FW/1 - The "napkin" spec — An Architect's View

FW/1 - The "napkin" spec

February 6, 2010 · 6 Comments

A few folks have asked me to post the "napkin" on which I wrote the spec for FW/1. My "napkin" is actually Evernote because I have it on every computer and my iPhone so it's always with me and it's easy to develop notes with. I started the spec on July 17th and "finished" it on July 20th. The spec was titled "New Lightweight Framework". Here's what it said:

Goal: Create an extremely lightweight convention over configuration framework. Considerations:

Leverage Application.cfc and lifecycle

Automatically call controller, model, view if appropriate

Autowire from bean factory?

Application.cfc extends org.corfield.X

Programmatically set everything, no XML

variables.framework struct to specify everything

variables.framework.action is URL / form variable for the, er, action, defaults to 'action'

variables.framework.home is home action, defaults to main.default

fold URL / form into request.context

?action=section.item maps to controllers/section.cfc:item() then models/section.cfc:item() then views/section/item.cfm

implicit layouts based on actions

Caveats:

Should controller / model be instantiated every request or cached?

How should cache be refreshed?

That's it. I wrote the first version of FW/1 on July 19th. You can see the original 381 line framework.cfc on RIAForge. If you click 'Return to SVN History', you'll see the entire history of framework.cfc - with the majority of changes since early November being Ryan Cogswell's awesome contributions. One of the reasons I love version control (and why I was so pleased to see Ray add source / history browsing to RIAForge!). So there you go: an insight into my design process!

View count: 361

Tags: coldfusion · fw1 · oss

6 responses so far ↓

1 Lola LB // Feb 7, 2010 at 5:02 AM

This is weird . . . clicking on "Return to SVN History" takes me right back to this post. This isn't supposed to be happening, is it?
2 Mark Phillips // Feb 8, 2010 at 7:46 PM

Hats off to you for such a clear and effective spec. Does exactly the job its supposed.
3 John Allen // Feb 9, 2010 at 3:58 PM

Thats super cool, like a good pop song.

Just released my first production app (internal non public) using FW/1. Working like a charm.

Thanks Sean!
4 Sean Corfield // Feb 11, 2010 at 1:17 PM

@Lola, I guess "Return to SVN History" just does a JS back then... Report it as a bug to Ray Camden :)
5 Joel Cox // Feb 11, 2010 at 1:44 PM

Hi, Sean,

Just taking a quick look through your spec and admiring FW/1 for its grace and simplicity.

One thing I noticed, though, it that the delimiter for a subsystem action is the colon and it seems to be hard-coded that way. We ran into an issue with colons when we used it as the delimiter for Mach-II modules. Certain network appliances (shall remain nameless) deem the colon to be the URL delimiter for port number (and only for the port number) and when they attempted to handle a Mach-II URL with a colon as a module delimiter all hell broke loose. We had a change it to another character to restore order.

Just a suggestion to make the delimiter a configurable parameter.
6 Sean Corfield // Feb 12, 2010 at 4:41 PM

@Joel, good idea. Open an issue on the FW/1 RIAForge site for that!

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