The Conversion: Introduction

While working as the senior level developer for a small liberal arts college, I've had the luxury of deciding the technology to be used internally for custom applications. When I first started, the college was using Coldfusion 7, HTML, and many MS Access databases. Over the course of the past 11 years, we've moved to Oracle, are on CF11, and utilizing AngularJS / Angular for our front ends. Coldfusion is still doing the heavy lifting in interfacing with Oracle.

During those 11 years, we also found ourselves developing Adobe (now Apache) Flex applications. Flex was a great tool - easy to develop in and fairly easy to deploy when Flash was ubiquitous. But Flex was not great on mobile platforms. Hence our move to Angular due to the idea that we wanted to give our users a rich web experience.

So over the course of the past two years, we've been either retiring Flex applications altogether due to the direction that some departments have taken (read outside vendor); or retooling the applications into current technology such as Angular.

The purpose of this blog series is to describe / document the process that I use as a developer for creating an application in our environment. I will say upfront that I will unlikely ever win any awards for best practice or standards. For the most part, I am self trained. My start in programming was the TI99/4A. If you know what one looks like, you'll get an idea of how long I've been programming.

At the moment, I have two applications to convert from Flex to AngularJS: a music background database, called the Enrolled Student Music Database (ESMD); and a travel system - Travel Resource Information Planning System (TRIPS) - used by the college to track college sponsored trips. This blog series will focus on TRIPS. It is a major application with a lot going on so it should be fun.

Cheers!

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