Mark Drew (Redux)- cf_etc...

I have been back from the cfObjective conference in Minnesota for a few days and it has allowed me to reflect a bit on how awesome a conference it was. Everything was spot on, the speakers, the venue, the food, the Jack Daniels (thanks to the ColdFusion Weekly guys for the bottle of Gentleman Jack!)! The CFEclipse presentation had a great turn out too, so much so that Jared had to move us into the main presentation room. I was astounded when I asked how many people used CFEclipse and nearly everyone put up their hands! Finally being able to show the world the CF Frameworks Explorer was the highlight of my presentation. I am over the moon with the positive feedback, and for those that are experiencing bugs with it, don't worry, its in VERY active development! You can download it from the CFEclipse Update Site (http://www.cfeclipse.org/update) but also remember that you need to update your copy of CFEclipse too. If you are just getting started with it, I have updated the CFEclipse TV section of the CFEclipse website with a quick introduction to the frameworks explorer. With Scotch on the Rocks round the corner, I wanted to announce that Project:X will be demonstrated at Scotch on the Rocks. This is the only place that you will be able to see the unveiling of what I must say is going to be a fantastic addition to the CFEclipse project. It will REALLY speed up your development and is a perfect companion to the CF Frameworks Explorer. If that wasn't enough, I have just been informed by Andy Allan that there will be FREE Beer ("free as in beer" beer) at a conference that is a must if you are anywhere near Europe. It is very inexpensive for a conference with the quality of speakers that you would get at something double the size. If you haven't booked a place yet, get to it! I cannot stress enough about how much a conference of this quality goes to make you a better developer. If you think a couple of days away from work is too much to gain this kind of knowledge, then you don't deserve a pay raise.

I have just booked my flight to cfObjective in May. I am both full of trepidation as this will be my first time speaking at a US conference but overly excited at unveiling the results of the top secret, Project:U. I am still working on this, and probably will be working on it non-stop till the eve of the conference but even in its current (broken? err.. feature incomplete?) state I still think it will cause quite a hit (hopefully not a hit of rotten tomatoes hitting me!) Does anybody else get nervous when they spend ?379.31 ($744.889) on a flight and check and re-check everything like 100 times? This also brings me to hotel bookings, why is the world mad on Visa cards? I don't posses one and I am happy with that. It just makes me nervous to think that a foreign government (yes Mr Bush, I am looking at you) is allowed to get all my private details including being able to look into my bank accounts just when I visit their country! Illegal? I think so! (rant over, sorry, back to normal service)

As I am working on the application framework that I mentioned before, I noticed that I started repeating myself. Looking into other frameworks like Model-Glue you notice that there is a generic way of getting information out of an object (like the Event Object) so, for the configuration I created a GenericBean. This Generic bean can be initialised with a structure of key/value pairs, you can get a value, if the key doesn't exist, it returns a empty string. Bearing that in mind, I had other objects I started creating (lets call them Transfer Objects, they just carry some data from one place to another) and I realised that even though I started doing things like: <cfcomponent name="Bob">
      <cfproperty name="name" default="">
      <cfproperty name="age" default="">
   
      <!--- insert gettters and setters here --->
   
   </cfcomponent> (the code above is just to give you an idea) Now, this was a bit annoying, I mean, it is just another transfer object, so out of coding lazyness I used a my GenericBean, I mean which code is "better"? <cfset Age = Bob.getAge()>
      or
   <cfset Age = Bob.getValue('age', 0)> I find the second more dynamic, it also allows me to set a default and this is coming in very handy. I know it then stops you doing things like type checking, but then again, I could add a method (which I shall do later today) such as bob.isValid(stValidations) where stValidations is a structure with the keys/valuetypes that it should hold. <cfset stValidations = StructNew()>
   <cfset stValidations.name = "string">
   <cfset stValiudations.age = "numeric">
      
   <cfset bValid = bob.isValid(stValidations)> What do people thing of this approach to coding? Should I make Bob and object? Or does a generic bean work for you? (I should say that as an afterthought, I could store the validations in the BOB object so that later on I can validate it)

I just spotted a couple of posts that are going along with my own work, Peter Bell has released LightWire Version 0.01 and another post over at WebApper by Steve Nelson with regards to running Fusebox using CFC's (rather than the massive XML file). I am a known fan of Model-Glue, Reactor and ColdSpring, but for my latest project (for work, not released) I am creating a framework that is similar to MG but since it has one purpose there is less (sorry about this Joe) 'bloat'. Not that MG is bloated, but for our framework we have some specific goals and not others (such as scaffolding). Its a specific framework that needs to be built for speed and deployment ease. It means that there should very few application files (the front end of the application) and its based on Application.cfc doing a lot of the calling. Index.cfm being a rather lonely file doing not much at all (maybe up to 5 lines of code or something). So far I have CFC's as listeners and controllers, a generic Value Bean (like the Event object in model glue, but its re-usable for other parts of the application), SoftCache to keep the right things in memory and a optional cache level (its for a CMS so you can get stuff from cache, from live and from edit modes ). I need to add some forwarding functions (to the core) and more data access in controllers (but that wont be core of the framework really) Sometimes you need to write your own frameworks, but when you do you will come across the same problems that are resolved by other frameworks. To that end, you should DEFINITELY read Peter Bell's Application Generation and look into how the other frameworks deal with those issues.

I just finished watching Ray Camden's fantastic Spry presentation and I realised, I keep forgetting to blog about the stuff I am doing with ColdFusion, Spry and other technologies (what can I say, CFEclipse is what I like talking about!). Over the last couple of months we at Design UK have released a couple of big retail sites for the UK. They are both driven by ColdFusion (of course) and Java, but I kind of forgot (silly me) that they also have some nice Spry implementation. Jaeger is a luxury British brand renowned for designing stylish, innovative and superb quality womenswear, menwear and accessories whose site we redesigned and redeveloped, as well as adding a lot of features (content management and eCommerce), there are some real-world examples of using Spry. The reason I am posting this is that a lot of the examples I have seen are not "in-situ" so I thought people would like to know of sites that ARE using it. A nice part of the site for you to check it out working are some product pages such as this one or this one. Just change the colour and you can see different related products and the image changes. So, I know its a pre-release technology, but its pretty handy and works really well, go check it out.

What a day for framework releases!! ColdfFusion on Wheels has just reached 0.5 status and it comes with a great new set of features such as scaffolding, better render() methods, IIS support and finders. It also has support for IIS which I think would be a big thing in helping its more commercial use (I know I am a Mac guy but enough CF installations run on Windows and IIS) I cant comment on its use just yet but it is a great time to get hooked onto Frameworks! Another thing that Rob Cameron commented was that CFonWheels is probably the first framework that relies on Application.cfc which is very interesting as its the first framework aimed at ColdFusion 7. About time too!