cfFrameworks workshop: Transfer ORM - by Mark Mandel

Developing Applications with Transfer ORM
When developing an Object Oriented web based application, it is normal to have a database with relational tables and a series of objects that represent that data. Often, the amount of time and effort it takes to manually map these objects back and forth from a database is large, and can be very costly.

Object Relational Mappers (ORM) were developed to cut down the amount of time this process takes, and automate the translation between a relational database and an Object Oriented system.

Transfer ORM’s main focus is to automate the repetitive tasks of creating the SQL and custom CFCs that are often required when developing a ColdFusion application. Through a central configuration file Transfer knows how to generate objects, and how to manage them and their relationships back to the database.

This presentation will outline the basics of what an Object Relational Mapper is, and the use case for using one within web application development.

From there the presentation will look at Transfer, its main capabilities and how some examples of how it is utilized.

A small Calendar application will be used to demonstrate developing an application with Transfer.