Digital Ninja

Quick post tonight, as I'm between tasks. I've been wanting for a long time to get more familiar with ExtJS, a most excellent JavaScript application framework (can I call it that?). It's the good stuff that's built into ColdFusion 8, but that was version 1.1. Since then they've gone all the way to 3.0, and the platform is getting better and even more expansive.

What I wanted to do was get into it, but I kept getting sidetracked. It can be a bit to digest in one sitting - or even 10. Eventually, I heard of ColdExt, which is a ColdFusion, er, helper application... well, it's like training wheels. I hope that doesn't offend anyone - particular the ColdExt gang. It's really amazing what they've done. Using their imported tags you can get off the ground really fast using the familiar tag-ness that is ColdFusion but when it's processed and sent to the browser it's all proper ExtJS JavaScript.

Now, I LOVE this. What it's doing is providing me, the developer, those all-important positive and productive feedbacks we call "success". In no time I had an AJAX-powered grid with a CRUD form hooked up to the rows. Even better is that some of the things I wasn't completely familiar with in the ExtJS syntax was getting written for me. A quick view-source and I was staring at a guide for how the under-hood-goods were written. This has helped me gain mountains of comfortability with this JavaScript framework!

So, even if you don't want to use ExtJS through a layer of ColdFusion tags in the end, I highly recommend you ease into the deep and incredibly powerful world of ExtJS via ColdExt. It put the "RAD" back into my AJAX/Rich Client applications. That's just awesome.

After keeping up with Adam Haskell's frustrations with Fusebox (well, with the vested interests, to be fair) it got me thinking about what Fusebox means to me. I mean, sure, I've thought about ColdBox and ModelGlue and even on a particularly spunky day Mach-II. But each morning I wake up and I'm still a Fusebox developer after 9 or so years.

So with project Fusebox being somewhat of a rudderless ship, or coffee-less donut, or Guinness-less me (you get the picture) where does that leave the Fusebox community? As rich as it ever was, I say!

It's a great framework because it started out dead simple. I started on FB2 and then wrote most of my professional code in FB3. Man, those were the days! Pop some variables into the ole' fbx_Settings file and away you go! It was a snap to get new hires up and running. Then FB4 came, and with it came XML - some kind of new, alien acronym that looked all foreign-like. ;) We pretty much ignored that version. Then along came FB5 and I had to figure out what all the hub-bub was about, so I immersed myself in that. Now I'm a FB5 fan through and through. Yep, you heard me right - a fan of the leader-less, roadmap-less framework.

It's left behind a great legacy with the community. So many applications (many still running) and so many wise lessons learned the hard way. It taught us why a framework is good, it inspired us to try to better it (nod to the sibling frameworks) and it gave some much-needed shape to the wonderfully flexible language that Allaire- er, Macromedia- er, Adobe had given to us.

Personally, I'm going to revel in my continued embrace of Fusebox. Having a fleet of major applications deployed using that technology might have something to do with that, but it's also a feeling of trust and familiarity. Let's not forget, too. We do have FuseNG! Let's wish the Fusebox/FuseNG community further longevity, whether it be called tomayto or tomahto. Just don't call the whole thing off.

I think I found myself a solution. First, here's the problem.

The Problem

I have Transfer managing my ORM. It works awesome, I love it, and now I want to start building AJAX-based tools to manage the data through Transfer. But Transfer hides all properties of a class behind getter and setter methods, so when I hit a remote CFC to get, say, new("person") or get("person", 42), all that comes back in a JSON string is {}. No properties visible, so nothing comes back.

The Solution

My LTOFactory (Lightweight Transfer Object) is a component that will talk to Transfer, get the object I'm looking for, and then return the product of Transfer-ORM's built in getMemento() method, which is a simple struct that contains all the properties - publicly exposed. Now my JSON string has the properties!

The same concept for the get method can be, with a little elbow grease, made to work also for list, save, and delete if I choose. If I do that, LTOFactory probably isn't a very good name anymore, but I'm talking results here, not semantics.

The Code

Here is my LTOFactory code.

Here is my ColdSpring configuration that sets up Transfer, its factory, the LTOFactory with dependency injection, and the AOP remote bean configuration so I can hit the LTOFactory via AJAX.

I'm working awfully hard these days to be a lazy S.O.B. What I'm trying to do right now is figure out how I'm going to send and receive a simple JSON data chunk that represents a business object (a "data transfer object" (DTO), a.k.a. "value object" (VO) or just "transfer object" (TO)) to and from a remote proxy bean (CFC) generated by ColdSpring AOP. This is not hard to do. What's become an unexpected challenge, however, is when that remote proxy bean is a Transfer factory (from the awesome ORM framework by Mark Mandel).

If you don't know already, here is what will happen with a class pulled out of the Transfer factory when slurped down a remote access pipe; as a part of the process of translating it to a JSON string to send back to my AJAX call, ColdFusion will only turn public, visible properties in the ColdFusion component into JavaScript object properties. This doesn't serve me well because Transfer will not expose any data properties. Rather, it makes getter and setter methods for each property - which I love! But I don't love it for trying to bounce objects back and forth via AJAX/JSON.

All that I've said so far makes it difficult to receive object data without some custom service layer nonsense (I'm lazy, remember?) But just as frustrating is that there doesn't seem to be a simple way to pass an argument collection of property name-value pairs to a constructor in the Transfer factory to create a new object or update one. There is a get method which will return a new class of the requested type, but no way to send in a struct full of default values, which is what I would push up to the service layer via AJAX in my RIA.

Am I going to have to write a custom service layer after all this? I've been poking and prodding for hours here trying to avoid this work.ﾠ :) Yes, I fully appreciate the irony in this. I'm a geek, it's what I do.

This little gem goes down as another of those "I've been using CF this long and never knew this important thing" scenarios.

When you're performing a query-of-query and using a LIKE operator, the match becomes case sensitive.ﾠ Here's an example.ﾠ Let's say you have a table, "chores" with these records in it (one column):

First start with a standard select out of the database.ﾠ Of course, this doesn't make sense, it's just for the example.

Now we'll select from that query (the famous query-of-query) but use the LIKE operator.ﾠ The objective is to get all the records with some variation of "wash" in them.ﾠ We expect to see records with ID 1 and 2, however, the following will only yield ID 2:

<cfquery name="qChores" dbtype="query">
SELECT ID, name
FROM qOriginalQuery
WHERE (name LIKE '%wash%')
</cfquery>

In order to retrieve records with ID 1 and 2, as you might have wanted, you can force everything to upper case to eliminate any value differences:

<cfquery name="qChores" dbtype="query">
SELECT ID, name
FROM qOriginalQuery
WHERE (UPPER(name) LIKE '%#UCase(wash)#%')
</cfquery>

Credit for this answer to my frustrations goes to my Google result, Just Skins.ﾠ Thanks!