Charlie Arehart

While many experienced CF developers will spurn the notion of creating a production CF application with a back-end database in Access, there are far more developers who for one reason or another proceed to - or simply have to - do so. If you've got to deal with Access, you may as well deal with it in the most effective manner possible. This article introduces a significant new feature for Access developers that will bring dramatic improvements in query processing performance as well as modularization of code. In the bargain, you'll find it significantly eases upsizing from Access, or may enable development of one code base to execute effectively against both Access and an enterprise version of a database. Bring on the Stored Procedures One of the greatest benefits of us... (more)

Getting Focus()ed and a Quick JavaScript Lesson

Many new J2EE developers get caught up in focusing on the details and nuances of servlets and JSPs and, as a result, may not learn how to leverage JavaScript. Some may even dismiss it as too much hassle, given cross-browser compatibility issues. For both audiences there's still value in learning at least a minimal amount about client-side scripting. Even learning about just one feature - ... (more)

Validating Input with Regular Expressions

Have you ever wished CFINPUT provided a way to validate an e-mail address? Or were you frustrated that its telephone validation didn't allow parentheses around an area code among other such limitations? Well, your wish has been granted in a new, little-known feature of CF5. While many will know of the top 10 or so new features in CF5, few will know about the dozens (yes, dozens) of less-pr... (more)

Errors in Your Code

Errors and bugs: they happen in all code, mostly in development but in production too and perhaps more easily in CFML than in compiled languages. There are several features to help better handle, debug, and test for them, and this article will focus on those. I started writing in the CFDJ in 1999, and I often point people back to my previous articles and those of others when challenges ar... (more)

Monitoring Your ColdFusion Environment With the Free Log Parser Toolkit

There are many resources we should analyze to ensure optimal ColdFusion operation or to help diagnose problems. Fortunately, there's an awesome free tool that comes to our aid to turn voluminous data into useful information. In this article, I'd like to introduce you to the free Log Parser tool from Microsoft. Yes, it's free. And while you may not run ColdFusion on Windows, that's okay. Y... (more)