In response to a thread on the MXUnit forums about mocking, I've made a quick update to ColdMock. I added a method named methodCallCount(methodName) to the mock objects. This will return the number of times that the specified method has been called up to the current execution point. This might be useful if you are testing a component that makes calls to a mock object but doesn't return anything or returns void, to ensure that the call to the mock object actually happened as expected.

One thing that I've heard people ask about in the ColdSpring mailing list over the years relates to properties. These are quite useful. If you didn't know, you can specify a dynamic property in certain places in your ColdSpring XML using the syntax ${myPropertyName}. You then pass a structure of property names and values into ColdSpring, and it will substitute your property names for the placeholder values. It's a nice feature, but it only works in specific places, like simple string values.

I've been using Eclipse as my IDE for a while now. It's just far too sweet to have my CF IDE and Flex IDE together, plus XML, CSS, HTML, ANT, and all the rest. I've also been a Subversion zealot for a long time. Quite frankly, if you're not using Subversion, for everything related to your development, then you're nuts. And a glutton for punishment.

I've updated the BeanInjector component and have created an RIAForge project to host these until we can figure out where these will live in the ColdSpring repository. The ColdSpring Bean Utilities project is at http://coldspringutils.riaforge.org/. It includes the BeanInjector and TDOBeanInjectorObserver, as well as the AbstractMetadataAwareAdvice, VOConverterAdvice, and GenericVOConverter. A zip file and Subversion access are available at RIAForge.

I've thrown my hat into the 30onair ring with a video showing how one can use a single CFC to supply data to HTML apps, AJAX components, XML, web services, and AMF Flex integration.

Paul Marcotte asked me to post about how one might unit test a Transfer Decorator. So here you go Paul (and anyone else who might be interested) :-) . To start with, basic testing of a Transfer Decorator is really no different than testing any other component. First, I set up a ColdSpring file to use for the test. Note that, depending on how many things you need to test and what you're testing, you can use the same ColdSpring file to test numerous things.

An awesome little Flex and CF performance gem popped up on the Transfer list last night. Some of us had been discussing how we return data to Flex from ColdFusion. As I've mentioned before on the blog, I use AOP to translate queries and other data into CFC Value Objects for automatic translation into ActionScript classes. I actually thought this was the only way to get the automatic type conversion.

In response to people who wanted to see and test out my take at a metadata-aware ColdSpring Advice, I've zipped up an example. Simply unzip into a folder named /tests/coldspring/metadata under your web root and run the index.cfm file. If you don't put it here, you'll need to modify the XML files and the extends attributes of the various components, so save yourself the trouble and just put it in the above folder.

I've had some good feedback about the TDOBeanInjectorObserver that I released earlier this week. However, I realized that with a small bit of further effort, I could make the idea even more useful. I had put quite a bit of work and thought into handling the dependency injection and the caching of the dependencies for maximum performance.

I've been working with Flex a lot recently. One of the first things that I did was create some ColdSpring AOP Advices that would take data coming back from my service layer and convert it into Value Objects so that they can be automatically converted into ActionScript Value Objects on the Flex side. This seemed to work pretty well and did exactly what I needed it to. However, in the quest for creating something more generic and reusable, I decided to build an Advice that I could feed an XML file.