Best Served Cold

There has been a lot more attention paid to testing CFCs this year at CFUnited, and cfcUnit is right there at the front when discussing unit testing one's CFML. Perhaps the biggest proponent of unit testing has been John Paul Ashenfelter and his talks on Agile Development and Testing ColdFusion. Additionally, I have seen demos of unit testing by Chris Scott when showing off different functionality of the ColdSpring framework.

A side effect of this attention has been that there will soon be a new Ant task written by John Paul that will allow cfcUnit to be run as a part of an automated build, but it could also be run from within Eclipse just as other unit testing frameworks do now.

Frameworks are a lot of fun to build. Over the last month I have been working on a framework for building ColdFusion service layers. I built it with the intension of making it available locally and remotely using Flash Remoting and web services. I have decided to call this framework Tartan.

Tartan is a command-driven service framework for ColdFusion. It was built to help produce the service layer within a larger application architecture which relies on strict separation or layering of functionality.

All access to the underlying business logic is controlled by public services which are available locally as CFCs and remotly via Flash Remoting and SOAP web services. A service can be composed of any number of commands, each of which implements a discreet operation within the application. These contain the core logic for the application. Commands can communicate with databases via DAOs, manipulate values received from the client, execute other commands and even communicate with services available on other remote servers.

At the center of Tartan are 6 core classes: RemoteService, LocalService, Command, DAO, ValueObject and ExceptionHandler. They provide most of the functionality of the framework, and must be extended by the application developer.

Although I am still working on proper documentation, there is some already, and tartan is now available for download as a part of the OpenXCF project on SourceForge via CVS. I will make it available as a single download really soon.

Well, tonight I attended the Bird's of a Feather session for CFCs that Ray Camden was good enough to set up for us. It seemed to be a more diverse group than last year and more people seemed to be interested in how things are done and why. It wasn't the gripe session that last year tended to be, and instead questions of "How do I learn how to use components?" were more important. We tended not to focus on what they could not do and instead reflected on different solutions to similar problems.

One person suggested starting with database queries and moving them into components one at a time. Really, the available documentation and body of knowledge since last year has changed quite a bit as more CF developers have embraced OO techniques using CFCs.

We also covered the need for good code generation capabilies similar to those in existance for Java developers--especially for writing boiler-plate code like database CRUD functionality.

Tom Schreck demonstrated a phenominal tool that will create a CFC, database tables that map to that CFC and the form for dealing with that CFC all in one place. He's spent quite some time on it, and it is something worth looking at and investing time and support in.

I also inquired within the group to see if anyone was using cfcUnit and if so what they thought of it. A couple of people in the room were familiar with it and liked it. Once again, I was reminded of the need for even more and better documentation... something I will have to work on.

Anyhow, it was a great session and I hope to get a chance to follow up with some of the attendees later on this week.