A few weeks ago I received a message forwarded onto me from someone in the Triangle Area ColdFusion User Group about frameworks and object oriented programming. The person who forwarded the message on to me asked for my input, which I figured I would give here on the Alagad blog. TACFUG, I am having some trouble at my new job explaining why Frameworks, MVC and OOP style application development in ColdFusion is preferable to development without them.

A while ago I received an email from a client who is also a ColdFusion developer. He was trying to get an report to display correctly, but kept running into what appeared to be a bug in ColdFusion. The behavior was consistent in all the versions of ColdFusion he tested, namely versions 5, 7, and 8. The problem was described like this: Suppose that you run a query which returns a set of data that can be grouped in a cfoutput by, for example, a field named monthYear.

Jason Delmore, Product Manager for the Adobe ColdFusion team, had this to say about Kevin Lynch's surprise announcement of the ColdFusion 9 codename, Centaur, toward the end of the MAX Day 1 keynote: "It's great to see us announce this initiative at MAX. It shows our continued commitment to ColdFusion, and that we are in it for the long haul."It's really great to see Adobe's continuing commitment to the community, to their flagship products, and to the Macromedia legacy.

Over the last few years, Alagad has grown tremendously. In terms of staff, we've grown 350% so far this year alone. Next year I plan to quadruple in size again. Our growth can be attributed almost completely to referrals from the tech community and people like you. We've very fortunate that way. In an attempt to pay back these business-sustaining favors, I wanted to announce the Alagad Affiliate Program.

During the day 1 keynote at Adobe MAX, work done by the Alagad team was presented on-stage by Ben Forta and Scott Fegette. The Alagad team had been asked to help Adobe do some enhancements for the UnitedWay Volunteerism website. Alagad made quick work of the tasks and was able to deliver an enhanced feature set hilighting some of the new ColdFusion 8 Flex integration and AJAX features.The project culminated in a pre-MAX deployment of the new features to http://volunteer.unitedway.

I know that some of the recent growth at Alagad, especially in terms our our team, has turned heads. With a team like ours, all of which are notable and respected people in the industry, many people have been asking me, what is Alagad up to? The answer is quite simple:Alagad is providing world class products, services, and training focused on the Adobe toolset.It really is that simple.

High Availability (HA) should be the goal for any web application environment, which is business-mission critical. The big question though is what constitutes acceptable HA? In this article we discuss the various levels in a total environment and what can and should be done in each level to ensure adequate redundancy at an affordable cost, in relation to the overall costs and business-mission critical nature of the web applications.

This post will be the first in a short series of blog posts showing an overview of Data Warehousing with a slant on how we as ColdFusion developers may encounter it. In these articles we will use a simple database example. The first major stepping stone in understanding Data Warehousing is to grasp the concepts and differences between the two overall database categories. The type most of us are used to dealing with is the On Line Transactional Processing (OLTP) category. I go into greater detail below.

This weekend I was doing some research about capturing 'screen shots' of a Flex application, or even specific UI components, and passing the 'image' back to the server for processing. While there are a few ways to do this, I am going to discuss the 'easiest'. Using the JPGEncoder class packaged as part of the AS3 CoreLib on Google Code. Using this class to encode the data on the client side means that very little needs to be done server side to save the data as an image.

Juts a reminder that I will be speaking at the Columbus ColdFusion User Group Thursday evening at 6:00 PM.The presentation will be an introduction to Flex with emphasis on how to use Flex with ColdFusion.