An Architect's View

If you were subscribed directly to "Best Served Cold", Paul Kenney's blog, he has upgraded to BlogCFC and the RSS feed location has changed to: http://www.pjk.us/paul/rss.cfm?mode=full

Just a reminder that there's a set of fairly active (if often off-topic) chat channels established on DAL.net IRC for ColdFusion developers. The main channel is #coldfusion which has a bunch of irreverent and fun regulars and then there are channels registered for several of the application frameworks: #fusebox, #machii, #modelglue, #tartan. In anticipation of ColdSpring becoming increasingly more popular, I have just created and registered a #coldspring channel. The #coldfusion channel is often all over the shop and sometimes politically incorrect in the extreme but the framework-related channels are generally much quieter and much more on-topic.

The early bird price of $299 ends TODAY then it goes up to $499 so hurry along and register for the 2005 Fusebox & Frameworks Conference! Don't forget that there are also full-day classes being run on the Wednesday before the conference (9/28):

• (FB103 Intro to Fusebox - Simon Horwith - cancelled)
• FB301 Advanced Fusebox - Jeff Peters
• (MT101 Mach II - Hal Helms - cancelled)

Those classes are just $449 each!

More details on the upcoming BACFUG meeting:

Paul Kenney will be introducing the Tartan Framework, a service layer framework for ColdFusion that helps you leverage your domain model in isolation from your application-level logic. Tartan's service management allows you to manage data consistently across multiple MVC frameworks, such as Fusebox, Mach II, and Model Glue, as well as Flash/Flex via Flash Remoting and SOAP web services. This lecture is a preview of Paul's upcoming lecture for the FuseBox conference. Wednesday. Aug 17, 7pm This meeting is in our new location: 601 Townsend (the new Macromedia building) corner of Townsend and 7th St., across Townsend from the old location Unfortunately, this means no outside food or drink (even beer, sniffle). Please eat before you come or eat with us after the meeting. If the "no beer" policy doesn't work out for us, we'll have to come up with a new plan of some sort.

Note that this is a preview of the talk Paul will be giving at the Fusebox & Frameworks Conference.

The Fusebox & Frameworks conference is coming together nicely - take a look at the list of topics and speakers! All the major frameworks are going to be covered: Fusebox, Mach II, Model-Glue, Tartan, onTap, Rails, Spring and various custom concoctions! I think it's particularly interesting to see Rails and Spring on the menu (with talks from John Paul Ashenfelter and Maxim Porges respectively). I'm going to be in Salt Lake City so I'll miss this year's conference which I'm fairly bummed about - it really looks like a great lineup! Only a week left to get the early bird price too so hurry up and register!

Ray Camden asked on the Model-Glue list about whether there was a way to avoid repeatedly typing the application name in the XML configuration file. Wayne Graham came back with a brilliant way to do this that uses XML entities - definitions of &entities; directly in your XML file. Read Ray's enthusiastic response to Wayne's blog posting about the technique. This should apply to other frameworks that use XML configuration files but I haven't tried it.

Michael Smith has just announced the 6th Annual Fusebox / Frameworks Conference at the end of September. The call for speakers / topics is open now until July 25th. This year's conference will cover more than just Fusebox and FLiP - it will cover a variety of frameworks based on the topics you request! And, no, I will not be there this year - it clashes with a cat show in Salt Lake City so I'll be on the road from California to Utah while the conference takes place!

I'd like to thank Tomoaki Tanaka for taking my frameworks sample application and creating a Model-Glue + Tartan variant. I downloaded his ggcc8.zip file, unpacked it into my web root and it worked just fine (although I'd recommend setting reload to false in ModelGlue.xml so you get good performance.

I spent several hours over the last couple of nights trying to get Tartan running on BlueDragon 6.2. I found several bugs in BlueDragon in the process. The first stumbling block is that BlueDragon does not support WEB-INF.cftags.component as the universal base class for all components. It's mentioned several times in the CFMX documentation so this is at best a compatibility issue that New Atlanta should document and at worst a bug they should fix. Workaround: change WEB-INF.cftags.component to any. The second stumbling block I hit was that the pseudo-constructor of a derived CFC could not access variables set in the pseudo-constructor of the base CFC. New Atlanta just released a Hot Fix that fixes this bug. You'll need it to get Tartan running. Then I tripped over <cfbreak/>. BlueDragon thinks that's an illegal tag. Add a space and it's happy: <cfbreak />. I found the same problem with <cfrethrow/>. Changing it to <cfrethrow /> made BlueDragon happy. Finally, BlueDragon does not allow derived CFCs to call private methods in the base CFC via super. Since private methods are accessible to derived CFCs (because CFML's private really means protected), this should definitely be valid. Workaround: change ServiceFactory.getServiceArgs() to be access="public". At this point my sample application (for my frameworks talk) runs on BlueDragon in all seven variants. Oh, and this exercise did highlight a bug in my code! My Tartan configuration file did not have a <parameters> tag around my DAO factory parameters which caused them to be ignored. This meant that my queries were being run with username="" password="". On CFMX, blank credentials are ignored and the values in the data source (in the CF Admin) are used. On BlueDragon, the blank credentials are used (so the queries failed).

For those of you who missed the live version, you can watch the recording of Paul explaining Tartan with live code examples. It was a great session - thank you Paul! You can learn more about the framework on the Tartan website.