Scott Coldwells, Author at ckh|Consulting

April 13, 2018

Published by Scott Coldwells at April 13, 2018

Retooling

Tech moves fast, there's no question. New languages, frameworks, ecosystems--it all develops at breakneck pace. It is simply impossible to keep up with all the things. Most of the technologists I know find something to deep-dive into, but also try to keep a pulse on what the broader community is doing. To make it a career, it's almost required to find a groove and rock it for a long time. Time spent and code written (and tested and debugged and refactored) is what allows deep context, which is what defines an effective developer. But as it goes, the tech landscape changes, clients (internal or external) require new shiny things, previously developed deep-context is no longer relevant, and the meaning of life is lost forever! (Too dramatic? Maybe it's just me? I digress...) When it's time to retool, do not lose heart! You did it once (or twice, or thrice), you can get back to being (and feeling) productive.

January 13, 2018

Published by Scott Coldwells at January 13, 2018

Legacy app, meet ColdBox

The term "legacy application" strikes fear in the heart of many a developer, invoking images of spaghetti code, undocumented secret sauce, and evidence of multiple attempts to start some semblance of a paradigm that might have been in the vague direction of a coding standard or convention. Fortunately, there now exists a direct path to bring your legacy out of the cold and into the warm embrace of a modern framework.

ColdBox has seen the need for a migration path for these applications and implemented a feature called Implicit View Dispatch. This means that without having an event handler defined, you can create views, and the events and actions are implicitly created based on folder structure of /views. For example, I can create a view file in the location of views/about/contactUs.cfm, and the corresponding event is implicitly created, permitting the URL mysite.com/about/contactUs to display that view. No handlers, no layouts, no routes. Just views. Pretty slick.