Cold Fusion Web Applications at UNT

By Kenn Moffitt, Web Developer UNT Central Web Support

UNT CENTRAL Web SUPPORT has been creating true Web applications for departments using Allaire's Cold Fusion Application Server for over a year. The Cold Fusion Server allows direct connection to popular databases such as Microsoft Access, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, etc. In fact Cold Fusion can connect to any database that has an ODBC driver.  The Cold Fusion Server can serve the database information to the Web quickly and allows update, insert, and delete database operations as well as dynamic querying of the database and standard data and text manipulation functions.

A Major Application

One of the major Cold Fusion Applications that Central Web Support has deployed in the last year is a 900 user lab registration system for the Physics Astronomy Department. The Astronomy Department offers 10 to 20 individual labs each semester per class and each of the required labs can meet up to 30 different times.

Since the labs and the times and dates of each lab's session vary, managing which students could enroll for specific labs and which students had scheduled individual sessions was difficult. Central Web Support created a Web based application with a Microsoft SQL backend to allow each of the students to log in to the system from a Web browser.

The student's ID and password are checked first by UNT's LDAP server. The UNT LDAP server verifies that the student is registered for the astronomy class and that the student is enrolled at UNT. After the student logs in successfully, the student is presented with a list of upcoming labs that they have already scheduled. Under this is a list of all of the remaining labs that the student needs to attend for the semester. The student can then choose the lab, date, and time that they want to schedule. The student can even choose to display a calendar that shows all of the labs that the student has scheduled for the month.

For the Astronomy Department staff and instructors that administer the system, there is a separate Web interface. The admin interface allows the administrator to grant a student access to the system, add a new lab, schedule the different times that a lab occurs, generate a roll of all of the students that have enrolled in a particular lab session, and take roll for the lab online.The administrative interface also allows the astronomy staff to send out a batch E-mail to all of the students in a lab or in a particular session. If a lab is deleted or modified, the system will also send out mail to all of the students affected informing the students of the change.

A Major Strength

The true strength of Cold Fusion developed Web applications is that anyone with Web access can use the Cold Fusion applications regardless of their computer platform or browser. All of the Cold Fusion functions are processed by the server first before being sent to the Web browser as standard html ensuring Web browser compatibility for all users.

If you have any questions about Cold Fusion, or you believe that you have an application that needs Cold Fusion, please contact me at moffitt@unt.edu.