With all of the ColdFusion frameworks that have been released this year, this feels a little like "me to". The fact of the matter, however, is that this framework has been in development for a few years and is being used on a dozens of sites. Moreover, it is different from other ColdFusion frameworks in some pretty significant ways.

The framework doesn't have a name yet. I have been calling it "AFF" ("Another Fun Framework" or "Anti-Frameworks Framework") so far, but it needs a better name pretty soon. I'm open to suggestions, of course.

I wasn't sure how to approach my first blog entry on the framework, so I decided to just answer the questions that I normally ask when I see a framework.

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In my recent review of Luis Majano's ColdBox presentation, I mentioned that I don't like Hub-and-spoke. I was asked for clarification on why Hub-and-Spoke doesn't work for me.

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The Online ColdFusion Meetup Group had two presentations yesterday and I was fortunate enough to be able to attend both. The first one was from John Farrar about his COOP framework and the second was from Luis Majano about his ColdBox framework. I haven't used either of these, but I have been interested in both for some time.

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Early in my use of Application-scoped CFCs, I realized that I would have to have some mechanism to reload them when I changed the code.

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Yesterday John Farrar presented to the Online ColdFusion Meetup Group on his forms custom tag set, COOP. Actually, he describes it as a framework to separate page markup from processing logic.

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In most of our interactions between code and database, one dictates the other. If we are working with a legacy database, then the structure of the database will dictate how we write our code. If we are proceeding from a visual prototype, then our database follows from our design.

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We have been working to enable access to our data via ODBC and/or MS Access - a project more complicated than expected. While we were working on this, I went to cf.Objective.

Among the very good presentations I attended was one called "Test Driven Development" by Paul Kenney. I had attended a few online presentations about TDD before and read a few articles as well. I always came away thinking that I should try that out "some day", but also feeling like I didn't quite grasp the concept fully (I did not grok TDD).

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I attended Peter Bell's online presentation on LightWire Wednesday which was put on by cfframeworks.com.

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On the CFCDev list, Barry Beattle just asked several questions trying to understand a badly-written Fusebox 3 app. One of his last questions was "what pain do these actually solve?".

To me, this seems like a really good question. I frequently see discussions on whether frameworks have any value or which frameworks are "best". The first discussion seems to produce a lot of heat with the non-believers saying "That doesn't seem to solve any problem that I have". The second discussion seems to generally resolve with "It depends.".

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If you are using any of the three major ColdFusion frameworks (Model-Glue, Mach-II, Fusebox), Massimo Foti has put together a Dreamweaver extension to make your life easier.

As I am not currently using any of the major frameworks (I am a recovering Fuebox addict), I haven't tried the extensions. Massimo has been responsible for plenty of other good work, however, so I am confident that these won't dissapoint.

You can find them on the Dreamweaver Extensions portion of his site, or use the following URLs for direct access to the extension of your choice.

http://www.massimocorner.com/dreamweaver/coldfusion/model-glue.mxp
http://www.massimocorner.com/dreamweaver/coldfusion/mach_ii.mxp
http://www.massimocorner.com/dreamweaver/coldfusion/fusebox.mxp

As I said, Massimo has done plenty of good work. If you go to his site, I recommend that you take the time to peruse his other free ColdFusion offerings as well (be sure to read the license first though).