There are many resources we should analyze to ensure optimal ColdFusion operation or to help diagnose problems. Fortunately, there's an awesome free tool that comes to our aid to turn voluminous data into useful information.

FusionDebug is an easy straightforward tool, but if you leverage the experience of others, you can be even more productive.

Do you really know what it means to run CFML applications on a J2EE server? How does it work, and why would you bother? There are many benefits you may never have considered. In this article, the first of a series, I'll answer these questions.

Do you know how to use the internal browse capability in CF Studio/ HomeSite+? Did you know that you don't need to use the RDS feature to be able to do so? And that you can use it to browse not only CFML templates running on both ColdFusion and BlueDragon, but also JSP, ASP, PHP, and others?

Fans of ColdFusion Studio may lament that Macromedia no longer sells the product, but take heart. It really does continue to exist in the guise of HomeSite+, which is basically the same thing and then some. What's more - if you own Dreamweaver MX, you can install HomeSite+ free. Have you checked it out?

Is your CFMX server running with the latest set of fixes? Macromedia now uses 'Updaters' as a means to apply patches and extensions. There have been three so far. Are you running the latest, or any at all? How would you know? And why should you bother?

Amazon.com, the 'earth's biggest selection,' has exposed their entire catalog of products, product reviews and ratings, user-created book lists, and more via Web services. Whether you're new to Web services or not, and even if you don't care so much about accessing Amazon's data, it presents an interesting case study of doing Web services in CFMX. You might even be able to turn the opportunity into profit!

Where do you stand in the march of CF developers moving toward implementing Flash interfaces in your Web apps? Are you gung ho? Still on the fence? Dead set against it? Feeling left out? Left behind?

There are a lot of powerful new integration points between CFMX and Java, but one that might benefit a lot of people - even those who don't know how to program in Java - is the ability to leverage servlet filters in CFMX.

Last month I introduced a precompile 'batch' file that allowed you to manually compile CFMX templates, saving the penalty paid by the first user to browse a CFMX template after it was created or edited. But there will be curious folks (and bit-twiddlers) among you who will want to know more - maybe lots more. How much time is this really saving? If it's compiled to disk, how and when does CFMX read it into memory to execute it? What's the cost of that?

Most of you have heard by now that ColdFusion MX templates are compiled into Java. Some may wonder what the big deal is. Many more of you may be surprised to learn that you can precompile CFMX templates.

With each new release of CFMX some features are trumpeted a lot and others seem to fall between the cracks. I call these 'hidden gems,'and in CFMX there are quite a few.

Tucked away among the press and praise about ColdFusion MX are some new options that could benefit every CF developer. If you've seen them mentioned, they may not have seemed important at first glance, but I hope you'll give them consideration.

Now that we can talk freely about ColdFusion MX, I want to share something new that you likely won't hear much about… but that I think stands to be an important feature: server-side redirects, or 'forwards.'

CFMX, the new release of ColdFusion, will allow us to use JSP custom tags within our ColdFusion programs. Some may say, 'So what?' In this article I hope to show you why it's definitely worth looking into this new possibility.

Ever wished you had easy access to Help on non-CF topics such as JavaScript, SQL, and DHTML? Did you know you could easily add such new Help topics to Studio? In this month's Journeyman ColdFusion, I'll show you how easy it is. I'll also point out some existing references you can use to easily extend Studio this way.

Have you ever wished CFINPUT provided a way to validate an e-mail address? Or were you frustrated that its telephone validation didn't allow parentheses around an area code among other such limitations? Well, your wish has been granted in a new, little-known feature of CF5.

You've probably seen the use of a variable called 'application.dsn' (or 'application.datasource') in code. Perhaps you've even been taught to use the method in a class. Maybe you've even been doing it in your own code. I'm talking about setting this variable in the application.cfm file to hold the name of your data source for a given application.

If you've programmed in a modern programming language (Java, C, JavaScript, or even stored procedure languages), you've probably heard of exception handling via try/catch statements. ColdFusion supports the same capability.

I actually look forward to the question, because I enjoy seeing their surprise when I list some of them. I don't have a definitive list, but it's enough to impress most who ask.

Have you ever wanted to test if a given array element exists? Or when dealing with arrays of structures, if a given key exists?

You may have heard that Release 4 of ColdFusion introduced support for nested and paired custom tags. This offers many possibilities for creating more complex custom tags.

It's fun developing wireless applications in ColdFusion, but if you don't solve several key challenges it'll be more painful than pleasant. In this second part of a series, I'll focus on some common problems encountered by CF/WML developers.

There's a growing buzz around the world of wireless Web applications, that is, Web sites accessible to phones and other wireless devices. You may have read that in ColdFusion 4.5 Allaire added support for something called WAP (Wireless Access Protocol).

Here's a dilemma faced by nearly every developer of Access databases who's got the database stored on a remote CF server. How do you reconfigure the database if you want to add, change or remove columns, tables or indexes? If it's remote, you can't very well use the Access interface to do so.

You visit a Web site that offers a form inviting you to enter some input. No big deal - we see them all the time, right? But do you move your cursor to that first data entry area using the mouse? Or are you, like me, a keyboard maven - in which case you find that often you have to hit the tab key several times before you can enter data?

In my Journeyman column last month (CFDJ Vol. 2, issue 4) we began looking at how - and why - to call custom tags in different ways. So far, we've learned that the CF_ approach will look first locally, then in the shared \cfusion\customtags directory, while the CFMODULE NAME= approach will look only in the shared directory.

You probably know about custom tags, but are you aware of all the possibilities for controlling who can access them and how? Perhaps you knew that a custom tag could be placed in the cfusion\customtags directory of the CF server to provide shared access by all users on the server, and you may even know that a tag placed in the same directory as the calling template will be found first (we'll call this a 'local' custom tag).

In my work as an Allaire-certified instructor, students often ask questions, and while the courses address most of them, they sometimes have some really interesting ones that I know have been asked and answered before.

Given that most people are now introducing and installing ColdFusion version 4.5, Allaire's latest release of the server and studio software, it may seem strange to read an article on 4.0.1.