Do you remember January of 2004? Macromedia had just released ColdFusion 6.1 a few months earlier. CFCs finally worked! Fancy JavaScript techniques were not pulled together under the moniker of AJAX. Rich Internet applications were just a casual mention in a Macromedia whitepaper. There was only one ColdFusion framework in common use and Flex was an unnamed beta behind the Macromedia cloak of secrecy. Macromedia Central was the way to deploy Flex apps to the desktop.

I'm going to postpone the second part of my RSS aggregator article to tie this column into this Flex-themed issue. Have no fears, though, it will be back in full force in the next issue. Flex, as I'm sure most people know, is a way for programmers (you, me, and us) to create Flash movies.

Over the past few years it's gotten a lot harder to write ColdFusion code. That's not to say that CFML has changed significantly. You can still write code today that's much the same as what you wrote five years ago or longer. However, with the introduction of CFCs in CFMX, ColdFusion started to feel like a real programming language for the first time. CFCs, as you probably know, let us encapsulate data and functionality. With this new tool in the toolbox of CF developers, many slowly started applying advanced programming concepts to their development. This caught on and things have spiraled.

In my previous article I wrote about Data Access Objects. Data Access Objects, or DAOs for short, are a way to separate your insert, select, delete, and update queries from other business logic. This lets you switch from one data storage mechanism to another easily. Whenever people talk about DAOs they also talk about Data Gateways.

It seems that there's a lot of talk in the ColdFusion community about data access objects and data gateway design patterns. Everyone talks about how great they are and why everyone should be using these patterns.

I'm at my best when I'm challenged. In my consulting business I tend to gravitate towards small businesses with delusions of grandeur. I want to be the one to help them realize their vision and turn their delusion into reality. Looking back, this has been an interesting week. I thought I'd share some of the interesting things I've done and how ColdFusion helped make them possible.

I remember a particularly long weekend sitting in a computer lab for 12 hours and trying to write an assembler program on a VAX machine that would read and write files. (A VAX is a big archaic mainframe computer.)

Two months ago I put together an article about building an RSS aggregator (CFDJ, Vol. 8, issue 5). Before reading this you might want to refresh your mind on the original article. Go over here - http://coldfusion. sys-con.com/read/235976.h tm - to read it.

So often in this column I feel that I'm writing about basic concepts and using trivial examples. It's often up to you, as the reader, to figure out how to apply these concepts to your development. I thought it might be a good idea to take some space to try to bring a lot of the concepts together and build an application. I don't always take the space to do so, but thought I'd give it a try here.

A new project just landed on my desk. This is not a maintenance project; it's brand new, start from scratch, development. The client asked me to build a site in ColdFusion 5. It's my fourth project in the past year that's based on a legacy version of CF. I could have saved the client both time and money by building it in CFMX, since I have a lot of the functionality pre-built as ColdFusion Components. But CFCs don't work in CF5, so those pre-built components are pretty useless. There's no better time to upgrade than right now; in this article I thought I'd show you the process I'd take when upgrading a server from CF5 to CFMX7.

It's not every day that you get the opportunity to pen an article about true love and technology. But in a few cases, true love and technology mix quite well.

About a year ago, when I wrote an article on Dreamweaver, I used half of Dreamweaver and half of Homesite. Today, as I write this, half my development is done in CFEclipse and the other half in Dreamweaver. Unfortunately I used Dreamweaver as a really advanced text editor, something it's not that great at. CFEclipse seemed like the obvious alternative so I got it installed and I'm slowly learning its power. The learning curve for CFEclipse has been steep, since, coming from Dreamweaver, its interface is counterintuitive. Assuming that other people are having the same problem, I thought I'd share my thoughts.

It is likely that at some point in your development career you had to deal with sensitive data. It might have been credit card numbers in an e-commerce site, or an employee identification number on an intranet. Perhaps you were setting up a security scheme and wanted to protect the passwords of the user.

I haven't left the house in 11 days, yet I'm not on vacation. I spent 3 hours last Friday morning replacing a broken doorknob, yet the clients don't care. They probably didn't even know. Most of the time they don't even know if I'm out of the office. I'm one of the lucky individuals who have been able to carve out a full-time living as a consultant. Almost all of my work is done on a telecommuting basis. How did I get to this point? It was an interesting road to say the least.

One of the most popular articles I've ever written was on Amazon.com Web services. The article was written for the Macromedia Developer Center and is located at www.macromedia.com/devnet /coldfusion/articles/wsam azon.html. This article is a bit dated. A few days before it was published, Amazon.com released version 1 of their SOAP Web services.

This month I will examine the cfif tag and discuss how we can use that tag to make decisions in our code. Along the way I'll talk about Boolean logic, decision operators, and Boolean operators in CFML.

I just spent four hours debugging an error for a client. The client is an application service provider, and they developed an administrator for internal use. The administrator allows for the user to switch between sites, at whim. The 'site switcher' is a drop menu, which loads up a different DNS depending on the selected site.

Most of us are never going to work on a Web site that gets the amount of traffic that Google or Yahoo (or MySpace) gets. Unfortunately, you can get away with bad coding practices on a small site that only gets 100 unique visitors a month and no one will ever know. With such a low visitor count, you'll never have to deal with the 'why isn't my site loading quick enough' problem.

XML is over 8 years old. How many of you have been using it that long? (Feel free to raise your hand.) I don't see a lot of hands, which doesn't surprise me. However, I bet a lot of you have used XML without even knowing it.

A few years back, when CF5 was still in the beta stages, a client wanted to be able to fill out PDF forms through their web browser and save, and print, the filled out PDF form. After experimenting with a few free methods, such as the use of FDF files, I stumbled upon the ActivePDF toolkit.

I open my e-mail this morning to find that one of my clients had sent me a file for import to their database. The file is comma delimited. Importing it into SQL Server is fairly simple with Data Transformation Services (DTS), however there's a catch.

You won't get very far while building ColdFusion applications without the need for a relational database. Since ColdFusion is so easy to use, many developers come from non-programming based backgrounds, and proper database design remains a mystery.

For as long as I can remember, I've been using ColdFusion Studio to develop my applications. Unfortunately, CF Studio appears to be on its last legs. It is still included with Dreamweaver under the name HomeSite+, but has not gone through any major revisions for quite some time.

Knock! Knock! Hey [insert your name here], can you create a report of all the users who have registered on our site? Geography is really important to the sales folk, so make sure you categorize it by state. Oh, and can I have it done today?'

Last month I introduced ColdFusion Components in this column. I wrote about the CFC file extension, the tags that make up components (cfcomponent and cffunction), how to create a component, and how to call methods on that component instance.

I'm writing this article a few weeks before MAX takes place. I'll be one of the unfortunate few unable to join everyone for the festivities. I am keeping a close eye on the Blackstone development though, and can't wait to start writing about it in this column.

An old friend, whom I hadn't seen in over eight years, recently brought an eBay auction to my attention. After some rough times, someone was selling everything he owned so he could start his life completely from scratch. The seller was located in my home state (Connecticut), was a programmer computer-geek, and had long hair. 'Jeff, is this you?' was the body of the e-mail.

For the past month or so, I've had the pleasure of doing some development in Lotus Domino. I worked with Domino a lot when I was just starting out my IT career, so I know it's a powerful development platform for client/server applications.

Many of my articles in this column have dealt with theoretical concepts and syntax of implementing those concepts in ColdFusion. In this article, I want to concentrate on the implementation steps you might take when building something.

Developers each have their own approach to development. You may not know it, but you have one too. Having a set methodology allows you to sit back down at a project somewhere down the line and know what is going on immediately. Maintenance of the application is more cost effective.

Arrays and structures are complex data types in ColdFusion. It is important to have an understanding not only of how to use them, but also of when it is best to use one over the other. This is the second of a two-part series in which I teach you about structures and arrays.

This is the first of a two-part column in which I'll teach you about structures and arrays, two of the complex data types in ColdFusion. To start, I'll introduce structures and arrays and then go into some details on how to make use of arrays in ColdFusion.

Hello and welcome to the second installment of CF101. Last month I talked about variables in ColdFusion and how to create them using the cfset tag. I also showed you how to display the value of a variable using the cfoutput tag and a ColdFusion expression. I decided to leave an in-depth discussion of ColdFusion expressions to another time. That time is now.

Welcome to CF101, a new column I'll be writing for ColdFusion Developer's Journal. This column is dedicated to all of you beginners out there, to teach you the basics of ColdFusion development. You don't need to have a prior understanding of programming, HTML, or Web development to read this column, although if you do, it's a great way to help reinforce the basics.