Ben Nadel

Finally, ColdFusion 8 has incorporated image manipulation directly into the ColdFusion tag and scripting language. No more are we, as developers, chained to third-party products. These products, while excellent in quality, just mean adding one more level of complexity to any application that requires server-side image manipulation. Now, with CFImage and an abundance of image-related functions, ColdFusion has done to image manipulation what it has done to almost every other aspect of Web applications development - it has made it simple. Due to the wide array of image functionality in ColdFusion 8, I am going to try and break this tutorial up into several small and manageable parts. The first part will cover basic reading and writing of images using CFImage and the related image manipulation functions. But, before we get into that, let's just quickly touch upon these ... (more)

CFImage Part 2

ColdFusion 8 has a load of awesome image manipulation functionality. So much so, in fact, that it will take several articles to discuss it in any sort of decent way. In Part 1 of this article (CFDJ, Vol. 9, issue 5), we spent the entire post just exploring all the ways in which ColdFusion 8 can read in and write out/save images. If you haven't read that already, do so now because I won't be explaining the reading/writing of images going forward (I'm assuming that you already understand all the crazy, awesome combinations of ways in which this can be done). Just as with the read... (more)

CFImage Part 3

ColdFusion 8 introduces the CFImage tag and dozens of image manipulation functions. We have already looked at reading and writing image files and we have covered the basic yet powerful image manipulation possible through CFImage tag actions alone. Now we know enough to be able to really start exploring the vast feature set of ColdFusion 8 image manipulation. When it comes to something like this your imagination is really the only limit, so it makes it a bit more difficult to come up with simple ways to learn this stuff. I find that task-based learning works well and will let us a... (more)