CFUNITED - MVC Unraveled

That's right, MVC (Model View Controller) IS an application design pattern used across the board with any object oriented language. It also happens to popularly be known as the king of patterns, itself being an efficient symbiotic relationship between three other patterns of lesser scope and with more focused purpose. The Strategy pattern, Observer pattern, and the Composition pattern are what allow MVC to do what it does so well: keep our application segregated (loosely coupled) while allowing each portion of the app to remain highly specialized and autonomous (encapsulated).

The M in MVC is the Model. This is the portion of the application where nearly (if not all) of the business logic and database access will live. Business rules, queries, special validation...basically, if it has nothing to do with the user interface, then more than likely it will live in the Model. Physically the model will be a collection of CFCs that contain the functionality mentioned previously.

The View is that portion of your app responsible for displaying and gathering data. It knows nothing about the Model, the database, the backend system...it only knows that it will display the data given to it, and it will deliver the data it collects. Physically the View will consist of CFM templates containing primarily just layout information, such as forms, tables, and CSS.

lastly we have the Controller. It's job within the MVC design pattern is nothing more than passing data back and forth between the Model and the View; that's it.

The last 10 minutes (that's right, 10 minutes) of the presentation were spent building an entire basic blog application from scratch. Using the Model-Glue Unity framework and some Eclipse Ant scripts, he quickly was able to add in all of the CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) functionality for blog entries and comments. How was this possible? By leveraging the many hours of hard work that have gone into producing and uniting three frameworks that have been all the buzz lately: Coldspring, Reactor, and Model-Glue. By strategically editing XML configuration files and using such shortcuts as "scaffolding", it is possible to auto-generate what would otherwise take a person days to code by hand.

Witnessing the creation of an entire application in just a few minutes is both exciting and disconcerting. On the one hand, Model-Glue Unity provides the developer with shortcuts that are nothing short of amazing, allowing productivity levels that I believe are unachievable otherwise. On the other hand, I could very well empathisize with the framework opposition camp, seeing how it is they could say that the usage of advanced frameworks such as Model-Glue will lead to the de-evolution of the CF community, removing many of the "needs" that often motivate developers to learn and grow. My own opinion, however, is that although frameworks such as this will allow us developers to become more productive, the convenience of it all will never quench the insatiable curiosity that has driven us up to this point, and we will always be "peeking under the hood" regardless of how much automation we adopt.