This month I've chosen to deviate from the normal Tales from the List format and interview Christian Cantrell and Sarge - two Macromedia employees who are largely responsible for offering support to the ColdFusion developer community. Christian is Macromedia's ColdFusion community manager and Sarge is a high-tier technical support officer for Macromedia.

Last month I introduced design patterns, including the Template Method pattern and how it encourages polymorphism and helps remove the common switch-case constructs we normally utilize in custom tags for purposes of code reuse. This month our topic is the Iterator pattern, a simple yet powerful design pattern you can use to generically traverse through a custom collection CFC. You'll need to know what a collection is and exactly where the Iterator pattern comes into the picture.

Over the past few months I've had several conversations with developers that have all been pretty much the same. Here's a paraphrase of a recent one: 'My management decided to standardize on , and my company isn't going to use ColdFusion anymore.

Before examining this month's thread, I just want to take a moment to welcome Christian Cantrell to the community. Christian took the position of Macromedia Community Manager for ColdFusion and, shortly thereafter, introduced himself to the list. Since then, he has chimed in from time to time not only to voice the 'official word' of Macromedia, but also to assist developers.

ColdFusion has always been an interesting Rapid Application Development tool but never a language taken completely seriously by object-oriented programmers because of its purely structural nature. C++ and Java CFX tags, and the somewhat unreliable nature of , kept many advanced programming concepts unreachable by the average CF5 developer. With the release of ColdFusion MX, Macromedia simplified the use of Java from within ColdFusion. Additionally, the language itself has been extended to include a Java class-like construct known as ColdFusion Components (CFCs).

Since New Atlanta first announced BlueDragon about a year ago, we've been asked two common questions: 'What is BlueDragon?' and 'Why did you create it?' I thought a good starting point and introduction for my first column (which, hopefully, will become a regular CFDJ feature) would be to answer these questions, particularly the latter.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of being an active contributor to the CFDJ List is having the opportunity to help developers new to ColdFusion. New developers greatly appreciate the help from 'seasoned professionals,' and often ask questions that are general enough to ignite lengthy debates over best practices as well as stories about situations and solutions that List members have encountered in the past.

There has been a growing trend in list discussions about Flash. This month, the list saw threads centered around the use of Flash as an alternative to writing DHTML Menus (hopefully cross-browser compatible), Flash on SSL, and resources for learning Flash - to name a few.

If you've spent time dabbling in Flash lately, you've probably encountered Flash MX components. Components are predefined Movie Clip objects designed to add functionality to Flash applications, and they're being applauded for encouraging standardization and consistency in Flash GUI design.

Four years is a generation in Internet time; in the life of ColdFusion Developer's Journal and ColdFusion itself, it marks an epoch. As we celebrate the new year and the beginning of CFDJ's fifth, here's a look at where we've been and where we may be going.

In computer terms, objects are abstracts of real-world entities that are all around us in everyday life. Examples of such objects could be people, organizations, cars, animals, or even less tangible entities such as math or time.

Creating wizards to collect well-defined data is pretty straightforward. But sometimes we're confronted with the task of creating a set of forms to collect data where the final structure of that data is unknown or inconsistent. Here, I'll describe a method I currently use to effectively collect such data by dynamically building and managing an underlying ColdFusion data structure to store and manipulate the data.

This installment of Tales from the List focuses on a couple of postings by long-time list member and frequent provider of expert advice, I-Lin Kuo. Someone posted to the list stating that they had a variable containing a list, and they wanted to replace the last comma with the word 'and'.

One of the great things about ColdFusion is that it makes it so easy to put together a quality application. I've seen a lot of good work out there by people with little or no formal training. But there's only so much that ColdFusion can do for you. To advance from 'good' to 'great' you'll need to use software engineering practices.

With Flash Remoting on the rise we're beginning to see a plethora of advanced Flash applications hit the Web. I'm not talking about silly Web site intros or loading screens, but full-blown Web applications such as shopping carts, e-mail clients, content management systems, and expense reporting.

Here's the situation. You're relaxing, reading the latest issue of CFDJ, when your boss, significant other, or the voice in the back of your head asks you to write an e-mail retrieval program. This could be for an e-mail feedback system, an error alert manager, or even to handle the huge volume of e-mail that you receive from mailing lists.

This installment of 'Tales from the List' focuses on SQL much more than ColdFusion. Databases and the SQL used to manipulate their data ac-count for roughly 85% of all ColdFusion application performance issues.

This article is based on the upcoming Discovering ColdFusion Components by Hal Helms, published by Techspedition Press (www.techspedition.com), and appears here by permission of the publisher.

'It doesn't matter to me that you use my methodology,' said the Fusebox expert sitting across from me at lunch. 'What matters is that you have a methodology.' And I thought back to my early experiences with ColdFusion...

As a member of Team Macromedia I respond to a lot of questions posted on the Macromedia Forums ( http://webforums.macrom edia.com/coldfusion). My responses often contain sample code, and I realized that many questions arose over and over again.

Because ColdFusion components are such a new feature, developers may not yet have a good idea of what constitutes best practices.

Toward the end of July I posted the URL to and a summary of Macromedia's performance comparison between ColdFusion MX and ColdFusion 5. The two versions of ColdFusion were performance tested on identical machines, with several different processor and memory configurations, on the Windows, Solaris, and Linux operating systems.

I'm sure you've heard this at some point in your ColdFusion career: 'ColdFusion is just a scripting language. It can't handle load.' ColdFusion can and does handle load, but it takes proper development practice and a thorough examination of the application from end to end.

ColdFusion MX has opened up an entirely new world for us CF developers, and along with its new J2EE underpinnings comes an entirely new development construct for us to use in our application development: Enterprise JavaBeans.

This month, as predicted, ColdFusion MX questions abound on the CFDJList as many developers attempted to create ColdFusion Components for the first time. While the majority of these posts turned out to be simple syntactical errors, Ray Camden did chime in from time to time offering links to CFC code samples for practice applications he's in the process of building.

ColdFusion offers developers several different scopes for variables, each with specific characteristics and uses. Application variables are global, shared by all users of an application. Server variables are similar, but if your server hosts several applications, these variables are shared among all the users of all the applications.

Over the next few months ColdFusion developers across the globe will be handed the keys to a next-generation Internet application development model. The culmination of over four years of work, which began even before the current release of ColdFusion went into development, it will generate a revolutionary way to develop and share application data and business logic over the Internet.

We live and work in an increasingly portable world. As programmers, most of us remember the large steel boxes of the '80s and the even larger steel and glass fixtures of the '70s. We wrote software that our users accessed through those venerable VT100 terminals. Those terminals represented portability. These days, portable means the computer fits in your pocket. And if it can't get on the Internet without wires, then it's clunky.

Query simulations, or querysims, are a means of simulating returned records from a database when no database exists. This article explores a method of using the tag to create an easy approach to custom log file processing.

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.

The thread I've chosen to examine this month is all about driving ColdFusion sites with Microsoft Access databases. Very often I hear developers state that 'Access is evil,' or that you'd have to be crazy to use Access on the back end of a Web application, but are these generalized statements warranted?

Developers were given their first glimpse of the next generation of ColdFusion at last year's Developers Conference, and periodic discussion/speculation has made the CFDJList ever since. In May Macromedia finally lifted the nondisclosure agreement on ColdFusion MX and the list was all abuzz.

The MX family of software was introduced by Macromedia last month. Without a doubt, it is the broadest and most impactful set of software releases in the company's 10-year history. Macromedia MX combines clients, servers, and tools into an integrated family that will deliver rich Internet applications.

As a ColdFusion developer you're in a unique position to harness the power of ColdFusion in a rich end-user experience. Don't be afraid of Flash. Once you have the hang of it, it's a fun environment to work in, and the results are always exciting - even inspiring sometimes.

Flash MX has hit the streets, and some amazing applications are already under development. Macromedia has gone above and beyond by providing us with this fully functional Web development tool. Now with drag-and-drop components such as scrollbars, list boxes, calendars, and much more, developers can harness the power of reusable code.

It finally happened: the next-generation ColdFusion (previously code-named Neo) is in public beta, and is scheduled for a mid-2002 release. We (Macromedia and premerger Allaire) have been talking about this product for a long time, and we demonstrated it first publicly at DevCon 2001 in Orlando. As a rule, future products aren't discussed publicly in any detail (if at all), but ColdFusion MX is no ordinary product - indeed, it's as revolutionary a product as the original ColdFusion was close to seven years ago.

This article is about developing an application for wireless devices with WAP support. For this I've chosen to implement a WAP-based e-mail client. On the Web, using HTML, this is quickly done with ColdFusion. This should also be true for WAP, I thought. Whether or not it turns out to be true...well, just read on.

This is the second part of a two-article series about how to use ColdFusion to solve some common session management problems in Web applications.

The CFDJList discussion thread we'll examine this month began with a post by list subscriber Helen Warren. Helen's e-mail described one of her daily on-the-job tasks of parsing a pipe-delimited text file containing approximately 30,000 records (about companies) and either inserting or updating data in a SQL Server 2000 database based on the text file's contents.

What can you do to make your app less vulnerable to the slings and arrows of outrageous users? And how should you keep the user informed of what's going on? (If you don't, he or she is likely to make mistakes and eventually avoid your site if the consequences of the mistakes are serious.)