Hi James, I know you've already received a proper and extensive reply from Geoff, but here is my take on the whole farcry thing:
I would agree that FarCry can be used as a "blackbox" for holding your applications, as in: - You can do a great deal of things by using the farcry tags and objects without knowing how they work - You can create and manipulate persistent objects without knowing anything about the DBMS / persistence layer - You can write most of your application code without interfering with the underlying system However, I would also agree with Geoff that if you want to pop open the hood, you can. Which is useful. Regarding FarCry compared to other frameworks, it's difficult to compare FarCry to an MVC or ORM framework; It's a bit of both. Having used frameworks such as Mach-II and Reactor I find FarCry requires much less configuration and runs much faster but perhaps doesn't allow your code to be as granular or object oriented as the other frameworks. In my mind it's a good compromise. As said earlier by Geoff, as long as you follow the conventions in FarCry, you will end up with a very powerful framework that allows you to do really cool stuff with the minimum of effort. One thing with FarCry development is that often you be tempted to "squash" all your code into one file, including presentation, data manipulation, business logic etc. This is mainly because you want a display method that shows a search form or a rule that allows filtering via a form etc etc. What I have done to get around this is create a small, simple framework that allows you to split your presentation from your data access, logic etc. You can have a look here: http://code.google.com/p/modules-framework/ (excuse the shameless plug) In regards to documentation (as asked by Geoff), the documentation that I would like to see expanded the most is information about formtools metadata and tags, for such a powerful and frequently used part of FarCry, I find that sometimes information about formtools, including metadata, tags, and the creating of custom formtools, is a little limited. Though examples of this don't come to mind... On Jan 19, 10:36 pm, James Buckingham <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi there, > > Happy New Year to everyone :-). > > We've just been sent a rather large spec for a rebuild of one of our > existing applications. > > We're going to need to do some extensive work in this on both the > front and backend with things plugged up to a few databases, stored > procedures etc. but as things stand the code is just pure spaghetti so > it's time to look at moving things into a framework. > > As we're doing our new website in FarCry and because it's advertised > as a Web Framework our initial instincts are to say we go with FC. > However I wanted to throw the cat amongst the pigeons and ask other > people, who have probably used FarCry more than me, what are the > pros / cons of using FarCry over other application frameworks like > ColdBox, Model-Glue etc. > > What would make you say "Ok FarCry is good for X,Y & Z but really in > order to do this project I'm going to need to look at this from a > different approach". > > My view - > > FarCry takes the approach of giving you the tools that allow you to > setup / manipulate the black box which is core to suit your project. > In some sense that's a good thing because it gives you a decent > platform to work up from and build your custom content within. However > if things, for whatever reason, need to go outside those tools > (external datasources mixed with FarCry content, storing of temporary > data etc.) then I can see us maybe having management issues here. > > The other application frameworks act as basic "template" to help > organise your business logic, HTML etc. in a standardised way. It > leaves it up to you to organise the rest of it. So greater flexibility > but the starting point is a blank canva so no webtop, database > management etc. so obviously more work intially to get it up and > running. > > I'm find though that there is more community support for the > application frameworks than FarCry. For example, I know that we're > going to need to do some quite complex form wizards for this > application yet I don't really know where to find tutorials for say > "Creating basic / advanced custom frontend forms using FarCry Core > Tags". It tends to be that you need to look at the existing code in > the plugins / core to work it out. > > Anyway talked enough, would be good to get your feedback on this :-) > > Cheers, > James -- You received this message cos you are subscribed to "farcry-dev" Google group. To post, email: [email protected] To unsubscribe, email: [email protected] For more options: http://groups.google.com/group/farcry-dev -------------------------------- Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/farcry
