Cory and I touched base on a couple of projects. Alan and John then joined and gave us some reports. Alan reported on his sub inventory model and his unit testing. It was going good but it is currently breaking. He will check this out and push the ball forward. His sub inventory model is being worked on outside in the ecommerce area. Once we get it working good and smooth out there, we will bring it inside and replace some older code with the newer object model based code.

Alan then did some reporting on some Adobe ColdFusion training that he participated in. He had lots of notes. These are a few of the notes that I took from his notes (secondhand notes).

- On the Application.cfc's - using the request scope - great place to put actions that need to be done or checked on every page.

- Lots of info on the cfc's and how the onRequest methods and code works. Also notes on onApplicationStart, onApplicationEnd, onSessionStart, onSessionEnd, onRequestStart, etc. Places to put code that gets called and used over and over again.

- ORM - Object relational mapping

- Lots of new ways to auto create getters and setters.

- Being able to handle mapping in both directions - one-to-many and many-to-one - this was a way of using a cfc (component) as a super simple database type structure without really having the actual database. We may need to look into this one a little bit deeper (need some clarification and more info).

-  Error handling and using try/catch better - Currently, we mostly use a catch "any" to do our error handling. They were recommending that we use special try/catches with type database, type syntax, and then the general "any" catch.

- Security stuff and watching for spoofs and things coming from other or outside sites. There were ways of passing tokens, generated on our site, and then looking for those tokens on the action pages. There were also ways to flip flop and rotate session values. Basically, let them login, set session scope values, and then auto switch certain values just to make sure it was a valid request from our site. Lots of little security ideas and hack prevention stuff.

- They are recommending that we use a new pdf tag called cfhtmltopdf (cf html to pdf) vs the older tag cfpdf - faster rendering and more options to offload the work to another server.

- Setting properties and then getting those properties to create auto getters and setters.

We encouraged Alan to keep checking for new code, keep learning, and keep pioneering some of these new concepts and new code options. Good stuff.

After that, Cory and Alan were talking about ecommerce and subs and parent line items, rules for picking and fulfilling packages assignments, tiered pricing, etc. They got into some order of operations. Cory and Alan were also talking about other ecommerce needs and options.

John reported in. He has been busy moving and getting settled in. He has made a small proposal for the year end payroll and tax forms (W-2's and 1099's) that he would like to get approval on. We haven't had too many developers create their own proposal that want to get approval. Interesting. I think he is asking for more documentation for his projects vs what we normal give him. I think he is lightly asking for more guidance vs flying by the seat of his pants. Lastly, Cory went over some other projects with John that we need his help on. They are the discount engine and the adilas quick search stuff. Good meeting.