Tom Peer

When I started I was using Macromedia's Director. It was the most productive and definitely the most enjoyable stage of my career - we had a great tool to build great products. Sadly the CD-ROM market bombed as the novelty wore off, and as business began eyeing the Web with dollar signs in its eyes, I decided to get involved. Working on the Web was nowhere near as productive - the tools weren't available and there was the endless disagreement about what we were trying to achieve. I solved one of those problems myself - I set up on my own and only took on jobs where the client and I shared a vision of the Web as a means of publishing information, and the process of Web publishing as building information systems, and then using the Web as a means of viewing, searching an... (more)

JavaScript Without the Headaches

Coding ColdFusion and coding JavaScript are about as far apart on the productivity spectrum as it's possible to be. CF tags are neat, easy to read, tolerant, and fun to write. JavaScript is none of that. It has all the drawbacks of traditional languages, with the added disadvantage of sitting somewhat awkwardly within the HTML document model. Anything but the most trivial JavaScript is di... (more)

Beyond CFMAIL

One of the reasons I was first drawn to ColdFusion was the built-in functionality for such things as sending e-mail, making HTTP requests, FTP uploads - all the myriad subsidiary functions you inevitably find yourself using when you build and manage large sites. Content has to be downloaded from here, uploaded to there, and e-mailed to thousands of users every day. Using only standard Co... (more)

Thinking Outside the Table PART 1

A two-part series looks at techniques for shifting workload away from the application server onto the database by using "extra" database tables. Most ColdFusion programmers understand that when it comes to bulk inserting into a database, it isn't good practice to loop over text files one line at a time with a . However, when faced with the realities of a data feed that needs prepr... (more)

Thinking Outside the Table PART 2

A two-part series looks at techniques for shifting workload away from the application server and onto the database by using "extra" database tables. It's just an average search - three full text indexes, ten subselects on many-to-many joins, and a bit of Pythagoras - to find results within 2km using latitude and longitude. It's the sort of query that makes your database give up just think... (more)