We recently completed a ColdFusion project for Georgetown University to automate their CEID application process. I got this email from their project manager. We always work hard to make clients happy and it is nice to hear back directly on how we did!

"Our Experience with TeraTech has been top notch.  Ajay was extremely helpful as our developer and provided us with useful feedback on our requests and task items. He was readily available for communication and delivered exactly what we wanted. The President of TeraTech, Mr. Michael Smith, impressed us as being just as available in case there were any problems and was consistently making sure we were satisfied as the project progressed. Nii was an excellent facilitator and he did a fantastic job keeping the wheels of our project turning. We thank them for all of the hard work and appreciate their efforts."

Recently we helped out Allergy Supply improve their ColdFusion website. The old website was hard for customers to use. Some don’t complete check out. And it didn’t display correctly in some browsers. We review current site front end and shopping cart and make list of suggested improvements and estimate of cost to do. We fixed a long list of bugs. And we figured out the shopping cart abandonment rate in the site statistics.

"From time to time we all need IT help. Allergy Supply Company recently had a project beyond our capability. We called TeraTech. After a consultation to define the job TeraTech had a solution that reflected changes in real time and allowed us to see how these changes could work for us. Thank you TeraTech.

Sincerely,

Ray Cardinale
President
Allergy Supply Co."

Fusebox is the most used framework, used by 35% of ColdFusion developers according to the partial results of the State of the CF Union survey. The next most used are Model Glue,  ColdBox and Mach-II each at about 15%. Note that the percentages don't add up to 100% because 1) people may use more than one framework 2) some people don't use any frameworks.

The survey is open for another few weeks, so if you haven't voted yet check it out. The survey also shows what versions of CF people use, databases used and common programming challenges.

A few weeks ago TeraTech's ColdFusion server tuning guru Ajay Sathuluri gave a webinar on How to Cure Slow and Crashing ColdFusion servers. He looked at how to diagnose problems and some common ways to heal a sick ColdFusion server. He also discussed what tools you can use to prevent problems from occurring.

If you missed the webinar you can get the notes from it by completing a short server survey here.

Ajay has been using ColdFusion for more than 10 years and has spoken on server tuning and load testing at CFUnited and MDCFUG.

Miki Saxon writes in her blog about four leadships skills that even Attila the Hun could have used:

• leading people
• strategic planning
• inspiring commitment
• managing change

"... it will be the executives and managers who get it; who understand that these skills need to be embedded in the company’s DNA; they are not CEO skills, but core competency requirements to thrive in the 21^st Century."

We had overwhelming interesting this week's webinar on How to Cure a Slow or Crashing ColdFusion server with over 200 people registering. Many attendees asked if we could do future webinars in more detail on some of the following topics

• Staging environment best practices
• JVM settings, memory configuration
• Garbage collection
• Monitoring tools
• Load testing

we are planning on doing some of these in the next few months. If you have other topics you would like to see let me know.

Of the attendees on the webinar the majority were using CF 8 Enterprise, with CF9 coming in a close second, followed by CF 7 and earlier.

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• Are your ColdFusion applications running slow or even crashing the server?
• Are you concerned about what increasing load will do the the reliability of your application?
• Do you want to protect your organizations reputation for quality on the web?

Then join TeraTech's ColdFusion server tuning guru Ajay Sathuluri for this webinar on what to do when your server is slow or sick. We will look at how to diagnose problems and some common ways to heal a sick ColdFusion server. We will also discuss what tools you can use to prevent problems from occurring. 

Ajay has been using ColdFusion for more than 10 years and has spoken on server tuning and load testing at CFUnited and MDCFUG.

The webinar on "How to cure slow and crashing ColdFusion servers"  is on Thursday Dec 3, 2009 1:00 PM  EST. The webinar will cover fixing slow servers, performance bottlenecks location and diagnosis tips. It will be approximately 45 minutes including time for Q and A. The webinar is free. You can register at  https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/750953064 Hope to see you there!

System Requirements
PC-based attendees
Required: Windows® 2000, XP Home, XP Pro, 2003 Server, Vista

Macintosh®-based attendees
Required: Mac OS® X 10.4 (Tiger®) or newer

Interesting article in CIO Insight on why having both business and technical skill is important to get ahead in IT management. And having the ability to translate from tech speak to biz speak and back again is vital.

The author knew he had connected with the C-level staff when at a buget cutting meeting the President said “IT isn’t staff,” he said. “It’s a core business function.” Now that is music to an IT manager ears!

Jo Ann shared these JQuery tips after CFUnited this year. Enjoy!

PS What are your JQuery tips?

1. Syntax:  The dollar sign ($) is an alias for the jQuery object.
2. Best documentation (online reference) is:   http://docs.jquery.com/   [www.visualjquery.com, which I have used, is only up to version 1.2.6 (and the current release is 1.3.2)]
3. OK to call the $(document).ready() function as many times as you want on the same page.  They will execute in turn; they don't overwrite each other.  This is in direct contrast to the more traditional body onload attribute, where it is NOT OK to use more that one definition. If you add 2 definitions for body onload, the 2nd overwrites the first, and the first is never executed.
4. In JavaScript, the Function IS a datatype.  This is very important in jQuery, because many jQuery methods take functions as parameters.
5. Named functions:  doSomething(param1, param2) { [some action statements in here]; }  If I set myVar1 = doSomething("foo","bar"); then myVar1 contains the RESULT of doing something with "foo" and "bar".  But if I set myVar2 = doSomething;     (i.e., without the parens) now myVar2 IS the same function as doSomething.  Now myVar2("foo","bar"); will return the same thing as doSomething("foo","bar");  This concept can be useful if you need to pass functions to a method that takes one or more Functions as arguments.
6. An Anonymous Function in JavaScript is a Function declaration without a name.  For example, $(document).ready() takes as an argument a Function that receives the ready event as an argument.  Typically instead of declaring a named function and putting the name inside the ready() parens, you put ready(function(event){ [what to do goes in here]; })
7. Can use jQuery to intercept a button click or other event, do some validation or manipulation with information on the page, and submit a hidden form instead of ever giving the user direct access to the form inputs.  Also for CFFORM augmentation - for example to grab the error messages and log them, to do some analysis before submission, to visually magnify the field with incorrect input so the user can see it better to verify.
8. Can overload existing JavaScript functions.  For example, overloading alert() could make the standard CF-generated validation messages display in a nicer alternative appearance and style.
9. Syntax: .attr('[attribute_name]') is a getter, and .attr('[attribute_name],'[value]'') is a setter.
10. Syntax: the filter  :eq(3)  gets the 3rd element of a set, while  :nth(3)  gets EVERY 3rd (i.e., 3, 6, 9, 12 ...)
11. A filter such as  :last  is applied to the selected / returned SET of elements - so 'li:last'  gets the last <li> element on the page, NOT the last item in EACH list on the page.
12. Syntax: A space in a selector (example '#list2 li:last') means get all of the 2nd selector that are descendants of the element(s) returned by the first selector (as opposed to separating with > which signifies "direct children" instead).
13. Utilities are jQuery methods without selectors [examples:     $.each()   or   $.support()   ]
14. How people create compressed and obfuscated JaveScript files: jsmin utility to strip out extraneous white space, yuicompressor to obfuscate by replacing variable names with something less easy to understand.  (However, JS is always still out in the world for everyone to see!)
15. jQuery UI is the only jQuery plugin created by jQuery itself.  Use Theme Roller: http://jqueryui.com/themeroller/  to create custom UI themes (try out and style the various UI elements).
16. http://layout.jquery-dev.net  - look at Layout Inside Dialog
17. Syntax tip: parseInt('30px') takes the 30 out of '30px'
18. Can use jQuery along with CF-generated JavaScript validation, for instance to enable/disable/re-enable CF validation in response to a browser-side event of some kind.

Congratulations to Liz Frederick on becoming Adobe Community manager. I wish her great success in her new role. It is a tribute to the TeraTech culture of creativity and promoting from within, that Liz was able to go from being a graphics intern in 2001 (helping with CFUN) to COO of Stellr in 2008. With her creativity, quickness to learn and hard work she co-created CFUnited together with me and some members of the ColdFusion community. This year the Stellr team made CFUnited-09 the best rated yet by attendees.

Fortunately Liz is very organized and leaves the Stellr conference team with pages of schedules, procedures, budgets and a full business plan for CFUnited. I have every confidence that Stellr together with the CFUnited advisory board will produce an excellent event next year. And as both the founder of CFUnited and an advisory board member I am here to help in any way necessary.