Requirements

What you need to know and have installed before you start programming in Wheels.

We can identify 3 different types of requirements that you should be aware of:

Project Requirements. Is Wheels a good fit for your project?
Developer Requirements. Do you have the knowledge and mindset to program effectively in Wheels?
System Requirements. Is your server ready for Wheels?

1. Project Requirements

Before you start learning Wheels and making sure all the necessary software is installed on your computer you really need to take a moment and think about the project you intend to use Wheels on. Is it a ten page website that won't be updated very often? Is it a space flight simulator program for NASA? Is it something in between?

Most websites are, at their cores, simple data manipulation applications. You fetch a row, make some updates to it, stick it back in the database and so on. This is the "target market" for Wheels - simple CRUD (create, read, update, delete) website applications.

A simple ten page website won't do much data manipulation, so you don't need Wheels for that (or even ColdFusion in some cases). A flight simulator program will do so much more than simple CRUD work, so in that case, Wheels is a poor match for you (and so is ColdFusion).

If your website falls somewhere in between these two extreme examples, then read on. If not, go look for another programming language and framework. ;)

Another thing worth noting right off the bat (and one that ties in with the simple CRUD reasoning above) is that Wheels takes a very data-centric approach to the development process. What we mean by that is that it should be possible to visualize and implement the database design early on in the project's life cycle. So, if you're about to embark on a project with an extensive period of object oriented analysis and design which, as a last step almost, looks at how to persist objects, then you should probably also look for another framework.

Still reading?

Good. :)

Moving on...

2. Developer Requirements

Yes, there are actually some things you should familiarize yourself with before starting to use Wheels. Don't worry though. You don't need to be an expert on any on of them. A basic understanding is good enough.

ColdFusion. You should know CFML, the ColdFusion programming language. (Surprise!)
Object Oriented Programming. You should grasp the concept of object oriented programming and how it applies to ColdFusion.
Model-View-Controller. You should know the theory behind the Model-View-Controller development pattern.

ColdFusion

Simply the best web development language in the world! The best way to learn it, in our humble opinion, is to get the free developer edition from Adobe, buy Ben Forta's ColdFusion Web Application Construction Kit series, and start coding using your programming editor of choice.

Object Oriented Programming (OOP)

This is a programming methodology that uses constructs called objects to design applications. Objects model real world entities in your application. OOP is based on several techniques including inheritance, modularity, polymorphism, and encapsulation. Most of these techniques are supported in ColdFusion, making it a fairly functional object oriented language. At the most basic level, a .cfc file in ColdFusion is a class, and you create an instance of a class by using the CreateObject function or the <cfobject> tag.

Trying to squeeze an explanation of object oriented programming and how it's used in ColdFusion into a few sentences is impossible, and a detailed overview of it is outside the scope of this chapter. There is lots of high quality information online, so go ahead and Google it.

Model-View-Controller

Model-View-Controller, or MVC for short, is a way to structure your code so that it is broken down into 3 easy-to-manage pieces:

Model. Just another name for the representation of data, usually a database table.
View. What the user sees and interacts with (a web page in our case).
Controller. The behind-the-scenes guy that's coordinating everything.

MVC is how Wheels structures your code for you. As you start working with Wheels applications, you'll see that most of the code you write is very nicely separated into one of these 3 categories.

3. System Requirements

Apologies to everyone still running on older versions of ColdFusion... You're going to need to upgrade to ColdFusion 8. The good news is that not only will you be able to run Wheels, you will also benefit from the tons of performance enhancements and cool new features that have been added to ColdFusion 8. It really is worth the upgrade!

Operating Systems

Your setup with ColdFusion 8 and Wheels can then can be installed on Windows, Macintosh, Unix, or Linux - they all work just fine.

Web Servers

You also need a web server. The web servers that we know work with Wheels are Apache (2.2.6) and Microsoft IIS (5.1 and 6). There is no reason other web servers won't work though, so give it a try even if you're not using Apache or IIS (or if you're using a different version of Apache/IIS).

Database Engines

Finally, to build any kind of meaningful website application, you will likely interact with a database. Currently supported databases are SQL Server 7 or later, Oracle 10g or later, and MySQL 5. (Please note that MySQL 4 is not supported.)

Ok, hopefully this chapter didn't scare you too much and you can move on knowing that you have the basic knowledge needed, the software to run Wheels on, and a suitable project to start with.