Andrew Powell

Andy Powell's ColdFusion, Mach-II, Flex, and Spry Blog Flex or AJAX? Which one is better? Which one will "win" in the RIA space? I am tired of this argument. I'm tired of seeing blog posts keeping this debate alive. It's a non-issue, really. I think that people make it an issue whe... (more)

Andrew Powell's Blog As CFML developers start to learn Java and move into the realm of Spring and Hibernate, it is very important to stop and ask 'What Is ColdFusion?'. ColdFusion, since CFMX, has been a J2EE application running within a J2EE server (JRun, JBoss, Tomcat, Webspher... (more)

Andrew Powell's Blog OK, so we know ColdFusion, to quote Joe Rinehart, makes it "stupid-easy" to render HTML off of dynamic data. We (CFML developers) have been using it to do this for years. Only recently, with the fast emergence of RIAs in the last 5 years, has the game changed... (more)

Andy Powell's Blog I am going to go ahead and contend that although a good number of ColdFusion developers can grasp and understand Flex very well, there are also a good number of ColdFusion developers who have no business going anywhere near Flex. Why do I say this? I am a big f... (more)

Andy Powell's Blog I was reading an old post by a buddy of mine about bad SQL being the cause of a lot of application problems and decided to weigh in my two cents. A lot of developers get forced into writing SQL as part of their jobs. Should they be doing it? I don't think so. It'... (more)

AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is nothing new. The technologies behind AJAX have been around for quite a while. Jesse James Garrett just gave the amalgamation of XML, DOM, and JavaScript a catchy new name. Many CF developers hear buzzwords like AJAX and Web 2.0 and simply... (more)

ColdFusion, BlueDragon, Coral Web Builder, IgniteFusion, and Railo. All are CFML engines, but none of them support the same implementation of CFML as each other. This, in the long run, is not a good thing. Up front, I am not opposed to other CFML engines. Yes, I use only ColdFusion... (more)

Is XML overrated? This is a question not asked lightly. It is a heavy and bloated question, much like XML itself. XML has been around since 1997. It is document based and it is extremely verbose.  It requires a higher payload across the network and cannot be natively used once it... (more)

Is XML overrated? This is a question not asked lightly. It is a heavy and bloated question, much like XML itself. XML has been around since 1997. It is document based and it is extremely verbose. It requires a higher payload across the network and cannot be natively used once it ... (more)

One thing that constantly bugs me on projects is when I am asked to work on the user interface. I can do CSS, but it is, admittedly, not my strongest suit. I can do some graphics work, but not my strongest suit. My time, and the client's money, is best spent on me maximizing ColdF... (more)

This is something that has been simmering below the surface for a while, but needs to come out in the open. There is a knowledge gap in the ColdFusion community and it is only getting wider. There are a lot of what would be considered "entry-level" or "junior" developers out the... (more)

Recently, with the introduction of ColdFusion MX 7.0.1, Macromedia began fully supporting a Mac OS X Server installation of ColdFusion. OS X Server used to be supported only in a development environment installed on top of JRun, Tomcat, or some other J2EE application server. Open... (more)