CakePHP: What I like

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 23:48:00 -0500

I've been doing a lot of thinking about frameworks lately, and about how much work it is to get a MVC/Model2 framework going in ColdFusion compared to in other languages/servers. This lead me to investigate the documentation for a number of non-ColdFusion server/frameworks that I've used, or are popular, and I've been trying to round out a list of what I like and why. The first installment of this mini-series is on CakePHP. Please remember that while I may have used some of these frameworks, I'm not an expert, so I might be missing the thing that makes that framework cool. If so, let me know that you think the best parts of the framework are, and I'll see if I agree. [More]

IIS vs onMissingTemplate

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 11:15:00 -0500

Several weeks back I was exposed to Python and Django for the first time, and it really got me thinking. While I'm not a huge fan of Python syntax, I really did like the setup for Django, and how it implements MVC. One of the first things that I loved was this little tid-bit for linking up URL requests to views:

from django.conf.urls.defaults import *

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    (r'^polls/$', 'mysite.polls.views.index'),
    (r'^polls/(?P\d+)/$', 'mysite.polls.views.detail'),
    (r'^polls/(?P\d+)/results/$', 'mysite.polls.views.results'),
    (r'^polls/(?P\d+)/vote/$', 'mysite.polls.views.vote'),
)

In that block, Django is defining regular expressions that map to Python functions, and defining how to pull named variables out of that regular expression, so that if you requested /polls/23/ becomes a call to the mysite.polls.views module to do the following:

# mysite.polls.views is the module, details is the function
detail(request=, poll_id='23')

Isn't that cool? I'd love to be able to do that in ColdFusion, but it looks like there are a number of hurtles I have to get past before I can make this work:

How do I make ColdFusion get the variables out of that URL path?
How do I make ColdFusion look at a URL that doesn't exist?

[More]

Jon Hartmann - Django

CakePHP: What I like

IIS vs onMissingTemplate