Tom Mollerus' Weblog

I can now announce the Boston CFUG's next meeting on December 9th: Service-Oriented Architecture with the onTap Framework, presented by Isaac Dealey.

The onTap framework moves developers away from stand-alone applications to a rich service-oriented environment in which applications are integrated with each other. Isaac says "This is the next evolution in software, taking us well beyond "single sign on". How many times have you written a security layer? A contact manager? A CMS? Stop reinventing the wheel. Let other people provide these applications as integrated services so you can focus on your core business."

For the door prize, we have something that I'd love to have myself (which only makes sense given that I'm the one who picks them out): a Kodak Easyshare 7" digital photo frame. And I'll throw in a free 2GB memory card to use with it. I hope that you can join us for Ike's presentation as well as some beers afterwards at the CFUG's second home, Dunn Gaherin's Irish pub.

Please RSVP at the following URL: http://www.bostoncfug.org/index.cfm?event=showRSVPForm&meetingID=DA41D921-D61B-FA8C-8D006B2CAAD11A72

Today I'm in San Francisco at the Dreamforce conference, which is Salesforce's annual conference. I'm starting with an all-day session called Visualforce for Developers, where I hope to learn more about how to write native Apex code that will run right in the Salesforce application. So far, I've only been able to call iframes which call ColdFusion pages to give people access to custom features. (This via URL-based "s-controls", which are a Salesforce-approved way to call external code.) The CF code, while running on its own server, does interact with Salesforce via Tom de Manincor's wonderful salesForceCFC.

I'll be very interested to see, as I learn native Salesforce APIs such as Apex code or Visualforce, just how I choose to interact with our ColdFusion system. I'm particularly interested in learning how to write more of the display code directly in Salesforce while having the web service calls go from Salesforce to our own systems-- the exact opposite of what we have now. As I learn more in the next few days, I'll be posting what I learn.