remote
     synthesis

YACFOP - Yet Another CFObjective Post

Posted on Mar 13, 2006

I got back from CFObjective() last night. This being my first CF conference, I have nothing to compare it against, but I very much enjoyed it. In fact it makes a great first conference IMHO because it was small enough to truly meet people. On that topic, I met quite a few (Sean Corfield, Matt Woodward, Peter Farrell, Ryan Guill, Peter Bell among many others). Alot has been blogged already (especially the new Flex beta and RDS plugin for CFEclipse in "wotay eeksway"), but I wanted to give an thousand-foot overview of some of the sessions that I attended for your benefit and my own (most have or will have more information at the respective presenter's site). I will spread these out in several posts with about two per post.Sean Corfield on Using Factories
Sean discussed that one of the features of ColdSpring (besides the AOP), is that it can function as a factory, serving up your CFC's. This removes the path dependency of your CFC's because they can be moved and only updated in the ColdSpring XML file. You then ask ColdSpring for the component by its id, and ColdSpring will serve it up for you already initialized with any dependencies (obviously I am oversimplifying this). In addition, ColdSpring can be configured to use an external factory, as in one that you create yourself, for example, Reactor's factory. Lastly, ColdSpring can be used in conjunction with Model-Glue's autowire feature. For more information, you can see Sean's Frameworks Sample Code (in the software pod)

Chris Scott on ColdSpring AOP
Chris Scott, the creator of ColdSpring's AOP framework spoke on the Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) features in ColdSpring. Basically, AOP offers you a way to weave common functionality into components while reusing common code (this code is thereby abstracted from the component which it is implemented on). ColdSpring returns what is called a Proxy, which still looks like a component of the original type (i.e. a person object still appears to be a person object), but with the added functionality weaved in. All this behavior is injected (based upon the configuration), but is completely transparent to the end-user who calls the method. In addition, ColdSpring offers built-in support for Flash Remoting. Just as a side note, this was the most difficult of the concepts presented for me to fully wrap my head around. I have a better understanding of it than I did prior (and I think Chris did an admirable job), but while powerful it is nonetheless confusing at first (at least to me).

Ok. More to come over the next day or two.

Comments

Hey Brian, I'm glad to hear that my session was more of a help that a hindrance! I was pretty nervous and worried that I was a little scatter brained up there. I have to admit that I'm pretty honored to have my session singled out next to Sean's on you blog. One thing I want to clarify, though. Dave Ross is the creator of ColdSpring, and deserves all the accolades, I really wish he was at cfObjective to see what a heavy impact is seems to have had on the conference. I am a frequent contributer to ColdSpring and the creator of ColdSpring's AOP framework.

Posted By Chris Scott / Posted on 03/13/2006 at 7:29 PM