Even though I cannot be at CFUnited, I wanted to bring a particular BOF to people's attention. Andrew Powell is hosting the AIR and Flex Fears Debunked BOF. While the Frameworks BOF is getting well-deserved attention, I think Andrew's session addresses some important concerns that I personally share. As I noted on Andrew's blog previously, I am sensing a shift in perception whereby Java folks are coming around to the idea of Flex but this is can help to marginalize ColdFusion if it is viewed as a purely UI focused language (i.e. in favor of purely Flex/Java applications)...wishing I could be there, but if you are there, you should be there ;)

My friend, Nick Sweeney of Big Fat Designs has generously taken his time to design a new logo for my Illudium PU-36 Code Generator (yes, the Nick from Ray's recent beginner's contest - we always consulted together back when I lived in Wisconsin). Just wanted to share because I like it...feel free to share your opinion, but be kind.

I have already bought the domain IlludiumPU36.org and I hope to have a site developed in the _near_ future. This will include the finally up to date documentation and then we will be 1.0 Final I think.

Five new releases and a handful of updates this week. For those of you lucky enough to be in D.C. for CFUnited...enjoy!

I was briefly talking with a friend who is hoping that ColdFusion 8 will be released at CFunited. Personally, I really don't think so. I feel that it would be better to give the public beta time to run its course, seeing as it has been only 22 days since it was released. This led me to speculate on what they might announce. Let me clarify that I have absolutely no insider information on this topic - this is pure speculation for the fun of it. First, I will begin with the more realistic possibilty...

In part 1 of this series, we learned how to use the code generator to help you get a head start on building your object-oriented code from scratch, including handling object composition. Part 2 showed how you could simplify managing dependencies using ColdSpring, however your components were still all maintained by hand. While, the code generator can give you a good head start, building and maintaining these components and managing composition can be a lot of work - especially when it comes to mapping these objects back to a relational database that doesn't understand composition but rather foreign keys.

Solving this problem is the core purpose of object-relational mapping (i.e. ORM) applications, the most well known probably being Hibernate for Java. A popular ORM for ColdFusion is Transfer created by Mark Mandel. While Transfer makes application development easy by eliminating a lot of the repetitive code that you have to build and maintain, the Illudium PU-36 code generator includes Transfer templates out-of-the-box to make that process even easier. This article will show you how to take the example objects from the previous article (i.e. our XBox console) and use Transfer to build the same - actually improved - functionality in less time.

Since this is the last article planned in this series for now, the download attachment includes all three examples to allow you to more easily see the progression from no framework, to ColdSpring integration, and finally to ColdSpring and Transfer integration. Also, this article resulted in a much tighter Transfer templates for the generator, which are available in the latest build.