First of all I should apologize for the long delay between this article and the preceding one which discussed the differences between On Line Transactional Processing (OLTP) and On Line Analytical Processing (OLAP). At a very high level OLTP databases are those used in typical day to day processes, inserts and updates etc and involve what is known as "normalization" which is used to avoid data duplication, here is a good clear overview of normalization.

Introduction Recently, in a mailing list I'm on, the question of code reuse came up. Someone wanted to decide at runtime which of two classes to extend in order to share the common code for the job (which was most of the code) across two slightly different implementations. The problem with that, however, is that you have to use a string literal for the extends="" attribute of the cfcomponent tag. There is, however, a fairly simple solution that accomplishes the same thing.

As I am sure most who have even just dabbled in Flex know, you can style your applications using CSS. The problem with styling is that, at the end of the day, your application still looks like a Flex application (not there is anything wrong with that). The real power behind making Flex apps look different comes from skinning. Now, if you are like me, the word 'skinning' will scare the ba-jeezers out of you.

This blog piece is intended for business users in the main but I hope will also serve as a good information point for pulling together ever expanding array of Flash based technologies.

This is very much an OT post but I just thought I would share what I think is a really neat piece of technology from Apple and Nike. I walk a lot when I have time, the furthest I have walked non-stop so far is 27 miles, just one over a marathon when I think about it. This is on a beach path which starts effectively in Hermosa Beach CA and goes on for a good few miles North.

As Scott has been blogging here, we recently released a new Alagad.com website built ontop of Farcry. The thing is, since we released the site we have been having intermitant problems with errors cropping up in the admin interface which simply say "corrupt table". We quickly discovered a few points about this: There are no corrupt tables. Or, more to the point, our data in our database was not corrupt. If you restart ColdFusion the errors went away.

I have something I need to get off my chest.  This blog entry is targeted squarely at the ColdFusion community and, I think, should be kept exclusively within the ColdFusion community.  I know I'm writing this on a public blog, but, let's face it, not many people other than Adobe webstack developers are goign to read this.  What I want to say is that I really hope ColdFusion programmers can find it within themselves to stop trying to convince other programmers that ColdFusion is not dead.

In previous articles we discussed how to extend the native FarCry objects and how to create a form to manage these new objects. Today we will discuss what we modified to allow users to see the form. Since we needed to use a new form for users to update their profile, and we wanted it to appear in the main content area rather than in a pop-up window, we needed to not only modify the menu, but some files in the core code.

Since Doug announced that he was working on an XML-RPC connector for the Alagad Team Blog, I've been dying for him to let us know that something workable was ready so we could try it out. Today he let us Alagad bloggers know that it was up and running, so I wanted to give it a try. At the moment, I'm using Contribute, which seems to be the easiest tool for this particular task and while I haven't yet tried to publish anything, at the moment I'm pretty impressed...

The other day, I discussed how we extended the dmProfile FarCry object so that we could add more properties. Today, I am going to discuss how we used this object's properties to be able to create a form that will easily allow users to edit the extra information we needed to save. This is a slightly different approach than you might take for other custom content types as most custom content types would be editable like any other content. First, let me throw out a disclaimer.