Frameworks Conference 2007 : Smart Frameworks: Utilizing Rich Metadata and Code By Convention

admin | May 20th, 2007 | conferences  

Elliott Sprehn from Teratech gave this session. He spoke about the use of metadata on objects and their relationships to infer information for use in things like design pattern implementations. He went over how sometimes configuration in frameworks causes a duplication of knowledge because the frameworks needs things spelled out in a specific XML grammar to work correctly. On the conceptual level, he did a descent, not great, but decent job of defending convention or configuration. There were a lot of the framework creators in the audience who disagreed with him, so that was a comfortable listen.

He spoke about some of the great tools that ColdFusion had which made convention-based frameworks very easy to build (e.g. - Named parameters in method calls aiding in writing routes for SES URL support). He went into the GetMetaData() function as well just to show what features ColdFusion offered in terms of introspection. Towards the end of the session he tried to show some examples, and nothing worked. He even came with a few excuses for it, which was again awkward. The session had the potential to be really good, but Elliott wasn’t prepared and it weakened his argument.

I was however able to get some ideas for ColdBox from his session. I would like to see the session again, just with a little more preparation.



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  1. Elliott Sprehn Says:
    May 30th, 2007 at 5:35 pm

    Thanks so much for the honest feedback.

    I realize I wasn’t adequately prepared and I hope that the session didn’t fall too short of your expectations. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to present again.

    What the code samples did was take a path in the form /{controller}/{action}/ and convert that into a call to Controller.action() assuming the controller had a method of that name declared as access=”remote”. Along with that was a demo of a CF implementation of url routing and matching based on the documentation at http://routes.groovie.org/manual.html and the start of a framework with integrated defaults, automatic config reloading when the files changed, and a couple other things.

    Thanks for listening! :)

  2. me Says:
    May 30th, 2007 at 6:03 pm

    Hi Elliot,

    I’ll definitely check out the resources you’ve listed in your comment. I think this topic has a lot of potential and you had a tough audience. I hope you continue to present on convention and the use of introspection in CF at future conferences. Thanks again for taking the time stop by.

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