Brandon Harper

HTTP status codes can help you implement threading and more. Here are a couple of ideas. Although the power of ColdFusion allows us as developers to do many things very quickly compared to many other languages, there are times when we find CFML does not offer all of the functionality required to accomplish a task. It can be quite frustrating to find that your end result of many hours of programming is limited by your tools, rather than your skills or experience. In this article, I will show you how to implement a couple of interesting and relatively simple solutions to problems I've come across in the past, through the use of an oftentimes underutilized tool - HTTP status codes. Have you visited Web sites that had a simple HTML form for voting that was able to tally your vote without refreshing the page? On the surface, it would seem that this was accomplished throu... (more)

Are There More Java Jobs Than .NET Jobs? US Job Market for Developers (Informally) Examined

I don't view this informal querying of a job aggregator to be the end-all absolute truth, nor do I really view it as a scientifically sound study, but I wanted just to make public last week the results of an job-market survey I compiled recently using data from indeed.com (an aggregator for job sites). I found it interesting that I was able to search a large percentage of the jobs available in the US and wanted to compare some various technology related keywords. The results, arranged by programming languages and platform architectures, were as follows: Java (-barista -coffee) 53,6... (more)

Blogging & Development Perspectives

Newly appointed CFDJ Editorial Board Member Brandon Harper writes: With the proliferation of many respected developers in the ColdFusion community sharing their experiences and knowledge by blogging, we've seen quite a huge jump in both information sharing as well as the discussion of best practices in software development. These increases in enlightenment also started happening around the time that ColdFusion MX 6.0 was released, which brought a pseudo object-oriented shift to programming in ColdFusion that has greatly influenced the direction of the average CF developer. Who w... (more)

Why Interfaces in ColdFusion Are Irrelevant

One of the many hotly contested items about ColdFusion in recent times that some developers have been clamoring for are the addition of interfaces to ColdFusion Components as part of the standard CFML language. At one time I was definitely in this camp myself - interfaces would indeed be a good way to make sure that components follow a given contract. However, after much thought about the underlying implementation of them at a compile time and runtime level, I find them to be only a semantic difference to what you can already do with CFCs. While something akin to a ... (more)

Are There More Java Jobs Than .NET Jobs?

I don't view this informal querying of a job aggregator to be the end-all absolute truth, nor do I really view it as a scientifically sound study, but I wanted just to make public last week the results of an job-market survey I compiled recently using data from indeed.com (an aggregator for job sites). I found it interesting that I was able to search a large percentage of the jobs available in the US and wanted to compare some various technology related keywords. The results, arranged by programming languages and platform architectures, were as follows: Java (-barista -coffee) 53,6... (more)