A few new Coldbox powered sites pushed live of this month.
EntryMaster. A sports registration gateway for the UK market using ColdBox to power a custom CMS and payment system.
Zurich, but you need to login to access via SimplyBiz.
Coming next month MonsterHunt.co.uk. A AR game powered by ColdBox. Lots of press for this one leading up to Halloween so watch this space, its going to be cool! The Zombies are coming!
As promised I will be posting on my own experiences in setting up CF9's inbuilt ORM with ColdBox. Most of this will be for my own reference, if I am making a mistake please point them out. Hopefully these posts will help others starting out with CB and CF9 ORM.
My first post starts at the beginning, how to setup ORM to use in your application. For this example I am using the M6 release of ColdBox so some of this may change by the final release.
First like a normal CF9 ORM project you have to tell your application you are using ORM. ColdBox has it's own set of tools which help integrate hibernate. The first is must if you're going to use hibernate within CB, and that's the event handler! I would suggest reading up on the ORM event handler as it does a lot more and shows you how to setup Autowire to inject objects into your entities etc.
As you can see you have added eventhandling = true, and eventhandler = "model.ORMEventHandler" to the code above. You will now need to add the ORMEventHandler.cfc to your model folder (providing you are following the same folder structure of course).
Next I am going to setup my first Domain Object. Depending on how your using it you will need to create this in the same model folder.
For this example we will setup a simple object and I will assume you already have some understanding of this.
It's been hard for me to get my head around CF9 ORM and ColdBox. The first mistake was using ORM within ColdBox for the first time. My life would have been easy if I had just started at the beginning with ORM. Why did I do it! Why!
Anyhow, I am committed! Truly, exciting and frustrated at the same time. The ColdBox support group is really helpful and if I may say incredibly patient at helping me with my stupid questions!
Over the next few weeks I am going to write up my own experiences with ORM and set up a demo using the M6 version of ColdBox. It won't be from an authority point of view, but from a beginners venture into ORM. In the mean time I want to just remind people of a post Luis made about community and support.
Luis gives back so much with this Framework it's made my life a lot easier, if it's helped you, then why not do your bit to.
I have had requests for an example of the CFC I used in the "Creating a simple Layar with ColdFusion" Tutorial. I decided to comment on the CFC and upload it to RIAForge. So if anyone wants it you can find the project there
It's only a example of what's needed to create POI's and Actions. POI, and objects. However you should be pulling these from a database!
I would love to know what others are doing with Layar at the moment.
I have been doing a lot of mobile development recently. The jqtouch plugin for jquery is awesome by the way! If you have not had the delight of developing with it yet I highly recommend the plugin for you next mobile project.
Anyhow back to Layar, I was asked to produce a simple Layar for one of our clients. Layar if you don't know is a cool augmented reality browser for the iPhone and Android. Other phone operating systems have been announced and its set to come pre-installed on most phones by 2012.
Augmented reality is exploding in Europe and I really think it's the next big thing. Creating a Layar is supper easy but no tutorial seemed to exist showing how to create POI in ColdFusion so I decided to write a quick post from an asp.NET Layar I did a few weeks back.
Requirements
You should know that a Layers consist of two parts:
Layer definition: Created using a web form on the Layar Publishing site. I will show you how to do that.<.p>
Points of Interest within a layer: Fetched directly from the Layer Service Provider via the API. We will do this in CF. I will show you a quick example of this here also
This morning I had sometime on my hands to revisit how I had setup ColdBox M5 using refactoring. Following a comment by Jason Dean, who suggested it would be much easier to use application specific mappings with CF8+. So I decided to give it another ago.
When I first tried this I got an error due to Application.cfc extending the framework. As another comment pointed out ColdBox apparently since version 2.6 comes with a no inheritance version that instead of extending the framework bootstraps it. This would allow me declare my mapping before the framework is initialised.
This is why I love the medium I choose to express myself in and the CF community, because they are so helpful.
To do this without refactoring see: http://www.cfcoffee.co.uk/index.cfm/2010/5/2/ColdBox-M5-and-264-Playing-Together-Continued
Have you downloaded the lasted update from Luis, ColdBox M5? No? Well you should download it right now! So many new goodies, however running CB release M5 alongside my stable version CB 2.6.4 took me a while to set-up in my environment. I have been playing with the new update for a week, but only locally. Now I wanted to actually do something I would need to run it in an environment with an older version.
I run IIS6 and have CB 2.6.4 mapped in my ColdFusion Administrator. Any reference to coldbox/system will use this release. I wanted to run both versions so that my old applications running 2.6.4 still work!
As I found out this can be done very easily following ColdBox Refactoring Guide found here and the Ant Script found in the download. I had a few issues with this tho, not many but here is what I did....
Your set-up many differ from this, this is just my experience!
I Downloaded M5 from the the ColdBox site and placed it on my desktop following the instructions in the refactoring guide. I used ColdFusion Builder to run the Ant script not Eclipse but it's the same.
My default path for my CFC's is coldbox.system, this is mapped in my ColdFusion Administrator to shared/frameworks/coldbox/system. Because my new version is going to run inside the same 'framework' folder I entered not the full path to the new location as the guide shows but the Logical Path. This is my case would be coldbox3.system.
Coldbox 3.0 will have Modules! This is actually a big thing in the world of CB! It opens up a whole new set of possibilities for the application we are developing at work. Extensibility with self-contained modules. Read more here
The feedback and press have started to come in for the She Says, She Says campaign created by Gencia Media which used ColdFuson and the framework ColdBox to power a mobile application to help awareness of teen sexual violence and rape. Read the full article on the BBC here
The start of several Government projects including a mobile application that helps teenagers become more aware of what constitutes as rape and how to get support was launched today. The applications both mobile and web needed a fast and reliable approach. After a short debate the development team including myself decided to use the ColdBox Framework by Luis Majano along with jQTouch (A jQuery plugin for mobile web development) we first heard about on a CF Podcast (CFHour).
The first campaign is using a version of Gencia's new survey based system written with the ColdBox framework. It's designed for Schools allowing them to create both mobile and web campaigns which then local authorities get live statistical data on how each area is doing including detailed analyse of changes in patterns of behaviour.
Glyn Jackson, 28 years old, MD and senior developer of a development firm based in Staffordshire called Newebia Ltd. Academic background in BSc Information System & Internet Commerce. Online marketing expert (EE Ranked) and .NET developer. Has been developing with ColdFusion for 5 years and loves it. "I am not a veteran in ColdFusion but I do work on challenging projects which help me learn more about ColdFusion and if I can contribute to the community in anyway then, it's all good!"
