Object Oriented programming has come up again as a topic du jour and is quite possibly one of the more divisive topics in the ColdFusion world, apart from Framework religion of course. Some may view OO as a smarter way to code. Some may view OO as a pain inflicted upon them by a Development Manager. Some may view OO as simply another elitist autocategorization. "Hey man, I am more 1337 than you. Even nOOb has OO in it, har har har. I have felt all of the above at one time or another.

Previously, we connected Transfer ORM into our ContactOMatic application. Now, we will use it to get some things done! The completed files for this exercise are included at the bottom of the post, just click on the 'Download' link. Using Transfer with MG:U is quite different than hand coding all the data access instructions so I separated out the new Transfer enabled code from the old hand coded bits to help compare similar operations between the two styles.

This past Saturday evening, the Adobe onAir Bus Tour breezed into Raleigh/Durham for a three hour stop. Mike Chambers and Kevin Hoyt gave presentations on AIR, the technology formerly known as Apollo, and the rest of the onAIR Bus Tour team took questions. Overall, I was left with the impression that jumping from Web Application Development to AIR Application Development can be very easy and the learning curve is small.

A word of caution. When working with Stored Procedures in a development environment, do yourself a favor and untick the 'Maintain Database Connections' option. If a stored procedure call results in an error, Maintaining Database Connections will sometimes cache the error and hand it back to you regardless of how the call is altered. These are very annoying symptoms to debug!

Today we will install the Transfer ORM inside our Contact-O-Matic application. To complete this tutorial, you should have the Contact-O-Matic installed and running. If you have not completed this step, please create the database described at the bottom of Series 6 and install the files at Series 10 download link. Test the application by manually adding several ContactTypes to the ContactType table in your database (I chose Co-Worker, Enemy, Friend).

Taking the decision to learn OO programming can be a confusing route. With all the new and complicated taxonomy, variety of opinions and general annoyances of OO programming, where do you turn for advice? Doesn't it seem that most OO discussions take place on the ModelGlue or MachII mailing list? While that is true, I would like to point out two resources that are truly gems. The #ColdFusion channel on Dalnel IRC is a great place to ask questions and get help.

I am going to continue the 'So You Wanna Create a Model Glue Application series. (Thanks Lola ;) For those just tuning in, the Contact-O-Matic is a simple example of a mini-application using ModelGlue and ColdSpring.

I have been maintaining an ad-hoc report lately. The report uses a stored procedure to perform Cross-Tab functions on a resultset. The stored procedure works by passing in an SQL string, which in my case, is a string of generated SQL. Yesterday, I added some additional functionality to the report and the stored procedure failed. After spending quite a while on diagnosing the problem, I found the maximum length of the input parameter was 8,000 characters.

Update: This post is no longer true. The documentation has been updated to reflect the inclusion of PostgreSQL in the standard edition of ColdFusion. See the comments for Steven Erat's response. While the specs are not fully complete, Damon Cooper has released the system requirements for the impending CF8 release. I thank the entire CF team and Adobe for their transparency. From the document, it appears that support for several databases will be only for CF8 Enterprise edition.

Jim Collins added a file browser to the Var Scope Checker originally authored by Seth Petry-Johnson. The code is now on Google Code, since Seth's website is REALLY down now. Get it while it's hot!