BACFUG
April 15th, 2009

Agenda
Welcome!
Announcements!
Sponsors!
Featured Presentation (yeah, me!)
Q&A
Raffle

Welcome!
Tonight's topic:
ColdBox? Mach-II? Model-Glue?
Sean Corfield
Next meeting: May 20th
What's New in Mach-II?
Kurt Wiersma (remote via Connect)

Announcements!
Anyone hiring?
Anyone looking for work?
Any other announcements?

Announcements!
Sean Corfield is joining Railo US!

Announcements!
Sid Maestre is the new BACFUG manager

Sponsors!
Sid for the beer!
Anonymous for the pizza!
Planitax for hosting our meeting!

Presentation!
ColdBox? Mach-II? Model-Glue?
Sean Corfield

Which Framework?
Sean Corfield, Railo

Who am I?
Consultant, Railo, Inc.
Adobe Community Expert for ColdFusion
Manager of BACFUG
Formerly Sr Architect for Macromedia IT
CFML developer since 2001 ("Neo")
Java dev (since '97) and C++ (since '92)
Flex / AIR / Groovy (since '08)

What we'll cover
Structure of frameworks
ColdBox, Mach-II, Model-Glue
What do they have in common?
How are they different?
Show & Tell!

Structure of frameworks

Traditional Applications
Display code
Link to page / form submit to page
Validation / data processing in page or ad hoc includes / CFCs
Logic to select next page

Traditional Applications
<cfif isDefined("form.submit")>
... process data ...
... redirect or continue to show errors ...
</cfif>
<cfform ..>
...
</cfform>

Model-View-Controller
View = display code
Controller = logic to select next page, form validation, interaction with Model
Model = all the business logic - validation, data processing etc

Model-View-Controller
All requests go through the Controller
It writes to the Model and reads data back from the Model
It selects the View to render
Views may read from the Model (or data provided by the Controller)

Types of framework
MVC - application frameworks
cfWheels, ColdBox, Fusebox, Mach-II, Model-Glue, onTap etc
ORM - persistence frameworks
DataFaucet, Hibernate (Java), Reactor, Transfer etc

Types of framework
IoC / DI - management of services (CFCs)
ColdSpring, Lightwire, Spring (Java)
Miscellaneous
Validation frameworks
Event handling frameworks
etc

What do they all have in common?

Commonalities
What do ColdBox, Mach-II and Model-Glue have in common?
More than you might think!

Commonalities
index.cfm - entry point for Controller (the framework plus your CFCs together)
event-based - focused on "handlers"
event "object"
Contains URL and form data
Provides a data bus for Controller / View

Commonalities
URL and form scope are blended together
Views are "regular" CFML pages
Controllers are CFCs
Model is a collection of CFCs too

Configuration vs Convention
Event handlers are specified in XML files
Mach-II, Model-Glue - like Fusebox XML
Event handlers are located by convention
ColdBox - like Fusebox no-XML

How are they different?

ColdBox

ColdBox
Event names look like entity.action
Map to handler entity.cfc, method action(event) - like Fusebox no-XML
Default view would be entity/action.cfm
Handler can set a different view
e.g., user.list -> user.cfc:list() -> user/list.cfm

ColdBox
Core configuration is via XML file
Just basic properties - no "logic"
Layouts
Default layout for whole app
Default layout for specific views/folders
Can override programmatically

ColdBox
Interceptors - called automatically during the application / request lifecycle
SES URLs, security, tracing, cache advice...
e.g., environment interceptor can override configuration for dev, QA, prod

ColdBox
Plugins - add custom functionality
Create plugins/Stuff.cfc
In view or handler, getMyPlugin("Stuff")
Automatically cached
Lots built-in: i18n, logger, RSS, web services, timer etc

ColdBox
Incredible documentation!
It's a very rich framework with a lot of functionality but it's also very easy to get started

Mach-II

Mach-II
Event handlers in XML
Call methods on listener CFCs
Specify views to render
Can publish message for subscribed listeners
Can map event names
Both decouple listeners from XML

Mach-II
XML also defines
Modules - to decompose large apps
Subroutines - reusable handler "logic"
Properties - simple and complex
e.g., ColdspringProperty CFC
Can be like plugins in ColdBox

Mach-II
Plugins - a bit like interceptors in ColdBox
Automatically called during each request
Filters - conditional logic for event handlers
Can change flow of events
Built-in caching, logging (as of 1.6)

Mach-II
Environment support (coming in 1.8)
Conditional configuration based on dev, QA, prod server groups
HTML helper (coming in 1.8)
Reduces clutter in views by encapsulating boilerplate code and common operations

Mach-II
Reasonable documentation
Strong, consistent architecture
Very "OO" which can be a barrier for some

Model-Glue

Model-Glue
Event handlers in XML
Publish messages for subscribed listeners
Specify conditional result / event mapping
Specify views to render

Model-Glue
Controller CFCs (methods are listeners)
Conditional logic sets "results" to control the flow of events (like filters in Mach-II)
A few automatic events during each request (like plugins in Mach-II or interceptors in ColdBox)

Model-Glue
Scaffolding (MG2) / code generation (MG3)
Builds XML, controllers and views for you to speed up development
Event types (new in MG3)
Reduces boilerplate layout / result mapping in event handler XML

Model-Glue
Integrated ColdSpring
Autowiring of model into controllers
Model-Glue itself is wired together with ColdSpring!

Model-Glue
View formats (new in MG3)
Select different views in single event handler to render HTML or XML or ...

Model-Glue
Very simple, clean architecture
Aimed at CFers (even tho' it is OO)
Poor documentation :(

Show & Tell!

Let's see some code!
I'm going to install each framework and then we can have a look at a small sample application with each one

Wrap up...
At a high level, ColdBox, Mach-II and Model-Glue perform similar functions
ColdBox has convention-based approach
Model-Glue is lightweight and simple
Mach-II is very OO and built for extension

Q&A
sean@corfield.org
sean@getrailo.com
http://corfield.org/
http://getrailo.com/

Raffle
Includes: Webucator Online Training