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: ColdFusion Blog10 Questions for Mark Mandel on Transfer ORM
Ahead of the WebDU conference next week, Mark Mandel just yesterday released version 1.0 of Transfer ORM. If you’re wondering what the hell Transfer ORM is and why you should care, I asked Mark to answer a few questions to explain it all to us.
This post is in the same series (and uses the same questions) as the Geoff Bowers on FarCry and John Farrar on COOP.
Hi Mark! Give us your elevator pitch: summarize the essence of Transfer in a sentence or two.
Transfer is an Object Relational Mapper for ColdFusion.
It generates and populates CFCs that are Objects that represent the data in your application based on an XML configuration file. From there, it is able to automatically insert, update, delete that data into, and out of your database, without you having to write any of the SQL or CFML to do it.
OK, that sounds pretty cool. Let’s dig a little deeper: tell us more about the main features.
At the top level, Transfer generates what is commonly referred to as Business Objects for you, without you having to write any CFML or build a CFC. By Business Object, I mean an Object that represents an entity …
The Week in ColdFusion: 28 May – 3 June: Another CFML engine goes open source
Strictly, this falls outside the 28 May – 3 June timeframe for this weekly roundup, but it’s news too big to hold off on: Railo, the alternative CFML engine, is going open source. Hat tips to Kai “Agent K” Koenig, currently kicking his heels up at Scotch on the Rocks in Edinburgh, and also to AJ Mercer who has been dropping hints on the CFUGWA mailing list all afternoon.
According to reports from Scotch, Railo 3.1 running on JBoss wlll be released sometime around October on JBoss.org, under the LGPL license. Although coming only a couple of months after the Open BlueDragon announcement, this move is generating a lot of excitement. No doubt the coming weeks will see a lot of blog commentry – once again, it’s an exciting time to be a ColdFusion developer.
Right, back to our regular programme!
Code
News flash! ColdFusion Jedi Master makes a mistake! That’s right, Raymond Camden has posted about a “bonehead” custom tag mistake that had him scratching his head for quite a while - showing us that he IS actually human after all, and not just a coding machine. The machine did do …
The leadup to WebDU: web conference with a difference
The time for WebDU, Australia’s only web conference with a dedicated ColdFusion track, is just around the corner. The fun starts next week with workshops on the 11th of June followed by the conference itself on the 12th and 13th, at the Sydney Convention Centre. I’ll be there to cover all the action for SitePoint.
First up, the workshops. You can signup for a full day of Flash, Flex, or FarCry - but I hear the one NOT to miss is Mark Mandel’s session on the Transfer ORM framework. Mark will take participants through building a sample application with Transfer, including Eclipse setup, Transfer installation and configuration, basic usage and some of the more advanced stuff too - to “drastically cut down the amount of SQL and ColdFusion you need to write”. In actual fact I’m very sorry that I can’t manage to get there in time for this one - Mark keeps hassling me to try out Transfer and it’s something I definitely want to do.
On the evening of the 11th, Robin Hilliard is going to be running CODE WAR at the Connections Bar at Crowne Plaza Darling Harbour. Eight teams of 2-4 members will be competing …
The Week in ColdFusion: 21-27 May: Better late than never
ColdFusion 8 is an award-winner once again - this time it’s the SIIA’s Codie Awards (hat tip to Ben Forta). Ben also points out that UK based Software Editorial magazine has published a detailed review on ColdFusion 8 and they’re encouraging businesses to try ColdFusion out.
Open Source
Two posts from Alan Williamson this week about the official Open BlueDragon Plugin API - firstly an overview of the API itself, and secondly a step by step overview of how to develop a tag.
Brian Rinaldi’s open source update highlights five new projects, including AnythingToXML, the Open BlueDragon Web Admin, and an interesting-sounding project called templateListener to help streamline use of the trusted cache. Brian also asks Does ColdFusion’s Cost Inhibit Its Development? - and he’s got a ton of comments expressing a variety of viewpoints, from some very well-respected members of the community. Well worth a read!
A new open-source ColdFusion content management system called Sava has been released. Gary Gilbert discusses the plethora of open source content management systems built in ColdFusion, and ponders the lack of widespread support for internationalisation in Not Yet Another CF CMS (citing FarCry as the only open …
The Week In ColdFusion: 14-20 May: Keep on growing the community
Conference season update
The WebManiacs conference is on in Washington DC at the moment, so I’ll do a full report on that next week. The week after will be Scotch on the Rocks in Edinburgh (June 4-6) before CFUnited (June 18-21). Excitement is building - part 2 of Speakers getting ready for CFUnited has been posted.
At last week’s Adobe Community Summit, much of the interesting information was under NDA - and annoyingly, none of those user group managers or community experts are leaking anything! Aaron West posted some wrap-ups of the stuff he was allowed to tell us: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3.
It’s all about the code
Some quick nuggets of coding gold this week:
- Raymond Camden shows us how to shrink an image, but not the canvas, using CF8’s image processing functions
- There’s been no new CFGRID tricks for a while (Dan Vega, where are you?) but this week Ray also has instructions for how to add …
The Week in ColdFusion: 7-13 May: Community and Open Source are where it’s at
From the Adobe camp
This week saw the beginning of the Adobe Community Summit, a briefing event for Adobe Community Experts and user group managers. According to Aaron West’s Day 1 summary post, there are over 150 attendees this year, catching up on the latest in Adobe tech and giving feedback on the various community programs they are involved in. Aaron also revealed that Rachel Luxemburg was introduced as the new user group manager, replacing Ed Sullivan who many people involved in their local user groups would have had contact with over the past few years.
Adam Lehman, Platform Evangelist at Adobe, released his set of demo ColdFusion applications, covering the Ajax, Flex, PDF and presentation features of ColdFusion 8 (amongst others). The quick and dirty demos are designed to work with the standard cfartgallery sample database, an Apache Derby embedded database that gets installed with CF if you choose to include the samples, so if you’ve got a development server handy and you haven’t had a chance to try all the new features, check Adam’s demos out.
Also from the Adobe camp, briefly:
- Russell Brown has a controversial request for ColdFusion 9: drop the built-in Ajax and JavaScript libraries. …
cf.Objective Conference Wrap-up
cf.Objective() 2008, the third instalment of the “enterprise engineering conference for ColdFusion MX Programmers” run by Jared Rypka-Hauer, is now over for another year. cf.Objective() is unique in the conference circuit in that it concentrates almost solely on advanced topics. It also seems to generate a huge buzz in the community, and attracts attendees from around the world to Minneapolis.
It seems most delegates have arrived back home and updated their blogs, so I figure it’s time to see what they all learnt over the three days…
Brian Rinaldi wrote a comprehensive wrap-up for Fusion Authority. He noted that as the CF community continues to mature, developers are looking to the more advanced tools available to them to solve problems, namely Java, and this was evident in a number of session topics. He also noted that Flex was a hot topic, with so many sessions that a developer could spend the entire conference focused solely on Flex. Brian also reviewed several sessions in detail: Selling Professional Development in a Hostile Shop by Terrence Ryan; Leveraging Code Generation by Brian Kotek; Mate Flex Framework by Laura Arguello; Transfer Caching Mechanisms by Mark Mandel; and Flex: …
The Week in ColdFusion: 30 April-6 May: Is ColdFusion a programming language? blah blah blah…
There were a couple of big news items in the blogosphere this week, but making the most noise was the cf.Objective() conference. I’m not going to link to those blog posts here - I’m going to wait a few days for the dust to settle, and for everyone to get home and write up their thoughts, and do a big round-up early next week. From what I’ve seen so far it the people who were fortunate enough to attend had a great time and learnt a lot.
TIOBE Malarkey
Controversy abounds: the TIOBE Programming Community Index decided to remove ColdFusion from it’s list of most popular programming languages, on the basis that it was not a programming language, but a framework like .NET and Ruby on Rails. Obviously, much outrage ensued on blogs and mailing lists - far too many outpourings of disgust to link to them all! After reconsidering, TIOBE updated their FAQ to note that CFML - the ColdFusion Markup Language, as distinct from Adobe ColdFusion the application server product - was in fact, a Turing complete programming language and would be included in future lists.
What is interesting about this incident is that it has got the community talking …
Frameworks, frameworks everywhere
Frameworks are a favorite topic of mine. Just to get everyone on the same page, Wikipedia says a framework is “a basic conceptual structure used to solve or address complex issues”. Put more simply in application development terms, a framework is a set of files (code), conventions and best practices designed to help structure code for ease of programming, collaboration and future maintenance, and to stop developers from reinventing the wheel on every project.
When I started using ColdFusion, frameworks were largely unknown to the developer community, with one or two fledgling offerings available for the really adventurous. As the web has grown, ColdFusion has become more sophisticated to meet its expanding needs, and the choice of frameworks available has absolutely exploded.
A few weeks ago, SitePoint ran an interview I did with Geoff Bowers, the “benevolent dictator” of the FarCry community. While FarCry is better known as a content management system, the FarCry building blocks act as a framework, allowing developers to build complex applications. Just last week, this was followed up with an interview with John Farrar on his COOP framework, which is designed for rapid prototyping and easy collaboration between front end developers and …
The Week in ColdFusion: 23-29 April: sharpen your skills
Resources
Because that’s just the kind of guy he is, Charlie Arehart keeps a massive list of tools and resource of interest to ColdFusion developers - over 700 resources in over 100 categories. This week Charlie highlights the categories in his mammoth link collection. Come back when you’re through all that!
Subscribers to MXNA, the RSS feed aggregator for Adobe-related technologies, may have noticed that the site has been down quite a bit lately. Mike Chambers, one of the originators of the project, has posted an update to his blog on what is happening with MXNA. Looks like it will be back sometime soon.
In the only BlueDragon news I saw this week, the final instalment of the BlueDragon Open Source interview series - with Andy Wu - was released. That wraps up the introductions to the steering committee - they’re a smart and well-qualified bunch of people for sure.
Ben Forta has blogged his response to an enquiry from a ColdFusion developer from the CF3-CF5 era, who was wondering what he needed to learn to get up to speed with the current state of ColdFusion. Ben’s advice is interesting and applies equally well to any developer looking to improve …
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