It's good to experiment - this holds true for any and every endeavor. Last month I tried something different with CFDJ; almost every article in the issue was about one topic - security. I've gotten a lot of feedback from readers and am happy to report that it was all very positive. Many of you wrote telling me that you really enjoyed seeing an issue devoted to one topic in-depth. I will do my best to organize issues that are focused on one issue in the future. If you have an idea(s) for focus areas you'd like to see CFDJ concentrate on, let me know. I have some ideas of my own, but I much prefer to base the magazine content on audience feedback. Next month's issue will also feature heavy focus on one topic: MAX conference coverage.

For those of you who aren't already familiar with MAX, this event is the largest conference of the year for users of Macromedia products (and is organized by Macromedia as well). The first was last year in Salt Lake City (prior to that, we had the annual DevCon Conference); this year the conference is in New Orleans from November 1-4. Next month we will feature more in-depth coverage of the conference than any prior year. Many regular contributors to CFDJ will be presenting at the conference, including Hal Helms, Ben Forta, Ray Camden, and myself. CFDJ has sent April Fleming, who you may remember reading about in Sean Corfield's CFUN 04 conference summary a few months ago, to cover the "MAX Experience." Historically, Macromedia (and Allaire) have always made big announcements about upcoming software at the conference, and several Blackstone topics were added to the session schedule at the last minute. I won't speculate on what that means, but obviously for the ColdFusion developers in attendance, Blackstone is going to be in everyone's thoughts. In addition, I will pen a post-conference Community Focus column that you won't want to miss. The only other thing I can tell you is that it will contain a lot of quotes.

Because last month's format was an experiment and I wanted to get feedback before using that format again, this month's issue doesn't focus on any one topic. My community column is about choosing sessions to attend at conferences and about a few of the MAX session descriptions on Macromedia's Web site that look interesting to me. Dennis Baldwin wrote an article about choosing between Flash Remoting and Web services in Flash MX 2004. A couple of months ago I wrote a Tales from the List article about a trend in the increasing importance of metadata. Following up on that theme, David Athey has written a very interesting article in this month's issue about digital taxonomy. Another article I found interesting is Brandon Harper's article about using HTTP Status Codes in order to create asynchronous module calls as well as performing form submissions without an apparent page reload. Whether you like the technique or not, it's a good example of how you can creatively use the CFHTTP tag. If you've always wondered about (or never heard of) online analytical processing (OLAP), you'll definitely want to read Mark Murphy's article, which introduces the reader to the ideas behind data warehousing and how to use Microsoft's Analysis Services software.

Also this month, Jeffry Houser explores one of the most important programming constructs in CFML, User Defined Functions, in his CF-101 column.

This month also features a couple of articles about methodology and design. Hal Helms offers a good overview of extreme programming and his thoughts on the methodology. There's also an article about developing leadership skills by Reuben Poon. On the design front, David Chandler has written an article about controlling page loads using what he likes to call a "state machine" framework. Also addressing how to architect applications, I contributed an article this month that shows (using a case study example) how I used J2EE design patterns to enhance functionality and performance in a large enterprise application framework.

As always, I am open to ideas for articles, issue focus topics, magazine format, or any other way to make CFDJ the best resource for ColdFusion developers. If you have any ideas and are at MAX, be sure to grab me and let me know your thoughts about the magazine. If you don't grab me at MAX, be sure to send me an e-mail... there's no point in having good ideas if you keep them to yourself. I'm really looking forward to the conference and to seeing the articles and ideas produced by MAX in next month's issue. I hope that you are, too.