Written as an advanced companion to Ben Forta's ColdFusion 4.0 Web Application Construction Kit, Advanced ColdFusion 4.0 Application Development is a topical guide to the more sophisticated aspects of ColdFusion 4.0.

The book is organized into four independent parts--scalability, security, extending ColdFusion, and advanced application development. Scalability covers the various ways to keep track of your server performance, scale up configurations, and keep track of clients. This first part also covers Cluster Cats--a load-balancing solution bundled with the Enterprise version of ColdFusion 4.

In the security section, the author discusses the User Authentication Framework and security sandboxes and explains how to integrate ColdFusion security with your network operating system. The third part focuses on how to modify and extend the ColdFusion environment to truly make the most of it. It begins with an extensive discussion on custom tags and CFX tags and then covers integration with Delphi, CORBA, Visual Tool Markup Language (VTML), and customization of the development environment.

The final part is a rapid-fire discussion of many key areas: Web Dynamic Data Exchange, code sharing with Visual Basic and Perl, scripting, intelligent agents, and interactions with the System Registry. The book wraps up with useful appendices that provide references for tags, functions, VTML, the Wizard Markup Language (WIZML), and the DTD file format. A companion CD-ROM provides a trial version of ColdFusion to make this definitive work complete. --Stephen W. Plain