CFUG Quarterly Meeting

The training wheels were off, and we were rolling on our own with two presentations from locals. Both presentations were similar in that both featured tools to simplify how data is managed by Coldfusion web applications but that was where the similarity ended.

Kristian Ward and David Mayerlen from UpstartX and the Pointt, gave a presentation on their product the Pointt. At first I thought it was a RAD tool or some sort of ORM tool, but now I realize it's more of a datamining/manipulation tool. I think their analogy was the best; it's like File Maker Pro for the web. Just like how with filemaker you can create "table" and "columns", and make interfaces for working with that data all without writing code. Great for clients who have need to be able to constantly update the schema of their "tables" while on a production. It suprising that there aren't more webapplications or webapp frameworks out there that provide this sort of flexibility.

Byron Bignell and Nolan Dubeau gave a presentation on cfcPowertools. CFCPowertools is a very ambitious project and is a RAD/ORM code generation tool. It's basically a webapplication that can operate a plugin for the coldfusion administrator application that can generate cfc Data Access Objects to take care of your Create Read Update Delete operations automatically from a database table. There are other tools that provide this sort of functionality like ARF, Reactor, or even CFHibernate. Where cfcPowertools distiguishes itself from the other ORM tools for colfusion is that it can create or alter the schema of a database table based on a DAO cfcs. So it can be used for code generation, or it can be used for database generation. It's compatible with most of the popular coldfusion frameworks like MachII, fusebox, and CFMVC. It doesn't limit self to just the behind the scenes code though, and this is a great demo feature, it can autogenerate the cfml code for forms, lists, and display views. It's expected that you will likely have to modify or extend any code it generates to add the business logic specific to your application but it certainly gives you a big head start.