Here is a question I received via e-mail over the weekend, and my response. I thought it was worth sharing. What does the "Use J2EE session variables" ColdFusion Administrator option do, and should I use it? And if I should use it, why is that option not checked by default? There are two ways that...
Three more locations added to my summer US user group tour, two locations in CA and one in TX. Dates and locations are posted on my home page. If you're in the area (or rather, if I'm in your area), make sure to come by and say "hi".
ColdFusion lets developers access files and directories using tags like and and functions like FileExists(). These tags and functions have access to local drives only. ColdFusion (on Windows) runs as a service, and Windows services by default cannot access other servers. Is there a workaround? Yes,...
I had the pleasure of speaking to a user group in Washington, DC last night. Attendance was great, and the crowd was interactive and enthusiastic (as per usual in DC). I polled the group: about a half were using CFMX, just under a half were using CF5, and a few were still using CF4.x. Only 1...
It happened, the first "porting" problem reported to me by a user. Last week I moved my sites from a Windows 2000 box to Linux 8 running Apache 2.4. The move was about us painless as can be (with the exception of having to rename a few copies of application.cfm to Application.cfm). Today a user in...
Several people have asked recently about running ColdFusion on Windows Server 2003 (including one gentleman at the NY CFUG event last night). So, here's the scoop. Windows Server 2003 is not supported in ColdFusion MX, but will be supported in the upcoming "Red Sky" maintenance update (which will...
First real problem on the Linux box. Sites were down for most of Sunday (and early Monday). Somehow Apache stopped running, it seems that a module was not at the version level that it required. (I am still trying to work out how this happened, I did update some RPMs last week, but if that caused...
If you have ever spent time optimizing the performance and user experience of your Web pages, then this utility may be the best $200 you'll spend. HttpWatch installs right into IE and displays a pane which exposes everything that a browser is doing when a URL is requested. You'll see the load time...
Someone posted a message on cf-talk today that quickly mushroomed into a discussion on shared hosting and the related security risks. There is nothing wrong with shared hosting, and for many applications shared hosting may be the right choice (due to the low cost). But such an environment does have...
This one has tripped me up a few times recently, so I thought it best to share. is used (among other things) to assign default values, for example . You can use CFML functions for the default value, but you must provide the expression as a string with #'s delimiting the function call. For example,...