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:

http://www.bryantwebconsulting.com/
http://datamgr.riaforge.org/

Although we will be holding the meeting at the regular time and place
(7:00 pm at Cal Poly Pomona -- see our meetings page at
http://www.iecfug.org/page.cfm/meetings 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