Fancy Bread

I've started using Coldbox recently and really like the tooling it provides. I don't always have access to the ColdFusion logs for apps on shared servers and although I have worked with log4j, I didn't like property file configuration. The simplicity of the ColdBox logger is great, but I wanted to be able to set log levels and work with the standard debug(), info(), warn(), error() and fatal() methods. One way to achieve this is to mixin the desired behaviour. Another ColdBox plugin, methodInjector, allowed me to do just that.

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The Transfer ORM Event Model provides an API for notifying components in your application of events in the Transfer object life cycle. You can use it to setup your component dependencies as demonstrated by Brian Kotek's TDOBeanInjectorObserver (part of his ColdSpring Utils library), or set specific properties on the Transfer object prior to creating or updating the object (see Bob Silverberg's post on the subject). Depending on your application needs, you can also tap into other Transfer events to create an audit trail and history for specific classes in your model. That's where the idea for the TransferAuditObserver (which is included in the Metro security package) was born. Setting CreateDate or LastModifiedDate properties on an object didn't sit well with me, because the observer was acting on the object state. Instead, I wanted an observer that recorded the events and state of of the object when those events were fired. Therefore, the TransferAuditObserver registers itself to listen for AfterCreate, AfterUpdate and BeforeDelete events, depending on a simple configuration map.

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Metro is a library of components to support rapid development of applications that use ColdSpring and Transfer ORM.

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When developing web application, it is very likely that at some point you will need to create dynamic configuration for your application in terms of development, staging and production environments. I recently discovered the excellent Environment Config project by Rolando Lopez. Rolando has created a very interesting package with lots of robust features for configuring your application dynamically. There are portions of the package that I must admit, I'm not using (yet). What follows is my current setup for integrating the environment config with a custom factory.

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Thanks to all the folks who have read and commented on this blog over the past year. I've met a lot great people and learned more than I imagined. A quick review of my stats for the year shows 44 posts with an average of 865 views and just under 2 comments per post. The top three categories are ColdFusion, ColdSpring and Transfer. I started blogging to share my learning experiences and ideas. Year two will be a lot more of the same. :)