CPMS - Development Environment
I've setup up my development environment on my 1&1 VPS using the following technologies.
CFML engine
I will be using Railo, and OpenSource CFML engine, for various reasons. The biggest of course is the price, it's free. But on top of that there are some other great reasons to use it. It's very fast, has a much smaller foot print on the the server, works great with Flex, and has some great people backing it. I was fortunate enough to meet some of the Railo team at CFUnited 2009 and they were amazing. When I first tried to get Railo installed on my VPS I ran into a couple problems. But after bring my laptop to their booth where they could see first had what I was doing wrong everything was setup and has been working perfectly.
Programming Languages
The overall design will use ColdFusion for all the server side processing and initially I'll be using Flex as the front end. Then if all goes well I'll translate the Flex front end to an Air application to take advantage of Air's strengths.
Frameworks
I won't be using a prepackaged framework on the server side. I'll be using my own creation which resembles a light weight ORM. It provides the basic CRUD functionality without having to write any code. I'll write more about it in a latter post.
I admit my Flex skills are still on the lower end of the scale. I've built a couple small applications but nothing worth showing off. I have gone through a few tutorials and I'm fairly comfortable with Flex and have started to work with the Cairngorm framework so I will be using it for this project. What better way to learn then to just start using it.
Database
MySQL will be the database of choice for this project, but the server side code will be designed so it can run on Microsoft SQL as well.