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 ColdFusion developers.

Luckily, on the second day of the show, I had the opportunity to sit down with Jeremy Allaire and Paul Colton of Live Software to talk about Allaire's acquisition of Live.

Life is funny. It just so happened that the special issue of Java Developer's Journal for the JavaOne show has an article, written by Ajit Sagar, about using "Competing, yet complementary, technologies," those being Java and ColdFusion. This article is in the June issue of JDJ and I highly recommend that you get a copy. In this issue of CFDJ Ajit has written an article complementary to the one in JDJ.

Talk about growing pains... "Anyone who has checked out the CFDJ Web site or skipped ahead through this issue may notice that we are changing a lot in the way of design and layout. Much of this is a direct result of your feedback. You'll notice that we jazzed up the article layout quite a bit. Most important, you'll also notice an abundance of source code printed in the magazine itself. This is entirely due to your requests. The only exception is Ajit's article, due to the abundance of code he provided. As always, this and all code will be included on the CFDJ Web site.

I'm rather fond of this issue. I'm sure I don't need to tell you this, but take a look at Ben Forta's article. Finally, someone addresses the scalability issue with CF. And he addresses it quite well. The previously mentioned article by Ajit is a definite read. Tom Taulli reviews RSW Software's e-Test Suite, and Jeremy Allaire talks about the history of Allaire and Live Software's merger.

Reader Feedback...
I just got the ColdFusion Journal last night here in Mexico. I made the city newspaper in ColdFusion (http://www.vanguardia.com.mx) last month. These guys add about 400 news items every day to the database. We had about 10,000 news items in the first month and the applications started to get slow and worse, the server memory and processors started to work more than they should. I used the cachedwithin="#CreateTimeSpan(0,1,0,0)#" and I was expecting it to work about 20% faster after adding your example from the article. The applications work mainly on search querys that use the NEXT RESULT BUTTON and the cache is so useful for this purpose. It made my application 10 times faster than it used to be by adding this simple attribute...Keep up the good work...and thanks...you saved me from getting a bigger server. Ing. Guillermo Dewey Guerra
Soporte Metro Cybercomercio

Picked up your mag yesterday. Love it. Read it while the kids played on the swings. Gonna subscribe (make the boss pay). I'm trying to convert all Canadians to CF. Lots of resistance from the the army of Perl. Potential Topic: can somebody please explain ColdFusion session management to me? It's got to be a great idea. I just can't figure it out. The virtual pet explanation in Forta's book leaves me feeling dizzy. I (and others I know) end up building my own system based on IP address, TimeFormat(Now()) and a little database. Mike Corbridge
Ontario Ministry of the Environment

The premier issue was passed among the different developers and we all loved it! There was a problem in your Web site that I experienced and I found the response from Chad to be prompt and refreshing. I eventually had to call because I was not clear enough about the problem location but Chad stepped up, we chatted and it was fixed right away. His dedication is obvious and I am sure the publication will go far. Keep up the great work and the issues rolling. KD Nyegaard
ERISS Corporation

You put out a superb product. Recently I was trying to find an answer to how to update multiple records in CF and had spent four days trying to figure it out. I had received my CFDJ a week earlier but I did not have time to read it. As a manager and a developer, my time proves to be very precious. In any case, out of frustration one evening (around one in the morning), I just sat back and started reading my CFDJ to relax (strange, huh?). The first article I read was the solution to my problem! The Caras article in the Special edition, "Dynamic Variable Length Forms." I sent a message to Caras thanking him for spending the time writing the article and to the CFDJ Forum thanking CFDJ for publishing it... . Again, thanks... . Elbert T. Shaw
Science Applications International Corporation

As always, we love to hear from all of you. Keep the comments coming!