Even if you’re against frameworks for some reason, at least give one a try. Refuse to try an MVC framework? Okay, well at least take a serious look at ColdSpring! Check out the fantastic Quick Start Guide (by Brian Kotek, I believe): http://coldspringframework.org/coldspring/examples/quickstart/

FWIW, I think I’m up for the challenge. I spent the past few months building my first Model-Glue (3/Gesture) app, after years of Mach-II (preceded by a few years of spaghetti CF:), in which I also used some Transfer for the first time. I’m also currently swimming in books about Groovy, Spring, Hibernate and Object Oriented Design and Analysis. I hope to begin an application soon using CFML+Groovy+Spring+Hibernate.

Learning at this pace can be overwhelming, but incredibly fun and rewarding too!

Cheers,
Jamie

i accept your challenge. rules are simple:

you are to take the current project that you wrote in rails and port it over to cfwheels.

at the end you are to give us details on how the experience was.

if you find that working with cfwheels is anywhere as good as with working with rails, you are to eat your cat.

feline preparation:

feline is also to be force fed bacon for 5 days before cooking (strictly for flavor).

feline is to be baked in a 375 degree oven for 3 hours. and drizzled with bacon grease while every 30 minutes of cooking time.

By the time I got to coldfusion, I had already spent 6 years on C and 10 in Java. And one of the coolest things about coldFusion is it’s ability to ‘build’ on other languages. That really lifts a lot of limitations. Once you get past the syntax, logic is really the same, no matter the language. Ultimately, it is the job market that drives the language.

@Tony – if CFWheels is anywhere near as good as Ruby on Rails, I’ll eat my cat. Ruby is what makes Rails, not necessarily the framework

my have times changed. i think leveraging xml in your framework, might have been the norm back then, not so much so now. personally i think we can thank rails for that. it was the first framework that got mvc right. do yourself the favor and take a look at wheels, you’d be surprises by it progress within the last year.

My facts may be off a little. I hit 40 a couple of years ago!

rails is being ported to coldfusion as we speak and it’s VERY close to going 1.0. check out cfwheels.com

PDF creation – not there yet. sure prawn allows you to create pdfs from within ruby, but until the day when you can do this as easily as passing in html (like you can cf), it’s still too cumbersome.

GUID support – i use sql server as does probably tons of other businesses and developers around the world. the rails community looks down on anything ms, so while support for sql server is there, it’s lacking some things. in rails you can use migrations and validations for uniqueidentifiers (guids), they’re treated as strings, which can make for big problems.

IIS support – i know this isn’t the rails or ruby community’s fault, but let’s face facts, organizations use windows as their server operating system. right now there is no “formal” documentation telling how to setup rails to work under IIS. There are hacks using FCGI and mongrel clusters, but they’re just hacks, nothing you would use in production. Until rails can run under IIS the same way that CF and ASP.Net run under it, it will never get into the “enterprise”. hopefully when ironruby gets released this won’t be a problem.

i’m not trying to put down rails. i think it’s probably the most exciting thing to come along in a long time and i do plan to work with it at some point. however because of the current issues, it will have to be as a hobby and nothing too serious.