Eric Brancaccio

When an application is functioning exactly as expected, does that mean it's bug-free? Not necessarily. ColdFusion provides developers with many useful and powerful debugging techniques. If I find that part of an application isn't functioning the way I expect, I can usually use one or more of them to target the problem. I consider debugging to mean much more than targeting obvious malfunctions in an application. It also involves taking into account performance and security, and making sure that execution time of all pages is optimal and that no part of the application is vulnerable to malicious attacks. Obviously, you could write an entire book on performance and security checks, but I hope to share some of the ones I feel are most important and most often overlooked. An application could seem to be functioning fine, but it could still be inefficient and unsafe once i... (more)

Making the Most of J2EE Event Listeners

In the Servlet 2.3 specification, Web application events were introduced. These Web application events pertain to both the application and session life cycle. Along with these events came a group of listeners. As you might imagine with all the talk about the integration of Java and ColdFusion, these J2EE event listeners exist on the CFMX platform, and proper use of them can be very beneficial to a developer. I hope to provide an introduction and basic understanding of these event listeners and to examine some ways to listen for session events and respond with custom code. The C... (more)