ColdFusion Frameworks, coldbox, tarten, MG, fusebox, machii

Today, i came across a number of helpful/interesting podcasts, articles. First, the helms and peters podcast on Framework Shrink is both entertaining and informative. During this cast, fusebox, MG and machii are all praised, frameworks in general are praised and people who program willy nilly are not praised. They joke about the NMM (no methodology methodology) this is characterized by the developer who thinks they are too smart to have to use someone else ideas, why use a framework when i can solve the problem myself. This brings to mind the debate between Hal Helms and Simon Horwith. This was not so much a debate as a informative discussion about the pros and cons of frameworks. With a decided edge going to the wisdom of using solid solutions created by others that follow best practices and encourage solid design for large applications that are scalable, maintainable, predictable (thats what the use of frameworks provide).

I followed a thread to coldbox, another CF framework that lead to this discussion about the value of frameworks. Who is using coldbox.

There was a mention of Tarten, which i had not hear of before. Interesting, in my brief read, Tarten encourages a service oriented architecture, where the controller speaks only to a service that acts as a mediator to the bus. logic in the model.

This is the common thread through all of the frameworks that i have been into and out of the past few months. Each promotes the

tiered architecture
MVC design pattern to achieve separation of views and bus. logic via a controller
OO design
tight encapsulation
loose coupling
reuse of small singular type classes or objects or with CF, components
the use of a controller to coordinate/direct requests made by application
pushing of bus. logic into the model layer
use of XML style controller
preference for application to speak to the model via a service (tarten).

I also found this useful cf portal site.

I really liked this part of the conversation, quoting Luis Majano.

"Most major design patterns do apply to Coldfusion and decoupling and object oriented approaches are posible. Yes, they will make your application more complex, harder to grasp, and event WEIRD!! But that is the intent, to take your application to an Enterprise level. You can continue to build procedural code for certain applications, it doesn’t mean its bad. But for high availablity and enterprise applications, I would go with a framework. The flexibiliy and architectural extensibility that it will give you, cannot be found in other approaches. It will be hard to grasp and you might think, why do all this work, all these calls. Object Oriented architecture is not easy and you also have to note, that some complexity on these approaches, will make you sacrifice speed. But the benefits will be tremendous."