Thanks for the reply, very informative and useful. I'm gong to try to get a demo of SQL server and run through the Plum tutorials - what I am hoping then is that I can use Plum with Access and make the changes later so it will work with MySQL (or am I being hopelessly optimistic :)
I do still think that the tutorials only running on SQL Server could be a problem for you in the long run, although I understand why you it is so. For many people - particularly larger web dev companies it won't be an issue, but a lot of small independent developers and in house teams don't run it and are unlikely to install it just to check out Plum's capabilities. It would be nice if there was even a cut down version that worked with Access. It's good to know that you did the research on shared hosting, although I do have my doubts about the server mappings - maybe it's just UK hosts but I have had a very negative response in the past, good thing my current (Canadian) host has no such problems. Before submitting a troubleshooting ticket I'll do the SQL server tutorials and try again. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Adam Churvis Sent: 05 December 2004 17:50 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [plum] My experience with plum so far This is good feedback, Wayne. Let me try to address your issues: Right now Plum only supports SQL Server, Oracle 9i, and Microsoft Access. It takes a tremendous amount of effort to support a single database platform, so we picked the largest slices of the market pie to start with. We're planning to add MySQL and PostgreSQL in a future release, but for now we have exhausted our development effort with these three most popular platforms. Demo versions of SQL Server are freely available, as is a Developer's Edition that goes for a little over forty bucks. Since Access doesn't support stored procedures, we can't run the tutorials on that platform. Oracle's stored procedure support is more complicated and we didn't have the time to both create a completely different stored procedure generator and component generator and document a complete tutorial cycle for another database platform for this release. We did pretty good research early on regarding the shared hosting aspect of Plum, and talked to a good number of hosting companies. They all support creating a ColdFusion Server mapping and custom tags, and we don't use any tags or functions that most shared hosts restrict on MX servers, so you shouldn't have any problem there. If we turned off certain tags in Plum, then Plum wouldn't work. You don't need ColdFusion Administrator access to deploy a Plum project; you only need ColdFusion Administrator access to setup a new Plum project on your development machine. Once the project is finished, you simply copy the files up to the staging or production server and give the target server it's own Environment.cfm so all the code slipstreams right into the new environment. The error you got on the browser setup page indicated that you either did something wrong during the setup, or that a bona fide problem occurred. Please submit the details through the Troubleshooting Wizard on our Support page, and we'll handle it with you ASAP. Note that we're teaching the MX Master Class this week, so we'll have to respond in the evening hours. One piece of advice that I give to everyone is to go ahead and purchase your own private copy of the Developer Edition of SQL Server 2000 (try Buy.com). The fifty bucks you spend (with shipping) will be very well worth it. I consider it to be a necessary part of every ColdFusion developer's toolkit, even if their main DB platform is something else. The ability to hit the ground running with the world's most popular web development database will help when you get a call to deliver on it. BTW, the Developer Edition will run on non-server Windows OSes, unlike the production versions, so you can run it just about anywhere. Wayne, we really appreciate what you're doing here. Your feedback helps everybody by letting us know what's good, what's bad, and what's just plain *fugly*. Submit that support incident and we'll help you sort it out. Respectfully, Adam Phillip Churvis Member of Team Macromedia http://www.ProductivityEnhancement.com Download Plum and other cool development tools, and get advanced intensive Master-level training: * C# & ASP.NET for ColdFusion Developers * ColdFusion MX Master Class * Advanced Development with CFMX and SQL Server 2000 ----- Original Message ----- From: "Wayne Putterill" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, December 04, 2004 7:37 AM Subject: [plum] My experience with plum so far Hi, this is a beta so I thought I should contribute how I have got on with it so far :) A bit of background: I'm a freelance developer producing 2-5 small sites per year which are usually hosted on shared space, I have been using CF since version 3 and would consider myself reasonably accomplished but no guru. I also sometimes do contract work for larger companies - the last was three months working for the International Baccalaureate Organization on an internal system using Oracle and MX. My testing set up is a linux box running the CF webserver and MySQL. I don't want the following to sound negative, I honestly like the look of what I have seen so far and would love to evaluate Plum further, I really think it could help me a lot. Now on to Plum. Installation went fine with no errors, the licence code doesn't seem to remove the ads but I presume that hasn't been implemented yet. I couldn't run the tutorials as I don't have SQL server, I know there are cheap options but to be honest I'm not going to buy it just to test something. More to the point in an organisation that doesn't use it (such as the IBO) that’s as far as evaluating the software would go, there is no chance they would buy or install anything on their servers to run a tutorial. Will the production version offer tutorials that work with other databases? I tried setting up a new project instead, going through the wizard the fist thing I noticed is the limited number of databases plum can connect to. As I mentioned, I use MySQL on Linux which isn't supported so I fired up CF Server on my development box and created an access DB instead. The rest of the wizard seemed OK but I did wonder how all the usage of CF Administrator would tie in with using shared hosting. If it's just a case of transferring the finished code to the production server then no problem, but if mappings etc. need to be created then I would be out of luck as most hosts wouldn't allow it (there is also the question of many hosts restricting tag usage, it would be nice if certain tags could be "turned off" in plum to reflect this limitation many of us have to work with). On completing the wizard Plum opened a webpage asking me to complete the site setup, on submitting this page Plum crashed (no error messages I can post sorry) and the webpage reported problems with users not being defined and roles not being set. I could go to the site and browse around it but couldn't login to the admin section. I don't know of course if I made mistakes in this part as I couldn't run the tutorials and I was "flying blind" a bit :) So that’s as far as I have got, I hope this may be of some use in the ongoing development of Plum although I suspect that I may not really be representative of a typical user which is why I had problems. I may even try to find a demo version of SQL server and have another go at it; I feel a bit like a kid before Christmas at the moment, I know I want to open and play with the present under the tree, but I'm not allowed ;) --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). 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