ColdFusion developers have known for years how powerful rapid development can be and how much of a difference that makes when building dynamic Web applications. Over the course of a little more than a year we've watched as the Web model was turned on its head in favor of something that feels much more intuitive and is much more user-friendly. Part of this change has come about because of what most people call 'Web 2.0.' Web 2.0 has brought about more buzzwords than a marketing convention. A lot of normal users have stopped trying to figure out what tagging is, what AJAX means, or what the blogosphere really is. They have to be wondering why most of the Web sites they're using suddenly have 'beta' on them.

With the release of Macromedia ColdFusion 7 and the arrival of Flash Forms, developers were presented with an alternative to HTML forms that offered them additional functionality, such as full-featured controls not available in HTML and built-in validation. That alone made Flash Forms appealing - and with the addition of pieces of ActionScript code, developers were able to create truly responsive forms. But because they were meant to be compatible with HTML forms, they still shared the same submit-refresh model. What if you could 'submit' the form and, without a page refresh, get feedback from the server?

In modern-day ColdFusion development, we tend to rely heavily on various Design Patterns to automate or 'template' our daily coding chores. The patterns most frequently touched on are the Data Access Objects (DAO), DataGateway (DG) and VO (Value Object) ­or Bean (VO with setter/getter routines).

Although earlier versions of ColdFusion supported Java objects and servlets to some degree, ColdFusion MX does so in a big way. This support opens up commercially available libraries to ColdFusion developers that were previously only available to J2EE shops. Moreover, you can now draw from an immense library of free code from within the Java open-source community. This availability greatly enhances the features of your own applications and speeds your ColdFusion-based solutions to market. Use these objects to provide back-end processing or user-interface functionality, or simplify coding CFM pages by supplementing ColdFusion functions and tags with Java TagLibraries.

From the first day the Internet was conceived, its primary goal was to allow people to access information stored on remote computers. Over the last couple of years, the technology of Web services has evolved not only to enhance accessing this information, but to share it as well.

The can be very simple or very complicated. It all depends on what you're looking to do and how you want to authenticate your users. I wound up learning most of it on my own after getting an LDAP browser and snooping around in Active Directory for what I was looking for. To my surprise accessing Active Directory wasn't as complicated as it may seem. There are tutorials out on the Web that show you different ways to access Active Directory and references that show the different attributes of Active Directory that you can query.

Wouldn't it be nice to get all the high-availability and scalability benefits of a cluster of multiple servers without the need to purchase multiple machines? How about being able to manage a number of isolated, performance tuned applications on one piece of hardware instead of taking up many machines in your server room?

For those not familiar with web services, they are a way for servers to exchange messages with each other using XML standards. Despite the extreme hype, web services do not enable you to do anything that was not previously possible. Since the earliest versions of ColdFusion, CF developers have used the CFHTTP tag to post an HTTP request to another server and then analyzed the response. Submitting (or receiving) a request via web services simply does the same thing, albeit using XML standards.

Most of us at one time or another have experienced the poor result of printing Web content from a browser. The page printout is ugly because the printer breaks the Web content into pages with borders and edges. Trying to fix the HTML code with style sheets and other layout tricks still yields an unsatisfactory outcome. You, the developer, and your end users desperately need a solution for printing rich document formats.

When the ColdFusion engineering team started planning ColdFusion MX 7, we finally had time to give the cfform tags some love. We talked to and heard from many customers and knew that we needed to do a cfform tag overhaul for HTML-based forms. We also knew that that if it was possible, we wanted to help ColdFusion developers harness the richness of Macromedia Flash Player and open up the cfform tag to the incredible flexibility of XForms.

Event gateways are an exciting, new feature in Macromedia ColdFusion MX 7 that arose from one simple idea: that there are many applications out there that aren't part of the Web and don't communicate through the HTTP protocol.

Reporting is one of the most common tasks developers have faced since the beginning of the IT revolution. In the past, Macromedia ColdFusion developers didn't have many choices for easily creating reports and integrating them with their applications. They either had to leave the comfort of using ColdFusion and use a third-party solution or write CFML to generate HTML layouts - a solution that involved writing a lot of CFML code to read data from database, slice and dice the data, and generate HTML output.

After an entire year spent meeting with and speaking to thousands of ColdFusion developers, The CF Team at Macromedia are unleashing this month the feature-rich new release, CFMX 7.

The release of ColdFusion MX 7 provides developers with several options for deploying their CFML applications. While the current option of using ColdFusion Archives (CAR files) has worked to this point, a fundamental problem still remains in that the source code needed to be included.

IBM's eServer p5 510 is designed to bring impressive POWER5 performance and advanced virtualization capabilities to an entry level UNIX and Linux server, making POWER5 affordable for every small and medium business.

'The new version of ColdFusion extends the Internet to mobile devices and delivers groundbreaking rich forms support, reporting, and printing solutions,' says Gruber, ColdFusion product manager at Macromedia on his SYS-CON.TV interview today with MX Developer's Journal chief-editor Charles Brown.

'I get excited every time we release a new version of ColdFusion,' writes Tim Buntel. 'I usually hit the road and talk about the release to customers at their companies, user group events, and conferences. I start the conversation by saying, 'This is the best ColdFusion ever! Wait till you see what you can do with this!' Well, ColdFusion MX 7 is here and this time, I won?t need to say a word. All you need to do is take a look at this release to see that I am not exaggerating whatsoever.'

ColdFusion Developer's Journal editor-in-chief Simon Horwith writes: 'It's finally here! ColdFusion MX 7 was released about an hour prior to this writing. This release is the most customer driven release of ColdFusion to date.'

'I've been looking for that!' 'How did it know what I was looking for?' If you've made any of these comments recently, then you've probably been using the Knowledge Base, a self-service guided search tool that allows you to access precise technical information on Macromedia products.

By now you've probably heard about Captivate (formerly RoboDemo), Macromedia's tool for creating engaging software simulations, demonstrations, and tutorials. You've decided to take the plunge and create your first 'captivating' demonstration, but how do you get started? This article will walk you through the basics of producing your very first Captivate project.

In the first article in this series (MXDJ, Vol. 2, issue 10) I made the case for the rich Internet application (RIA) and discussed the advantages of the Flash client. Last month we examined the construction of an XML driven RIA built using Flash S data and UI components.

At its annual developer conference, Macromedia provided a glimpse of new features that are under consideration in new releases of ColdFusion and Macromedia's Flash Player. The conference itinerary could be viewed using mobile phones.

I love building applications, and I've built some pretty good Flash and Central applications, if I may say so myself, but I never grasped the concept of building similar applications in ColdFusion (CF). By similar I am referring to how with Actionscript I can import a class and create an object containing properties, methods, and most likely some form of data.

Updates to ColdFusion MX 6.1 are now available and Macromedia is urging users to install the upgrader. Anyone expecting only minor bug-fixes from the 6.1 Updater will be pleasantly surprised by this comprehensive offering - much more than was at first speculated.

The ColdFusion product team reveals that 'Blackstone' - the next-generation version of CF - will among other things provide a new, integrated business reporting capability; the ability to print from the browser without chopping off margins or breaking up content; and new, tag-driven forms capability that will enable developers to quickly and easily build and deploy multi-step data-entry forms.

I tend to keep myself available to help people with code and Web projects on a daily basis. It seems to be quite fruitful. The majority of the questions tend to refer to Actionscript 2.0 and/or object-oriented programming (OOP) in Actionscript 2.0. It has become the inspiration for this article.

In an effort geared towards familiarizing elementary students with media applications, Macromedia announced a new, affordable license for elementary schools. This is the first time that Macromedia has offered licenses, reduced or otherwise, on the elementary level.

The University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, considered by many to have one of the best MBA programs anywhere, has been raising the interest of IT professionals for ten years.

Macromedia announced that a free update is available today for its Flash web applications program Flash MX 2004. The update, version 7.2, applies to both Flash MX 2004 and MX Professional 2004.

With the advent of ColdFusion components (CFCs), introduced in ColdFusion MX version 6.0 and greatly improved in version 6.1, ColdFusion MX allows CF programmers to enter the mainstream of object-oriented (OO) programming. With the overwhelming success of the J2EE and the .NET platforms, OO has become the dominant paradigm for building commercial software and gaining a thorough, working knowledge of it is essential to any programmer's long-term career success.

So far, all the information about Blackstone, the next major version of ColdFusion, has been third-hand, based on what bloggers have been saying after seeing Ben Forta preview the product. Now you can read information straight from the horse's mouth, courtesy of 'The Blackstone Tour Report,' which talks about all the features that Forta has been previewing (with the exception of the event gateway) and also gives some more information about what might be happening around CFCs, including serialized CFCs (so that you can replicate CFCs in session) and access to CFC code from Java.

The great thing about being a 'Freak' and working with a 'Geek' is not having to concern yourself with the nitty-gritty details of coding a dynamic site. The bad thing is that you will get involved with the nitty gritty details whether you like it or not.

No doubt, you have heard about XML. XML is everywhere. For Web designers, that can add to the confusion. If something is everywhere, it's nowhere. If only you heard 'XML is the new HTML,' then maybe you could wrap your mind around it as a markup language. But chances are, you've heard much more than that about XML.

In Part 1 of this two-part article (MXDJ, Vol. 2, issue 3) I showed how to invoke a Web service for the purpose of validating user input. Part 2 will delve a little deeper into the ColdFusion MX language structure specifically designed to handle XML result sets such as those returned from a Web service. The goal is to consume a Web service that will return headline news articles for a user-specified topic.

This is the second in a series of articles on globalizing ColdFusion MX (CFMX) applications. This article examines character encodings and CFMX, BIDI (bidirectional text), the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in application globalization (G11N), and why we should all just use Unicode.

This past summer I decided that my courseware site needed a complete overhaul. It was, in fact, a bit of an embarrassment. As a teacher, writer, and lecturer I had been sticking my courseware and lectures notes up on a site that was designed more for convenience than anything else.

This is a very good time to be a Web application developer. Over the years we have moved from complex and proprietary methods of sharing data, to a more standardized and easy-to-implement method of exchanging simple or complex objects over the Web.

80,000 IP addresses host sites using ColdFusion, according to this month's Web Server Survey from UK company Netcraft.

From the first day the Internet was conceived, its primary goal was to allow people to access information stored on remote computers. Over the last couple of years, the technology of Web services has evolved not only to enhance accessing this information, but to share it as well.

Three years ago, I wrote an article in ColdFusion Developers Journal discussing how to create customized roles-based Coldfusion {CF} authentication {CFDJ Vol. 2 Issue 3: 'Customize ColdFusion Authentication 1'} The article focused on showing how to implement page-level security within CF without the pains of setting up advanced security in ColdFusion 4.5.1.