ColdFusion Setup

For this application, the ColdFusion team's job is actually pretty easy. Since the application will need to function from the MonkeyTongue sales team's laptops with or without an Internet connection, the ColdFusion team knows that most of the application logic will take place in the Flash movie. This has allowed the team to focus on implementing some of ColdFusion MX's newest features. From an architectural standpoint, all that's needed is an Application.cfm (which gets run before every ColdFusion template or component is called) with code for the user authentication, and a ColdFusion Component (CFC) called expenseapp.cfc (this will perform the application's major server functions). The Vshift ColdFusion team decided to place the ColdFusion files under the Web root of its development server in a directory called com and a subdirectory called monkeytongue. This com\monkeytongue directory structure is used because ColdFusion components are referred to not only by name, but also by location. This is the industry-preferred method for storing ColdFusion components; "com\monkeytongue" refers to "monkeytongue.com" in reverse order, with backslashes instead of dots. This will ensure that there is no overlap of component names, since there will be only one expenseapp.cfc on the monkeytongue.com domain. The initial code for this CFC is the CFComponent tag with the name of the component listed:

 <cfcomponentname="expenseApp"> <!---Allofthe<cffunction>'sgohere---> </cfcomponent> 

The rest of the code for the expenseapp.cfc and the Application.cfm will be covered later in this chapter.