Brian Kotek:
Inversion of Control

Just a quick note that I've had an article on ColdFusion 9 published over at CNET TechRepublic.com. It probably won't tell anyone who reads my blog much that they don't already know, but I hope that it attracts the attention of those outside of the core CF community!

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My entry late last week on association management methods prompted a number of comments. I was going to add another comment but this became quite long so instead I'm adding another blog entry.

The point of my last post was to talk about bidirectional relationships, particularly a one-to-many/many-to-one between two entities. Hibernate (and, thus, the CF9 ORM) has the ability to specify an "inverse" attribute on your relationship. To better show why you usually want to do this, let's look at an example.

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And to follow up on my recent pledge to start blogging further about ORM, lets jump right into a recent topic. A thread on the CF-ORM mailing list brought up the topic of dealing with a bidirectional relationship.

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The blog has been quiet lately, but that should be changing now that I'm finally doing some real work with ColdFusion 9! In the meantime, I've committed a few minor updates to some RIAForge projects, and added a new one.

The new project is Collection Iterator. This is simply a CFC that allows you to iterate the same way over queries, lists, structures, or arrays. The syntax is simple:

var array = ['foo', 'boo', 'zoo'];
var iterator = new Iterator( array );
var counter = 0;

while( iterator.hasNext() )
{
    counter++;
    var thisRow = iterator.next();
    assertTrue( array[counter] == thisRow, "Array element not found." );    
}

assertTrue( counter == 3, "Iterator did not loop the correct number of times." );
		

The obvious benefit is that it lets you handle all four collection types in a standard way. This is a CF9-only component, as it is written using the new script-only CFC syntax (which I LOVE, but will be talking about further in future entries).

As for updates, I fixed a bug in the DynamicXMLBeanFactory, which is part of the ColdSpring Bean Utilities library. There was an issue when using ColdSpring configuration files that imported multiple other config files. The CFC was also modified to only attempt to do an ExpandPath() on the configuration file location if a file doesn't exist using the value supplied by the developer. I also updated the FormUtils CFC to make the constructor arguments optional, to make it easier to configure and use.

So, that's all for now, but look for some entries on CF9 ORM tips and techniques, as well as a full reboot of my earlier series on the Swiz framework for Flex. Swiz 1.0 alpha was just released, and as the finishing touches are added I plan to be blogging about all the excellent new capabilities that have been added by the Swiz team!

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I've uploaded my CFinNC presentations to SlideSix for anyone who's interested:

Object-Oriented Design Principles

Introduction to Swiz

Overall, CFinNC was great. I actually had to work for a large chunk of the weekend so aside from presenting and mingling with folks later in the evening, I didn't get to attend many other sessions. That said, everything looked top-notch while I was there. The conference unfolded very smoothly and all of the attendees seemed very engaged. Hats off to Dan Wilson and the entire volunteer team for pulling this off! This conference definitely held its own against the other CF conferences I've attended. It was very difficult to tell that it was completely free. Hopefully we can do it again next year!

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