Coldfusion on jason grey

Handy is going open source...

Fri, 05 Mar 2004 00:00:00 +0000

There were a few sugestions by members of the CF community to make Handy CFC tester open source… so I’m going to give it a try.

Along with the move to open source, I’m going to make “Handy” more of a suite of usefull ColdFusion/Mach-II stuff. To be included at launch will be:

Handy/TestSuite/index.cfm - the Handy CFC browser/tester.
Handy/BeanGen/index.cfm - a simple utility to generate CFCs with Java Bean get/set methods. Usefull if you do any Mach-II development.
handy.dao - a base class for all my dao objects, has only one fuction right now to convert results of a query to a struct - for passing instance data to an object (memento).
handy.validatable - a base class for all my objects which need to have a “validate” funciton. Has functions for keeping track of what’s wrong with certain fields, or in general.
handy.plugins.ServerProperties - lets you have mach-ii properties defined outside of the mach-ii config file - usefull if you want to manage mach-ii with Source control, but need different properties on different servers.
handy.plugins.EventData - allows you to have an XML config file to specify data for events. You can also specify other buckets of data which you can include on specified events (like an include) This allows powerful setup of meta-data per-event, but doesn’t tie you to your mach-ii.xml file to do so.
Handy/MachIIMapper/index.cfm - maps a mach-ii application in many ways. Requires GraphViz to be installed, and you need CFEXECUTE permissions.

I’m submitting “Handy Suite” to SourceForge today, so with any luck, I’ll have all the code and docs up there, along with the CVS repository.

Humn, thats handy...

Thu, 27 Nov 2003 00:00:00 +0000

http://handy.jason-thorpe.com/

Handy is a browser and testing framework for ColdFusion CFCs. Just drop it in a directory of ColdFusion CFC’s, and browse to it in your web browser. Full instructions are below, and included in the download.

Mach-II first blush

Thu, 27 Nov 2003 00:00:00 +0000

I recently have evaluated the Mach-II framework for ColdFusion MX. I started by developing our company holiday party RSVP website. It used a pretty simple form bean, and some standard “manager”, “dao”, and “gateway” objects, as shown in the Mach-II developer guide. My initial thoughts are very favorable:

Cleanly supports writing your code in a re-useable way.
Much more object oriented than fusebox.
Very good framework for MVC development.
Fast - I like how many objects are stored in application scope, so they don’t have to be instantiated every request.

I’ve also started developing some base objects, filters, plug-ins and other useful tools which others may find useful, I’ll post them up here soon.