Jeff Peters

At this year's CFUnited, I gave a talk titled "Supercharging Fusebox Project Management." As indicated by the title, that presentation was aimed at managers who use Fusebox. While I am a major proponent of Fusebox, this article deals with some aspects of team management, regardless of what framework is used. We'll take a look at some basic management goals, and how we can use simple tools to ease the task of managing development in a team environment. The first point I'd like to make is that this is not an article about using version control. I only have one thing to say about version control if you're in a team environment: use it. No matter whose arm you have to twist to get a version control system set up, do it and do it right now. Your time is too valuable to waste on code lost to oversaves. When it comes to project management, we're concerned about two things:... (more)

Building Fusebox Frameworks Visually

As the Fusebox standard grows in popularity, our attention turns to ways we can leverage the standard to work in our favor. As an application architect, you need to use every means you can to help "blueprint" the project and improve the end product. I was recently introduced to a piece of software that leverages design thinking and consequently created a ColdFusion tool that, hopefully, will apply even more force to the lever. Fusebox Framework If you've followed the Fusebox concept at all, you're familiar with the general hierarchy of files used by a typical application: a home ... (more)

Playing with Arrays

When I found out this month's issue would be a "back to basics" issue, I was torn between several topics that I hope are of interest to every CFML developer. I settled on the array, which is a powerful tool in the hands of a skilled coder. Just to make sure everyone's on board we'll start with the assumption that we need to explore the nature of an array first. Every programming language has simple datatypes and complex datatypes. Simple datatypes are things like strings and numbers - datatypes that store a single value. Complex datatypes are things like arrays and structures (whi... (more)

ColdFusion Feature — Directory Watcher Dangers - A Follow-Up

In the July 2006 issue of CFDJ, I wrote about the Directory Watcher event gateway, and how easy it was to set up and how powerful a tool it could be for managing files and external interfaces. While this is true, there are some potential hazards waiting for the unsuspecting developer who jumps into DW waters without a life preserver. Fortunately, Dave Ferguson has used this particular gateway extensively in his work, and offered to share some of his experiences and solutions with us. Never one to turn down a good follow-up article, I immediately agreed to an education courtesy o... (more)

Praise For IBM WebSphere Application Server Community Edition Installation

Rarely do I get to have as much fun as this morning. I decided to download and install the new IBM WebSphere Application Server Community Edition V2.0.0.1 to one of our blade servers. The install was flawless and the instructions were exceptional. Before starting the server and deploying the XAware 5.0 WAR, I updated the startup.bat file with my JRE_HOME=%JRE_5_HOME% and added the XAWARE_HOME environment variable to the file, geronimo.bat. (set JAVA_OPTS=%JAVA_OPTS% "-Dxaware.home=%XAWARE_HOME%"). I started the server, started the administrative console, and deployed the XAware 5... (more)