Refactoring with on eye on patterns

I have been looking with a different eye at existing code in our applications. Refactoring code is an important part of any programmers job. I hear the stats about 75% of programmers time is spent maintaining existing systems. That seems about right to me. I have spent a lot of time the past month studying design patterns and best practices for CF developers, since the excellent CF Objective conference in May.

I have been looking at listeners in our mach-ii application and their managers (services) with an eye for moving bus. logic out of the listener and into the service. We actually had a cfc that was named a manager, but was actually a listener, it was extending the machii listener framework and was referencing event args. but did not have a service layer at all. I have been refactoring, renaming the manager to listener and creating a service layer between the listener and DAO/Gateway. It has taken me a long time to really get my head around why we would need all these layers, but i think its finally starting to jell.

I have spent lots of time in blogs, tutorials, books and existing code, learning from the experts, standing on the shoulders of giants, as my former co-worker liked to say.

I will continue looking at the listener and moving bus. logic out and into the service layer repeating the mantra "the listener only passes data to the service layer", its a traffic cop, not a problem solver. The listener can contain logic that directs the flow of the application, but not any logic that pertains to the bus. objects. The bus. objects are application agnostic!

I woke up this am thinking and repeating this to my 11 year old son.

"The bean is a container, that holds data and instructions about something, an object". When the application needs to reference the data or behaviors of the bean, it asks the service layer to do it. The service layer instantiates the bean and passes references to the bean into DAO which will operate on the bean." In others words, a reference to the bean is passed along to service who then passes where it needs to. Any functions that manipulate the data stored in the bean do so by reference. A DAO method requires a object be passed in and references the attibutes of the object via the argument reference passed in."

We are no longer passing values around from one function to another, but rather passing references to a bean.