Book 2: Fusion Authority

Book Title: Fusion Authority Quarterly Update, Summer 2006

I have a problem with magazines and collections of short publications. Articles that aren’t immediately eye catching sometimes get skimmed over and eventually forget to follow up. I decided to use one of my 50 Books as a way of finishing up this great publication. The Fusion Authority Quarterly update is a publication that premiered at CF United, put out by House Of Fusion . The publication includes well written and edited articles, all Coldfusion specific of course. The authors include a number of well known bloggers such as Raymond Camden , Joe Rinehart and Matt Woodward ; amongst many others guest writters. The main focus of this issue is “Coldfusion 7 Features you need to know”, which it covers in a handful of articles. Not all are immediate useful to me, but at least they are enlightening on features I was unaware of. Coldfusion Report Building? Sounds cool, but can’t say I’ve had the need just yet. One of the best and easily implemented articles is about Application.cfc, a new feature for Coldfusion 7. That’s one article that was read on the first pass, but I can safely say the instructions and commentary helped further organize an application using it.

There are other related articles on features you _ should_ be using as well, including a great in depth article about Unit Testing, and the obligatory CFEclipse article (you use it by now don’t you?!). The most interesting article for me was Doug Boude ‘s article The Shoemaker and the Asynchronous Process Elves comparing performance using CF7’s asynchronous gates versus standard serial processing. Doug provides easy to follow code on a subject I was aware of, but not aware of the huge advantages gained. In his sample application, he records the time taken to insert 256 records using using both methods. The end result? Inserting it asynchronously took 1.7 seconds, which inserting it using “normal” means took a whopping 20.7 seconds. Quite an eye opening article on the possibilities this offers. The biggest downside of this feature is that it’s a CF7 Enterprise only, which might rule it out for most people.

One of the first articles is a round table discussion of “What’s Hot” and what has the authors interested and passionate. This is one section I’d love to see in future issues, because it’s both ever changing and shows what people are truly passionate about now. Reading over peoples blogs gives some of this information, but the overall snapshot of the Coldfusion world these gives is great. This is a great publication, easily worth the cost. There’s almost no ads, and there’s great content! I did end up running into information I already knew a few times, with a little difficulty holding interest during those lows. I’m looking forward to reading the second issue now: focus on frameworks!