David Gassner

I'll plead guilty to having tortured more than my share of bytes into completely unnatural configurations. In the BX years (Before XML), if you had to share data with your business partners you might have represented the data in comma-delimited text files. If the data was too complex to fit one record to a line, you might have created a proprietary design to hold the information. Today you'd probably consider XML. Its consistency makes it possible to create and parse text-based data files with standardized programming tools. When deciding how to transfer your data to XML you'd have a choice of programming approaches. Some would be hard, others easier, but until now none would have been native ColdFusion. That's changed with the release of ColdFusion MX. This is the secon... (more)

Transforming XML Part 3

There once was a mild-mannered XML packet with greater ambitions. One day I'll be presentable, it thought! I'll dress up as HTML - and as WML, and maybe, just maybe, I can turn into WDDX! Transformation looked scary, though, with lots of downloads, and installation, and really complicated syntax. But then along came ColdFusion MX, and the XML packet found that transformation wasn't such a... (more)

ColdFusion and XML

XML- it's here, and you have to deal with it. Whether you need to generate XML files to share data with your business partners, extract content from XML files, or transform XML into some other format... ...the ability to deal with XML has become a common requirement for ColdFusion developers in the past couple of years. Prior to the release of ColdFusion MX, the tag gave develop... (more)

ColdFusion and Microsoft's XMLDOM Object

When working out data-sharing systems with an organization's business partners, you as a developer may be asked to send and receive data in a more conventional XML format. This may be because those partners prefer to speak more generic forms of the XML language. If so, there are a number of tools available to developers in this situation. If you're using ColdFusion 4.5, for example, you c... (more)

Creating Maintainable Web Sites

"It doesn't matter to me that you use my methodology," said the Fusebox expert sitting across from me at lunch. "What matters is that you have a methodology." And I thought back to my early experiences with ColdFusion... I developed my first ColdFusion application by the seat of my pants. I opened the manual, looked through the sample applications, and got started. On looking back, I was ... (more)