Codito Ergo Sum

I have been coding coldfusion for about 7 years now, since I first got the Coldfusion Express edition and learning kit when it was still owned by Alliare.  Next week I start 2 new classes at school, Java I and C++ I  (with JAVA II and C++ II the following semester)  Does anyone have any advice for me?  I have at least been exposed to Java in my CF travels, but I have done little else in C++ than compile a 'hello world application.  I know Java has many frameworks, is there one that would be more useful to learn over another one?  How about C++, are there frameworks out there (I'm sure there are, I just have never been exposed yet).

I'm a big fan of Eclipse, and feel very comfortable within it.  Can I work just as easily in Eclipse with C++ as I do with CF or Java?  What are the best plugins for Java or C++ work?

Thanks anyone for advice you can offer!

So you did it. You ran an UPDATE or DELETE SQL statement without a WHERE clause. Don't panic (well, panic, but don't despair). You can fix it with a few steps I will outline here, provided you are doing a few 'best practice' SQL maintenance items.

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I am writing code that will replace a legacy CF system. At some point in the past this system was forked to run a 2nd company, and the web root was copied to another folder. Of course, over the years the 2 systems diverged, fixes were not always put into both, and gradually the single code base become twice as hard to handle. One of my goals for this new system was to write it such that many sites could share the same code base.

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Cute little joke my wife told me this weekend (click the 'read more' link for the punchline):

Question: What kind of bee's make milk?

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I wanted to put this code out here just to help anyone out who try's to get started with the IBM toolbox for Java.  This is still rather rough, but this CFC will allow you to connect to your iSeries, retrieve a filtered list of spool files, and download a spool file into ASCII or PDF format.  This is really not 'production ready' code,  but it does function in its limited capacity right now.  I am releasing this to solicit opinions or additions to this, and maybe even find other sections of the iSeries toolkit that someone else has addressed.  It would be cool to create a Riaforge project that has a rollup of CFC's that can interact with the AS400 to do anything! *Note: You  need to install the JTOpen classes into the coldfusion classpath and restart before this component will work.

Anyway, you can download the wrksplf.cfc file and check it out. Don't try and drop it into a production environment, just look and see if you can learn anything from it, and if you have something to contribute either email me at justice@cfcode.net, or comment here!

I'm a firm believer that you should always let your database server return data as pure and ready for display as possible. While coldfusion *can* take your entire dataset and break it into pages, and Query of Queries has some decent functionality to mix things up, I find it is orders of magnitude faster to leave that work to your database server. With the following snippets your mileage may vary, as these are primarily done in MS SQL of some variety, but at least this may show you some tricks you didn't know!

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