ColdFusion MX and Database Design at Harvard

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ColdFusion MX and Database Design at Harvard

Proper Database Design remains a weakness of mine when considering my web application development skills, so this semester I've decided to cross that one off my list by enrolling in the Harvard Extension School class:

CSCI E-253 Developing Web-based Database Applications
Web-based applications offer the advantages of workstation productivity and ease of use together with the power and sophistication of relational database servers. This course provides the concepts and skills necessary to design and develop web-based database applications. Students build a working database application using Oracle and a client application using ColdFusion to serve the information needs of an enterprise. Through hands-on projects, students will build, populate, query, and write transactions for a relational database using SQL and then develop a client application to access their database. As a final project, students will build a prototype client/server application.

We've only met one week so far, and tonight will be the second class. I'm thrilled to know that the instructor is not only very articulate when conveying technical ideas, but she professes to be very passionate about both Oracle and ColdFusion.

Database design is a topic not commonly found in ColdFusion FastTrack classes or other CF-related classes from private vendors/instructors. Outside of formal academia, the most comprehensive course on ColdFusion and Database Design that I know of is taught by Adam Churvis and his ~~brother~~ son at Productivity Enhancement. I've often perused the curriculum there, but I find it hard to take time off of work for travel.

Advanced Development with ColdFusion MX and SQL Server 2000
This new version of our ever-popular Advanced Database course is now even better. We took out the Oracle content because only 5% of our students really used it and the other 95% didn't care, plus we removed the data warehousing and load testing content so we could add even more exercises and also spend more time teaching engineering principles, like when you would use one technique for a solution as opposed to another... Now there's plenty of time to explain exactly when and why you would use a correlated subquery versus an outer join, when you should stick with CFQUERY rather than migrate to a stored procedure, etc.

posted on 27 September, 2005 at 4:25 PM.
Learning, ColdFusion | Comments (9)

Comments

"...she professes to be very passionate about both Oracle and ColdFusion"

That's kind of different. Almost everybody I talk to in the CF community uses MSSQL. I'm glad to know there are people out there that use CF with other databases. Although I have met people that use CF on Linux, so I guess they wouldn't be using MSSQL...

comment by Yacoubean, posted at 9/27/05 3:38 PM

As a matter of fact, Harvard provides centralized Linux servers and related software for use by the students. I believe we will be working with Oracle on Linux, but I'm not certain about ColdFusion yet.

The class is taught in a computer lab with Dell workstations running Windows where we will be using Dreamweaver MX 2004 to connect to CFMX. For home use the instructor recommended using a simple notepad or vi/emacs rather than requiring students to purchase DWMX. I took this as an opportunity to plug CFEclipse on the class forums:

CFEclipse: A FREE and robust IDE for developing ColdFusion MX code
While Dreamweaver is available in the labs for developing ColdFusion, there is a free and very robust development environment for ColdFusion (and Java and more) available for use at home or work.

The free IDE is Eclipse, and when used with the free CFEclipse plugin it provides a very easy to use means of building ColdFusion code and applications, and it provides Help, Tag and Function assistance, and much more.

Macromedia is contributing to the open source CFEclipse project, so look for improvements in the plugin soon.

If you are a traditional programmer or a newbie you should find CFEclipse provides a great way to build CFML code.

comment by Steven Erat, posted at 9/27/05 3:46 PM

Steve,

Are you getting a degree from Harvard, or are you just taking a few courses?

I took an Oracle based DB design class for my degree, and it was very valuable. I can't tell you how many databases I've seen since taking that course that were poorly designed. I am not an expert, but that course gave me a lot of generic DB design knowledge that I've been able to use in my career.

comment by Yacoubean, posted at 9/27/05 4:25 PM

For the last few years I've taken the classes that appeal to me from a variety of local universities, including Harvard Extension, Brandeis, Bentley, etc... I've been most interested in taking courses that directly apply to my work such as XML for J2EE, Java, Security, etc, rather than following a curriculum where I'd have to take courses that aren't immediately applicable like C or VB. Since my background was in Biology, I'm taking a practical approach to round out the skills needed for work. At a later time I would like to choose a graduate program for a MS in IT/eCommerce degree.

When this instructor introduced the class last week, she noted that we were going to learn to "do things right", and then later we would be frustrated because many of us would see just how poorly designed are the databases that we work with professionally.

comment by Steven Erat, posted at 9/27/05 8:42 PM

PS -- David Churvis is Adam's *son*, not his brother!

comment by Dave Carabetta, posted at 9/28/05 10:14 AM

You may want to check my Normalization article at http://www.FlashCodersNY.org. Hope it helps.

comment by RconR007, posted at 9/28/05 2:54 PM

Thanks for the link to the site. For convenience, here's the specific link to that article on your site:

http://flashcodersny.org/?p=34

comment by Steven Erat, posted at 9/29/05 11:47 AM

"Database design is a topic not commonly found in ColdFusion FastTrack classes or other CF-related classes from private vendors/instructors"

That is definitely true to my experience, but from my limited perspective, I think you see even less database schooling in the Ruby and PHP sector.

Also, although ORM frameworks just scratch the surface of database design, CF has an increasing number of them which are helping to coerce people towards the better path.

comment by Tuggle, posted at 8/12/06 7:05 AM

The Performance Organiser is a good database design software, try it!

http://www.sharewarecheap.com/business-finance-pro...

comment by design database, posted at 8/20/06 11:01 PM

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