Simon Horwith

Because of the time difference between my new location in the UK and the vast majority of the CFDJ subscribers in the U.S., one of the first things I do every morning is read over all of the threads that transpired on the CFDJ List the night before. Not only does it help me to st... (more)

Those of you who frequent the CFDJList already know that in early May of this year I relocated from Washington, DC to London, England to work as a private consultant. Not only does this mean that I can now enjoy a pint of fantastic ale on a much more regular basis, but also that ... (more)

This month we're returning to our regular format of showcasing a thread from the CFDJList mail-list server. The thread we will review reminded me that there isn't always one right answer - often there are many alternatives to one approach. Each comes with its own advantages and d... (more)

Like its predecessors, Macromedia's most recent installment of the Devnet Resource Kit (DRK 3) is stocked with many excellent utilities for Flash developers. Unlike previous releases, DRK 3 aims to make the lives of ColdFusion developers easier by including many applications and ... (more)

In March, Macromedia created quite a stir in the community by releasing a completely new version of their Web site (www.macromedia.com). This beta version of the site reflected the Macromedia vision of the way Flash can be used with ColdFusion (or any other application server) to... (more)

I recently reviewed Macromedia's new "Developing Rich Internet Applications" (CFDJ, Vol. 5, issue 2) course to make developers interested in adding Flash to their arsenal aware of this terrific new offering from Macromedia Training. It is equally important to note that Macromedi... (more)

This month I've chosen to deviate from the normal Tales from the List format and interview Christian Cantrell and Sarge - two Macromedia employees who are largely responsible for offering support to the ColdFusion developer community. Christian is Macromedia's ColdFusion communit... (more)

Before examining this month's thread, I just want to take a moment to welcome Christian Cantrell to the community. Christian took the position of Macromedia Community Manager for ColdFusion and, shortly thereafter, introduced himself to the list. Since then, he has chimed in from... (more)

One of the most enjoyable aspects of being an active contributor to the CFDJ List is having the opportunity to help developers new to ColdFusion. New developers greatly appreciate the help from "seasoned professionals," and often ask questions that are general enough to ignite le... (more)

Everybody knows that Flash MX and ColdFusion MX are able to communicate with each other via Flash Remoting, right? But where can ColdFusion developers go to learn everything they need to know to begin building Flash applications and Flash front ends to their existing ColdFusion M... (more)

There has been a growing trend in list discussions about Flash. This month, the list saw threads centered around the use of Flash as an alternative to writing DHTML Menus (hopefully cross-browser compatible), Flash on SSL, and resources for learning Flash - to name a few. As I m... (more)

Another ColdFusion Developers Conference has officially come and gone. All in all, this year's conference, held October 27-30 in Orlando, Florida, was a huge success, both in terms of attendance (well over 2,000) and content. I'll begin with my personal view of the conference and... (more)

This installment of Tales from the List focuses on a couple of postings by long-time list member and frequent provider of expert advice, I-Lin Kuo. Someone posted to the list stating that they had a variable containing a list, and they wanted to replace the last comma with the wo... (more)

This installment of "Tales from the List" focuses on SQL much more than ColdFusion. Databases and the SQL used to manipulate their data ac-count for roughly 85% of all ColdFusion application performance issues. Let's examine a thread from the CFDJList that deals with this topic i... (more)

Toward the end of July I posted the URL to and a summary of Macromedia's performance comparison between ColdFusion MX and ColdFusion 5. The two versions of ColdFusion were performance tested on identical machines, with several different processor and memory configurations, on the... (more)

This month, as predicted, ColdFusion MX questions abound on the CFDJList as many developers attempted to create ColdFusion Components for the first time. While the majority of these posts turned out to be simple syntactical errors, Ray Camden did chime in from time to time offeri... (more)

The thread I've chosen to examine this month is all about driving ColdFusion sites with Microsoft Access databases. Very often I hear developers state that "Access is evil," or that you'd have to be crazy to use Access on the back end of a Web application, but are these generaliz... (more)

Developers were given their first glimpse of the next generation of ColdFusion at last year's Developers Conference, and periodic discussion/speculation has made the CFDJList ever since. In May Macromedia finally lifted the nondisclosure agreement on ColdFusion MX and the list wa... (more)

The CFDJList discussion thread we'll examine this month began with a post by list subscriber Helen Warren. Helen's e-mail described one of her daily on-the-job tasks of parsing a pipe-delimited text file containing approximately 30,000 records (about companies) and either inserti... (more)

Welcome to the first installment of "Tales from the List," a monthly column devoted to the discussion threads (and their creators) on the ColdFusion Developer's Journal Mail List (CFDJList). Each installment will examine popular discussion thread(s) from the list from the previo... (more)