I'm currently working on a site where the staff can upload images for display. Part of the design requirement, is that the corners of these images are rounded off. Step forward coldfuson 8...

Image support in coldfusion was long overdue. Although there were some very good 3rd party components (such as the Alagad Image Component), there should have been something bundled with coldfusion many versions ago. Coldfusion 8 comes with the new <cfimage> tag and dozens of image manipulation and drawing functions. So drawing rounded corners should be easy?

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I've been using Google Chrome for a few days now.

First experiences have been quite good:

• It hasn't crashed on me yet.
• Flash ads on yahoo mail don't max out the processor
• I really like the homepage thing that shows snapshots of your most popular pages.
• The added functionality in the address bar is powerful, yet intuitive.
• I haven't found any rendering problems with existing sites yet.

I remain to be convinced on the skin, although I'd imagine plugins will start appearing soon for it. I also missed the homepage button until I realised it was an option you had to turn on.

The big downside though is the lack of a 'print preview' facility. Until Google add this feature, I'll still be using other browsers.

Overall though, I've been quietly impressed. If only Microsoft would give up on Internet explorer and concede to the other browsers. I'd be a happier developer then :)

I first heard about Lucene a few years ago, as it's used to power the search functionality in BlueDragon. Although that makes it sound like an open-source version of the Verity Search Engine software, it is so much more. I've been using Lucene on my current project and have turned into a big fan. I bought the book Lucene In Action to help, and I've been equally impressed with the book.

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I've recently been using a Java for a project, which I hope to blog about later. I haven't done any Java development since version 1.2 back in 2002, so I had a a bit of catching up to do. I also needed to update my library with some Java material.

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I would imagine that most developers are already aware of this by now, but for those who haven't heard, there's a nasty sql injection attack going around. Details are here and you'll find plenty more on google: http://www.rtraction.com/blog/devit/sql-injection-hack-using-cast.html

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I spent several hours today wading through IIS access logs. Not the most fun part to my job, but sometimes necessary. During the course of it though, I found a subtle difference with the way clients (browsers) pass the information that goes into these logs. Hopefully it will be of use to someone else.

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A digital solutions company I've recently being doing work for in Coventry are on a requirement drive just now.

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The last few years have seen a huge shift towards building Rich Internet Applications, with technologies such as AJAX and DOM scripting to the fore. Unfortunately, the web is littered with bad examples. This book shows you how to do it properly.

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Following on from yesterday's review of High Performance Web Sites, I had a quick go with YSlow, to see where I could optimise this site.

The starting point was a respectable score of C(71) for the home-page. The first rule that didn't score well was number 2: Use a Content Delivery Network. A CDN is over-kill for a blog, so that left me looking at the following rules 3 (Add Expires Header), 4 (Gzip components) and 13 (Configure Etags).

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When a website is running slow, the traditional response has been to look at optimising the application code. In fact, 90% of the response time is taken downloading and rendering the page and it's constituent elements. In the book High Performance Web Sites, Steve Souders describes 14 rules for improving front-end performance.

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