Advanced ColdFusion Development  (4 days)

Onsite and private classes available. Please enquire directly for details..

Description

Advanced ColdFusion Development provides ColdFusion application developers with the knowledge and hands-on practice that they need to build, maintain, and scale effective web applications. Topics include using the Application Framework, creating advanced queries, manipulating complex data in arrays and structures, structuring your code with ColdFusion Components, gracefully handling errors and exceptions, encapsulating your user-interface with custom tags, leveraging external Java code libraries, and creating highly interactive interfaces using Flash Forms. It includes optional content on exposing and reusing application functionality as web services and working with XML documents. This course focuses on creating and delivering scalable and well-performing applications.

Audience

This course is for developers with prior ColdFusion experience. To take this course, you should have:

• Completed the Fast Track to ColdFusion course, or other equivalent experience building ColdFusion applications.
• Experience developing web applications using ColdFusion for at least three months upon completion of the Fast Track to ColdFusion course.
• Practical experience using CFML tags, functions, and variables.
• Practical experience with the SQL command set, including SELECT, INSERT, and UPDATE.

Course Outline

Unit 1: Introducing the Course

• Getting familiar with the course methodology and format
• Understanding the course objectives
• Understanding the course prerequisites

Unit 2: Configuring your Application

• Using the Application Framework
• Introducing CFC syntax
• Configuring application settings
• Handling application events
• Handling request events
• Locking shared scope variables
• Handling session events

Unit 3: Manipulating Lists and Queries

• Using lists
• Manipulating queries
• Summarizing and grouping data
• Transaction processing
• Querying a query

Unit 4: Manipulating Data with Arrays and Structures

• Using arrays
• Using structures
• Using built-in ColdFusion data structures
• Dynamically evaluating variables
• Combining data structures
• Accessing data by value or by reference

Unit 5: Building ColdFusion Components

• Reviewing ColdFusion Components
• Creating a static component
• Defining functions in components
• Invoking static CFC methods
• Using CFC self-generating documentation
• Creating instance based components
• Persisting CFC instances
• Using built-in components
• Inheriting methods, properties, and data between components
• Restricting access to component methods

Unit 6: Handling Errors and Exceptions

• Introducing error handling
• Customizing application error messages
• Understanding the try/catch methodology
• Learning about exception handling frameworks

Unit 7: Leveraging Code Reuse

• Writing code using <cfscript>
• Creating custom tags
• Nesting custom tags
• Using JSP tag libraries
• Calling a Java library

Unit 8: Creating Flash Forms

• Understanding Flash Forms
• Laying out Flash Forms
• Using data binding
• Working with a dynamic number of elements
• Setting default values for form fields
• Extending Flash Form interactivity with ActionScript
• Using <cfgrid>
• Controlling form appearance
• Extending Flash Forms with custom components

Unit 9: Scaling Applications

• Understanding performance, robustness, and scalability
• Effectively configuring the ColdFusion server
• Identifying scalability bottlenecks in your code
• Caching recordsets
• Using <cf_Accelerate> to cache generated page contents
• Caching entire page results
• Using asynchronous processes to improve performance
• Supporting concurrency

Unit 10: Interfacing with External Systems (optional)

• Retrieving data from web pages
• Retrieving external text
• Importing text into a query object
• Creating web services
• Calling external web services

Unit 11: Using XML (optional)

• Introducing XML
• Creating XML documents
• Application of XML: Really Simple Syndication (RSS)
• Retrieving XML data from XML documents
• Validating an XML document
• Referencing data from an XML Document object
• Transforming XML to HTML