808s & Heartbreak

Finally bought the new album. Lovin' it!

ColdFusion 8 avec MAMP!

Added CF8 to my existing MAMP dev environment this morning. Was a breeze especially after watching this guys paiiinfully slow and noobalicious install video.

But hey, it seems to work thus far. I'll keep you posted on what I run into and how learning model glue works out.

MVC Demystified

I posted yesterday about application frameworks causing vertigo. In reading through this article by Malcolm Tredinnick I breathed a sigh of relief. Things made sense again.

I genuinely feel that people are locking their thinking in, and causing unnecessary confusion, by getting hung up on "MVC practices". When, as I hope I've shown and linked to, the problem space is much more subtle than that and multiple solutions exist. Focus on the problem you are trying to solve. Keep in mind that there are many similar, but different solutions and think about the Django mapping example I did in the previous section. Hopefully you can see that it's ridiculously constraining (not to mention, simply incorrect) to assign labels to broad components in a framework when they work at a much finer-grained level.

Malcolm links to ModelViewController at WardsWiki which provides excellent information on these usefult echniques. In a recent interview, a developer asked me to define MVC design. I put together the traditional explanation, and I thought the quote on the WW article summed it up nicely:

The model is the data, the view is the window on the screen, and the controller is the glue between the two. -- ConnellyBarnes

Springs, Boxes, Controllers

Oh, my. Trying to decide between MVC frameworks, implicit invocation features, and Object Relational Mappers is enough to make your head spin. One advantage is that I am narrowed down to a language (Coldfusion) and DataBase Management Server (SQL Server), which is interesting because although normally I would probably choose something LAMP oriented, for this current project I am confined to MS/Adobe land.

Adobe devnet article on ColdFusion Frameworks: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/coldfusion/articles/frameworks_intro_print.html

Model-Glue vs Coldbox?

Coldspring vs Lightwire?

ORM or custom solution?

So many questions, such little time. Will choosing an ORM wall me in for the future? Is this ok? Setting out in the brave new world that is web application development. Always evolving and highly malleable. Perhaps that's why I like it.