Christian Thompson

Don't reinvent the wheel." We've all heard, and perhaps uttered, this maxim many times during our programming careers. ColdFusion MX has introduced new features to help CF developers avoid reinventing the wheel, including tag-based user-defined functions (UDFs) and ColdFusion components (CFCs). As more CF developers begin to use these features, more code will be available for other developers to download and use. However, code reuse in ColdFusion is not limited to ColdFusion code. Integrating with Java is easier than ever with MX. Since the developer base for Java is large and it has been around much longer than ColdFusion UDFs and CFCs, there is a lot of code already out there that CF developers can use. I discovered this firsthand on a recent project when I didn't think about using existing Java libraries before starting down another path. This project required me... (more)

Back to Basics

I read somewhere that when faced with a task that takes one hour to do manually, or one hour to automate, a good programmer will choose to automate the process. As ColdFusion developers, we often face this decision when we need to programmatically use data contained in a text file. There are two ways to access this data - automating the process by parsing the text file or manually inputting the data. This article presents some basic techniques that can help you make the choice to be a "good programmer" by automating the process. Bulk upload and data import are the two primary typ... (more)