Hi Philip, > I do not have experience with MACH-II or On-Tap, but would > like to ask the following:
> 1 - Are there any CASE like tools to put the software > design in, and let it generate the CF code? Can that > same CASE tool let me modify the design and then regen > my application? regen in another language?? I haven't worked with any CASE tools personally. I've heard of them -- and I've seen the resultant CF code from at least one (which in all honesty was nightmarish, especially since the company developing the CASE tools perceived CF as a dying technology and didn't want to upgrade their cfml engine from 4.0 and "didn't want to maintain more than one language library per language", even though they maintained had at least two for ASP). Fusebox has been modeled in several different languages, so if there are CASE tools for CF frameworks they're more likely to use Fusebox than anything else as it's the only one I'm aware of that's been drafted in multiple languages at this point. > 2 - With MACH-II & On-TAP & others, which ones give you > the ability to call/invoke non-CF executables the most? > Maybe this is a mute point, but interfacing to middleware > and other executables is an important point. I suspect it is a moot point. I haven't done much (or really any) legacy systems integration with ColdFusion, however, my understanding is that this is primarily done via cfx tags written in Java, CORBA and previously a lot of COM before microsoft deprecated it. The CF language itself is designed to be simple and encapsulated and so it doesn't have any native tools for doing a lot of the lower level functions that legacy systems integration typically require, and that's why CF allows for extensions to be written with Java, etc. when something can't be done with native CFML. Its even easier with CFMX as a result of the ability to include Java tag libraries without having to register cfx tags. But in any event, when you're integrating with legacy you're typically going to be just writing a lot of controler code to integrate with the legacy system as a "model object" (this all being lingo of the model-view-controler (mvc) metaphor), and all the frameworks have areas where you would normally interface with model components. When you boil it all down really afaik legacy-systems integration in CF is just having, understanding and using tags (and/or functions), just like the rest of the language. > 3 - Rather than laying all the groundwork out, creating > the login programs, the message utilities, error trap > routines..... whose has a nice foundation > that we can just obtain and run with it? There was a commercial product I saw a while back that advertised itself this way. I'm not aware of anything in particular that's open-source with the possible exception of the FarCry CMS (a competitor of mine) although I haven't taken the time to download it myself and look at it, so I can't really speak to its contents. The onTap framework is "headed" in that direction, or at least, I'd like to see some additional open-source projects for the onTap framework that encapsulate common foundations like user management, login, roles based security, etc. It's gonna take a while to build up the community for that to be a reality tho. Incidentally, I think all 4 of the frameworks have some error handling features. s. isaac dealey 214-823-9345 team macromedia volunteer http://www.macromedia.com/go/team chief architect, tapestry cms http://products.turnkey.to onTap is open source http://www.turnkey.to/ontap ----------------------------------------------- To post, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe: Send UNSUBSCRIBE to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe / unsubscribe: http://www.dfwcfug.org
