Tim Burton

Many of the mainframe computers purchased by companies sometime in the past 3 decades are still in use. This is because they were a major financial investment to buy, they house years' worth of crucial data, resources have been spent to develop applications for these systems, and because quite honestly they still do their job well. "Web-enabling" these legacy systems can be a daunting task...but it needn't be. This article looks at three methods for making CFMX talk with the mainframe; our shop uses all three methods extensively in order to deliver a suite of heavily-used e-commerce applications over the Internet. The Mandate The state agency where I work does hundreds of thousands of transactions involving about a quarter billion dollars yearly, nearly all of it supported on the mainframe (Z800 with OS/390) and written in COBOL with a bit of SQL thrown in. Nearly a... (more)

Easy Flash Dashboards

Dashboards are user interfaces that organize and present information intuitively, usually with graphical elements. The information is often aggregated from several sources (databases, operational metrics, log files, etc.) and summarized. They are often used by decision or policy makers. Using CFMX v7's tag, you can build Flash-based forms whose "controls" look much like those found on standard "fat clients"; you can also build charts and graphs. However, combining them in a typical dashboard application results in a rather hodgepodge look-and-feel. Of course, you can ... (more)

Improve Your Coding Smarts with ColdFusion

If you read CF-related blogs, you've undoubtedly stumbled upon discussions of seemingly arcane subjects like continuations or closures or first-class objects or absence of side effects. It's likely bloggers have tracked down the source - some would say fount - of such concepts and you'll find them waxing eloquent. As they should. This short article shows how you too can find the source, play with it, and maybe join the ranks of the anointed. The source is Lisp, a functional kind of language - as opposed to a procedural, OO or logical language. One of the oldest programming langua... (more)

Handling PDF Forms with ColdFusion

Over the past few years government agencies and businesses have converted many of their paper forms to static PDF documents, making them available on Web sites as downloadable files for users to print locally, fill out, and submit by snail mail. All Internal Revenue Service forms are now available this way. However, it doesn't take long to realize that if the data on mailed-in PDF documents needs to be input into a database, or if the filled-in form needs to be kept as an electronic image, it's more efficient to have the users do the data entry in the first place. One option is... (more)