Last years best ColdFusion conference, Scotch on the Rocks, is back in Edinburgh later this year !
I got so much out of last years, smaller, shorter and only slightly cheaper conference that work have kindly sent me again.
What will be said if you don't make it ?
If you are playing around with the Linux version of Flex Builder, CFEclipse, or generally mucking about with your Eclipse, or need to upgrade to a new Eclipse version, you've no doubt been annoyed at the way this removes all your carefully installed plug-ins.
Fortunately there is a way to keep them across Eclipse re-installs.
All you need to do is create a few magic directories and one file:
I've been playing with the method that seems to have been hiding from everyone for a while at http://www.briankotek.com/blog/index.cfm/2008/1/28/Returning-Typed-Structs-vs-CFCs-to-Flex
to generate arrays of value objects based on a query, but without using createObject().
Before I get into the meat of using ColdSpring to save even more time (by writing the Service layer for you, believe it or not), I wanted to take time out to give you some 'take home' reading and also address some terminology issues.
Looks like this is your chance to give a bit of direction to Adobe on what you'd like from a ColdFusion coders IDE - take the survey here.
For the record, I plumed for 'free' as 'how much should it cost', but added a note that if the server was free, there was probably a market for an IDE with all the features CFEclipse doesn't have (yet). Competing with free is hard work though, and I'd much rather Adobe just paid people to improve CFEclipse.
If you just said 'yes', you want something Adobe is working on, not even in private beta yet, code named 'CoCoMo'.
If you are using Reactor, you are probably aware that it's best practice to put all those weird little cfquery's any project has all together in a project-specific Gateway file 'com.falkensweb.project.data.Gateway.barGateway.cfc'.
The final layer is the data access (this is normally combined with a database abstraction) layer, which commonly uses ORM techniques.
Reactor or Transfer typically slot in here and take care of the details of writing actual SQL.
As an example where this might be of use, here is a quick question- is the LIKE operator in the Where clause case sensitive in the Informix database? Reactor's GetWhere().isLikeNoCase() method knows the answer, which means you can mostly not care what database your code is running on.
This brief article is a follow up to the code that nearly worked at the end of Mark Drew's Scotch on the Rocks '07 presentation on ColdSpring.
The idea is that if you've written lots of setFoo() methods, so you can have property tags in your ColdSpring config inject dependencies at run-time, it rapidly seems as though you are writing everything twice (once in the CFC, once in the XML).