So, despite the debate on utilizing an Active Record (sometimes called Table Row) design pattern, there are times when it can be incredibly useful. Especially when dealing with simple forms that deal with a single record within a table (go figure). It's also really handy if you're utilizing something like The Illudium PU-36 Code Generator to auto-generate your data modeling. But, occasionally, you hit a glitch and need to rethink.
You may notice the new Flash banner above, retelling the exciting news that Ben Forta is coming to Nashville on May the 9th. With reports coming in after the first week of this tour, we are all getting pretty jazzed. Daily reports come in on new features, functions, capabilities that are going to blow the doors off the other guys. Truly great stuff, and we'll have quite a few really nice giveaways as well.
We were discussing this at last night's meeting. Which rocked! Andy Matthews (who sits next to me daily at work) did a great presentation on Cascading Style Sheets. I'm already very familiar with CSS, but Andy taught me one or two things last night. Very in depth, and well done on his first presentation effort. You can access the Adobe Connect preso from the link in the Archive section of the Nashville ColdFusion User Group website.
So, anyway. Scorpio is coming. It's weeks away now, so make sure to go to the UG site and signup. For those who might be unfamiliar (or slightly familiar), Ben is a terrific technical author, with books on ColdFusion, SQL, MySQL, and more, and is a senior technology evangelist for Adobe. Not to mention his alter ego, Scorpio Man.
So, I just got home from the monthly Nashville ColdFusion User Group meeting, and I have to say that I'm looking forward to watching the Breezo (Connecto?) again of Steve Bryant's presentation on DataMgr. This lightweight utility seems like it can actually do some heavy lifting with some of your basic database interaction, handling all of your basic CRUD and a whole lot more. Has some very nice, built-in functionality for handling things like automatic data truncation when inserting to a column of a smaller size (but only if you ask it to), rewriting a batch of records to reflect new sort orders (like when re-ordering display orders), and quite a few other things.
OK, I'm not a beginner with SQL. After 7 years of hammering away at web apps I've picked up a little bit here and there. But I also try to remember how difficult it was for me to wrap my head around certain things that didn't necessarily have to do with programming logic. Things like design, layout, and database calls.
