Viewing by month: May 2009

Steve Bryant on DataMgr Starting Soon!

If you can't make it down to Cal Poly tonight, you can catch the meeting via Connect at:

http://experts.na3.acrobat.com/r31081269/

ColdFusion/Flex User Group Tour

We have exciting news! Adobe is embarking upon a world-wide tour of user groups to publicize the next versions of ColdFusion and Flex, as well as the first releases of Bolt and Flash Catalyst, two new tools for developing ColdFusion and Flex applications. We have been selected as a stop on the tour, and our event will be held on Tuesday, June 16th at 7:00 PM in room P2-7 of the C/L/A building at Cal Poly Pomona. We are fortunate to have Josh Adams from Adobe as our presenter for the evening:

Josh Adams is Senior System Engineer & ColdFusion Specialist at Adobe Systems Incorporated. In this role, Josh supports the ColdFusion sales team throughout North America. Josh is passionate about ColdFusion and the ColdFusion community: he presents regularly to User Groups and conferences throughout North America and is a longtime member, past President, and current Director of the Atlanta ColdFusion User Group.

Josh will be speaking about what's coming up in both the ColdFusion and Flex realms, so this promises to be a jam-packed session:

The Adobe ColdFusion team is hitting the road to discuss Centaur, the next version of ColdFusion, and Bolt -- code name for the highly anticipated first ColdFusion IDE from Adobe. Learn about exciting new features and discover how Centaur and Bolt will accelerate your ColdFusion application development.

Come learn about the newest features in the Flex 4 framework, Flex Builder 4 and the newest Adobe product -- Flash Catalyst. See product feature demos, and learn how the new Flex framework powers both Flash Catalyst and Flex Builder to speed the development and testing of rich Internet applications and content.

We're going to have plenty of food and drink, as well as some great giveaways, including Adobe software. This promises to be a fantastic evening that you won't want to miss!

May Meeting: Steve Bryant on DataMgr

Due to scheduling issues, our meeting this month has been moved to Thursday, May 28th. Our presenter this time will be Steve Bryant, who will be speaking on DataMgr, his database abstraction ColdFusion component. Although we will be holding the meeting at the regular time and place (7:00 pm at Cal Poly Pomona -- see our meetings page for further details), Steve is located in Tulsa, Oklahoma, so he will be presenting via Adobe Connect. As usual, pizza and soft drinks will be provided, so bring your appetite!

Steve Bryant is the proprietor and lead programmer of Bryant Web Consulting. He is a ColdFusion MX Certified Developer who has been programming in ColdFusion since 1999. He is the founder and current manager of the Tulsa ColdFusion User's Group.

He is the author of a number of ColdFusion tools, including Custom Tags, CFCs and a few programs.

Steve teaches occassional classes on ColdFusion and web development at Breakaway Interactive. He has written articles for ColdFusion Developer's Journal and maintains a (fairly) regular blog.

What is DataMgr?

DataMgr is a database abstraction tool to simplify common interactions with the database. This encompasses three major types of functionality:

• CRUD: Database reads/writes including those of the type performed by cfinsert/cfupdate
• ActiveSchema: The ability for your code to define your database structure. DataMgr can introspect the database structure or it can define it.
• Prototyping: The ability to use simulated data for prototyping (much like QuerySim, but more powerful and less work).

Additionally, DataMgr provides some advanced functionality that allows you to define special behaviors and relation fields that can dramatically assist development. Taken together, these features can effectively create interactions with the database that fit the way we develop web applications.

DataMgr could be viewed as a competitor to an ORM approach - though it doesn't require the same types of interactions. While ORM solutions effectively change the perspective of development from database to object, DataMgr maintains the database perspective, but makes common database interaction code more concise and powerful.

DataMgr currently supports the following databases (others are generally easy to add):

• Apache Derby
• MS Access
• MS SQL Server
• MySQL
• Oracle
• PostgreSQL

DataMgr currently supports (and has been show to work in) the following CFML engines:

• ColdFusion MX 6.1
• ColdFusion MX 7
• ColdFusion 8
• OpenBD 1.0
• Railo 3.0.1