cookies and code

This wasn’t a session at the conference, but it caused me to miss a few sessions today. I wasn’t that impressed with the topic selection today anyway so this was more fun and more educational. I was able to catch up with Luis Majano for almost 4-5 hours today. I interviewed him at my previous job and really got a chance to know him better today. He humored me and gave me a full walk-through of ColdBox over an espresso. Wow, he has really found a good balance between convention and configuration I think. I really think that ColdBox has the ability to do for ColdFusion what Rails did for Ruby, or least to certain degree. Luis has built-in more tools than I can think of to help with productivity and debugging. ColdBox has framework configuration options available in XML, but the bulk of the work done by the application programmer is done by using convention. ColdBox has tools to generate a working application skeleton, a robust caching mechanism, and an amazingly sexy debugging utility. What even crazier is that ColdBox gains most of its power from the massive number of plug-ins available for the framework and the ease in which they can be created. ColdBox comes with support for Java localization and layout management out of the box and even better, if you want they can be turned off. There are tons of things I’m leaving out but I would definitely suggest checking it out. I’m seriously considering it over Fusebox after talking to Luis.

In an effort to better understand how the framework works and to help Luis with the 2.0 release, we sat down and did a domain model analysis to see if we could develop a more descriptive domain model. We made some good progress and will hopefully pick back up tomorrow.

The sheer amount of work that Luis has put into this framework is amazing. With the current documentation available for the project and Luis’ robust approach to product management, this framework is not going away. The tools alone make it worth using this framework. Definitely check it out.

The selections for today’s session were kinda stale. I started with this session and only went to 2 others. Matt Woodward gave the talk and it was ok. He is a good presenter but he was introducing a very light-weight approach to architecture and didn’t mention anything regarding other options. Felt kinda one-sided but whatever. I finally learned how the ColdFusion community is using certain terminology in this session. A DAO is regarded as a proxy for datasource that returns single instances of domain objects. A Gateway (referring to the Table Gateway pattern) is used as a proxy for a datasource which returns multiple instances of a domain object but in query form. Exactly, wtf. There was no notion of a collection of objects anywhere, so that mark I gave the CF community yesterday, yeah … I take it back.

Overall, it wasn’t a great choice and I got a good survey written for the session so I said my peace. The other choices were Database Tuning and Hal Helms Large Scale Architectures, so the lesser of 3 evils I guess.