CF on Wheels: What I Like

CF on Wheels LogoOver the last few days, I've taken the time to make myself a little more familiar with CF on Wheels, and I've I'm really digging it. CF on Wheels bills itself as a ColdFusion framework "in the spirit of Ruby On Rails," and I think it lives up to the tag line. Click "more" to read more about it.

ORM Included

CF on Wheels comes with a rather impressive ORM abstraction built into the framework. Although the syntax is not always as elegant as Rails, it does the job, and it does it well.

"MVC" Design

It would be kind of tough to say that CF on Wheels is a pure MVC or Model2 design, but I think that it captures the essence of MVC without sacrificing usability. It also doesn't suffer too badly from the need to make everything sound like its Ruby rather then ColdFusion.

Easy Setup

Wheels comes as a single zip file that is dropped into the root of each site. This means that each code base is independent, making it much easier to customize the code as you need to for your application.

Full Action Handling

Not only does the system know what action you want to execute from the URL, but its ability to redirect and filter out actions is very impressive. Creating a secure application if quick and easy in a Wheels setup.

Perhaps the only thing that is a miss to me is the actual code of Wheels. I can't speak about the coding style of the other frameworks I've reviewed, but I can say that I'm not a big fan of this one. Rather then utilizing the private, public, and package access types, the designers chose to begin internal functions with a $ character, which seems like a very archaic way of designing.

 

Comments

John Bliss's Gravatar CFWheels FTW! Cannot wait to use it for my next "real" project where I have a choice of framework!
Chris Peters's Gravatar +1 ColdFusion on Wheels :)
Jon Hartmann's Gravatar Glad to see that someone found my blog :) I've just now started playing with version 0.9.2, and I'm really liking a lot of the updates and changes. Still haven't gotten to use it in a "real" application, but I'm very interested in using for my next personal project, and might try to present it to the rest of my department when its my turn for our monthly "Lunch'n'Learn" session.
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Jon Hartmann, July 2011

I'm Jon Hartmann and I'm a Javascript fanatic, UX/UI evangelist and former ColdFusion master. I blog about mysterious error messages, user interface design questions, and all things baffling and irksome about programming for the web.

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