If You Use ColdSpring, Use Its Full Potential

I noticed a blog post recently called Building ColdFusion services with ColdSpring and Reactor, part 3 and wanted to comment about it.

A side note to Tom and Rachael (owners of that blog). You've decided to force visitors to register before they can comment. Which is quite a pain, but I tried to do it nevertheless. My password was never emailed to me. I requested another password, and it never arrived either. Please do something about this as it was pretty annoying to go through the process and still not be able to comment!

In this blog entry, and the others in the series, the writer is talking about using ColdSpring. This latest entry shows ColdSpring being used with Reactor. However, in my opinion they are only using ColdSpring for a portion of what it is really meant to provide.

The Reactor example has them injecting the Reactor factory (for some reason they have named it "ReactorGateway" which is a rather confusing choice) via a public setter. But then, other code is calling createGateway() on the Reactor factory to get a Gateway instance.

I think a better approach would be to use ColdSpring to get a Gateway instance and inject it for you. You can do this using the ColdSpring factory method support:

<bean id="UserManager" class="path.to.UserManager">
	<property name="UserGateway">
		<ref bean="UserGateway" />
	</property>
</bean>
<bean id="UserGateway" factory-bean="reactorFactory" factory-method="createGateway">
	<constructor-arg name="objectAlias">
		<value>User</value>
	</constructor-arg>
</bean>
<bean id="reactorFactory" class="reactor.reactorFactory">
	<constructor-arg name="configuration">
		<ref bean="reactorConfiguration" />
	</constructor-arg>
</bean>

		

This way, your manager doesn't have to know anything about the Reactor factory, or where this gateway is coming from. The same advice would apply to the previous entry in that blog series, where the Manager is making calls directly to the ColdSpring bean factory. Instead of calling getBean() for UserManager and Logger, inject these at object creation.

I think the only time I would access the ColdSpring factory directly is if I were creating a transient CFC. And even then, I'd probably use ColdSpring to inject a factory object into the necessary CFC and use that to create and return my new object. This is because the logic to correctly create and return a transient CFC (often a business object) ususally requires actual CFML code to perform (conditional statements, etc.)

Anyway, I just wanted to comment on this post and since I couldn't do it at Tom and Rachael's site I decided to do it here. If you're using ColdSpring, use it to its full potential. Don't stop at just injecting Reactor or ColdSpring into other components. Leverage the complete dependency management features of it. I think you'll find it makes your code more flexible.