Over the weekend I updated my Using a Session Facade entry on the Mach-II wiki, and decided to abstract part of it and repost here as a "non Mach-II" tutorial on Session Facades. Now by no means do I consider myself an authority on Session Facades (or anything else for that matter). I realize that there are varying opinions on the subject of Session Facades, as well other (possibly better) ways to accomplish the same thing. My hopes are that I've written this blog post in a way that it can explain the basic concept of a Session Facade to someone who's never used it, and possibly help to trigger one of those "Ah-ha!" moments that we programmers do so enjoy.

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I have some confusion on caching a query from inside a component, so this post is really just a call-out to the CFML community to help me figure it out. In a nutshell, here's my question: Can you cache a query if it's in the "var" scope of a CFC? Before you answer, let me elaborate a little to explain my thoughts on the subject.

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Last week I added an entry to the Mach-II wiki on using a Session Facade. This was my first time writing anything for the wiki, and I have to say that I really enjoyed working on it. Do you ever have those "Ah-ha!" moments when you're trying to figure something out and suddenly everything just clicks? Well, that happened to me 3 or 4 times while putting that wiki entry together.

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In a previous post, I wrote about using cfheader to specify different HTTP status codes and how you can use them to guide the Search Engines. I briefly touched on using a 410 "Gone" status code versus a 404 "Not Found", and wanted to expand on that a little bit here.

A lot of times people mistakenly use a 404 status code when they should be using a 410. In fact, there are very few (if any) cases where you would want to programmatically return a 404 error.

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One of the things I like about ColdFusion is how easy it is to tap into it's underlying Java capabilities. Now I'll be the first to admit that I know virtually nothing about Java, but I have found a few places where tying in to it via CF can be useful. One of the best uses I've found for it (so far) has been working with directories and files.

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