In four short days we can teach you some of the latest and greatest techniques for building robust and maintainable applications using enterprise development frameworks and techniques.

We will help you build a strong understanding of not just the Model-Glue framework, but several supporting and related technologies including ColdSpring, CFCUnit and much more.

The class is taught by Doug Hughes, a member of Team Model-Glue and the first person to use Model-Glue in a production application. 

The class alternates between an interactive lecture and hands on exercises. By the end of the class you will have built an example application which demonstrates all of the key technologies.

Introduction to ColdFusion Components

The ColdFusion component is the key to everything we teach in this class. Before you can use Model-Glue or any of the other enterprise class frameworks or techniques you need to know CFCs inside out. Don’t worry, we’ll get you up to speed quickly. You’ll learn what exactly a CFC is and how to write one. We’ll also be sure to teach you best practices to help you avoid common pitfalls. Finally, we’ll give you a quick primer on Object Oriented Programming with CFCs.

Things You Need To Know

You can’t just sit down and start writing enterprise applications. We’ll help you build the foundation of knowledge you need to begin using and being productive with Model-Glue. We’ll review and compare traditional development techniques to enterprise techniques. In particular, you’ll learn about the Model View Controller and Implicit Invocation design patterns and the role they play in Model-Glue and maintainable applications.

Getting Started

Clearly, to use Model-Glue you need to know where to download it and how setup it up. You will also need to know how to create a new project. Knowing what’s what and where to put your code can’t hurt either. We’ll teach you all of this and more.

Model-Glue Introduction

Finally, we’ll dive head first into the Model-Glue framework. Expect to learn how to configure the framework as well as a lot of internal details. In particular, we’ll cover the structure of the Model-Glue configuration file, application request flow, the event and message models, and various components which will prove essential knowledge for day to day usage of Model-Glue.

Model-Glue In Depth

We’ll continue to dig deeper into the Model-Glue framework, exposing many more details of the configuration file. We’ll also cover essential knowledge to help your applications performance.

Testing with CFCUnit

Model-Glue can’t force you to write code that doesn’t break. We’ll cover common testing techniques and their problems. We’ll teach you how to use unit tests and Test Driven Development to help you improve software quality and insure that bugs you fix don’t reemerge. Finally, we’ll show you how to automate testing in Eclipse.

Data Access Design Patterns

Virtually every web based application needs to read and write data. We’ll cover the traditional techniques for data access with ColdFusion and the pitfalls therein. You’ll also learn how you can avoid many of these pitfalls by applying common data access design patterns.

Wiring it Together with ColdSpring

Even the best developers get tripped up when writing Object Oriented software. It can be a bear tying everything together. ColdSpring makes this easy through the use of yet more design patterns. We’ll walk you through these patterns and how ColdSpring implements them. From there, you’ll learn how ColdSpring allows you to write better components of higher quality. Finally you’ll learn how apply Service Oriented Architecture to make your application and flexible, maintainable and testable as it can be.

Data Access Frameworks

As we wrap up the class we’ll cover some of the basic details of the most common data access frameworks for ColdFusion, including Reactor and Transfer. You’ll learn how to leverage these frameworks to simplify data access in your applications.

Advanced Model-Glue

Finally, we’ll teach you some of the advanced and most compelling features of Model-Glue. You’ll learn how to quickly “scaffold” applications and how to use generic techniques built into Model-Glue to read and write data using either Reactor or Transfer. Finally, we’ll show you how to make two separate applications aware of each other and how to make one application composed of several smaller components.

Giving Credit Where Credit's due:

The Model-Glue framework was created and is maintained by Joe Rinehart of Firemoss.

The ColdSpring framework was created and maintained by Chris Scott and Dave Ross

The CFCUnit framework was created and is maintained by Paul Kenny.