Advantages of hosting your ColdFusion Website or Application with a ColdFusion Developer

So you have a ColdFusion Website or a ColdFusion Application and you are looking for hosting. The question here is should you host with any provider, or look out for those hosting Providers that have ColdFusion specialists on hand? Some businesses look at, and prefer hosting with ColdFusion Developers that actually offer CF Hosting as an additional Service.

There are several advantages to hosting your ColdFusion systems with a ColdFusion Hosting Provider that also has ColdFusion programmers or resources on hand:

1. You can rely on a competent CF Network Architecture, proper and dedicated ColdFusion Environment, updates / patching done without trial and error episodes, and advanced CF knowledge

2. ColdFusion Development Firms that offer hosting as a service typically know what resides on their coldfusion hosting servers even if they didnt develop the ColdFusion Website or ColdFusion Application.

3. If there is a problem with ColdFusion hosting, an intervention will be more competent (remember, ColdFusion Development Firms often work on live servers, unless they have set up a mirror ColdFusion development environment).

4. Major advantage – If you need any changes to the ColdFusion Website, a ColdFusion specialist is available right away, or much faster than a remote ColdFusion developer.

5. The ColdFusion Development Firm specializes in ColdFusion and doesn’t need to babysit other unrelated Websites or Applications

6. A ColdFusion Developer that offers ColdFusion hosting as a service typically has a dedicated ColdFusion Department within their Firm, complete with ColdFusion Programmers, ColdFusion Analysts, and project managers that can be at your service

7. Major advantage – ColdFusion Developers may offer discount rates for ColdFusion Development if you decide to also host with them, rather than just use them for ColdFusion development. The discount of sometimes even $5-$10 per hour off of the normal ColdFusion development rate can be often significant over a savings of only a few dollars in a a year of Hosting with a regular Hosting Provider

8. Requested changes, maintenance, components, functionality features, media or content updates, will be completed faster during regular hours, as well as in case of short notice / emergencies

Disadvantages of Hosting your ColdFusion Application with a ColdFusion developer:

• Hosting on a different continent, or a different country / time zone (Eg. India, Pakistan, South Asia, etc.) Those deals might seem cheap, but trust me … you will pay the price later

Click on the logo for ColdFusion Hosting with ColdFusion Developers

Adobe is currently working on ColdFusion 9 (Codename: Centaur). There is no release date set, but the list of potential new features include :

• Ability to code User Defined Functions (UDFs) and ColdFusion Components (CFC’s) entirely in CFScript.
• An explicit “local” scope that does not require local variables to be declared at the top of the function.
• Implicit getters/setters for CFC.
• Implicit constructors via method called “init” or method with same name as CFC.
• New CFFinally tag for Exception handling syntax and CFContinue tag for Control flow.
• Object-relational mapping (ORM) Database integration through Hibernate (Java).
• Server.cfc file with onServerStart and onServerEnd methods.
• Tighter integration with Adobe AIR.

Working With ColdFusion Frameworks

Frameworks can drastically reduce the time frame of your Development Cycles by letting you focus on the fundamental business solutions rather than getting trapped in the nitty-gritty of developing repetitive code. For instance let’s say you are working on an enterprise level online accounting system coded in ColdFusion. Instead of writing tons of code on how to handle transactions with the database and user verifications, you can work on the actual logic of the accounting system because the framework you are working with provides you with all the necessary routines to take care of repetitive but essential tasks.

So basically a framework is like a library of different code routines that you can use as and when you need them, but the big difference is that once you start working under a framework, it basically controls your work flow, and this is not in a bad way. A framework helps you streamline your development process and maintain code so that it can be easily used and customized. (more…)

Is your Company overwhelmed by more accounts than you can handle? Or maybe you have a nice Contract opportunity, but don’t have the skills to deliver it…

The trend nowadays, especially after many disappointments of outsourcing to other continents and odd time zones in the past years, is to Subcontract your overhead Web Development and Programming tasks to experienced, U.S based Companies that don’t work while you sleep.

Who can benefit from using Web Development Subcontractors?
A variety of established Enterprises, Software Giants, and Government Contractors are prone to profit from offering Subcontractor Web Development and Programming Services to knowledgeable, U.S. based firms that will deliver on time. In your time zone, too!
•    Companies that provide Information Technology Solutions to others
•    Web Design Firms with overhead, busy or inadequate resources
•    Marketing Companies looking to offer their clients a guaranteed delivery
•    Anyone that likes to have piece of mind when it comes to Professionalism, Clear Contract Terms, and Timeliness
•    Most people that like to sleep nights and dislike heavy accents

Why would you want to use Ecom Solutions as an IT Subcontractor?

Should you need ColdFusion and Flex expertise, we have it under our belt. Our firm can partner with you to fulfill your clients’ demands. If the following points make sense to you:

•    Profit Control – We offer you our rates, and you can handle financials with your client as you see fit
•    Cost Management – You only pay for the work you need done. Unlike a permanent employee, we don’t cost anything while we aren’t being put to use.
•    No extra Hassle – You can avoid the headaches and extra cost of permanent personnel. We take care of our own benefits, and you don’t need to provide them.
•    Assured Added Capacity – Our expert ColdFusion Analytics and Programming staff is here to stay, and you are guaranteed the combined experience

…then Contact us Today!

I just noticed the news on the Adobe Website, about their upcoming North American Event.
MAX 2008 is an opportunity to connect with the Adobe community. The North American event will take place in San Francisco, California on November 16-19, 2008
At the event, Adobe will bring together the most creative and influential minds in the community, from designers and developers to executives and partners, for three days that they claim will shape the future of the industry.

MAX is an Adobe Conference centered on the ecosystem of companies, developers, and designers using Adobe Tools such as Adobe ColdFusion, Adobe Air, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Flex, and other Adobe products .

ColdFusion 8 Update 1 provides developers with 64-bit support for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and provides the latest updates to ColdFusion 8. Adobe recommends that all ColdFusion 8 users apply this free update.

There was a time when even simple HTML pages used to make us happy. A few hyperlinks here and a couple of form elements there and you would have an “interactive” presence on the Internet.

JavaScript and CSS improved things to a great extent but still the functionalities on a webpage could never even remotely match the interface of a desktop application. With the advent of Flash things spiced up a bit but they were still on the static side. There was nothing that we could call interactive and dynamic in the Flash animations that the developers created. Although there is a fair amount of “programming” that you can do in Flash, this feature never caught on with hardcore programmers because interface designing skills were always required; they needed something that could help them create Flash applications by simply having to write code. Flex was developed keeping this in mind. And with this was born the concept of Rich Internet Applications. (more…)

It’s not just developers who have made Fusebox the most popular web application framework for ColdFusion and PHP. Project managers and team leads also value Fusebox for:

1. Fusebox offers excellent support for team development — even when developers are geographically separate. Fusedocs (the program definition language used by Fusebox architects) insures that each developer knows exactly what is required to successfully complete their portion of the project. (more…)

Ecomsolutions Inc has been developing ColdFusion applications — e-commerce websites and online content management solutions — for more than five years with an unbeaten track record. There has not been even a single instance of project failure during this triumphant phase of ColdFusion web development. But why web development with ColdFusion and not with some other programming or scripting language such as PHP, Ruby on rails or Python? First of all ColdFusion is amazingly fast; it is so fast that sometimes it seems like magic. It is a language specifically evolved for enterprise level solutions, although it can be easily used — without resorting to an overkill — for smaller websites and applications too. In fact you can use ColdFusion for static web sites too but it is rarely done. It can be easily integrated with any platform from Java to .Net and it supports all Web 2.0 web development features and enhancements such as Ajax and user generated content management. Most of the online content and document management applications are developed using ColdFusion because of its unmatched features.

The web development methodologies at Ecomsolutions Inc are time-tested as well as innovative; sometimes we strictly follow the rules and sometimes we define our own rules in order to deliver the maximum benefit to our customers. As a first step towards delivering world-class online application solutions we have only been focusing on programming in ColdFusion. Other than that our strict quality control mechanism is a self-regulatory system that is set in motion as soon as a new project initiates.

We employ highly modular web development techniques while developing solutions for our customers. Due to a very high efficiency level we are able to minimize the time spent on web development and maximize the output and hence charge a very reasonable rate from our customers. Of course ColdFusion has a great part in it because when you work in ColdFusion coding efficiency is handled by its environment automatically.

Our web development activities are mostly centered around developing highly advanced e-commerce and online content publishing solutions for our customers from all over the world. You can easily say that when it comes to developing e-commerce and online publishing applications we have developed an incomparable expertise during the past five years. We have left no stone unturned trying to understand all the aspects of this great niche.

In our further posts we will be delving more on web development in ColdFusion.

I was just on a web site (no, not a ColdFusion powered site, and no I will not name names) browsing for specific content. The URLs used typical name=value query string conventions, and so I changed the value to jump to the page I wanted. And I made a typo and added a character to the numeric value. The result? An invalid SQL error message.That’s bad. Very very bad. It means that I was able to create a SQL statement that was submitted to the database for processing, a SQL statement that was passed to the database as is, unchecked.

You’d think that by now we’d have learned to lock down our code so as to prevent SQL injection attacks, but apparently this is not the case. You do not know what a SQL injection attack is? Well, read on.

Consider the following simple dynamic ColdFusion query: (more…)