14.1 General Considerations

Above all else, building any substantial project requires organization. You can be the best coder in the world, but if the project is not well-organized, it will take longer to put together than it should. The longer you spend planning, the greater chance you will have of bringing a project in on time and under budget. With that in mind, we'll prepare for the coding first by laying out all the requirements, setting up a specification, creating a code skeleton framework, and finally getting down to some coding.

The example application uses ColdFusion MX as the server model. Many of the concepts translate directly to other server models, and we've tried to leave the implementation as generic as possible to facilitate porting. Porting the example to other server models such as ASP.NET, Java, or PHP is left as an exercise for the reader.

The code shown in the examples uses <cfquery> tags for all databases queries. We've kept the query in the page purely to keep the implementation generic; these queries will work in SQL Server, as well as MS Access or MySQL, which do not support stored procedures. If your database supports stored procedures, you will want to move the queries into stored procedures.

When inserting records into a database, you'll often need to retrieve the primary key of the newly inserted record. There are various methods to do this in different Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS), but the example application uses a generic method that will work in different databases. When a new user is inserted, you can use the username to retrieve the UserID ; usernames are unique in the database. When inserting a script, we'll also insert a unique identifier that will aid in retrieving the ScriptID for a particular script.