Roland's blog

Having the job at AIT&L has taught me a great deal about OO web development.

For some time I tried using Transfer as an ORM  but I find it slow in general.

So I moved on to the next cool thing Reactor and I must say I am very pleased with it.

For the Rails minded developer Coldfusion is a real mess; however, an old php developer might not find it as difficult to work with because it natively is procedural like php.

In Coldfusion you have several datatypes: arrays, lists, strings, structs, and queries. Queries are a strange concept but basically you can iterate over them REALLY quickly. In Rails a query returns objects, actually an array of objects. However, in Coldfusion arrays are VERY expensive so when you talk about doing pure OO in Coldfusion you will end up realizing that you can't get as good as Ruby, but you can get close to it.

Model Glue is really cool. It REALLY helps you organize the app. It is basically an event handler structure but with lots of power. Basically, everything is an event and events can call each other render files and invoke controller methods.

The cool thing about Model Glue version 2.034 is the state of views. In Rails once you assign a redirect your state is lost, unless you save in the session somewhere. However, MG (Model Glue) preserves the view state. This is really useful because it allows you to render a complete different file with the state of an object you just updated instead of fetching it again from te database.

Coldspring is really cool too. It allows you to create Beans, which are configuration structures which can be mapped to CFC components for logic handling. Model Glue + Coldspring work together really well through something called autowiring ( I really don't understand why electricians like coldfusion: recall fusebox).

I wanted to check out the coldspring framework from it's repository but my experience is mainly with subversion. So:

Here's what you basically do:
cvs -d:pserver:anoncvs:anoncvs@cvs.coldspringframework.org:/coldspring co coldspring

Blogged with Flock

I must tell I have become good at Coldfusion but have had to learn a great deal by myself because the framework's documentation on web services sucks.

Okay, so Coldfusion has one tag ( instruction ) that invoke a method from somewhere.

<cfinvoke webservice="http://somewhere/component.cfc?wsdl"
method="blah" var1="1" var="2">

Now if your method has three optional variables, the above instruction doesn't work, because the WSDL informs the invocation that there are three variables, even though they are optional. They need to put this on their docs CLEARLY!!!