ColdFusion Programming Methodologies?

lars-o-matic asks: "I work at a small (dozen people) company doing quite well building small-to-medium sized sites on the ColdFusion platform and the Fusebox architecture (which also has PHP and JSP versions). With our growth, increasing demand for Flash apps, new features of CFMX, and wanting to take on larger projects, we are researching methodologies. We like Fusebox3 for CF but worry it does not leverage the new object-like CF Components, web services, Flash remoting etc. and wonder if some kind of model-view-controller approach would help separate presentation from business logic. And there's structured documentation, re-usability, maintenance and yes, performance to consider. We're happy with the platform, which suits our project scale. We're not (yet) building a Google or an Amazon.com. It's methodology we need. How have the Slashdot CF users out there scaled from 2 to several coders and from little sites to larger ones?"

Comments

Re:FuseBox? Blech.

[Tablizer]

i can't stand fusebox. it's an artificial construct attempting to impose order on what is, essentially, a scripting language. a powerful one (i've been building fairly large scale applications in it for ~5 years), but a scripting language nonetheless. it's just not MEANT to have that kind of structure/organization.

There is nothing wrong with scripting languages and scaling. However, it does depend on your design style. I try to use the database to manage over-all structure, and not so much programming code. More on this at:

http://www.geocities.com/tablizer/misclang.htm#d ef ine

The most annoying thing I found about ColdFusion was it's lack of first-class functions/subroutines and funky variable scoping rules. You can get subroutine-like structures using custom tags or the scripting syntax, but they are just not "full citizens". There are certain things you cannot do with or in them. Thus, one tends to end up with long "main" scripts. I want full-blown subroutines.

On the plus side, it has something that PHP and ASP do not have: named parameters.

I looked at fusebox a bit, but found it not very adaptable. It seemed to force pages into one of a predefined set of categories and I needed a finer control for the more complex pages which did not neatly fit into a category or spanned multiple.

Personally, I would totally overhaul the way many biz-centric web forms are typically handled in web scripting languages. There needs to be a "view buffer" IMO on the server side, and one talks to that view buffer instead of to HTML directly. The view buffer is then echoed at the end of the script task to the client (after being converted to HTML), but does not disappear. It would make development more GUI-like. Complex form validation and lookup fields would be much easier because you don't have to keep redrawing the HTML from scratch each time with subtle changes.

Microsoft's dot-net stuff comes a bit closer, but they admittedly convoluted their approach for speed purposes. This is a mistake for most biz apps. The best techniques and optimization profile for building eBay and building an intranet are very different. MS sold out to the benchmark wars IMO. More about this at:

http://www.geocities.com/tablizer/webstif.htm