That’s in part because the onTap framework doesn’t require mental acrobatics around the notion of an “event” and its “results”. It certainly allows you the ability to code that way if you find a need, but it’s just as easy to just write a simple page that creates a DataFaucet activerecord and uses that to populate a form.

The other half of that story is that all the data normalization is already done and handled by the activerecord. Before I created DataFaucet actually, I wrote an article about porting Ray Camden’s Galleon forums to 4 different frameworks (onTap, Mach-II, Model-Glue and Fusebox 5) and although I didn’t port to any other ORMs, I did port the queries to the onTap framework ORM (now DataFaucet). That sub-article is also included in the DataFaucet documentation, showing how I removed about 500-600 lines of code from Ray’s original components.

On a very small app for just myself, I wouldn’t expect to see that many lines of code removed. If I measure the amount of time I spend coding however, I spend less time and get more done when I use DataFaucet and the onTap framework. So it’s not always true that using a framework is extra overhead in terms of man-hours. In some cases it means fewer man-hours.

Do I need to use DF/onTap for those apps? No. But I use them there like I do for other projects, so that I can get them done faster.

From my perspective, a resounding yes. If you are writing a small app all on your own and odds are that nobody else will ever touch it, just crank the fast spaghetti code. Heck, put the whole thing in a single file even.

Now, I do support frameworks, but they have their place and the quick and dirty CRUD apps that are more of a utility than anything else just don’t need it. I liken it to the people who feel compelled to normalize a database down to using a table named GENDER with three columns, ID, GENDER_CODE and DESCRIPTION and ensure all the constraints are there so the parent table stores the ID. Come on, just put M or F in your parent table and save the frameworks for the apps that really need/demand them.

But I was thinking … I dunno… languages that prompt criticism… How about Lasso + FileMaker? You know with all the talk about LAMP stacks and LAMBDA stacks, they could set up a Lasso Apache Ubuntu FileMaker (LAUF) stack, that’d be a hoot.

Though seriously, I think from within any given software community it tends to seem that the community is always under attack from the outside, whether it’s Microsoft technologies or Adobe techs or PHP or Ruby. If you study cognitive science at all, you come to realize that those sorts of skewed perceptions are fairly universal.

What I did find interesting was that the arguments being used in favour of PHP work even better when applied to ColdFusion. But I can get a bit one-track-minded like that