Kevin A. Schmidt

Sitting in the lounge at Detroit Metro, waiting to board my flight to DC, I began to wonder what to expect at the Allaire Developer Conference. Would I really learn anything? Meet anyone interesting? Actually enjoy myself? After all, this would be my first developer conference of any kind, and all I had to go on were a schedule of events and a few bits of information from Allaire. I began to conjure up images in my mind....Would this be nothing more than a geekfest, with a bunch of geeks sitting around reveling in their geekdom? I snapped out of it when I finally heard my flight number. After a pleasantly uneventful flight, I arrived in Washington late Saturday evening. I'd opted to stay off-site of the convention and get a rental car, which in retrospect was a bad idea; anyone who knows the Beltways traffic and parking issues knows what I mean. No matter though - h... (more)

PDFs on the Fly

If you've ever generated any type of custom report using ColdFusion, odds are you've fielded this question at some point in time. And while the task may sound rather difficult, it can be made relatively simple with a particular open-source third-party tool. HTMLDOC The tool, offered by Easy Software Products (www.easysw.com), is called HTMLDOC. The company has made this tool available through the GNU General Public License, so you can download and use it for free. Among the many things HTMLDOC allows you to do is convert an HTML file to a PDF. HTMLDOC is a normal Windows applica... (more)

The Question: What's FTP?

When I told them there was a better way to send us large files. They'd been accustomed to sending large image files via an e-mail attachment; I wanted to get them away from this practice and suggested that they use FTP (file transfer protocol). That's where I hit the roadblock. Many of our clients only knew how to send e-mail, surf the Web or create a document in Microsoft Word. So rather than spend several hours trying to teach each of them how to use an FTP program, I turned to ColdFusion for a quick and easy solution. With ColdFusion I could create a simple and easy-to-unders... (more)

Setting Up Shop: Adding a Cart with ColdFusion

Ever wonder what's going on behind the scenes when you click that "Add to Cart" button on your favorite Web site? Sure, whatever you want to buy gets dropped in your cart, but what actually makes it work? There are actually several answers here, so let's go step-by-step through the principles of designing and developing a simple shopping cart system with ColdFusion. The Shopping Cart Say you're ready to sell on the Web and you want people to be able to use that handy little button "Add to Cart" to purchase your items. To do this, you need a shopping cart, and what, exactly, does t... (more)

Company Calendar

Ever wonder how to keep your colleagues up to speed on what's happening within your organization? How best to inform them of company picnics, community events, and ColdFusion clinics? Wouldn't it be nice to direct them to a Web site where a single resource provides all this info and more? With ColdFusion it's easy to assemble and maintain your own online events calendar. Just think, no more paper calendars push-pinned to your cubicle wall. Now you can access up-to-date information with a simple point and click. An online events calendar can be used for many applications - trackin... (more)