This is the webmaster's equivalent of checking yourself for lumps. It's important to scout your databases for stuff that might confuse ColdFusion later. These include:

• Field names should be devoid of spaces. Use the underscore character, like new_items instead of "new items." If your database was set up by someone else, budget some time to explain to them why rewriting all of their database queries and macros will be worth it in the long run. Smile as you say this.

When I was first introduced to ColdFusion, I was against it. It was version 5.x at this point, and I couldn't see anything about it that I liked. My counterpart on the East Coast had been using it for years and was a seasoned ColdFusion programmer. I was a seasoned PHP programmer who had just completed a major project for my department, and was now being asked to move to ColdFusion to come into line with worldwide operations. I was a rogue developer with my FreeBSD PHP Web server and I didn't fit with the Microsoft world I was working in.

This example will show you how to use URL variables and make use of ColdFusion templates. The idea is to have an image gallery with two Pages. One standard HTML page and one ColdFusion template. The normal HTML document will be the page with all of your thumbnails on it. When a specially formatted link beneath the image is clicked on, the browser will go to the ColdFusion template and display the larger, full-size image in the page. Before you would have to have used one page for the thumbnail and another for each larger image. Now all you need to use is two pages, one with the thumbnails and one for the full size image. What you do is tell the ColdFusion template what image you want to insert into the page. The following code shows you how to do this

False! ColdFusion is very fast, even for someone who is just starting out and hasn't learned all the tricks.

Currently, ColdFusion MX is built using Java (in the past, it was developed on C++), and when your pages are run for the first time, they are compiled into Java bytecode. In layman's terms, your ColdFusion pages are compiled when they are first run, much like a program, and are then stored on the ColdFusion Server as binary files. If your ColdFusion server is configured with Trusted Cache turned on, then your files will be compiled only once. If Trusted Cache is turned off, your files are compiled with each page load, or when the page expires (again, a discussion of the CFML code and server configuration details to do this are beyond the scope of this article).

New to CFMX 8 is a slew of 50 or so new functions for manipulating, creating, and drawing images natively including imageResize(). Here is a brief overview of the Read, Resize, Save process.

ImageRead()

This function will read a file from the server hard drive OR URL! It returns a ColdFusion Image - this is a new ColdFusion data type.