With Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft strikes again and implements a new format for their Access database standard. I do not recommend using Microsoft Access databases for production applications. In fact, I believe you will pay, sooner or later, for adopting such a practice. Nevertheless, it is useful for testing or development at times, and more importantly, you may be in a situation like me, where there are databases that you do not “own” or control but your ColdFusion apps must use them.

That said, please note that the drivers that come with CF8 do not support Access 2007. This is mentioned in the ColdFusion 8 Release Notes under #69495. The solution is nicely described right in the release notes. Download and install the Data Connectivity Components for Office 2007, set up a Windows ODBC connection, and use ColdFusion’s ODBC socket driver to connect to the Windows ODBC connection. A bit irritating that all of this has to be done, but like I said at the outset, these irritants are the price you pay, among other things, when using Access databases.

Another point to note! You thought you were done, but no, Microsoft has more joy in store for some of us.  The Office 2007 drivers do not support Windows 2000. So if your server is still sitting on a Windows 2000 installation, the final word is either (a) No Access 2007 for you, or (b) Time to upgrade to Windows 2003 SP1 or later.

These are notes from the presentation by Tom Jordahl about BlazeDS.

History lesson. Flex 1.0 introduced MXML. Originally built to be a server-based compiler. Flex 2.0 fine-tuned the product. ActionScript 3 was introduced, the Eclipse-based IDE was developed, and the server-side component was renamed Flex Data Services. That server-side product continued development and was renamed eventually to LiveCycle Data Services. Finally, a free portion was released as BlazeDS. So, its heart and heritage is in the development of Flex.

So what is BlazeDS? The part that lets your Flash/Flex app have remoting and messaging services via web services, remote objects, data push, etc.

Remoting. Used to be Flash Remoting. Allows mx:RemoteObject tag be used to make RPC calls to the server. Allows you to use CFCs and ActionScript or MXML together! Works with Java classes too, but obviously it is very nicely integrated with ColdFusion. This is the most familiar purpose for this kind of tool. But what else can BlazeDS do?

Messaging. Publish and Subscribe functionality becomes trivial. We can have real-time pushes over the web. What exactly does this mean? Your Flash/Flex apps can push data from one client to the next without refreshes or polling the server.

These services use AMF (Action Messaging Format). It is fast and small: Rather than being verbose text, it is a compact binary protocol. Not that you would ever have to know that, because it just happens behind the scenes. And its specs have been released, which means it can be supported by open source and third party developers.

So why would you still get LCDS? Well, you get certified builds with warranty coverage and support. You’re paying for Adobe to back the product. There will even be an LCDS “Community Edition” that will basically be BlazeDS with this support. Somewhat reminiscent to Red Hat vs. CentOS: Why get Red Hat when CentOS is everything Red Hat is? Because Red Hat has official support for its product. So Adobe is making the technology freely available, and giving you the option to pay for support and official builds and bug fixes.

LCDS “Enterprise Edition” is still the mother of data services. This version adds the data management capability of data services.

The installation of ColdFusion 8 gives you the free express edition of LCDS. But this is a single CPU license. If it doesn’t meet your needs, you can configure BlazeDS for ColdFusion 8. But to do this, you WILL have to remove the LCDS Express Edition that installed with CF8. Now, if you’re just using Flash Remoting, there isn’t any burning need to go to BlazeDS with CF8. However, the messaging features have no CPU restrictions with BlazeDS, so if you are using the messaging features, you may want to go with BlazeDS.

What do you use with BlazeDS vs. LCDS? LCDS has the data management features: Real-time data updates, conflict detection, caching, paging, more! RTMP channels: Direct socket connection to server, instead of the more resource-expensive HTTP. Scalability is also better with LCDS.

Tom indicated that Flex and BlazeDS will not be standing still. He certainly implied that Silverlight is in Adobe’s sights by indicating that it is “nipping at [Flex’s] heels”, suggesting that the AIR, Flex, and BlazeDS technologies will be progressing in development at a rapid pace by Adobe.

Tom explained BlazeDS and LCDS very clearly, albeit at a quick pace at first. My development rarely calls for the messaging features that would especially drive me to BlazeDS, but even so, it was beneficial to understand what BlazeDS is and it is good to know even when a product is not needed in your development arsenal, as in my case. For me, I will be using remoting only, so will stick with LCDS Express that comes with CF8.

Thanks, Tom.

These are notes of the prepared presentation for ShadoCMS on its website.

Installing ShadoCMS. Same process on any platform. First step is to install CFMX 7, which actually is included in the price of ShadoCMS. Next, create a database (Oracle, MSSQL, or MySQL) and the DSN. Finally, deploy the site by dragging the software into your site’s web root. You can either begin building your site or use a template to start as a jumping point for your site.

Editing some content. Like many CMS packages, displays editable regions with a colored border around them. When clicking “Edit”, will open that region and can edit the content. Has a very typical WYSIWYG editor.

Site Management. Pages are clearly visible with a site tree that is collapsible by clicking on containers. From this view, you can view past history of a page and roll back to previous versions if desired. Easy to cut/paste pages in and out of various sections of the site, and your navigation can be automatically controlled by this to make it easy to be updated. Very nice.

Adding new pages and new content objects inside those pages is very simple. A click to create a new container, and the new object in a page is created.

Application framework. Shado provides an object-oriented framework for developers. Has a comprehensive, documented API for developers. Because of this exposure to the API, it is simple to modify the objects in Shado. In the demo, he took a user object and added a new field, which then showed up in the user manager form. Nice.

User Mgmt. Built to integrate with an LDAP directory.  Can control what pages users can see, etc. Users belong to groups and permissions are assigned to their groups.

Modules. Additional modules can be built and deployed on the site. News/Events mgmt, form builder, Microsoft Word Import Engine, SEO, etc.  Custom modules can be written by Shado or even by customer.

Search. Verity K2 is used, and excellent Google-esque searching is thus supported.

I haven’t used the CMS in a hands-on fashion yet, but it does indeed seem like a very solid CMS.

These are notes for a presentation on Savvy, the content management system, by Joshua Cyr.

For setup, there is a cfm page that has numerous CFSETs that you have to set. After that, everything is basically good to go. It will create the database in the DSN you provide it, by simply running an install script by calling a cfm page.

First thing you’ll have to do when you login: Set up some templates for your site. In CFEclipse, he took a normal HTML page with content, and just started editing Savvy tags. He replaced the <title> with a header object, some menu navigation with a nav object, basic content with a content object. What about when you alter a template? There is an option to rebuild pages (or entire site) for when a template is changed.

He showed that an object can be shared. This way, anytime an object with that name appears on any page, changes to that object will be reflected on all of the pages.

Creating pages and directories, actual physical files and directories are indeed saved. This is handy for apps that do traffic analysis. Sometimes they sputter on pages that have a front controller for pages (index.cfm?page=MyPage).

When you create a page, you then can view each content area in the new page. Just click on it and you can edit that particular content area. The editing mechanism is pretty typical: A WYSIWYG editor, decent picture management. You can adjust settings so that the WYSIWYG editor will look exactly like you want it. Handling links is pretty simple: Can pull up a screen similar to picking a picture, except for pages. When you start typing a page name, it has auto-suggest to help. Note that the link management is very basic: It helps you create a hard link in the content, and nothing is done to warn you if you will break links when you change a page’s name or location (or delete it).

When it comes time to publish, you can publish an object at a time, or the whole page. Publishing can be scheduled, and expiration is available as well. Additionally, it supports workflow where the user will not have publishing rights, so instead he can request publishing, and then a person with that permission will do the publishing. Savvy does not have sophisticated workflow management, however. It keeps the process simplified. History of items is recorded and can be viewed. History by object/page or by user.

When managing users, you not only can supply exact permissions of what a user can do, but also can do groups that users belong to. Then perms are assigned based on their group.

Now, when you have CF in you template page, it doesn’t work like you’d expect, when a new page is created from a template, it will effectively paste in the results of your CF, not actually render the CF on the page. Thus, welcome to their custom code object. It effectively acts like a CFINCLUDE for your pages.

Savvy plays nice with other CF applications. He did not demo or speak on this any further, though.

Thanks, Joshua.