I have spent most of the day today working on Skweegee trying to finalize the port over to ColdBox. During the port I decided there were quite a few things I wanted to change or update so that has undoubtedly slowed me down. That coupled with the insane amount of time we have been putting in the last couple months trying to wrap up some projects at work. I hope to spend most of the day Sunday working on it as well in hopes to get a beta out by the end of next week. I will post some screenshots of some of the new screens and features later in the evening Sunday. Its too late to worry with tonight.

Since I have made the switch to using ColdBox, I never get tired of discovering features that are already built into the framework. I find myself so caught up in the framework "just working" that I sometimes forget to look into all of the plugins for features that I could really take advantage of. Luis calls ColdBox "A next generation Framework and Development Toolkit" and I really keep forgetting about the development toolkit part. There are so many built-in tools to help you out with your application that its almost dizzying. One such plugin that I have found myself using quite often lately is the BeanFactory plugin. This plugin makes working with Transfer extremely easy by automatically populating new beans with data for you among other things. Im not going to go into full detail but I wanted to show an example of populating an empty Transfer object with data and saving that Transfer object back to the database.

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While working on my latest ColdBox application, I had a need to implement friendly URL support for the public facing front-end. This is pretty much a requirement for all of our client sites so it was important to use something that worked really well without coming up with some hacky method. I turned to ColdCourse after reading several posts about how easy it was to setup and use. I quickly found out its not a plug and play solution, it took some work to get it going properly in my application, although nothing difficult, it was just a little more than I expected after reading the docs. During the setup there were a few things that I ran into that I thought you guys might benefit from reading about. But before I get into that, remember, this is ColdBox specific. I have no experience with using ColdCourse with any other frameworks.

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Earlier today I had a need in one of my ColdBox applications to create printable versions of all my pages. A pretty normal request. What I like to do for these applications is have a single Event Handler called "Display" that manages all of the front-end calls, so all of the Event Methods that I would want to print were all in the same Handler. There are a mixture of methods in my front-end handler, some of them pull their content from the DB, some of them use a view that has content coded into it, such as forms. Some pages have views that render news items and things of that nature, so the methods are all pretty different. This led me to believe that creating this print functionality was going to be a bit tedious at best.

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I started poking around Coldbox a couple months ago but only had enough time to see how it operates from a 10,000 foot view. So I decided that I wanted to take another crack at it and really see what it was all about. I figured the best way to do that was to port one of my existing Fusebox 5 apps over to Coldbox so I could get a good comparison. After creating a new application via the Coldbox dashboard and importing it into CFEclipse, I was on my way to porting bliss. In my opinion, the two frameworks aren't really all that different. Of course I develop all of my Fusebox applications using MVC so that helps quite a bit. One of the biggest differences that I noticed right away is that Fusebox 5 uses XML based controllers where Coldbox uses CFC based controllers. I have to admit after writing literally thousands of XML fuseaction's over the last couple years, I am finding myself smiling every time I write a new method in one of my event handlers for Coldbox. This has been the one single feature of Fusebox that has bugged the crap out of me since it was introduced. And to be fair, I know that Sean Corfield and Team Fusebox are working hard on the new Fusebox 5.5 release which will allow you to use CFC based controllers. Going into a full feature comparison is beyond the scope of this post so lets look at a couple examples of what I did when porting my application over to Coldbox.

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