> I have a hard time understanding why PLUM was not better received
> with in the coldfusion community as a whole. I understand it is not
> "oop" or certainly not pure mvc...I understand it was written by
> titans within the coldfusion community that didn't get along with
> other titans within the coldfusion community...I get that the Plum IDE
> (it is not really an ide, it's a crud generator) is built in .net,
> which rubs many the wrong way... but it really is a fantastic bit of
> work...
The onTap framework also has some similarities to PLUM, although it
lacks any code generation and I have yet to write anything in dot-net.
It's agnostic about whether or not you use OOP or for that matter even
MVC (much like Fusebox in that respect) although imo it does provide a
good ready-made structure for MVC-style separation of concerns. In my
own apps, my business model is 100% CFC's -- the framework acts as
controller and there are includes for the view, which makes it
practically little different from the more popular OO-style frameworks
like Mach-II or Model-Glue.
There are however a lot of semantic differences, perhaps chief among
them being an emphasis on the notion of Convention over Configuration,
which is a good part of how Ruby on Rails has become so popular. Yet as
a philosophy for taking the tedium out of daily programming tasks and
freeing up time to focus on "key" integration points where the
application's behavior needs to deviate from the norm, somehow CoC just
seems not to create much interest in the ColdFusion community.
I remember watching one of the demo videos for RoR where the guy who
recorded it kept repeating the phrase "look at all the things I'm *not*
doing", to emphasize the fact that all the time you would normally spend
configuring, etc. can be diverted to working on other tasks. At the time
I had actually linked to that demo side by side with my own demo doing
something very similar on the home page of the framework domain.
There's a lot of stuff in RoR that I disagree with, like they automate
the order of input elements in forms based on the order of the columns
in the database metadata, which imo is taking CoC too far, and they have
a "scope" called "flash" (and yes, it causes confusion) which exists
only from the beginning of the current request to the end of the
following request, which imo is asking for problems related to refresh /
concurrency, etc. I also disagreed with some of the philosophy behind
PLUM (no disrespect intended).
To me it doesn't make a lot of sense either. Though I will say that I've
had this one particular experience a few times where someone will
download the onTap framework core, open the QuickStart or the Getting
Started section of the documentation and then email me saying "this link
in the Hello World example is broken". Or some other link in another
example, but Hello World in particular if they're going through them
sequentially. Which either means that they hadn't read the tutorial
before sending the email or didn't understand the instructions when they
said "create this file - THEN - view the following URL". The intention
of the link is to show the relationship between the file and the URL, in
the same way that a FuseBox tutorial might offer a URL and then explain
how to configure the circuit & fuse configuration files to make that URL
work. I.e. for the fuseaction "messaging.sendmessage", the "messaging"
circuit and the "sendmessage" fuse are declared in different places and
so it's important to understand the relationship between them.
And it seems from my perspective that people are often willing to spend
many hours struggling to learn the ins and outs of best-practices with
more "traditional" OO-style frameworks like Mach-II and ModelGlue but
that they often give up after the first 5 minutes with something like
the onTap framework (not just onTap, but others also) which are
structurally different as a result of different philosophies about
development like CoC.
So the only thing that really sticks out in my mind as being a likely
answer for why PLUM (or onTap or a number of other frameworks) which
might all be very effective frameworks seem to get very little attention
in the community is that they're different. I think that one thing,
irrespective of the relative strengths or weaknesses of the framework,
may be the single biggest thing holding other frameworks back. That
people either have a difficult time wrapping their heads around the
approach simply because they've learned to expect a traditional OO-style
approach (with minor variations, i.e. Mach-II vs. ModelGlue) or that
they just don't have as much interest in alternative approaches.
If that's true, then I'd imagine it might be similar in the Ruby world
for example, that while RoR gets a lot of press, it would be difficult
to generate much interest in something like Mach-II, irrespective of how
well written it is, for no reason other than that peole in the Ruby
world have learned to expect a CoC philosophy and they either have
difficulty adapting to an alternate philosophy or are just not as
interested.
Okay, that's the end of my spiel. :)
--
s. isaac dealey ^ new epoch
isn't it time for a change?
ph: 503.236.3691
http://onTap.riaforge.org/blog
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