Patrick Correia

Most ColdFusion applications that require users to be authenticated follow the pattern laid out in the official ColdFusion documentation and in the ColdFusion MX Developer's Guide. This HTML forms-based method is perfectly serviceable, but as applications become more complicated it's not uncommon to run across issues with session expiration and deep linking/bookmarking. This article describes an alternative method of implementing user authentication that's based on the mature and time-tested authentication scheme laid out in the original HTTP specification. Without making the application significantly more complex, it can route around many of the most common limitations of traditional forms-based authentication. An Overview of Forms-Based Authentication To start off, let's take a look at some typical ColdFusion code that uses forms-based authentication from the poin... (more)