It’s prob­a­bly no sur­prise to those who read this blog from time to time (when I actu­ally post, ahem) that I’m a big fan of the con­cept of cod­ing frame­works (a sys­tem of com­mon code ele­ments and accepted prac­tices to speed devel­op­ment and ease main­te­nance of appli­ca­tions). I use Fuse­box myself, but there are a ton of great open source Cold­Fu­sion frame­works out there and I def­i­nitely encour­age all Cold­Fu­sion devel­op­ers to check them out and find one that suits their needs.

Con­se­quently, I was very inter­ested to read a recent arti­cle by Mark Man­del in the Adobe Devel­oper Cen­ter, on the topic of frame­works. Mark has taken the approach of divid­ing his arti­cle into three clas­si­fi­ca­tions of frameworks:

• Model-View-Controller frame­works used to man­age appli­ca­tion struc­ture and exe­cu­tion (Fuse­box, Model-Glue, Cold­Box etc);
• depen­dency injec­tion frame­works to man­age Cold­Fu­sion com­po­nents (Cold­Spring, Lightwire); and
• per­sis­tence frame­works or object rela­tional map­pers (ORMs such as Mark’s own project Trans­fer, Reactor).

What’s inter­est­ing but maybe not imme­di­ately obvi­ous to some­one new to frame­works is that a sin­gle appli­ca­tion can make use of one frame­work from each of these three clas­si­fi­ca­tions. Mark’s arti­cle does a great job of explain­ing the dif­fer­ences between them as well as briefly going over the most popular/well-known frame­works from each grouping.

The large num­ber of frame­works that exist, have active com­mu­ni­ties, and are being con­stantly devel­oped and expanded says a great deal about the matu­rity and growth of the Cold­Fu­sion language.

Check it out: An Intro­duc­tion to Cold­Fu­sion Frameworks