Andrew's ramblings

Coldfusion and frameworks

Tags: Coldfusion

I would like to touch on a subject that has over time, not really been given much thought or if it has it hasn't been heavily discussed.

Coldfusion is a very niche market, that appears that will remain in that state for a long time to come. And although this is something that can be changed, it doesn't appear to be very high on Adobe's list at the moment.

There are a number of factors that this assumption is made on, but that can be debated another timer. For now I would like to talk about frameworks, and how they can and do impact our working life.

When we sit down and plan our next application, or development life cycle on a product or existing application. We are faced with a number of frameworks, that could hinder or make the application. The decision to go with one over the other is a lot to do with future support, and most importantly features that we need to get our job done.

One framework that I am a huge fan of is Coldbox, the amount of features and documentation that Luis has put into this is amazing to say the least. But this type of framework is not the be all and end all to get the work done with either, and that leaves us to discuss the pitfalls of picking one framework over another and that is the developer of the framework.

So far Fusebox has to be the oldest well know open source framework out there, and has a lot of followers to it. But what would you do if the developer was hit with no more time to develop this anymore, or the fact that it just dies by the wayside what do you do.

I know a lot of developers who will not use these type of frameworks, for that very reason and it is a very justified reason to expect that the decision you make is going to see you through the life of the application.

Sean Corfield posted a blog recently, and I am sure most of you have read this by now. However in case you haven't here is the link.

Is Model-Glue Dead?

The problem that Sean has indicated is the lack of time that one person has to continue to develop these frameworks, most of this is because they don't get a great deal of support to help and sometimes we developers are not fully aware that we can do this. I have always been a big advocate that ColdFusion should begin to adopt an MVC framework in the core language, the main reason for this is that there are by far too many entry points into the language. And it keeps growing, with no forethought into the overall problem that it keeps adding too.

Again that is another debate for another time.

What I would like to begin to see, and I think it was touched on by one of the comments posted on Sean's blog. And even though Ray Camden has created a very wonderful site for a repository of open source projects, I think as a community we can do more and the question is how.

I have a few ideas on this, and will be investigating something in the next few weeks or so, and I would like to begin to open the community of ColdFusion up some more with the huge talent that does seem to come and go within the ColdFusion community. The idea will be simple, but it will also begin to provide more support and a mechanism to encourage more people to get involved in projects.

It will be something that I believe can only benefit the community as a whole so much more, and I'll post more as I give this concept some more thought, so stayed tuned.