An Architect's View

I'm working with just three clients right now and with each of them I am essentially doing the same thing: taking an existing system that has been built up over a number of years and helping them rearchitect it for better maintainability and better scalability. The technology stack is pretty similar in all three cases:

• Model-Glue (two clients), Mach-II (other client)
• ColdSpring
• Transfer

In addition, we're using cfcUnit and ColdMock for unit testing (Brian Kotek's ColdMock project is awesome for unit testing beans that are actually Transfer decorators!). All three clients are on - or imminently moving to - ColdFusion 8 (as most of my clients have been) so we can take advantage of AJAX, performance, array/struct syntax, enhanced operator syntax, onMissingMethod() - which powers ColdMock - and many other recent enhancements. These three clients have been keeping me pretty busy - I was even on-site with one of them for three days this week which, as folks who know me will realize, is pretty unusual since I've mostly kept to remote work since I left Adobe. I think they're going to be keeping me busy for at least the first quarter of 2008. I haven't been blogging much this past two weeks but I've been posting to a few mailing lists, covering decorators (Transfer), dependencies (ColdSpring) and various OO design issues. I've also been writing an article for FAQU which will be in issue 6 (issue 5 is at the printers and should be in readers' hands soon). The article covers the whole "beans + DAO + gateway + service" object stuff, looking at four possible ways to structure your code and examining the pros and cons of each. I'm also reviewing a new ColdFusion book that is in the works. It's a great introductory book that covers a lot of best practices and focuses on CFCs up front. It's target market means that it probably won't get on most American developers' radars but I think it will be worth tracking down and reading if you're a novice (to ColdFusion). I'll also be writing a regular column for [name withheld] on my favorite subject: architecture. As you can tell, 2008 has started off busy and looks likely to stay that way. I think the year will offer me some interesting challenges and some interesting opportunities - and maybe some big changes too.