Preparing to Learn ColdFusion - macromedia COLDFUSION MX 7 Web Application Construction Kit [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Preparing to Learn ColdFusion

You''re just about ready to go. But before you do, you need to know a little about the sample applications you''ll be using.

Orange Whip Studio is a low-budget movie studio waiting for its first big break. To help it get there, you need to create a series of Web applications. These include:

• A public Web site that will allow viewers to learn about the movies

• Intranet screens for movie management (budgets, actors, directors, and more)

• A public e-commerce site allowing fans to purchase movie goodies and memorabilia

Your job throughout this book is to build these and other applications.

TIP

Most of the applications created in this book share common resources (images and data, for example) but are actually stand-alone, meaning they don''t require components or code created elsewhere. Although this isn''t typical of real-world application development, in this book it is deliberate and by design.

Here are a few things you must know about how to manage code and resources:

• You''ll create and store the Orange Whip Studio applications in a folder named ows beneath the Web root.

• ows contains a folder named images, whichthis should come as no surprisecontains images used in many of the applications.

• A folder named data in the ows folder contains the database used by the applications.

  CAUTION

  
  

  The database is being stored in ows/data for simplicity''s sake, but as a rule, this is a practice to be avoided on production servers. Any files beneath the Web root can be access by users, and so data files stored under the Web root can be freely downloaded. As such, any files that you do not want in unknown hands (including database files) should never be stored under the Web root.

• Web applications are usually organized into a directory structure that maps to application features or sections. However, you won''t do that here. To simplify the learning process, you''ll create a folder beneath ows for each chapter in the book: 4 for Chapter 4, 5 for Chapter 5, and so on. The files you create in each chapter should go in the appropriate folders.

• A data browser that displays database contents and contains links for moving from one page of the listing to another.

• An age calculator that asks for your date of birth and calculates your age.