For those that don't know, cfrails is supposed to be a very light framework for obtaining
MVC architecture with little to no effort (aside from putting custom methods where they belong). It works such that any changes to your database tables are reflected immediately throughout the application.
For instance, if you change the order of the columns, the order of those fields in the form is changed.
If you change the name of a column or it's data type, the labels for those form fields are changed, and
the validations for that column are also changed, along with the format in which it
is displayed (for example, a money field displays with the local currency,
datetime in the local format, and so forth).
I've also been developing a sort-of
DSL for it,
so configuration can be performed quite easily programmatically (not just through the database), and you can follow
DRY to the extreme. Further, some of this includes (and will include) custom data types (right now, there are only a couple of custom data types based on default data types).
In a nutshell, the goal is to have such highly customizable "scaffolding" that there really is no scaffolding - all the code is synthesized - or generated "on the fly." Of course, this only gets you so far. For the stuff that really makes your application unique, you'll still have to code that. But you can compose views from others and such, so it's not like related tables have to stay unrelated, but I do want to stress that right now there is no relationship stuff implemented in the
ORM.
I've skipped a few "mini-versions" from 0.1.3 to 0.2.0 because there were so many changes that I haven't documented one-by-one. That's just sloppiness on my part. Basically, I started by following Ruby on Rails' example, and taking my own experience about what I find myself doing over and over again. That part is done, except that the ORM needs to be able to auto-load and lazy-load relationships at the programmer's whim. In any case, once I got enough functionality to start using it on my project, I've been developing them in parallel. The problem is, I've fallen back on poor practices, so the code isn't as nice as it could be.
In particular, there aren't any new automated tests after the first couple of releases, which isn't as bad as it might otherwise be, since a lot of the core code was tested in them. But on that note, I haven't run the existing tests in a while, so they may be broken.
Further, since I've been thinking in Ruby and coding in Coldfusion, you'll see a mix of camelCase and under_score notations. My original goal was to provide both for all the public methods, and I still plan to do that (because, since I can't rely on case from all databases for the column names -- or so I think -- I use the under_score notation to tell where to put spaces when displaying the column names). But right now, there is a mix. Finally, the DSL needs a lot more thought put behind it - Right now it is a mix-and-match of
variables.setting variables and
set_something() methods. Right now it is
really ugly, but when I take the time to get some updated documentation up and actually package it as a zip, I should have it cleaned up. In fact, I shouldn't have released this yet, but I was just starting to feel I needed to do something, since so much had be done on it and I hadn't put anything out in quite some time. Besides that, I'm quite excited to be using it - it's been a pain to build, but it's already saved me more time than had I not done anything like it.
In the end, I guess what I'm trying to say is: 1) Don't look at it to learn from. There may be
some good points, but there are bad points too, and 2) Don't rely too heavily on the interfaces.
While I don't anticipate changing them (only adding to them, and not forcing you to set
variables.property), this is still less than version 1, so I reserve the right
to change the interfaces until then. =)
Other than that, I would love to hear any feedback if you happen to be using it, or need help because the documentation is out of date, or if you tried to use it but couldn't get it to work. You can
contact me here. You can find
cfrails at
http://cfrails.riaforge.org/ .
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