Viewing by month: June 2010


Connecting Mura CMS to an ORM Application

Posted on Jun 17, 2010

Some of you may be wondering, based upon the title of this post, why you would want to connect a Mura CMS application to ColdFusion ORM. Let me give a long-winded explanation. Unless your site is entirely content driven you will often have large portions of your site that are not contained within the CMS (we'll refer to this as an external application). Mura makes it easy to connect the CMS portion of your site to another application (this is especially easy if the other application uses a front-controller framework). However, you may often need to display some portion of data from your non-Mura external application in the content-driven portion of your site. For example, let's imagine a site like Twitter (another clone perhaps) whereby the informational content (i.e. home page, about us, documentation, help and so on) may be CMS-driven but we'd also like to display a list of top tweets on the home page that are pulled from outside the CMS.

So, that's the background on why you might need Mura to speak to an outside application. However, now imagine that outside application has services that rely on ColdFusion 9 ORM. In the case of my Twitter-clone site, I can't just directly call tweetService.getTopTweets() from my Mura driven home page because the Mura application does not have ORM enabled. You could use a remote method and call that via Ajax or a webservice since a remote call would mean the method call is instantiated within the external application's application context (i.e. it has ORM enabled) but that isn't always a desirable solution. Thankfully, as of a recent update, you can easily connect your Mura site to your external ORM application. I will show you how to do this by instantiating the ORM context within Mura thereby allowing you to directly call ORM-dependent service methods like tweetService.getTopTweets().
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Adding Solr Search to Mura CMS

Posted on Jun 15, 2010

The best thing about Mura CMS is that much of what you need to build a typical content managed site is already built-in. However, the second best thing about Mura CMS is that anything that isn't built in can generally be added in using its extensibility without breaking your upgrade path. In the case of my application, one of the requirements was that we use ColdFusion 9's new Solr-based search engine to index all of the site content. By default, Mura uses a standard query based searching, in part, I suspect, because its designed to run on the other CFML engines should you choose to. I am running ColdFusion 9, so I want Solr! Here's how I did it.

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In Defense of Technology Partisanship

Posted on Jun 10, 2010

Every now and then, usually in the middle of a debate between competing technologies such as .Net and ColdFusion or Silverlight and Flex, someone will espouse the idea that you should choose the technology that best fits the problem rather than our particular personal technology preference. Generally speaking, everyone will agree as this sounds like a perfectly reasonable ideal. However, I am writing this post to cal "bullsh*t" to that sentiment and defend the idea that people should feel free to stick to their guns and defend their personal technology preferences. Here's why...

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ColdFusion Open Source Update - June 8, 2010

Posted on Jun 08, 2010

Three new projects and three updates this week in ColdFusion open source. Actually, this post covers more than a week as things were a little slow the week before last so I held the post. My guess is that with summer starting, the warm weather and vacations are getting in the way of coding. I know they are getting in the way of mine.

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About

My name is Brian Rinaldi and I am the Web Community Manager for Flash Platform at Adobe. I am a regular blogger, speaker and author. I also founded RIA Unleashed conference in Boston. The views expressed on this site are my own & not those of my employer.