Widgets Ahoy, The Two-Hour MVC Framework

What does this ColdFusion developer do in his spare time? If you answered ‘write a custom MVC framework in two hours’ then you answered correctly. Initially I hesitated to share this, as it is nowhere close to finished (and probably never will be). But I decided to throw caution to the wind and offer it up for ridicule and scrutiny. Here’s a list of what I was able to accomplish in two hours…

• Create a spiffy directory structure
• Add model, view and controller logic
• integrate jquery, datatables.net and bootstrap (although I do get a warning when datatables loads)
• Create a controller layer that allows for persistant variables when forwarding to one action to the next (like the flash scope in Grails)

If I were to spend any more time on this project I would explore

• Moving the controller layer to cfcs
• Switching from a [url]?action=section.action convention to a [url]/section/ation/ convention
• Integrate ColdFusion’s built-in ORM goodness to the model
• Actually make the sample application to work (adding CRUD features for the ‘widget’ entity)
• Switching out the awesome Bootstrap front-end framework for the even more awesome Foundation front-end framework

If you are looking for a good ColdFusion framework I insist that you look elsewhere. ColdBox, CFWheels, FW/1 and Model Glue are all really good.

Without further rambling I present the 0.2 release of Widgets Ahoy!

Holy Grails, Batman

I’m fortunate enough to be working on three projects at the moment (I perform best when multitasking). One of these projects is ColdFusion-based (CF for life!), the second is rooted in Java and Selenium (test-driven development FTW) and the third project is written in Grails.

I chose the popular Eclipse-based IDE, SpringSource Tool Suite (STS). EClipse/CFEclipse is my preferred IDE for ColdFusion development, and I found the interface to be almost idenfical.

At present I’m bouncing back-and-forth between the book The Definitive Guide to Grails and Grails STS Integration and am really impressed with the language. In particular I like how controllers and unit tests are created in tandem. When creating a controller via the “grails create-controller” command both a controller class and a unit test are created.

I’ll be posting more about Grails in the coming weeks/months. 

Big thanks to long-time friend and fellow ColdFusion (and Grails) developer Mike Copeland for helping me to get my development environment set up and for sending me a good list of Grails developers to follow (Mike, please don’t ever delete that list!).

Shell

My first pet project is “Shell”, a simple O-O ColdFusion Sample Application. I’ve spent about 90 minutes on it at this point (translation: it’s not done), so consider it more of a “sketch” at this point.

Shell – Version 0.0.0.1b (pardon the hokey over-use of the shell metaphor in the code).