I have really enjoyed reading the perspectives on application architecture that have sprouted up on the mailing lists lately. It comes a at good time for me, since I'm beginning my first fully OO MVC project. One of the best recommendations, I feel, is to keep your controllers as dumb as possible. While this is a fine aspiration, there are plug-ins and convenience methods available to frameworks that just make life easier. In particular, the availability of "beaner" methods.

When the Coldfusion 8 Beta came out, I jumped at the chance to install. The beta release had a few issues, but nothing that I ran into until I tested out multi-threading for MachII 1.6. After a bit of back and forth with the MachII team, I finally realized that I was running the beta and not the final release. If you are running into issues with any ColdFusion OSS and you think it's time to open a ticket.

If you use Transfer ORM you may have seen Mark Mandel's Advanced Transfer ORM Techniques presentation. One of the most interesting portions of this presentation (for me) was his coverage of the Transfer Event Model. Mark demonstrates how to setup a service (in this case a CryptService) as a Transfer Event listener. There are several events that objects can register to as listeners. One event type is "AfterNew", which is fired when a new transfer object is created.

Okay, so it's not as sexy as announcing that I'm presenting at cf.Objective(), but I'm just as excited! This will be my first conference and I'm really looking forward to meeting a lot of folks whom I have corresponded with over the past year+. Deciding which sessions to attend will be the hard part, there are so many topics I'm interested in. If you're attending and see a wide eyed fella wandering the halls aimlessly, stop me and say, "hi". Here's my mug on ColdFusion Community.

Someone must like what I've been baking up over here at Fancy Bread. Being nominated for a CFeMmy is an honour. If you haven't cast your vote yet, vote now. Deadline is noon EST, Friday, Dec. 21. And a big thanks to whomever nominated me!

I recently starting Unit Testing with CFCUnit. Unit testing is not a new topic in the CF community, but it is new to me. I've found that there are a lot of aspects related to unit testing (like Mock objects and stubs) that you need learn about. As I continue to read and research unit testing techniques, I've seen items that go back years. One topic that I could not find a lot of information on is how to test DAOs and the SQL code in <cfquery/> tags.

The more I use JSON, the more enamoured I am with the simplicity of the format. For configuration settings, JSON can easily be decoded into structures used to populate simple configuration beans. While updating a legacy application to a service oriented, framework driven implementation, I found the need to access default settings in different contexts. In the legacy app, these defaults were set in many list templates to both pre-populate a form and filter a query.

Ben Nadel's recent post, Code Assertively, really struck home for me today. In it, he discusses the use of non-assertive methods, like Evaluate() and IsDefined(). I definitely prefer to use StructKeyExists() over IsDefined() as a test for variable existence, but a large portion of my code for the scaffolds in my transfer based "generic admin" made liberal use of Evaluate().

If you are not using Illudium to generate your application classes, I encourage you to check it out. Out of the box, the code generator comes with several templates for generating CFCs, Transfer and ColdSpring XML, Actionscript VOs (value objects) and TOs (simple transfer objects designed for Flex development). Modifying, or creating your own templates is encouraged and easy. The template I developed for this series uses ColdFusion templating, but you can also use XSLT or a combination of both.

Generating scaffolds for list, edit and view pages for business objects is an essential part of a many frameworks (in many languages) available to developers. I've done a little window shopping with RoR, Symfony, and MG:U, but have never committed the time to make a go of any one framework. When recently faced with a "quick and dirty" build for trivia game for a friend, I felt that familiar dread of building a "back-end" administration system.