Take advantage of an opportunity while the ColdFusion landscape is hot

by Brian Kotek | Jun 13, 2006 5:40:00 PM

Tags: Development tools, Flex platform, Brian Kotek, Allaire ColdFusion, Adobe Systems Inc., AJAX

Takeaway: Find out what's been happening in the world of ColdFusion development and why you should be paying attention to this development platform.

It's been a while since I wrote any ColdFusion-related articles for TechRepublic. We thought it was time to remedy that, because really exciting things are afoot in the CF world. In my opinion, it's never been a better time to be a ColdFusion developer. This article is meant to be an overview of what's been going on, and what's coming up. Future articles will go into each of these topics (and others of course!) in depth.

Under new management

One of the biggest mergers in the software world was finalized late last year: Macromedia merged with Adobe to create the world's 5^th largest software company. As a result, ColdFusion also became an Adobe product.

To be honest, for a good part of the last year it seemed like the CF world was sort of in limbo. Don't get me wrong, people were still using ColdFusion to build great apps quickly, just like they always have. ColdFusion MX 7 was a brilliant release that gave developers many new features. But everyone was silently (and not so silently) wondering what the merger would mean for CF developers and the future of ColdFusion.

Now that the dust on the merger has settled, it is clear that Adobe sees ColdFusion as a key product in its software offerings. They will take the great work that Macromedia has done and go even further, making ColdFusion an even more compelling application server option. ColdFusion isn't going anywhere but to greater heights. ColdFusion MX 8 is already well under development, and I expect it will provide tight integration with Adobe products like PDF and LiveCycle, in addition to many other enhancements.

To put its money where its mouth is, Adobe even built their new Web site with ColdFusion. That's right, the new Adobe.com, which brings together the existing Adobe site with the previous Macromedia site, is running completely on ColdFusion.

AJAX + CF

Whether you think AJAX is the greatest thing since sliced bread, or is nothing but a hype wave over technology that's been around for years, it is impossible to ignore. AJAX is here to stay, and using AJAX with ColdFusion is incredibly easy.

ColdFusion Components (CFCs) can be invoked remotely as Web services, Flash remoting components, or directly via a URL. When invoked directly, any data returned from the component is automatically converted into the WDDX XML format. With some simple client-side JavaScript WDDX conversion methods (freely available), using CFCs to respond to AJAX requests is simple.

If you need a more robust solution, the AjaxCFC from Rob Gonda is very powerful and easy to use. This is an abstract component that the developer can extend to create their own AJAX-enabled components or faÃ§ades. This is a very full-featured component that provides error handling, request states, and synchronous or asynchronous capabilities. Using AjaxCFC to populate select boxes, validate form fields, create "suggest-style" drop downs or generate content on the page is all very easy to do.

Finally, a breaking story is that Adobe has just released its own AJAX library called Spry. Stay tuned to see where this goes, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if something like this found its way into the actual CF server.

Flex 2

The Flex platform is Adobe's push to allow for the creation of a new breed of Web applications. Using Flash to create the user interface, Flex applications act and look more like real desktop applications.

While this might sound exactly like what AJAX is doing, it isn't. Flex uses a simple XML grammar to create an application and tie it to some back-end data service. It does not suffer from the cross-browser display or behavior issues that AJAX, DHTML and CSS do. It provides a unified set of UI components that can be fully skinned and customized. This new application delivery platform is so compelling that even Microsoft is trying to play catch-up with Vista's Windows Presentation Foundation. And the best part is that the Flex API and compiler are going to be released for free.

What does this have to do with ColdFusion? Well, while Flex applications can connect to a range of back-end data through Web services, Adobe is positioning ColdFusion to be the fastest and easiest way to feed data into your Flex apps. Adobe has been incredibly open in the beta cycle of Flex 2.0, and has produced some extremely compelling tools and example applications.

The FlexBuilder IDE contains some excellent ColdFusion development tools, and allows you to literally build an entire Flex application in minutes. If you have seen Ruby's scaffolding in action, you will have an idea of how rapidly you can use FlexBuilder to create Flex apps and all the related ColdFusion server-side components. The impact that Flex 2.0 is going to have, not just on ColdFusion development but on Web development as a whole, is (in my humble opinion) going to be huge.

UI Controller Frameworks

As ColdFusion has matured, so has the approach many developers use to build their applications. Many developers have adopted the Model-View-Controller pattern for structuring their applications. There are several frameworks available to provide the controller functionality. The most popular three are Model-Glue, Mach-II, and Fusebox.

Model-Glue and Mach-II are actually quite similar. They are event-based implicit invocation frameworks. The frameworks receive a user request via a URL or form post, broadcast messages to a set of model components, and then render HTML views. Both frameworks require the developer to have experience with object-oriented programming, as the model is created using CFCs in an OO way.

Model-Glue is at version 1.1.0, with work on version 2.0 already in the alpha stages. Mach-II is also nearing version 1.1.0. Both of these are now stable frameworks that work very well and, assuming you are familiar with OOP, provide a great foundation to build HTML-based applications.

Fusebox is the oldest and most popular of the "big three". It allows for a wider range of programming styles, as developers can code either procedurally or in an OO fashion. This is great for developers who are trying to learn OO but wan to adopt it gradually. The upcoming Fusebox 5 release is a ground-up rewrite of the framework files as CFCs, and introduces more flexibility and full backwards compatibility with Fusebox 4.1 applications.

Acronym Soup: IOC and ORM

While the three frameworks I just mentioned are specific to the controller portion of an MVC app, the CF community hasn't forgotten about the most important piece of the MVC pie: the model. The model is the heart of an application, and is where all processing and business logic take place. I think most developers would agree that the model is where the fun stuff happens.

ColdSpring is an Inversion of Control (IOC) container for ColdFusion applications. It works in a very similar way to Java's Spring framework. The basic idea is this: the more complex and object-oriented your model components become, the harder it is to manage the dependencies between them. ColdSpring offers an easy way to "wire together" your CFCs.

Instead of manually creating and injecting CFCs into other CFCs, or forcing one CFC to concern itself with creating other dependent CFCs, ColdSpring does this for you. Even better, if you wish it will cache a single instance of the components in memory so that future calls to them are extremely fast (this is known as the Singleton design pattern). And as a free bonus, ColdSpring also introduces a set of Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) capabilities for your development pleasure.

Reactor is a rapidly evolving effort to create an Object-Relational Mapping API for ColdFusion applications. It is a challenging undertaking, but its usefulness and power are already causing it to make big waves in the CF world. Reactor reads database metadata and then automatically generates components that abstract out interaction with the database and provide validation logic. The components it creates follow several well-established design patterns such as Active Record, Data Access Object, and Table Data Gateway. And perhaps its most compelling feature is that it works with a vast range of databases, including SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, DB2, and Postgre. This means that an application could switch from using SQL Server to Oracle in a virtually transparent manner.

An Evolving Community

Perhaps the most obvious reason for the ongoing ColdFusion renaissance is the developer community itself. ColdFusion is so easy to use that a large number of people without any formal software engineering background picked it up and started using it. But now a heavy focus on best-practices and effective object-oriented development is rapidly emerging.

As you may have gathered from this article, CF developers are embracing OOP and pattern-oriented development in droves. Large and active mailing lists and forums like CFCDev and CF-Talk are overflowing with topics like these. Dozens of developer blogs are heavily trafficked, and no fewer than three regular podcasts are available. This is creating a feedback loop, where the more the community learns, the more it shares, and the more it shares, the more it learns.

Podcasts

In June, 2006, the seventh annual CFUnited conference will take place. Attendance this year is expected to surpass 1,100 people across 4 days and 75 sessions. And earlier this year, the CFObjective conference was held in Minneapolis. While CFUnited is a more general-purpose conference, CFObjective focused exclusively on enterprise software design and development.

Among the numerous open-source development efforts underway is the CFEclipse project, which is building an excellent, and free, ColdFusion IDE on the Eclipse platform. CFEclipse is a true coders IDE, and it continues to be improved on an almost nightly basis.

And finally, even the options for deploying CFML code are expanding. New Atlanta recently released a product called BlueDragon.NET. Where Adobe ColdFusion MX runs on top of the J2EE platform, BD.NET allows for deploying CFML code on top of the Microsoft .NET platform. In an impressive show of the power this provides, MySpace.com, one of the top three most trafficked Web sites on the Internet, is running on BlueDragon.NET.

Alive and kicking

I hope this quick rundown has demonstrated that ColdFusion is alive and kicking. In fact, great things are happening more quickly than I've ever seen before (and I've been using ColdFusion for over 10 years). Adobe is firmly behind CF, and the community is rising to the challenge and continues to push the envelope on best-practices and enterprise development. New approaches, from frameworks to AJAX utilities to Flex user interfaces, keep emerging on literally a weekly basis. Stay tuned here for upcoming articles that will explore these topics in more detail. And if you haven't given ColdFusion a look lately, now might be the perfect time. Download the free developer edition and see for yourself that it's a great time to be a ColdFusion developer.

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