The Adobe ColdFusion 8 Developer Exam arrived earlier this year and it is about time I took it. But like Ben Nadel, the exam scares me! Why? Because there is so much more to know. With the introduction of new AJAX tags, native JSON support, .NET integration, image manipulation, threading, interfaces, not to mention full PDF integration, the presentation builder and across the board enhancements, there are a lot of new things to know.
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In an earlier post I eluded to the implicit creation of arrays in ColdFusion 8. Well, the same can be said of structures.
A structure, also known as an associative array, is a complex data type composed of a collection of keys and a collection of values, where each key is associated with one value (a key-value pair). The operation of finding the value associated with a key is called a lookup or indexing, and this is the most important operation supported by a structure. The relationship between a key and its value is sometimes called a mapping or binding. For example, if the value associated with the key “Age” is 29 and “City” is “London”, we say that our structure maps “Age” to 29 and “City” to “London”.
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A great new feature of ColdFusion 8 is its new implicit creation of Arrays and Structures. In addition to the updates to operators in ColdFusion, those of you familiar with JavaScript will recognise and welcome these changes.
An array is a data structure consisting of a group of elements that are accessed by indexing. In most programming languages each element has the same data type. However, ColdFusion, as we will see, is not strictly typed and therefore allows any data type to be stored in combination. This allows strings, integers, booleans and other complex data types all to be stored in the same array. However, doing this certainly isn’t a good practice as it causes signification complication when accessing the stored data.
Variables of a simple data type commonly only store a single value but, in some situations, it is useful to have a variable that can store a series of related values – using an array. Arrays are described as complex data types because they can hold data in a structured, complex way.
Tags: arrayNew, arrays, cfscript, ColdFusion, examples, implicit, One, Three, Two, version 8
A few months ago I posted an article on Installing Apache on Vista, and it proved to be extremely popular. It appears that I was not the only one who found it a non trivial matter.
Now it is the turn of ColdFusion 8. ColdFusion 8 as we well know is the latest and greatest incarnation of the ColdFusion platform from Adobe. It has a lot of great new features such as cfimage, cfzip, cfexchange, some contentious features such as cfthread and cfinterface, and some not-so-necessarily-cool new “Web 2.0″ features such as cffeed and cfajax.
Tags: 101, Adobe, Apache, Application Servers, ColdFusion, help, how to, howto, installation, Microsoft, non trivial, version 8, Vista, Web Servers