Course Prerequisites

Prospective students should have taken the following courses or have equivalent development experience:

• Fast Track to ColdFusion 7 or equivalent experience

Course Objectives

• Develop more efficiently using Eclipse
• Speed up your development by using coding shortcuts and code generating wizards
• Manage and manipulate popular file formats including PDF, JPG, PNG, ZIP, RSS
• Easily build powerful AJAX applications
• Increase application responsiveness and track server load effectively

Course Outline

Unit 1: Introducing the Course

• Prerequisites
• 5 minute highlight Reel of New Features

Unit 2: Developing with Eclipse

• Installing Eclipse
• Interesting Features for a CF Developer
• Using the Wizards
• Using the Interactive Debugger

Unit 3: Syntax Improvements

• ArgumentsCollection
• Implicit creation of arrays and structures
• JavaScript operators in CFML Expressions
• PrecisionEvaluate()

Unit 4: Improvements to the CFC Framework

• Application Framework
• 404 Handling with onMissingTemplate()
• Welcome File List
• Using onMissingMethod()
• Application Inheritence
• <cfinterface>

Unit 5: Working with PDF Files

• Generate a PDF file using cfdocument
• Generate a PDF file using the ColdFusion Report Builder
• Generate a PDF file using cfreport
• Manipulate PDF Files using cfpdf
• Create Interactive PDF Forms with Adobe LiveCycle Designer
• Manipulating LiveCycle Form Data with cfpdfForm
• Parse data sent to ColdFusion from a LiveCycle Form

Unit 6: Improvements to File I/O and Transformations

• Image Processing
  • Reading Image Data
  • Storing images in the database
  • Reading images from the DB
  • Image transformations
• Assembling multimedia presentations
• Creating ZIP archives
• Creating and Processing RSS/ATOM Feeds

Unit 7: Introduction to Creating AJAX applications with ColdFusion 8

• Introduction to AJAX
• Debugging AJAX Applications
• Binding Data to Form Fields
• User Interface Tags and Functions
  • Container Tags
  • Forms Tags
  • Menu Tags
  • User Assistance Tags
• Using CFTREE
• Using CFGRID
• Submitting data in the background to a CFC

Unit 8: Performance, Scalability, and Administration

• Using CFTHREAD to create async processes
• Server monitoring and configuration
• Setting up multiple administrators
• Per-application settings