For those of you not in the know, ColdSpring is a port of the Spring framework (for Java) to ColdFusion. It provides an Inversion of Control (IoC) framework and an Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) container for CFCs. If you used stateful CFCs, you should be using ColdSpring. Period.
But that's not why I'm writing.
I am absolutely flabbergasted by the growth surrounding ColdSpring (and really, CF in general). Five years ago the thought of debating the intricacies of IoC and metadata introspection in the CF community would have been a joke. And yet today that conversation happened on the ColdSpring mailing list. Look back 10 years, and the closest thing to a framework was a pair of custom tags and some lose conventions for structuring apps (i.e. Fusebox 2).
Beyond ColdSpring, the "big 3″ UI-layer frameworks (Fusebox, Mach-II, Model-Glue) are in wide use, undergoing active development, and growing strong and active user bases. At least two major ORM solutions (Reactor and Transfer) are proliferating. We've got a community built IDE (CFEclipse) that blows the pants of any other available tool, commercial or otherwise.
So if you're a CF user, go buy yourself a beer.
Cheers!
And soon it will be the "big FOUR" Coldbox is on the rise, baby!
somehow I'll be sad when CF grows to have > 10 frameworks like in the PHP/J2EE/.net world. Then you'll need 10x more the time to research what's best for your own need… and 10x more the risk of choosing the wrong one.
Am I wrong?
Henry,
Yeah, having more options is not without downsides. But just because there's a framework out there doesn't mean you have to pick one; rolling your own is still an option. It's nice to have other options.
[...] of deep thinking, Barney Boisvert has posted on how far the ColdFusion community has come in the past few years, with ColdSpring, ORM solutions like Reactor and Transfer, and frameworks like Fusebox, Mach-ii and [...]