Today begins my foray into Model-Glue; a CF framework developed by Joe Rinehart and available for download at http://model-glue.com/.
I plan on documenting my experience here. However, before I do that I want to provide you a little background. I have been using CF pretty heavilly for the last 6+ years however I have never used one of the public/popular frameworks. No Fusebox, no Mach-II, no onTap, nothing. Well, nothing isn’t really true. What I have been using are two inhouse frameworks that work pretty well. The first is sort of like Fusebox (the oldest version) and was developed here back in 1999. The second is much heavier and provides a full API that various programs/datastores can plug into. Neither is anything like Model-Glue.
However, I have been interested in the various frameworks (Well, except for Fusebox) particularly Mach-II. When I first read about it I was very excited but my hectic work schedule has made a proper investigation and/or incorporation into a project nearly impossible. Today, however, I find myself unbillable. That means I have an opportunity for professional development and I have chosen to look at Model-Glue.
Why Model-Glue then instead of Mach-II? Well, quite frankly, Sean Corfield and ColdSpring. I think ColdSpring looks like an excellent project and I as a Java developer as well, I fully appreciate the newly integrated AOP work that has been done. Sean is a developer whose opinion on CF related matters I feel I can trust. He strikes me as a very knowledgable person about development in general and, more importantly, someone who isn’t afraid to say what he really thinks about something. His growing excitement for, and heightened opinion of, Model-Glue convinced me to check it out first.
My plan is to build a simple app with Model-Glue (MG) and then revamp it to utilize ColdSpring. I’m not particularly good at coming up with basic apps so I’m going to steal Seans idea, kind of, and build a Todo list application. Except I won’t have a persistence mechanism so all the Todo’s will disappear when the application is restarted.
If this goes smoothly, perhaps I will use M-G in the next project I have to do for a customer.
As I figure things out and discover useful tidbits I will be posting them here as well. In that vein I want to point you to Wayne Graham’s blog posting on ModelGlue.xml Entities. I have already updated my application template ModelGlue.xml file to incorporate this idea so that any future MG apps I write will have this idea included in the starting point.