October 2004 Archive

Streamlining the Data Access Layer in ColdFusion Enterprise Projects - 1 Introduction

Developing database schemas and writing SQL code to transfer business objects to and from data storage in Relational Databases is the foundation of most Enterprise applications. 

There are many solutions aimed at making the engineering of this task easier, more portable between projects, and more performant. 

There is a range of opinions based upon personal experience and problem domain as to which path to go down.  With every opinion, are tools in the market that advertise that they make this task easier.

It is very important for Enterprise Applications that this engineering of the “Data Layer” can be done quickly and is of high quality.  Our main criterion is the following:

1. Rapid Development – The solution’s aim is to rapidly allow an engineer to produce software which allows business objects with complex relationships to be serialised and de-serialised to a RDBMS.
2. High Performance – The solution should be performant and should scale to tens of thousands of objects.
3. Inexpensive – The solution should be portable across many systems and shouldn’t be tied to a proprietary solution.

We start with FourQ

We have been using the Open Source Farcry Content Management System by Daemon for quite a while now and find it a good framework for Content Management of ColdFusion applications.  We are fascinated by FarCry’s data layer written in ColdFusion called FourQ.  I once heard that FourQ was so named because its entire underlying structure was based upon only four queries.  This type of reuse may be exactly what we are looking for meeting our first criteria…

Posted by Neil Middleton on 05 Oct 2004

New Line Characters in labels in Flex

Now, I’ve been wanting to do this for ages, but haven’t had a chance to look into how. In any case I was scanning through the flex-coders list and saw a post that tells you how.

Unfortunately you can’t auto wrap, but you can use:

[code lang=“as3”]
[/code]

As a new line character to break the label over multiple lines.

[code lang=“xml”]

[/code]

Great for those form item labels.

Posted by Niklas Richardson on 19 Oct 2004

MX Europe 2005 Re-design

I am really happy to announce that we have released the new design of the MX Europe 2005 website.

Thanks to our designer Filip Ziolkowski for creating a fantastic new design. I would also like to thank Matt Ogle for creating the CSS implementation of the design.

Once the design had been turned into CSS (which took about 1/2 a day), it took another day to implement the new design on the website. This was made straightforward by us using the FarCry open-source content management system which made updating the templates a breeze.

The registration system should be coming online this weekend. We’ll keep you posted.

Posted by Niklas Richardson on 22 Oct 2004

UKCFUG Meeting Tonight - ColdFusion Security

We’ve got a great meeting tonight with Russ Michaels presenting on ColdFusion Security and security in a Shared Hosting environment.

The meeting is taking place at City University and starts at 7pm. Doors open at 6:30pm.

Don’t forget to register.

Posted by Niklas Richardson on 28 Oct 2004

Single Screen Checkout (tm) - Molecular

A very cool demo just came down the wire on the Flex Coders list. A US company called Molecular who did a single screen checkout component.

"Earlier this month, Molecular announced Single Screen Checkout, a Flex shopping cart/checkout application which has been adopted by TJMaxx.com and Homegoods.com already. Information and a demo of this application can be found here: http://molecular.com/singlescreencheckout/demo.aspx“

It integrates seamlessly into the site itself as a component – it doesn’t ‘look’ like a Flex application.

Impressive, I think that it really shows the direction of things to come. RIA and Flex components coexisting along side traditional Web Applications. Because at the end of the day, to use an British expression, the people who are doing the work couldn’t care less what the technology is.

We hope for our latest Freestyle project to be joining the showcase very soon.

Posted by Neil Middleton on 29 Oct 2004