10:30am Brian Kotek - Designing Framework-Agnostic Models with CFCs

When building MVC applications it's possible that the model can bleed into the controller. For example this can happen when a listener is being created in MachII and it seems easy to add SQL to the listener. Other Frameworks can have the same problem.

The other thing that can happen is with persistence or caching which gets hard coded as session or application scope and is difficult to change.

It is important to keep the controller and model separate. Controller should be as dumb as you can make it. The model should be able to be used by any framework and the controller should be able to use any model.

Ideally your model CFCs should be able to be used by any framework and one way to help is to ensure that they only do a single thing.

Services layer should be used to encapsulate the model and prevent the controller from bleeding in to the model or vice versa.

There are some big advantages for the Framework Agnostic Model.

Possible to switch frameworks
Use with CF, Ajax and Flex
Easier debugging
Easier testing
Easier maintenance

Brian has created a sample bookstore application that is built with three different frameworks, Model-Glue, Fusebox, MachII. The application also uses ColdSpring and Reactor to create and organise the model and can be downloaded from his site.

ColdSpring is also used in the examples to create a remote façade for Flash Remoting or web services.

There was an interesting discussion on the code in the example and how it worked with the different frameworks to move data from the model to the view.