Last year's Readers' Choice Awards greatly exceeded our expectations. Over 13,000 votes were cast, many more than we imagined. What it proved to us here at CFDJ, and what it demonstrated to the industry as a whole, was the maturity of the ColdFusion industry. It also showed your devoti...

We've got some exciting news to share with you before you get into this information-packed issue of ColdFusion Developer's Journal. SYS-CON Media, the leading publisher of i-technology magazines and the parent company of CFDJ, recently aquired CF Advisor and has added it to its onlin...

I'm writing this month's editorial myself, but if I wanted to stay true to the focus of the issue, I'd be writing it with a partner, or several. Collaboration is the name of the game in the world of ColdFusion, and in the magazine world as well. It's a team that produces CFDJ, and with...

A few months ago I wrote an editorial in CFDJ (Vol. 3, issue 1) about conferences in general, and what fantastic opportunities they were for learning and networking. I spoke with many readers after that piece (at conferences of course!) and all agreed with that sentiment. Many of our r...

When Spectra was first released, CFDJ devoted a lot of editorial space to it. To say the least, we didn't receive the most positive feedback to articles on software that ran on top of ColdFusion, required an additional expenditure, and at first didn't fit into many people's development...

A big part of the lifeblood of a good programming language is its ability to be expanded and built upon by its user community. Java, perhaps the hottest programming language of our day, certainly has this ability, along with many other languages. And CFML is certainly no exception. Ext...

Some of the most interesting news to hit the ColdFusion world in recent memory is the January 16th announcement that Macromedia and Allaire are to merge into a new, larger-than-life Macromedia. The goal of the combined company is to take the best of what each company brings to the tabl...

This editorial has been written in a way unlike any article you've ever read in this magazine. As a testament to the focus of this issue - 'ColdFusion and Wireless' - I'm typing it (albeit painstakingly so) on my RIM Blackberry 957. Three sentences in, I can tell you that it's by no me...

For those of you not keeping track, I wrote an editorial last April about finding a CF hosting company and promised more information the following month. As you may have noticed, it never came. Why? Because when I outlined Part 2, I realized I could easily write Part 3, Part 4, and so...

I was unfortunately unable to make the Allaire Developer Conference in Boston last year, so I was extremely excited when I found my schedule free and clear for this year's event in Washington, DC. The conference was expanded from last year's, offering longer technical sessions and exte...

The application server market is red-hot with vendors, open-source software developers, and application-service providers competing to be the platform for business Internet solutions. Businesses, better educated about the relationship between technology and their bottom line, are again...

The first annual CFDJ Readers' Choice Awards are filled with lots of surprises. Overall, they paint a clear picture of the industry and what you - the reader - like and dislike. Modeled after the extremely successful Java Developer's Journal awards (one of CFDJ's sister publications), ...

Wireless technologies are everywhere these days. I can't walk down the street for more than five minutes without seeing a cell phone, pager or Palm Pilot in use. And I'm seeing more of them every day. Wireless technologies are also being seen in the world of CF, which is being used mor...

Men at some times are masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings. —Julius Caesar, Act 1: Scene 2

Allaire – or should I say '(Nasdaq: ALLR)'? – continues to rise. For those of you that don't follow the stock market, Allaire Corporation recently reported record financial results for the second quarter ending June 30, 2000. Revenue was $33.3 million, an increase of 155% over the reve...

Living on Internet time proves more and more interesting every day. Sometimes it seems the online world is moving so fast that were I to sleep late one day, I might wake up and find that I'd missed an entire revolution - or at the very least another 'correction' to the stock market bef...

One of ColdFusion's long-standing advantages over other Web development environments is time-to-market. It's not uncommon to hear stories of start-to-finish ColdFusion projects that take less than a month...or even a week. But these ultratight schedules allow little or no time for prop...

That's the latest buzzword in the ColdFusion industry today, and by the looks of it you'll soon be hearing it a lot more - so now's the time to prepare. As I'm sure most of you have already read in the past few issues of CFDJ - in articles by Ben Forta and an interview by Ajit Sagar wi...

A few weeks ago I traveled abroad and visited London for the first time. Upon arrival I followed the hordes of passengers through the long, winding corridors of Gatwick Airport's International Arrivals terminal. With signs pointing the way and chirpy airport officials ushering us along...

Last month I promised to discuss the pros and cons of hosting a ColdFusion site in-house versus out of house in this month's editorial. But in light of some recent news and exciting additions to the world of CFDJ, that editorial has been bumped to next month. I don't think anyone will ...

From time to time we receive e-mails from CFDJ readers, sent by beginners and advanced developers alike, asking us what we think about a particular hosting company or seeking our opinion as to what a 'first-time' developer should be looking for in terms of offered features and pricing,...

It was a bright, sunny day when, after years of construction, Disneyland opened in California in 1955, proclaiming itself the theme park of the future. Unfortunately, as good as it all looked, the park wasn't quite as ready for the hordes of visitors as it thought it was. On opening da...

The life of a Web developer is never boring. Technology shifts so quickly that we refer to 'Internet years' the same way we refer to 'dog years.' We're constantly bombarded with new buzzwords. It's a full-time job just keeping track of what they mean, much less knowing how to integrate...

0kay, that title might be considered about two months late by some, but please read on. For some people the most wonderful time of the year falls in the holiday season when friends, family and - best of all - presents surround them. For ColdFusion developers, though, this time of the y...

Somewhere in my life, apart from being editor-in-chief of CFDJ and running the Web Services Department at SYS-CON Publications, I have a bit of spare time during which I work on a few other Web sites. One of them is the official site for entertainer Michael Crawford (the original Phant...

In 1523 Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizzaro conquered the Inca army and captured the emperor, Atahuallapa, effectively securing the conquest of the entire Inca Empire in a single battle. Remarkably, Pizzaro won the battle with a ragtag team of 168 Spanish soldiers on foreign soil ag...

When I first began my outline for this month's editorial, I realized I couldn't possibly fit everything in. With topics ranging from the excitement of the Allaire Conference, whose phenomenal success and fast sellout is a testament to the growing success of ColdFusion, to the amazing a...

I was first introduced to ColdFusion almost three years ago when one of the programmers in SYS-CON's Web Services Department suggested we implement it in a few different places on one of our Web sites. As the department manager I said, 'Sure, sounds good...By the way, what the heck is ...

On June 15 Allaire announced that it intended to acquire Live Software, makers of JRun, the leading server-side Java development and deployment server. With this acquisition Allaire also announced a broader strategy for embracing Java on the server, extending its leading Web applicatio...

I spent a week in San Francisco at Sun Microsystem's JavaOne show. Quite an interesting, exciting show! Personally, I spent most of my days there interviewing many of the movers and shakers of the Java industry. This was all very cool, but I missed having my usual interaction with Cold...

Over the past three years as an Allaire partner, I have been involved in countless marketing presentations where I touted ColdFusion as the best solution for producing Web-based applications. During this time other product vendors, instead of selling against CF based on feature compari...

Every year I find myself contemplating the dramatic changes in the Internet industry over the previous year. And every year the changes seem more dramatic, more exciting - and, most important, clearer. Everyone involved in the Internet industry does the same thing, I'm sure, and as par...

ColdFusion is touted as a robust e-commerce tool, and this is the truth, but as we're all seeing within these pages, there's much more than that to ColdFusion. Ben Forta's excellent article on fine-tuning your database cache is a good example of this. We've continued our coverage of ...

Growth in Internet commerce continues to fuel an adoption frenzy of Web technologies. The benefits of moving a business to the Web seem clear, but only a few can truly claim that they're building sustainable, long-term businesses.

Sometimes simple technologies combine in ways that create massive innovation and opportunity. The Web itself is a modern example. Formed as a simple request/response document delivery mechanism, the core technologies of the Web -- HTML and HTTP -- central to a broad computing platform ...