If you ever wanted to modify ColdBricks or BugLog, but didn't understood how these application were constructed; or if you just want to see yet another way of developing CF applications, then this post may be for you.

I just posted some pages describing the framework I use for developing CF projects. It doesn't even has a proper name, I just call it "Core" due to its simplicity and its minimalistic nature. The basic principle of this framework, and the reason why I choose to use it instead of going with more traditional offerings, is that it only focuses on one thing and one thing only: provide a formal mechanism for going from one page to another and for invoking actions.

It doesn't do any fancy things, no complex request lifecycles, no sophisticated caching, no extensive API, none; however, it does provide enough extension points to which I can hook any functionality that I desire on a per-project basis. Basically the framework consists on a Front Controller implementation, a base event handler and a few conventions for directory structure and nomenclature.

Anyway, you can find the code and read more about this framework by going to the Projects section or by going directly here.

We spend ridiculous amount of time discussing the merits (or lack of) of the different MVC frameworks in ColdFusion, and we keep doing it again and again. Well, at least everyone should agree that when it comes time to decide how to go from one page to another we got that pretty much well covered. But for all the OO fever taking over the hard-core ColdFusion community as of lately, why are we still focusing on the presentation layer still, which honestly is the least OO place in the whole application? Where are the repositories of just plain libraries? components and subsystems that we plug together to provide sophisticated functionality to our applications regardless of how the presentation layer is done.

Yes, we have Transfer, ColdSpring, and Reactor, and they really rock; but it seems that that's where the list ends. Has nobody written a really tight, super strong, caching library? what about a job-scheduling library? It could be that the lack of these libraries as separate entities is what motivates MVC framework authors to add more and more complexity to their projects, which in turn fuels the discussions of why these frameworks are so bloated and complicated. I know Luis, from ColdBox, has put a lot of effort in building the caching functionality in his framework, and knowing the quality of his code I'm pretty sure it kicks a$$; but sadly is all tied into the framework. Wouldn't it be much more beneficial to everyone if there were already some project out there that would provide this functionality so that you could just plug it in into your application?

If we have enough of these little libraries that would focus on doing one thing and one thing only, then the 'framework' in which an application is built would not need to be these gigantic-swiss-army-knife platforms that we are getting used to. They would become lighter and lighter until they are reduced to a 'core', just down to the basic principle that embodies their core ideas. Imagine a coldbox-core, a modelglue-core, a fusebox-core, super small code bases that just provide the basic guidelines and minimal code to support a proposal on how an application should be structured; And then on top of them we could have 'distributions' or 'shells', canned projects that would group together a 'core' and a few libraries to put together a basic solution, custom tailored for specific purposes. For example, you could have a shell for an intranet application that includes the framework core, a caching subsytem, a security subsystem, an IOC subsystem and an ORM subsystem; or on the other hand there could be a shell for a plain website that may only include the framework core and a caching subsystem. The bottom line is that all those parts can be plugged in an out and replaced or extended, and the application as a whole could be customized to the specific needs and would not need to carry any added complexity that is not desired by the author.

If I may give a suggestion, we should move on from the MVC frameworks and start focusing in these kind of projects. We need to focus more on libraries and subsystems in that the only interface is an API that can be used by other applications. Of course, in order to do that, it should be easy for everyone to find these libraries. RIAForge makes a terrific job as a repository of entire projects, and maybe it could be extended to add a new category exclusively for ColdFusion libraries and APIs; or maybe we need an entirely new website to allow us to post and search libraries for different types of functionalities that anyone wanted to add to their application.

Any thoughts?

One thing I don't like when starting on a new application is having to go through the process of setting up and configuring the database before I can get anything even running at all. So, for a couple of projects I'm working on I thought about reading and writing data to plain and simple XML files and then later replace that section of the code with a proper database access layer.

However the idea of just throwing away a large chunk of the application didn't sound very appealing, so after some thinking, I started playing with the idea of abstracting the actual storage medium from the application logic. Something that would let me change from XML files to database tables without having to change (or throw away) any application code. This, of course would involve some sort Data Access Objects, and also somewhere along the way would incorporate some sort of shape shifting object that would know how to either read/write files or do insert/select/deletes.

Well, after some more playing, thinking and tinkering I came up with a way to address the issue at hand; and in the eventual case that there is someone else out there with a mind as twisted as mine that would actually consider making something like this, I share my solution here.

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