Andrew's ramblings

We as developers, should look outside the box

Tags: General, Coldfusion

Well the title for this one was a little hard to describe, but sort of fits this.

Anyway one of the things that I have seen all too often in the mailing lists, is can I get such and such or there is a question regarding comparing a couple of products.

Don't get me wrong, if I could do it in ColdFusion I would too. But the reality is that ColdFusion really has no standard to coding, frameworks are all different so integration can always be a pain in the butt.

So sometimes when we think outside the box, and ask ourselves a few more questions. Hopefully we might get an answer that will help us some more, or take us outside of ColdFusion.

Sean Corfield has written a script, that allows one to use PHP or other java ScriptEngine's. Barney has also looke at taking that to the next level and using cfgroovy, and hibernate in ColdFusion. This opens up a lot more options available to us as a developer, so sometimes when getting to the bottom of a clients requirements, we can also look at what we need to do to accommodate the client.

For example we have a fairly heavy website at the moment, and we are now looking at providing a blog for our staff. With that in mind we can now look at a separate set of servers, to server the blog and any collaboration that is needed as well.

Now in our case the website is written in grails, so we can use the java JVM version of PHP to then server via grails the information via small PHP scripts. That call the API of the blog software, then display the information in a website.

The idea behind this was that a small PHP script written in grails, evaluated into a grails variable and then do what we need with the data. Would be minimal work on our part, than if we had to write the API calls. As we found examples in PHP that made our work minimal.

Anyway, the point I am making here is that we used other technology to integrate with ease. And by thinking outside of the box, you could reduce your work load and ultimately begin to increase your productivity.

Tweet