I remember my first official University programming course. We were to learn the language Pascal. Pascal is a socalled "teaching" programming language primarily to teach structured programming.

[More]

Last night I downloaded Mango Blog and did a local install to take it for a test drive. I've been using BlogCFC since I started this blog and it has served me well so far, but the Mango Blog interface is just so much better.

[More]

Friday is my last day with my current employer, who happens to also be my first employer in Germany.

[More]

I'm not sure how I missed this blog entry by Todd Raferty on the Railo Blog, but this is definitely worth mentioning again.

[More]

It's been relatively quiet in Munich on the CF front (user group meetings) but a nudge in the right direction always helps to get things moving. The Munich CFUG will be getting together on May 5th

[More]

Unless you have been living under a rock you will have read that the alternative CFML engine Railo has released their much anticipated version 3.1 as open-source under jBoss.

[More]

After the announcement at last years Scotch on the Rocks that Railo would be going open source, and be included as a JBoss.org project, the day has finally arrived.

Railo Goes Open-Source

[More]

Want to try out Railo but having trouble finding a hosting company? Well Alurium just started offering Railo hosting plans (Along with PHP and Ruby). It's a brand new start-up started by Peter Amiri.

[More]

I'm not exactly sure how I missed Ray Camdens post on the proposed CFScript enhancements for ColdFusion 9 but it's never too late to throw in my own two cents. I think it's awesome!

[More]

I got an email from a reader yesterday asking about CFCHART and my JFREE custom tags:

Hi - i noticed your blog entry from earlier this year about work you were doing on a CF custom tag interface to JFREE, and was wondering how that work was coming along. I'm looking at try to do charting beyond what CFCHART is capable of, and this looked like a nice alternative. thanks!

[More]

I wanted to test a PHP remote script today using CFHTTP method=GET. The remote script requires a few variables to be passed to it and well I wanted to initialize them using the cfparam tag.

[More]

I recently received word that there aren't many tickets left for the Coldfusion Camp in Munich. If you were thinking of attending then now would be a good idea to register before it sells out!

See you there!

In my previous post we started installing Railo on the CentOS Linux distribution. As most of us know installing applications on a Linux system sometimes requires more than one step. This installation is just that type.

[More]

This may well not be a "Gotcha" at all and a simple settings issue in the administrator but I haven't been able to find the "switch" but here it is anyway. Hopefully someone from Railo will be able to correct me if I am wrong.

[More]

In a previous post I alluded to how I learn by doing and generally go about it the "hard way". What I learn while sometimes being frustrating tends to settle in my brain and stay longer than if it was a piece of cake. It also allows me to then share with you what I learned and hopefully make life a little bit easier for you. Not everyone likes to do things the hard way.

[More]

This just in from Christoph Schmitz of the Munich CFUG

[More]

One of our clients an electronic entertainment company provides movie trailers on their site. They also want to provide their partners with a simple EMBED tag for a flash player similar to what youtube does with it videos. Naturally they want to be able to track how often the movie clip or trailer is viewed on their partners sites by using google analytics, or as yet to be determined tracking methods.

[More]

Yesterday I spent a bit of time setting up my home machine with Apache, Railo and Resin (I have my PC at work similarly set up but hadn't set up my home machine yet). I have to say that I really like the set-up and by following a few tips by Gert Franz I think I have a pretty good set up that I can move into a production server environment.

[More]

If you don't know what EC2 is it's Amazons Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2). It is a service that provides re-sizable compute capacity in the cloud.

There are lot of different public server images available

[More]

It seems to me that if you want to drive traffic to your website (and you happen to be a moron) the best way to do it is to post a Top 10 dead (or dying) Computer Skills post.

[More]

I've been playing around a bit with the Railo 3 beta and have been so far impressed with the performance and features, and the fact that I can run the express version from my USB stick.

[More]

Last night at the Munich CFUG meeting I had the opportunity to meet Gert Franz and Michi Streit from Railo on the last leg of their Whirl Wind Railo World Tour.

[More]

Gert Franz and Michi Streit will be visiting the Munich Cfug on the 28th of August to demonstrate and discuss whats new in Railo 3. They have, apparently, also volunteered to sit in the hot seat and answer "all" of our questions with respect to Railo's open source plans.

[More]

In the last few days there have been a rash of attacks seemly targeted at Coldfusion. More specifically older Coldfusion applications/sites that do not make use of parameterized queries

[More]

Everyone says that we should var scope all of our variables and I make a concerted effort to do just that. But for some reason I've never considered the idea of

[More]

There are a lot of articles around about coldfusion components; doing a Google search for the term "coldfusion components" brought back just over 160,000 results, that's an awful lot of information to

[More]

This isn't about how to write queries, or stored procedures. It's also not about relational databases function or how to properly index. It is about being kind to your database and more efficiently communicating with it.

[More]

Well the guys at Scotch really got a real news sweep on the rest of us. I first saw Seans blog entry about Railo 3 and then Rays and I'm still a little flabbergasted.

That makes two open source initiatives of CFML Engines this year, first Open BD and now Railo.

[More]

It seems to me that this year is the Year of open source CF CMS's. Ben Forta recently made us aware of ColdBricks open source CF CMS, and now I have stumbled upon Sava CMS. I think it's a great sign to see all of these open source CFM projects coming out, especially in the crowded CMS market.

[More]

Just a quick note about my Capitalizing Peoples Names post yesterday. I forgot to change the extension of the enclosure to something other than .cfm.

I updated the enclosure and also further optimized my function. You should now be able to download the function.

Happy Coding...

While doing a code review at work I stumbled accross a horrible piece of code that was written in a hurry, The developer did the best he could at the time with the time that he had available to him to complete the task. He never really had time to think it though so just continued to throw worse code after bad until the problem was eventually solved.

The Problem

There has to be a better way to do what he was doing and so when I got home from work today I decided to actually look at the problem in the context of the system we have.

[More]

I have been doing some code review lately and am seeing quite a few cases that look something like this:

You have a structure with some information in it and you are looping over the structure and adding the data from the structure into the database. No bid deal right?

Well you probably won't be surprised to find out that having a loop around the cfquery tag forces the Coldfusion server to execute that query N number of times, where N is the size of your array.

So what can you do?

[More]