At the time of this writing, the submission deadline for last month's contest ("Developer's Challenge #1: Create a Blog, Win ColdFusion MX 7") is still pending, so the winning entry will be announced next month. In the meantime, another month means another contest. . .

This month, our contest is to develop a generic poll application. By "generic," I mean that it should be able to be integrated with other applications in order to add the capacity to poll site visitors either with a single question or with several questions (a survey). The application must include an administrative interface. In this administrative interface, I would expect that an administrator should be able to create new polls and surveys, define the questions that make up a survey or poll as well as the order in which they appear, flag questions required or optional, view reports about survey usage, and should permit the editing or deleting of surveys or survey responses. I'd think that a developer should be able to make the statistics regarding answers submitted to date publicly viewable as well as viewable in the admin area, if they choose to do so. I say that "I would expect" this functionality advisedly because these are only suggestions, not requirements.

Obviously data should ultimately be stored somewhere other than memory - you can choose to use the file system, Access, or SQL Server. If there's another database that you'd rather use, so long as it's a freely available database and/or you provide scripts to set up one or more other database platforms, then that is fine as well. Like last month, the code will actually be tested on a developer edition of ColdFusion MX 7 on J2EE?but for this month's contest, using new features in ColdFusion MX 7 is not a requirement - as long as the code will run on CFMX 7. Obviously, if you plan to add reporting and/or graphing capabilities to your solution, ColdFusion MX 7 will most likely make your life easier and offer you more functionality for achieving this.

I should note that the contests run in this column are coding contests. Appearance is not going to be judged, so don't worry if things aren't pretty. That said, whenever applicable, entries should take into account best practices with regards to separation of presentation layer from business logic, use of CSS, and other usability best practices.

The prize for the winning entry this month is a free entry to the CFUnited conference being held just outside Washington DC this June, for you AND a colleague. The winner will have to tell me the name of the other person that's going to attend in advance. Thanks to TeraTech for donating this great prize! You can learn more about the CFUnited conference in this month's community column.