what do I know

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.