Brian Kotek said: > If you're used to procedural programming, Fusebox may be a very good > option to consider. If you come from a more OO background, you may > find Model-Glue or Mach-II more intuitive. Either way, I'd urge you to > disregard any useless jibes and investigate for yourself. A book on > Fusebox 5.5 just came out, and Doug Hughes is teaching a full course > on Model-Glue in the near future. > > There are plenty of options to look at.
And speaking of options (wait for it)... Here is a page that Charlie Arehart maintains with a list of some various ColdFusion frameworks you can check out: http://www.carehart.org/cf411/#cffw There have actually been a number of similar lists maintained by different people. Some more comprehensive than others and of course they fluctuate because projects do come and go. I will give a little more insight into Charlie's list: Database frameworks: Transfer, Reactor, DataMgr and DataFaucet IoC / Dependency Injection: LightWire and ColdSpring (required by Model-Glue) Full Stack (frameworks that "do it all"): cfrails, CF on Wheels, FarCry and the onTap framework (Of course, if I left anyone out, feel free to correct me) And who knows what other frameworks on RIAForge.org might not even be in Charlie's list currently. You may also want to check out Kay Smoljak's recent series of articles on SitePoint in which she's interviewing various framework teams / authors to get the skinny on their history, purpose and techniques http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/05/06/frameworks-frameworks-everywhere/ And I recently published this survey in which I'm trying to get some general information about the community's thoughts on frameworks. I posted the survey URL before, but this time I'm going to post this blog article where I explain a little bit more about my reason for creating the survey: http://ontap.riaforge.org/blog/index.cfm/2008/9/14/Framework-Survey For a long time there was only FuseBox in the ColdFusion community... Really, right up until the introduction of ColdFusion MX and the advent of CFCs. I'm not sure how related those two things are, I just know they happened at the same time. And even initially the first frameworks to be released after that were influenced by FuseBox. Though today even FuseBox doesn't much resemble what it looked like back then. My own frustration with the earlier versions of FuseBox (primarily 3) stemmed from what seemed to me a lot of repetition. More recent versions of that particular framework have really streamlined that aspect and made it much easier to work with (imo anyway). And while I personally found early versions of Mach-II even *more* repetitive than FuseBox, that's also changed some and is continuing to change as I read recently that they're planning to revise the XML syntax for views to make it more concise. There has been (and I think continues to be) a gradual shift toward more "configuration light" style frameworks and making those XML config files more concise (that is, when they're not being removed all-together). Anyway these days there's a very wide array of public frameworks available to choose from and that's not even including the host of private or proprietary frameworks used by various corporate entities. And I suspect the proliferation of frameworks will only continue with more of them being created and more of the ones that are already available gaining popularity and becoming larger development communities. At the moment I don't really have much to back up that claim other than to say, check out this list of application frameworks on Wikipedia and look at the size of the lists for Java and PHP! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_application_frameworks And to note as well that the ColdFusion community is growing and can be expected to grow rather rapidly in the coming year or so thanks to a recent proliferation of free/open-source CFML engines (Railo, OpenBD and SmithProject) as well as the Adobe merger and a lot of good press we've been getting recently, such as the codie award given to ColdFusion for "best webservice solution". http://www.talkingtree.com/blog/index.cfm/2008/5/21/SIIA-2008-Codie-Award-For-Adobe-ColdFusion And the recent evangelism kit Kristen Schofield published, showing some of the roadmap for Centaur (9), Sully (10) and Link (11). http://www.webbschofield.com/index.cfm/2008/9/15/ColdFusion-Evangelism-Kit http://www.codersrevolution.com/index.cfm/2008/9/17/A-Look-Into-ColdFusions-Future-Centaur-Sully-Link We're already starting to see the effects of these things. I've been seeing recruiters recently talking about a dearth of ColdFusion talent in California. Basically if you're a talented CF programmer it seems you can pretty much have your pick of jobs if you're willing to move to LA. So I wouldn't expect the proliferation of frameworks to abate any time soon. All that being said, (okay, now I'll hawk) Kay Smoljak did a fantastic job editing an interview for me on SitePoint about the onTap framework and will be publishing another one on DataFaucet soon... She mentioned wanting to "change it up" and get another framework article or two in there rather than publish both of mine back to back. But has been having difficulty getting the Fusebox folks to commit to their interview answers. That's probably because it's a bigger team of them answering so it takes longer. :) And I'll be recording an interview for the CFConversations podcast soon as well. And as always I'm thankful to Nick Tong and Kola Oyedeji (I hope I spelled those right!) for an interview and podcast they did with me a while back for cfframeworks.com. Links to both of these interviews for the onTap framework can be found on the site at http://on.tapogee.com Happy hunting! ~ike (expecting a "body too long" message in the near future) -- s. isaac dealey ^ new epoch isn't it time for a change? ph: 781.769.0723 http://onTap.riaforge.org/blog ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Adobe® ColdFusion® 8 software 8 is the most important and dramatic release to date Get the Free Trial http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;203748912;27390454;j Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/message.cfm/messageid:312813 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=11502.10531.4
