Well another project done and set live today. We just released a new site for one of our furniture manufacturing clients: Solutions .

What's noteable and kinda fun is the technology behind this one. Our customer wanted a web presence quickly to showcase their products. The only information they had were EXCEL spreadsheets ( everything is always in excel :) ).

So what do you do?

We decided to try out some cool web based services to help them out.

Step 1: Imported all the product information into Dabbledb.

Step 2: Edited the products in Dabbledb and add any missing information.

Step 3: Used CFJSON and CFHTTP to pull the product information into MYSQL.

Step 4: Used the Amazon S3 component and a simple CF interface to resize images and store them in S3 based on product information.

STEP 5: Code the Screens using Coldfusion and Fusebox.

We decided to pull the information out of dabble and store it in MySQL to run the site so we could write the queries for the site in plain SQL. Dabbledb is really powerful for manipulating spread sheet data and saved us the time and our customers the cost of building a front end for marinating product information. We are using a custom script I wrote for ImageMagick for resizing the images. The java ones never seem to resize small thumbnails very well. Although i haven't played with the CF8 ones yet.

This project reminds me how great a community we have of CF developers. CFJSON,S3 and Fusebox are all thanks to them.