Microsoft is finally making real efforts to woo the designer community who have traditionally worshipped the Adobe and Mac product ranges. One new product that addresses this previously overlooked community is Silverlight, which uses the XAML technology and is touted as Microsoft’s Flash killer. For anyone who is keen to listen, Microsoft proposes that Silverlight will achieve similar results to Flash, but it does so in an entirely different way and has different aims. So, the big question is, will Microsoft be able to break the dominance of Adobe’s Flash platform, that is available on the PC, Mac and mobile devices alike? I’m sure the jury is out on that one, but it can be said it is an uphill task. Read more – ‘Web 2.0 and Beyond with Silverlight and XAML’.
ColdFusion has never satisfactorily removed whitespace from generated content, however, removing this whitespace can dramatically improve your website's performance. Take a 100KB page for example. If 20% of the page is made up of whitespace, that is 20% that is unneccessary and 20% bandwidth cost that can be saved. Read more – ‘Eliminating Whitespace in ColdFusion’.
Rich Internet Applications are just the beginning. A key trend taking place throughout the Web industry is the urgency to integrate disparate systems and software tools to reduce costs, increase developer productivity, reduce the need for manual processing and intervention in transactions, and decrease time to market. To achieve these objectives, organisations have endorsed the adoption of standards-based systems combined with the migration to Web Services and Service Orientated Architecture. This has led to a requirement to create a consistent and intuitive interface to applications, data and services. The immediate goal of these efforts is to provide simpler, quicker and more efficient access and processing of information. Read more – ‘Future Directions for Rich Internet Applications’.
The Internet has emerged from obscurity to become a dominant platform for application development and is integral to the idea of Software as a Service (SaaS). Unfortunately the demand to build applications of increasing complexity has continued to outpace the ability of traditional Web applications to represent that complexity and expectation. Utilisation of AJAX technologies attempts to reconcile some of the issues, but frequently the result is a frustrating, confusing or disengaging user experience resulting in unhappy customers, lost sales, and increased costs. Read more – ‘The Future of the Rich Internet’.
Almost every web application will benefit from the compression of content. A compression filter optimises the size of the content that is sent from a webserver to a web browser via the Internet. Since generating content and serving pages via the World Wide Web is the core behind web applications, it is simple components that aid these processes that are incredibly useful. This is where servlet filters come into play. Read more – ‘Poor Man's HTTP Compression with ColdFusion’.
Object-Relational Mapping (or ORM), is a programming technique that links databases to object-oriented language concepts, creating (in effect) a "virtual object database". There are both free and commercial packages available that perform object-relational mapping, although some programmers opt to code their own object-relational mapping for their systems. Read more – ‘ColdFusion ORM Frameworks & Tools’.
For many ColdFusion developers, server setup, tuning, troubleshooting and configuration is one of the least understood areas of ColdFusion. Achieving the highest possible performance and scalability with a ColdFusion MX application is a complex combination of many different factors. Standard performance tuning guidelines in conjunction with the tips provided below should allow you to achieve maximum application performance and scalability. Performance refers to the response time of requests to CFML pages and Components (CFCs), whilst scalability refers to how the performance results change when the load on the server increases. Read more – ‘Coldfusion MX Tuning’.
Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It's a whole new way of looking at the web where HTML page makes asynchronous calls to the server using JavaScript and loads the data in bits and pieces as needed. Ajax is not a new technology. It’s a new developing approach, based on the following existing technologies: XHTML, CSS, DOM, XML, XSLT and XMLHttpRequest. Read more – ‘Coldfusion AJAX Frameworks’.
With the introduction of ColdFusion MX, the ColdFusion community is maturing. Most CF developers have moved beyond spaghetti code and the mixing of business logic with presentation code. But it can be difficult and wasteful to "re-invent the wheel" for every application you write. Frameworks can help promote good development practices, standards, and a sound foundation for creating an application. Read more – ‘ColdFusion Frameworks’.
