... (more)

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 sess... (more)

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... (more)

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 recen... (more)

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 busi... (more)

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 ... (more)

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. By now, everybody knows that the... (more)

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! In addition to the suite, Macromedia Central has entered the public limelight with the public beta releas... (more)

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. One reason is... (more)

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. Metadata, in a nutshell, is information about information. It's how da... (more)