Now that I am starting to wrap my head around everything a little better I thought I would re visit a favorite book. Object Oriented Analysis & Design is a book in the head first series by O'Reilly. I have not read this book in a long time and even when I did I don't think I really understand it. Know that I want to learn more about the actual architecture side of things I thought I would dive back into it.

One of the most fundamental concepts you will need to grasp is Abstraction. Let's take a look at the Wikipedia definition and we can break it down from there. In computer science, abstraction is a mechanism and practice to reduce and factor out details so that one can focus on a few concepts at a time. The following English definition of abstraction helps to understand how this term applies to Computer Science, IT and Objects - i.e.

A little background on me before I get into which may turn out to be a heated discussion but that's how we learn. I started out doing basic html web sites like most of you. I then found myself in a 2 year technical college learning a variety of languages such as Basic,C,C++ & Java. Now I truly never became skilled in all languages it prepared me for the future. I then started programming using ColdFusion and even to this day people say that does not classify me as a "real" programmer.

This is a common problem and I use to come across this a lot. Here is a question from my friend Greg that I find many people scratch their head at. Do you happen to know if there is any easy way in CF to mask against the use of commas in integer/float fields within a form? We are running into a lot of error on database insert due to the presence of commas (1,234 vs 1234). CF seems to let these through when a form is submitted, and then we get an error on insert.

I have been digging through a bunch of old code for review and I would like to share some findings with you. If you are a beginner or fairly new to the CFML world this will be some good information to know. One of the very first things I notice when doing code reviews is the misuse  of pound signs. When a CMFL server encounters pound signs inside of a cfoutput tag body it will check to see if the text is either a variable or a function.

I got around to installing Railo 3.0 on my local machine as a development server. I quickly found out that it was easy to use and has some great functionality built in. I was however not ready for all the fun packed into the administrator. There is a plugin for Simon Says and I thought I would share a quick screen cap with all of you!

I saw this over at http://www.coldfusioncommunity.org and just had to re post it. If you ever needed a reason Ben Forta provides a real reason why you would not want to use it.

When Flex 2 came out there was a lot of buzz on how programmer friendly it was. At the time I thought it sounds great but what current problems of mine would it solve. I then came across an article by Ryan Favro titled Multiple file upload with Flex and ColdFusion. I saw a real problem being solved by Flex and I thought it was a fantastic program. The big problem is at the time I did not know how to use Flex so I could not really customize the component.

Dan Wilson recently recorded an interview with John Wilker for CFConversations. John Wilker is a Flex & ColdFusion developer and also happens to help run 360 Flex Conference. Dan is pretty knowledgeable on both subjects and I think it really showed in the interview. He had some great questions for John for those wondering where Flex can fit in for them. I was actually not familiar with John before this interview but I really enjoyed the interview and plan on keeping track going forward.

Lately I have been doing a lot more development using jQuery and I am loving it. If you think back to when you first started using ColdFusion I would imagine we have a similair story. Some of you may have read an article somewhere about this great language but I bet most of you may have a story closer to mine. I was getting into building dynamic sites and a friend told me you really need to pick up ColdFusion. It makes complex things very easy and cuts down on development time.