Sean Cornfield posted a request for opinions regarding cfmail and cfquery support in ColdFusion 9. I suggested that they name the functions “writeMail” and “writeQuery” (to stick with the convention of the existing “writeOutput” and upcoming “writeLog” functions), and like the idea of the email and query bodies being attributes of their respective functions.
Why in the world would anyone want to take one line of code…
1 | <cfset variables.Gouda = "" /> |
and turn it into three?
1 2 3 | <cfscript> variables.Gouda = ""; </cfscript> |
ColdFusion developers have been getting by just fine without using cfscript for quite some time. Some prefer old-school CF syntax to cfscript. It’s true that cfscript cannot do everything that ColdFusion can do*. There are some situations where avoiding cfscript is the best path.
First an analyst at Gartner reaffirmed what I already knew, then I read that there are 750K ColdFusion developers out there (wow!) and then I read Ray’s post about all of the new goodies in ColdFusion 9, one of which is “full language support for CFSCRIPT”. This is indeed a good week for ColdFusion!
If you want to add a rich text editor to your forms in ColdFusion 8 it’s as easy as CFTEXTAREA richtext=”true”…
My associate Ryan is hiring a Senior ColdFusion Developer. I had a chance to meet Ryan and the team recently to discuss what they are working on and I can assure you that the work is exciting and that the team is friendly and supportive.
If you don’t know what an Application.cfc file is or how to use it I suggest that you start with this
excellent Application.cfc Tutorial & Reference over at Ben Nadel’s blog.
There are number of approaches for managing environment-specific variables for your applications. One is to store them into an external XML file. I would imagine that there is an increased processor overhead associated with this path (it may be marginal), and there is the extra code of parsing the XML data to get your variables. One approach that’s worked well for me is to define the variables for each of my applications environments in a function in my Application.cfc files. This function detects which environment it’s being run in and sets the variables accordingly. Peep this out…
Word up, dawgs? Consider the following code…
If you don’t know what a ColdFusion component is you may want to review this before continuing.
Every system that I’ve developed over the last few years has included a Utility component. This component is where I store helper functions. The example below contains a single function that takes one argument, dumps it out on the screen then calls CFABORT.
In my previous post we built a Cheesy Database using simple SQL Scripts. Now I want to build on that by coding a stored procedure. Stored procedures are a ColdFusion developer’s best friend. You can use stored procedures to store some/most/all of your SQL logic. This is a great way to organize your code (stored procedures are generally faster than inline queries), optimize your application’s performance and help to protect your system from SQL Injection.
Writing a basic Stored Procedure is not a difficult task. First lets take a look at our inline query…
After reviewing my previous posts I thought that it would be helpful if all of my examples (1) worked and (2) worked together. So without further adieu, here are a few SQL scripts to get a basic database up and running. Once you’ve run these scripts you will be able to run the scripts found at my previous post on SQL Joins.
First we’ll create the database…