May Meeting: Steve Bryant on DataMgr

Due to scheduling issues, our meeting this month has been moved to Thursday, May 28th. Our presenter this time will be Steve Bryant, who will be speaking on DataMgr, his database abstraction ColdFusion component. Although we will be holding the meeting at the regular time and place (7:00 pm at Cal Poly Pomona -- see our meetings page for further details), Steve is located in Tulsa, Oklahoma, so he will be presenting via Adobe Connect. As usual, pizza and soft drinks will be provided, so bring your appetite!

Steve Bryant is the proprietor and lead programmer of Bryant Web Consulting. He is a ColdFusion MX Certified Developer who has been programming in ColdFusion since 1999. He is the founder and current manager of the Tulsa ColdFusion User's Group.

He is the author of a number of ColdFusion tools, including Custom Tags, CFCs and a few programs.

Steve teaches occassional classes on ColdFusion and web development at Breakaway Interactive. He has written articles for ColdFusion Developer's Journal and maintains a (fairly) regular blog.

What is DataMgr?

DataMgr is a database abstraction tool to simplify common interactions with the database. This encompasses three major types of functionality:

• CRUD: Database reads/writes including those of the type performed by cfinsert/cfupdate
• ActiveSchema: The ability for your code to define your database structure. DataMgr can introspect the database structure or it can define it.
• Prototyping: The ability to use simulated data for prototyping (much like QuerySim, but more powerful and less work).

Additionally, DataMgr provides some advanced functionality that allows you to define special behaviors and relation fields that can dramatically assist development. Taken together, these features can effectively create interactions with the database that fit the way we develop web applications.

DataMgr could be viewed as a competitor to an ORM approach - though it doesn't require the same types of interactions. While ORM solutions effectively change the perspective of development from database to object, DataMgr maintains the database perspective, but makes common database interaction code more concise and powerful.

DataMgr currently supports the following databases (others are generally easy to add):

• Apache Derby
• MS Access
• MS SQL Server
• MySQL
• Oracle
• PostgreSQL

DataMgr currently supports (and has been show to work in) the following CFML engines:

• ColdFusion MX 6.1
• ColdFusion MX 7
• ColdFusion 8
• OpenBD 1.0
• Railo 3.0.1

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