I want to put together a little sample app leveraging CF Groovy and it's Hibernate integration, but I don't know what. From a high level, the architecture will look like this:
- CFML for the view layer (the HTML templates)
- CFML for the web controller (probably FB3Lite)
- CFML and Groovy for the service layer (ColdSpring-managed CFC's with Groovy delegation where appropriate)
- Groovy w/ Hibernate for the data layer
The question is what the application should do. The default choice of a simple blog engine is, well, boring. I considered implementing the BlogCFC API as a drop-in replacement for BlogCFC backed by Hibernate, but that means mapping the legacy schema, which I don't really want to get into for a simple demo.
My next choice is a simple survey application, since that at least has the potential to be real-world useful. It's also sufficiently simple and would provide appropriate illustration of the concepts I need to demo. The data model for survey construction is simple, but it gets a bit nastier with response storage, and I'd like to avoid too much nasty.
I've implemented a basic timeclock as a sample app a few times (CFML, Spring+Hibernate, Grails) as well, but there's a lot of "application" in there, compared to the amount of persistence, which is what I want to be highlighting.
So, my all-knowing readers, what simple app do you want me to implement? Preferably something that will be useful to people, either as it is, or as a starting point for building a richer version of what I produce. I've just about got the Hibernate APIs nailed down, but I've got a couple more hours on that task. I'm thinking that Wednesday night I'll pick something and start coding, so speak up (in the comments) with what you want to see.
How about a product catalog? Categories of products and items within the categories. (And you could be creative with the products you display) Unlike the blog/blogCFC issue you raise, I can't think of a dominant CF implementation for this type of useful tool. You could even include your old nested tree set cfc for the product menu.
In any case, I'm looking forward to what you come up with. I've been following your progress with interest.
Consultant hour keeping, client management app, where you can keep track of your hours worked, clients can see progress and invoices can be generated.
This wouldn't require much a View, but might be a good fit with your emphasis on the Service and Data layers: how about a folksonomy application with an extensive API that lends itself to integration with existing applications? People want to tag everything: blog posts, users, financial statements, tax receipts… And the underlying tagging logic and services is always the same. Who knows what's going on with Delicious (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/21/will-we-see-delicious-20-this-week/)? …but if I had the time, I'd tackle a version of http://del.icio.us/help/api/ without the front-end – only APIs for developers to leverage in their *connected* applications. Tagging also presents interesting issues for the underlying database schema and object definitions and relationships. Anyway, could be cool! Keep up the fascinating work and thanks for sharing!
A simple booking application?