Fusion Authority Quarterly Update Magazine

The Fusion Authority Quarterly Update (FAQ-U) is a print publication dedicated to collecting the best and most useful technical articles of high interest to ColdFusion developers. Each issue is based on a theme. The journal is designed to be clear, easy to read and highly informative.

Every quarter, Fusion Authority provide you with the well-written, up-to-date, comprehensive articles that you need to be a ColdFusion professional. Each issue is a mini-book of at least 80 pages of content written by experts – Sean Corfield, Raymond Camden, Michael Dinowitz, Hal Helms, Jared Rypka-Hauer, Joe Rinehart and Matt Woodward and many others.

Personally, I’m not into ColdFusion development but I just loved to keep a tap on top of technologies I’m involved with in a team. ColdFusion developers in our team, however, love the articles which they say, “are well focussed, straight forward and well up-to-date.”

Their latest “ColdFusion 8 Special Edition” is already out, you can sign up for a subscription to the FAQ-U on their Quarterly Page. This issue highlights some new and interesting features of ColdFusion 8. Brian Rinaldi, Ben Nadel, C. Halton Humphrey, Key Smoljak, Brian Meloche have teamed up to give you What’s Hot? What’s Not? in ColdFusion 8.

Kay Smoljak, owner of Clever Starfish say, “For me, the biggest reason to insist that new clients host on ColdFusion 8 is the performance increases, particularly CFCs. I use CFCs a lot and according to Adobe, ColdFusion 8 is about 23 times faster at CFC innovation than ColdFusion 7. That’s a big difference!”

ColdFusion guru Sean Corfield talks about “Handling unknown messages with onMissingMethod()” – the concept of object passing messages to each other in any Object Oriented Programming (OOP) language.

Raymond Camden discusses two new features of ColdFusion 8 – JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) and CFAJAXPROXY. JSON, a subset of JavaScript, is a language independent text format and thus not just ColdFusion 8 but most Program will transform their respective objects into the JavaScript equivalent. The other way of doing this is to represent the objects and/or data structures in raw XML formats. Camden goes on to introduce you to the intricacies of CFAJAXPROXY, which as the name suggest is the proxy between the client layer (Browser, applications) and JavaScript to the ColdFusion backend. Camden assures that with native JSON support and simple connection between JavaScript and CFCs, your ColdFusion development will take off in ways you’ve never seen before.

With the release of ColdFusion 8, you no longer need to rely on third-party Image manipulation plugins/addons. ColdFusion 8 comes built-in with not just Image Resizing functionality but with over 50 additional image processing function. Pete Freitag introduces you to the new CFIMAGE tag and several of the new Image processing functions in ColdFusion 8. With CF 8, Adobe has given a toolkit for both basic and advanced image manipulation. Adobe has, however, keep things simple by standardizing the invocation of these new features.

The Magazine tend to get rather technical, complete with code samples and working codes. It is indeed a Magazine for the ColdFusion developers written by the ultimate ColdFusion developers.