Jeff Chastain

Now that Scorpio is here (at least in beta), it is time to start figuring out all the new tricks of the trade, right? However, as most of your clients will not be switching immediately, you will still have to be doing ColdFusion 7 work for some time. How do you run both ColdFusion 7 to support your current clients and ColdFusion 8 to keep your development skills sharp? You could run one using the built-in Web server, but that's not really the same as your production systems. Instead, let's take a look at using the multiserver configuration option to run both CF7 and CF8 instances simultaneously and under your choice of Web server. The problem is, the system requirements for CF7 and CF8 are not compatible with each other, right? Yes and no...it's not quite out of the box, but it is possible to have complete working copies of each, running in complete parallel. The k... (more)

ColdFusion Feature — Objects Everywhere

Many times object-oriented programming (OOP) is billed as the end-all solution to cure the spaghetti code that can come from procedural style applications. After all, you just have to stuff your logic code into a component (big OOP buzzword - encapsulation), and now your code is instantly better, right? How hard is it to stick a createObject function call or a tag in when you need to access that bit of code? Can anybody look into the future and see a problem here? Let's look at an example. Many object-oriented articles use cars as examples, so we'll stick with the tre... (more)