Category Filtering: 'ColdFusion-Builder'
In my last post I played with the Media API to add sounds effects to the Roll The Ball game and made an Adobe CF Soundboard. Today I'll be showing my work with the Geolocation API. I wish I had some more time to do something more useful, but the CF mobile contest is drawing to a close tonight and I this will be the last feature I have time to put in.
Previously I played with the Accelerometer API make a "roll the ball" labyrinth game. While I found the accelerometer API easy to implement, my experiments with the Media API proved less fruitful. For a while I was afraid I would be unable to show anything at all, but after a considerable amount of fiddling (and Googling), I was able to get it working.
The Media API contains function for capturing audio and video as well playing back audio. The first thing I did was add some fun sound effects to my "roll the ball" game. And secondly, I made an Adobe ColdFusion Sound Board. But first, I had to get it working.
In my last post, I tackled two APIs-- notifications and contacts. Even though I wasn't able to fully explore the contacts, I managed to get things working without too much troubles. I'm occasionally hitting some weird parsing issues in CFBuilder or underlying JavaScript errors I can't explain but "rearranging" my code will usually make it go away (more on this later). I'll try to go back and put in tickets for these after the fact, but I'm always reticent to shout "BUG!" in a crowded theater when I'm not 100% I'm doing it right.
In my last entry, I discussed my decision to create a "CFClient Sampler" app that would simultaneously allow me to play with each mobile client API, all the while providing the community with some nature of blog-based documentary on my attempt. With a solid proof of concept under my belt (and on GitHub) I pushed forward with two goals in mind this time:
I'll start with the last one, which was to make the app not look like a middle schooler banging something out with Microsoft FrontPage. Quite frankly, I suck at UI stuff. I'm a "function over form" guy and I'm quite happy architecting the back end of an application far far away from the perils of CSS, responsive layouts, and viewports. For this I used my phone-a-friend and dialed up jQuery Mobile. JQM has been around for a while and it doesn't make web pages that very unique (kind of like the BootStrap cookie cutter sites) but it's stupid simple to setup and covers every major navigation, button, control, and layout concern I'll be detailing with.
So, in my first entry I discussed that I'm trying my hand at CFClient, mostly drawn to the idea of winning a $1000 gift card from Adobe. Previously I followed Ram's YouTube videos and articles on setting up a Mobile project in ColdFusion Builder, installing his sample app, compiling that app via Adobe's cloud-based PhoneGap server, and installing it.
This venture was met with mixed success. The PhoneGap shell app which allows one to test without needing to recompile after EVERY code change fell flat out of the gate for me. I'm still waiting to hear back from Adobe on that. I was able to compile and run the sample app, but couldn't get the file APIs to work. I've sort of given up on that for now-- there's just not enough time to keep banging my head on that wall for the time being.
This didn't start as a blog entry. I originally typed it up as an E-mail to Anit Kumar, Adobe's rockstar support guy who offered to help me on Twitter. See, I'm trying to build a mobile app using ColdFusion 11 mobile technology to have a chance at winning the $1,000 prize from Adobe's little contest. If you didn't know about it, please forget about it-- I don't want any more competition :)
So after several hours of fiddling yesterday, I got a lot of the workflow understood and working but still have some major hang ups and questions. After I finished typing this E-mail to Anit, I thought to myself, "Self, why not make this conversation public so everyone can benifit from it?" There's precious little information about CFClient out there already and some people like Adam C has already expressed interest in hearing my experiences-- not that I expect to sell him on CFClient or anything :)
This is a little rambly and I apologize for that. I'll try to blog some more organized thoughts after I get this all working. So, without further ado... Anit, please reply here if you can just so everyone can benefit from the answers-- even if it means I'm a numbskull and did it all wrong.
With the release of DataBoss 1.3 today, I thought I'd share a quick story about my recent first project diving into DataBoss. Full disclosure: DataBoss is a commercial product and I work for the company that makes it. None the less, I thought it was pretty freaking useful so I thought I'd throw out this quick post.
For those of you who don't know what the heck DataBoss is-- it's a Dynamic ORM Administrator. Basically, it can scaffold out CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) screens for pretty much any database structure and it's all based on ColdFusion ORM. It runs on Adobe ColdFusion as well as Railo and the minimum to get it running is to create ORM entity CFCs, drop them in your models folder and reload ORM via the interface. It will pick up your entities, read all the relationships, and create all the screens necessary to manage the data in your database complete with formatting, validation, rich text editors, date dropdowns, etc.
So, the recent project I got assigned was for a company that does development services. They had a project they had been working on for one of their clients that involved a nicely-normalized database of about 20 tables that supported a multi-lingual ordering and reservation system. They had the front end system built out with ColdFusion but the problem was the deadline was getting very close and they weren't going to have to time build the backend of the system that allowed all the products, descriptions, and companies to be configured. They needed to have a backend over to their client in a matter of days to start entering data, but there simply wasn't enough time to build one from scratch.
Enter DataBoss. I was tasked with setting up a data-entry app they could use to manage their database until they had time to finish the backend. The database that had already been built was well-structured and contained many examples of one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many relationships. I was given a backup of the data structure and a diagram that showed all the foreign key relationships. Using Adobe's CFC Generator for ColdFusion Builder, I selected the tables via the RDS datasource view and stubbed out all the ORM entities in script. Don't try to use the CF Builder plugin to create relationships. It's horrible and you'll be sorry. For just stubbing out the entities and the properties, it's pretty good though and saves a lot of time.
DataBoss is packaged as a portable ColdBox module which means you can drop it into an existing ColdBox app, or just deploy it as a small standalone app. I chose the latter and dropped my ORM entities in the /model folder. After adding my datasource name to Application.cfc and changing dbCreate to "none" the app sprang to life and displayed a list of all my entities in a drop down. There's settings in a JSON file to control pagination as well as the internationalization of the DataBoss app itself. DataBoss already comes bundled with German translations which was nice since this project was for a German company.
At this point, I went through and configured all the relationships and added metadata to each entity and property that controlled how it displayed on the screen, what kind of validation it applied, and what form controls to display for each field. After a bit of tweaking, we had really nice CRUD screens fleshed out that even used 24-hour clock and dd/mm/yyyy date formats to match the local standard. I enabled the Basic HTTP Auth built into DataBoss, and it was ready to deploy publicly! All in all, we had the entire admin finished and ready to deliver to the customer in just a few days.
I was pretty pleased with how easy it was to get working, and was a major saver for them to get the edit screens to their customer in time. And now, they can use those ORM entities for future development on the application. DataBoss Standalone is only 99 bucks which isn't bad considering the time it can save you. Think about using it for that old legacy database you have no edit screens for, or to help you create your next database. You can also download a trial to play around if you want.
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