While the framework is loosely based on Grails and Ruby on Rails, I've borrowed inspiration and concepts from other ColdFusion (ColdBox, ColdFusion on Wheels, Framework One, Mach-II, Model-Glue, QuickSilver) and non-ColdFusion (Spring, jQuery, Swiz) frameworks, as well as incorporated some of my own tips and tricks, too. Best of all, it's powered by ColdFusion 9, Hibernate, and ColdSpring.
Without going into too many specifics, here are some key concepts in the framework:
* convention over configuration
* MVC design pattern
* automatic creation of controller beans
* implicit invocation of controller actions
* centralized event dispatching
* metadata-driven AOP
* dynamic finders
* global helpers available using $
* implicit rendering of views and layouts
* helper tags and method plugins for views
* form data binding
* params and flash scopes
Finally, here's a sample application I created called UserDirectory, which performs your basic user CRUD.
Application.cfc
/**
* @extends coldmvc.Application
*/
component {
}
config/settings.ini
[default]
controller=users
[development]
development=true
app/controllers/UserController.cfc
/**
* @action list
* @extends coldmvc.Controller
*/
component {
function list() {
var paging = $.paging.options();
var options = {
sort = "firstName",
order = "asc",
max = paging.max,
offset = paging.offset
};
var search = $.params.get("search");
if (search != "") {
params.users = _User.findAllByFirstNameLikeOrLastNameLike(search, search, options);
params.count = _User.countByFirstNameLikeOrLastNameLike(search, search);
}
else {
params.users = _User.list(options);
params.count = _User.count();
}
}
function edit() {
var userID = $.params.get("userID");
params.user = _User.get(userID);
}
function save() {
var user = _User.get(params.user.id);
user.populate(params.user);
user.save();
flash.message = "User saved successfully";
redirect("edit", "userID=#user.id()#");
}
function delete() {
var user = _User.get(params.userID);
user.delete();
flash.message = "User deleted successfully";
redirect("list");
}
}
app/model/User.cfc
/**
* @extends coldmvc.Model
* @persistent true
*/
component {
property id;
property firstName;
property lastName;
property email;
}
app/views/users/list.cfm
<cfoutput>
<form>
Search: <input name="search" value="#search#" wrapper="false" />
</form>
<table label="Users">
<tr>
<th>First Name</th>
<th>Last Name</th>
<th>Email</th>
<th>Edit</th>
<th>Delete</th>
</tr>
<each in="#users#" value="user" index="i">
<tr index="#i#">
<td>#user.firstName()#</td>
<td>#user.lastName()#</td>
<td>#user.email()#</td>
<td><a href="#linkTo('edit','userID=#user.id()#')#">Edit</a></td>
<td><a href="#linkTo('delete','userID=#user.id()#')#">Delete</a></td>
</tr>
</each>
<cfif users.size() eq 0>
<tr>
<td colspan="3">No users have been added yet</td>
</tr>
</cfif>
</table>
<paging records="#count#" />
<a href="#linkTo('edit')#">Add a User</a>
</cfoutput>
app/views/users/edit.cfm
<cfoutput>
<fieldset label="User Information">
<form action="save" bind="user">
<hidden name="id" />
<input name="firstName" />
<input name="lastName" />
<input name="email" />
<submit />
<cfif user.exists()>
<a href="#linkTo('delete','userID=#user.id()#')#">Delete</a>
</cfif>
<a href="#linkTo('list')#">Back to List</a>
</form>
</fieldset>
</cfoutput>
app/layouts/users.cfm
<cfoutput>
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html lang="en-us" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>User Directory</title>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
#renderCSS("reset.css")#
#renderCSS("style.css")#
#renderJS("jquery.1.4.2.js")#
</head>
<body>
<cfif structKeyExists(params, "message")>
<div class="flash">
#params.message#
</div>
</cfif>
<div class="content">
#render()#
</div>
</body>
</html>
</cfoutput>
If you couldn't tell from the code, I've named the framework ColdMVC. Pretty boring, right? If someone has a better idea, I'm open for suggestions. I've written a handful of small sample applications with the framework already and, to be honest, it's made programming fun again. Plus, writing everything in cfscript syntax makes ColdFusion finally feel like a real scripting language.
Eventually I'd like to release the framework as open source, but I haven't had the time to make it happen yet. Plus there are a couple more features I'd like to finalize first, like validation and more robust route mapping. In the meantime, if anyone is interested in learning more or seeing some more code, shoot me an email or feel free to track me down at cf.Objective() in a couple weeks.
