April 28 2008 by
Andrew Powell
I get asked a lot: "What is the best book for learning 'x'?". Well, I decided that I would post my own bookshelf, a listing of all the books I personally own (tech related). You can browse through the listing, and, if you like, purchase the book from Amazon.
My Bookshelf
Posted in ANT | Apache | Java | ColdFusion | Flex | General | Oracle | Test-Driven Development | Spring | Adobe | Hibernate | Air | XML | AJAX | 
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October 17 2006 by
Andrew Powell
Ok, so maybe the title was a bit misleading.
One side effect of having CF generate your XML files for Spry datasets is that every time a dataset is loaded or re-loaded, you're making a call to CF. This call to CF is eating up a processing thread, of which there are a limited number. On a high-traffic site, with a lot good number of Spry regions (in one case, dynamic drop downs), you can see ColdFusion's load actually increase b/c it is doing more work "behind the scenes" to build and deliver the XML files to the browser.
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Posted in Apache | ColdFusion | Caching | General | Spry | IIS | XML | AJAX | 6 comments
October 05 2006 by
Andrew Powell
One of the fastest ways to speed up your web application is to enable content expiration on your web server. You do not want to do this for your CFM pages, but your CSS, images, JS files, and any other assets that do not change on a regular basis are all candidates for content expiration.
When you set content expiration, the client will not even check for a new version of the file on the server until that asset's expiration date has passed. A good expiration period to use is 1 day. This will make all assets download the first time they are pulled, then not again for 24 hours.
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Posted in Apache | Caching | General | IIS | 2 comments