ColdFusion AIR Synchronization - Best practices

I'm a long time ColdFusion developer who has put off learning Flex because I never had a need (not to mention the bad taste Flash left in my mouth in its early stages). Now I'm jumping in because of its integration with Air+SQLite and Coldfusion9 that allows online/offline support.
Really cool stuff, but to my knowledge there are only two blogs that have a post about how to do this synchronization (Jayesh's blog and Terrance's blog), both of which use the same sample application. So I'm hoping there are experts on this subject (which is not entirely CF+Air sync related), can shed some light for me.
My questions are from a best practice standpoint, primarily: where should all of this code go? Let me be a little more specific (and I appologize in advance for my misuse of termonology, and my overall ignorance of OO ):
In the example code there are two tables (AS classes): Address.as and Customer.as. The contents of these files and the ORM concepts in general I understand. However, the files are lodged in a folder called "onetoone" in the main "src" directory. In a best practice scenario, should these be in a "model.vo" directory (assuming no other frameworks are being used)
Also in the example code, all of the AS code that handles connecting to the back end, fetching, saving to SQLite and back to the server is in the main application mxml file "CFAIROfflineCustomerManagerApp.mxml". I'm not a Flex developer yet, but I don't think this is good. I guess it's fine for a simple 2 table scenario, but in real life this will become a huge beast. How would this best be broken up into separate files? I'm relatively new to OO, I get the concepts but haven't used it in a pure form in any production applications. My initial inclination is to separate the code that deals with the CF back-end and the SQLite database into a "services" directory and all the code that pulls that data into the UI (and stuffs it back) into a "controllers" directory.
Perhaps one of the many frameworks out there may clear things up for me? I have been reluctant to use a framework at this point because I would like to understand better what they solve before choosing a framework. Are there any examples of this new sync feature via cfair.swc in any of the popular frameworks? I've searched, but turned up nothing.
I think this is enough for now. I like to keep my code really organized, and before I get too far into writing bad code in an unorganized way - I thought I'd ask for some guidance. At least this way I can write bad code in an organized way!
Thanks in advance for any advice, resources, etc...
--Abram

Similar Messages

New to ColdFusion - Question regarding best practice

Hello there.
I have been programming in Java/C#/PHP for the past two years or so, and as of late have really taken a liking to ColdFusion.
The question that I have is around the actual seperation of code and if there are any best practices that are preached using this language. While I was learning Java, I was taught that it's best to have several layers in your code; example: Front end (JSPs or ASP) -> Business Objects -> Daos -> Database. All of the code that I have written using these three languages have followed this simple structure, for the most part.
As I dive deeper into ColdFusion, most of the examples that I have seen from vetrans of this language don't really incorporate much seperation. And I'm not referring to the simple "here's what this function does" type of examples online where most of the code is written in one file. I've been able to see projects that have been created with this language.
I work with a couple developers who have been writing in ColdFusion for a few years and posed this question to them as well. Their response was something to the affect of, "I'm not sure if there are any best practices for this, but it doesn't really seem like there's much of an issue making calls like this".
I have searched online for any type of best practices or discussions around this and haven't seen much of anything.
I do still consider myself somewhat of a noobling when it comes to programming, but matters of best practice are important to me for any language that I learn more about.
Thanks for the help.

Frameworks for Web Applications can require alot of overhead, more than you might normally need programming ColdFusion, I have worked with Frameworks, including Fusebox, what I discovered is when handing a project over to a different developer, it took them over a month before they were able to fully understand the Fusebox framework and then program it comfortably. I decided to not use Fusebox on other projects for this reason.
For maintainability sometimes its better to not use a framework, while there are a number of ColdFusion developers, those that know the Fusebox framework are in the minority. When using a framework, you always have to consider the amount of time to learn it and succesfuly implement it. Alot of it depends on how much of your code you want to reuse. One thing you have to consider, is if you need to make a change to the web application, how many files will you have to modify? Sometimes its more files with a framework than if you just write code without a framework.
While working on a website for Electronic Component sourcing, I encountered this dynamic several times.
Michael G. Workman
[email protected]
http://www.usbid.com
http://ic.locate-ic.com

Best practice to deploy some secret credentials in AIR app

Hi,
Can someone suggest the best practice way to deploy some
secret credentials in an AIR app please?
For example, network connection settings or passwords ?
In my particular case (and since this is only for testing)
I'd like to deploy a password in an AIR app. So is there any way to
effectively deploy an encrypted store with the app ? (hope that
makes sense!)
Tks,
Alex

I think the best practice is not to do it. You can't deploy
an encrypted local
store file to another computer. You could encrypt the
information some other
way, but that just moves the problem. If you have a server,
you could have the
app connect to the server to get the sensitive information
and put it into the
ELS (ideally through HTTPS).

Building a best practice web application using ColdFusion and Jave EE

I've been tasked with rewriting a software using ColdFusion. I cannot seem to find a lot of information on best practice development in ColdFusion. I am an experience Java developer who has never used ColdFusion before. I want to build this application using a synergy of ColdFusion and Java EE technologies. Can someone recommend me a book that outlines how to developer in ColdFusion? Ideally this book assumes the reader is an experienced developer with no exposure to ColdFusion. Ideally the methods outlined in the book are still "best practice" methods.

jaisheela wrote:
Hello Friends,
I am also in the same situation.
I am a building a new web application using JSF and AJAX.
Requirement is I need to use IBM version of DOJO and JSF but I need to develop the whole application using Eclipse 3.3,2 and Tomcat 5.5.
With IBM version of DOJO and JSF, will Eclipse and Tomcat help to speed up the development or do you suggest me to go for Rational Application Developer and WebSphere Application Server.
If I need to go with RAD and WAS, then I am new to RAD and WAS, is it easy to use RAD and WAS for this kind of application and implement web applicaiton fast.
Any feedback will be great help.Those don't sound like requirements of the system to me. They sound more like someone wants to improve their CV/resume
From what I've read recently, if it's just fast you want, look at Ruby on Rails

Adobe Air SQLite Concurrency/Best Practices

Hello Everyone,
I posted this on Stackoverflow, but I was wondering if there were any I guess design patterns or hints concerning the usage of a SQLite DB. I'm asking this mostly because with the Adobe Air sqlite implementation, you can't modify the timeout, so you have to re-architect your application to try and retry your sql statements.
I am attempting to use a SQLite DB with an AIR project and there seem to be a few questions that I just can't seem to find the answers to on the internet, especially ones concerning best practices.
The first is about having multiple connections in the same application instance. Some application processes require the use of a db for a split second, and would better be served by a synchronous type code flow (try{}catch(){}). Some processes may take awhile and would be better served by an asynchronous code flow with an AsyncResponder. Because of this, I have thought about having a ConnectionPoolManager which would have multiple instances of async and one instance of my sync SQLConnection classes. Is this a decent, good or absolutely atrocious idea ? This leads me to my next point.
Is there any issue of having multiple async connections running their async statements in parallel ? I've seen some people complain about the db being locked, and I've read that only one statement can perform a write at a time. What happens if a write statement gets called to execute(new Async...) while another one is busy ? Will an error be thrown, or will it wait for a timeout ?
Any clarification about this issue would be greatly appreciated. I keep running into sources that kind of answer one-off questions but not my question in particular. Usually I would go test it myself, but I'm worried I may not be able to reproduce the pitfall error that will only manifest itself at heavier usage levels.

I'd suggest checking out the following links for tips and
source code for best practices on SQLite:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/flex/articles/air_sql_operations.html
http://www.peterelst.com/blog/2008/04/07/introduction-to-sqlite-in-adobe-air/
- Rob

Coldfusion Error catching (cftry cfcatch) best practice question...

Hey all -
I wanted to get a couple of opinions about this. Obviously I want to catch any and all errors that hit my server and avoid exposures to my end users, but I didnt know what the most efficient way of doing such was. Does it make sense to put a cftry cfcatch around the entirety of my code on every page? (I use a lot of embeds...cfinclude) Or is that too broad? How does that effect performance? Is there another way to auto catch and email all errors and then show the user a custom error page? I searched around, but I got bits and pieces based on specific requests...not really any "best practice" tips. Any suggestions would be fantastic.
Thanks much!

There are no real best practices as such, as it's largely down to your application. The only real "standard" is the onError() method in Application.cfc, which will handle any Exceptions which make their way to it - i.e. any that are not caught by an explicit try/catch block.
When considering what you are now, I consider this: where do I want to display an error? How far down the line does it matter? There's no right or wrong answer, it's down to you.
Say you're displaying a page, which is made up of ten includes. If there's an error in one, do you want the other nine displayed, or do you want the whole page to error? If it's the former, wrap each one in its own try/catch. If it's nonsensical to do so, just let the page throw an Exception to get picked up by your Application.onError() method.
It also depends largely on whether or not an error is "recoverable" - is it of any use telling someone that a small but important part of the page failed becuase of a database issue? Probably not. There's nothing they can do about it, so just throw an error and let your error template sort it out.
It also depends on the context in which the page is being called - if it's an Application with users, you can display an error page with as much or as little information as you want. If it's a remote CFC call, however, it's extremely annoying for the remote developer to just get useless ColdFusion exceptions. Therefore I would always wrap every remote CFC method in its own try/catch, so if something goes wrong you can still return them something useful - even a "false" is better sometimes than an exception. You can then do what you like within the catch block - send you an email, log to disk, whatever.
Just a few thoughts, haven't proof read them though so expect massive, glaring mistakes and poor advice.

Coldfusion, MS SQL, Hash Best Practices,...

Hello,
I am trying trying to store hashed data (user password) in an
ms sql database; the datatype in the database is set to varbinary.
I get a datatype conflict when trying to insert the hashed data. It
works when the datatype in the database is set to varchar.
I understand that you can set your hash function with
arguments that will convert the data before sending to the
database, but I am not clear on how this is done. Now, along with
any assistance with the conversion, what exactly is the best
practice for storing the hash data? Should I store as varcahar or
varbinary? Of course, if varchar I won't have the problem, but I am
interested in best practices as well.
Thnx

brwright,
I suggest parameterizing your queries to add protecting from
injection.
http://livedocs.adobe.com/coldfusion/6.1/htmldocs/tags-b20.htm
hashing is best suited for passwords because the encryption
is one way, once encrypted using hash() it can't be decrypted.
Other fields that you might want to encrypt and still have the
ability to decrypt, you can use the encrypt() and decrypt()
functions.
http://livedocs.adobe.com/coldfusion/6.1/htmldocs/functi75.htm
I think there are also new encryption functions available in
coldfusion 8...

What is the best practice to protect coldfusion administrator login page

Hi all,
Can someone suggest what is the best practice to protect the administrator login? At the moment, there is only the normal administrator page password to protect. It seems like not very secure especially when the application is on the internet.
Regards,
Bubblegum.

You can protect the page with file system level privs. Setup a new virtual server that maps to a seperate copy of /cfide (and remove /admin and /adminapi from the other cfide folder your internet sites use). Limit what IP addresses can hit /cfide.
We run multiple instances, so we connect directly to each instance to manage it. And those ports aren't accessable on the internet. To top it off, we have an ISAPI ReWrite rule that sends a 404 if you try /cfide/administrator or adminapi.
If you're using CF8, you can set it up so it requires a specific username instead of a generic name.

Best practice on sqlite for games?

Hi Everyone, I'm new to building games/apps, so I apologize if this question is redundant...
I am developing a couple games for Android/iOS, and was initially using a regular (un-encrypted) sqlite database. I need to populate the database with a lot of info for the games, such as levels, store items, etc. Originally, I was creating the database with SQL Manager (Firefox) and then when I install a game on a device, it would copy that pre-populated database to the device. However, if someone was able to access that app's database, they could feasibly add unlimited coins to their account, unlock every level, etc.
So I have a few questions:
First, can someone access that data in an APK/IPA app once downloaded from the app store, or is the method I've been using above secure and good practice?
Second, is the best solution to go with an encrypted database? I know Adobe Air has the built-in support for that, and I have the perfect article on how to create it (Ten tips for building better Adobe AIR applications | Adobe Developer Connection) but I would like the expert community opinion on this.
Now, if the answer is to go with encrypted, that's great - but, in doing so, is it possible to still use the copy function at the beginning or do I need to include all of the script to create the database tables and then populate them with everything? That will be quite a bit of script to handle the initial setup, and if the user was to abandon the app halfway through that population, it might mess things up.
Any thoughts / best practice / recommendations are very appreciated. Thank you!

I'll just post my own reply to this.
What I ended up doing, was creating the script that self-creates the database and then populates the tables (as unencrypted... the encryption portion is commented out until store publishing). It's a tremendous amount of code, completely repetitive with the exception of the values I'm entering, but you can't do an insert loop or multi-line insert statement in AIR's SQLite so the best move is to create everything line by line.
This creates the database, and since it's not encrypted, it can be tested using Firefox's SQLite manager or some other database program. Once you're ready for deployment to the app stores, you simply modify the above set to use encryption instead of the unencrypted method used for testing.
So far this has worked best for me. If anyone needs some example code, let me know and I can post it.

IPhone Best Practices - A Work In Progress

Hello all. I've been tasked with introducing my coworkers into the inner workings of the iPhone, and there are a good number of pointers that I find myself saying over and over again. I'd like to share my best practices with everyone, as well as collect more pointers and opinions from the community at large.
Care and Handling:
First - wash your hands, often. Now I know we all do this often anyway, but I'd like to point out that a healthy amount of hand washing will really go a long way to keep your iPhone screen smudge free. The worst offender, unfortunately, is doughnuts. A small layer of sugar will render that area un-tappable, without any real indication that it has done so. If you are frantically tapping the screen on the iPod button and nothing is happening, clean your phone before you do a hard reset.
Second - Pockets. Keeping your phone in your front pocket is natural and what most of us do. In these summer months, however, keeping your phone in a sweaty front pocket can do a good deal to the dirt level of the screen. If you find yourself cleaning your phone constantly, try a belt clip.
Lastly - Battery Life. Your iPhone's battery life is in your hands, literally. Being aware of your power consumption and planning accordingly is going to be infinitely more important that the battery's native charge-holding ability. This goes especially for the day of purchase - as tempting as it may be to open the box and activate, immediately running around the house watching YouTube, it is best to let the phone charge for 12 hours before use. Charging the phone every night is an absolute must, skipping a day will kill the battery life as your ride the bottom edge the following day. Most of us have access to a USB port while we're at work, best idea will be to plug in your phone when you sit down at your desk.
iPod:
Large Libraries: In the opening weekend, I got many complaints that you cannot manually manage your music. There is a workaround that has made me change the way I work with all of my iPods: the iPhone specific playlist. Simply create a playlist with all of the music you wish to put on your phone and sync that one playlist. This also helps with sync time - you have a start sync and an end sync, not a constant sync all throughout your music management, slowing your computer down in the process.
TV Shows: I watch a lot of MST3K, which I have organized into iTunes as TV shows, split into seasons, the works. The problem that has arisen, therefore, is the one of selective synchronization - you cannot specifically select the TV show you want to sync to the device, instead getting the choices to sync all, unwatched, or latest shows. This is problematic when each show is 700MB large. Here's the work around - select all of the episodes of a specific show and right click, selecting "Mark as Not New", removing all of the little blue dots from the episodes. Select the one, three, or five episodes, and right click them, selecting "Mark as New", then sync the last one, three, or five unwatched episodes. The shows you selected will sync.
iPhoto:
Many users are complaining that iPhoto opens whenever the phone is connected. This is not a preference of the phone, but rather iPhoto. Remember when you first launched iPhoto and it asked you if you wanted to use iPhoto whenever your camera was attached? iPhoto is detecting that your phone is a camera and launching, just as you told it to do.
Mail:
POP accounts - too many unread messages: When first adding a POP account, all of the messages downloaded to the phone arrive as unread. Tapping a message, tapping back, and then tapping the next message can get tedious. Here's the workaround - tap the small down arrow to the upper right hand side of the screen, watching closely to the number next to Inbox. When that number goes down by one, tap the arrow again. If that number hasn't gone down yet, wait a sec, and do not try to tap tap tap tap tap, you'll flood the input queue and crash Mail.
Syncing Mail accounts - All too often people blame the iPhone when their mail does not work. A perfect test is sync you accounts from Mail. If they work in mail, they'll work on the phone, if they are unreliable in Mail, they will also be unreliable on the phone. The Mail client on the iPhone is just as powerful as any other mail client in terms of how it connects to mail servers, if you are having problems you need to check your settings before blaming the hardware. If you prefer to leave your install of Mail.app alone, create a new user account on your Mac, set up all of the accounts you want there, and use iTunes to sync that data to the phone. Make sure to remove that portion of sync from your actual user account's instance of iTunes, however, or it will all sync back.
This message has not been downloaded from the server: This message has snagged a couple users, but upon investigation, these users have filled their iPhones to the absolute brim with music and video. It hasn't been downloaded from the server because there is no space to download to - this also applies to the Camera application dumping to the Home screen. Because there is no space, it can't add any new data. Make some room, then be patient as the mail client gets to that message in cleanup (often a sync or reboot will clear it up).
Safari:
Safari and iPod: Many users have reported iPod stopping in the middle of browsing, often pouting and pursing their lips crying, "This is terrible, I can't even browse the web and listen to music at the same time?". I then check their phone, and lo and behold they have upwards of eight separate pages open at the same time. This device (like every other computer out there) has a finite amount of memory, each page taking up a significant portion depending on how busy the page is. I've routinely gotten through entire albums while browsing through Safari, but I've got one page open in total, and it's usually mostly text. Keep it to one or two pages open and iPod will run forever if you let it.
Web Apps: "This web app is terrible, it keeps booting me to Home!" When was your last reboot? How many other pages are open? In the same vein as Safari and iPod, Web Apps need a good deal of breathing room - give it to them. Close down other pages, stop iPod, or even reboot. Give the app a clean slate and it will perform, every time. iPhoneRemote users will attest to this.
iCal:
Multiple Calendars - Default Calendar: When adding a new appointment, it adds to the default calendar. Appointments can't be shunted to the correct calendar until after sync anyway, so create an "iPhone" calendar and make that the default. Because it's in that calendar, you'll know enough to move it to the appropriate calendar after sync.
Please feel free to add your own best practices, and ask questions, too.

is there any application you can get for the iphone to enlarge text and phone numbers ?
If included with an email or on a website, yes with no application needed.
If you are referring to the text size for your iPhone's contact list, no.
can you insert a phone number from your contact list into a text message ?
No.
i cant seem to figure it out, does the alarm clock work if you turn off the phone at night,
No - powered off with the iPhone means powered off. Any phone that provides for this is not powered off - it is in deep sleep or deep standby mode, which the iPhone does not support. If you don't want your phone ringing or don't want to receive SMS at night but you want to use the iPhone's alarm feature as a wake-up alarm, you can turn on Airplane Mode before going to bed, which will also conserve the battery if your iPhone is not plugged in at night.
can you send a multi media text message ?
No.

Best Practice: Storing an array in MySQL

Hi,
I'm working on an app that uses Flex 2, Coldfusion and MySQL.
I'd like to store an array (or in this case an ArrayCollection)
into my db. I'm not totally sure if I can do this. I read something
about PHP having an implode command but I'm wondering what the best
practice would be for trying to get an array into MySQL via
ColdFusion.
I'd be grateful for any advice.
Novian

Thanks, mike_the_maven.
I'm not familiar with that tag but I'll definitely look into.
I'm also wondering about potentially storing my ArrayCollection as
a BLOB in MySQL. Any thoughts about this approach?
Thanks.
Novian

Best practice for having separate clone data for development purposes?

Hi
I am on a hosted Apex environment
I have a workspace containing two instances/ copies of the application: DEV and PROD
I would like to be able to develop functionality and data in/ with the DEV instance and then insert it into DEV.
I gather that I can insert pages from DEV to PROD via Create -> New page as copy -> Page in another application
But I don't know how I can mimic this process with database objects, eg. if I want to create a new table or manipulate the data in an existing table in a DEV environment before implementing in a PROD environment.
Ideally this would be done in such a way that minimises changing table names etc when elevating pages from DEV to PROD.
Would it be possible to create a clone schema that could contain the same tables (with the same names) as PROD?
Any tips, best practices appreciated :)
Thanks

Hi,
ideally you should have a little more separation between your dev and prod environments. At the minimum you should have separate workspaces each addressing separate schemas. Apex can be a little difficult if you want to move individual Apex application objects, such as pages, between applications (a much requested improvement), but this can be overcome by exporting and importing the whole application. You should also have some form of version control/backup of export files.
As far as database objects go, tables etc, if you have tns access to your hosted environment, then you can use SQL Developer to develop, maintain and synchronize between your development and production schemas and objects in the different environments should have identical names. If you don't have that access, then you can use the Apex SQL Workshop features, but these are a little more cumbersome than a tool like SQL Developer. Once again, scripts for creating and upgrading your database schemas should be kept under some sort of version control.
All of this is supposing your hosting solution allows more than one workspace and schema, if not you may have to incur the cost of a second environment. One other option would be to do your development locally in an instance of Oracle XE, ensuring you don't have any version conflicts between the different database object features and the Apex version.
I hope this helps.
Regards
Andre

Delivering demo or trial versions of a product - best practice?

Hello there RoboHelp gang,
I am using RH8 HTML to create a knowledge product for commercial resale to clients and customers. One of the things I need to do is offer a 'trial' version of the end the end product. I imagine doing this by creating an instance of the knowledge product with selected areas freely available but with the bulk of the content 'locked down'.
I understand from the instructions that i can do this via condition conditional text function... the reason for posting to find out if anyone had any additional best practice comments, suggestions or tips on setting up and managing a demo or trial version of applications built in Robohelp 8 HTML? The end format of mine will be ADOBE AIR.
fyi - i've tried searching online and in these forums for more on this but can't find anything (... and that maybe because i've over-complicating it?!:)) but i'll happily post my findings (if any) once it's all set up to satisfaction.
Thanks,
DK
RH8 newbie from the UK

KeepItSimpleStupid!
That is, make it as functional as possible, but don't raise expectations needlessly with a lot of fancy foldarol; there'll be plenty of time to add cute stuff, and only as user feedback warrants. Yes, there are wonderful things you can add, but just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
Note also that the topics you have retained (not conditionalized away) must not contain links to the ones that are missing (you can try explaining away such broken links, but they'll leave a bad taste nonetheless). In addition, their Index entries will be missing, and the topics will not be included in a Search.
Good luck,
Leon

Best practice for CPU and memory usage?

I find my AIR application takes a lot of memory -- usually
>170M. And what is strange is that the memory usage is
increasing (about 4K/s) even when the application is simply sitting
there and do nothing. The CPU usage is supposed to be 0% when the
application is doing nothing, but it's not (usually ~5%). So I
wonder if there is any article about best practice on CPU/Memory
usage.

Those numbers indicate that your application is in fact doing
something. Perhaps you have a timer still running, or work being
done on an enterFrame event?

Best practice for adding and removing eventListeners?

Hi,
What is the best practice in regards to CPU usage and performance for dealing with eventListeners when adding and removing movieclips to the stage?
1. Add the eventListeners when the mc is instantiated and leave them be until exiting the app
or
2. Add and remove the eventListeners as the mc is added or removed from the stage (via an addedToStage and removedFromStage listener method)
I would appreciate any thoughts you could share with me. Thanks!
JP

Thanks neh and Applauz78.
As I understand it, the main concern with removing listeners is to conserve memory. However, I've tested memory use and this is not really an issue for my app, so I'm more concerned if there will be any effect on CPU (app response) if I'm constantly adding and removing a list of listeners every time a user loads an mc to the stage, as compared to just leaving them active and "ready to go" when needed.
Is there any way to measure CPU use for an AIR app on iOS?
(It may help to know my app is small - I'm talking well under 100 active listeners total for all movieclips combined.)

ColdFusion AIR Synchronization - Best practices

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