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 ColdFusion functionality keeps things neat and easy to
support. And for all the warnings about not running an SMTP server on the
same machine as your Web server, I'm sure many developers have a site running
somewhere that's doing exactly that and working extremely well. I also
suspect many developers have pushed things a little too far and found that
nothing soaks up resources quite like a... (more)
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)
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)
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)
Given the number of applications available for developing database front
ends, it might seem strange that the most popular method of doing it is using
HTML and an application server. It's become apparent, however, that the Web
offers something in terms of simplicity and familiarity that users value more
than the added functionality that dedicated packages can bring.
No doubt their bosses ... (more)