> I want your opinion ( or experience ) with refactoring an old project
> into a framework. I am working now on a old non-frameworked project
> with plain cfm files with .cfc function and object libraries. This
> projects contains a bunch of .cfm files and .cfc. About 1000 items.
> The discussion with my colleagues is that some want to refactor the
> whole project in a framework. I think it's to much work, and you can
> better start from scratch. My other colleagues disagrees. Do you have
> any experience or opinions?
Both approaches work. There are a lot of variables involved, so it would
be difficult to offer a blanket suggestion about how to approach this
problem. The amount of business logic that's been placed in or left out
of the CFCs will have a dramatic impact on the amount of time it's
likely to require to convert the application to a framework. If most of
the business logic is already in the CFCs, then converting to the
framework shouldn't take very long.
If you've got a lot of business logic in .cfm files currently, you might
want to start by converting that logic into objects -- which is what you
want anyway, irrespective of which framework you choose. And at least
for that portion of the migration project, I would tend to say that it
makes more sense to keep the business logic you have rather than start
over from scratch, since that has nothing to do with your framework.
The rest of the project will be converting the views (HTML) and creating
events in the framework's controllers. It's not difficult but it can be
tedious. The onTap framework is designed in a particular way that allows
you to convert individual pages incrementally in a "time permitting"
fashion. None of the other frameworks I've seen will allow you to do
this yet, you either convert them all at once, or not at all. The onTap
framework will also allow you to maintain your existing links and form
actions, which again, it's the only framework I've seen that will
eliminate that step from your workload (though I've heard that upcoming
versions of FuseBox will have features that allow this... I think).
Incidentally, I converted Ray Camden's Galleon Forums application to 5
different frameworks - ColdBox, Mach-II, Model-Glue, 2 versions of
FuseBox (with & without XML) and the onTap framework. In total the
project took me about 2 week. I don't think it had 1000 files, however,
I was able to replicate the migration to 5 different frameworks all by
myself during that time while still maintaining a 9-5 job. So I think
that says something for the potential to be able to migrate your
existing code. Whether you want to keep the existing code is really
another question. If you're unhappy with the user interface, you may
want to scrap it if you have time to start from scratch.
Good luck! :)
ike
--
s. isaac dealey ^ new epoch
isn't it time for a change?
ph: 817.385.0301
http://onTap.riaforge.org/blog
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