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)
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)