Adam Howitt's Blog

Oct 06
2009

Find a ColdFusion Framework

At : 5:15 PM | Link | | Comments (10) | Send | 1787 Views |

Looking to mine my readership for information about ColdFusion Frameworks. I'm working on a site redesign for a high profile, high traffic site and we're looking to select a framework. Which frameworks have you used and what do you like/dislike about them?

We're not going to be using the ORM capabilities so we're really looking for something that adds little page execution time overheads, little memory footprint but something that makes reuse easy, adds a commonsense directory structure and provides some sort of caching.

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  1. The lightest 2 frameworks would be FW/1 and LightFront.

    If you don't mind XML, Model-Glue is pretty good.

    If you do mind XML, try ColdBox.

    Posted By Henry Ho : Posted At 10/6/09 6:39 PM
  2. I've heard a lot of great things about ColdBox, but it seems like it probably does more than you want. Fusebox 5 has pretty light overhead and you can use FuseCache or CacheBox (or both) to add the caching mechanism.

    (Full disclosure: I wrote FuseCache lol)

    Posted By Matt Gersting : Posted At 10/6/09 6:57 PM
  3. http://www.coldboxframework.com/

    changed the way we code! makes things fast, eay and little overhead.

    Posted By Glyn Jackson : Posted At 10/6/09 7:19 PM
  4. Adam,

    It depends upon the kind of site you build.

    If I were to architect a web application, that responds to Flex/AJAX I would use ColdSpring.

    I would suggest you use a variation of the ColdFusion SOA back-end I have blogged about for a Flex / AJAX based application,

    http://www.hemtalreja.com/?cat=11

    Enjoy!!!

    Posted By Hem Talreja : Posted At 10/6/09 7:25 PM
  5. I'll have to put in a vote for ColdBox. I've been using it for about a year and really like it. It feels productive, yet doesn't get in my way with complex configurations. It's in-process soft cache is pretty cool and we use it a lot to help performance. It has tons of docs and an active mailing list which are a plus. Good luck with your search.

    ~Brad

    Posted By Brad Wood : Posted At 10/6/09 7:38 PM
  6. I asked a question similar to this a few months ago (http://www.cfgears.com/index.cfm/2009/3/31/Can-the-CF-Frameworks-take-a-beating).

    I wound up going with Mach-II and have not been disappointed. I highly recommend it. I came into it with zero frameworks knowledge and was able to dive in and start coding in no time.

    Posted By Eric Cobb : Posted At 10/6/09 10:26 PM
  7. Mach II has some really nice SES and friendly URL support in it. You might want to check our caching features as well which can even be used outside of Mach II app as well as being extended in order for you to developer own special strategies.

    Posted By Kurt Wiersma : Posted At 10/8/09 5:45 PM
  8. Highly recommend Coldbox - we have been using it in production for our most critical applications at ESRI for the last two years with great success. Our developers have no interest in any other framework. Can't recommend it highly enough.

    Once Coldbox runs the first request and has appropriate framework elements cached it is very fast. Caching is highly flexible and Luis has tools that allow you to monitor cache performance enabling easy tweaking of your cache settings for optimal performance.

    Perhaps the best part for a new user to a framework is the unparalleled documentation - check it out at http://coldbox.org/ . And for a final note Coldbox was named Open Source Project of the Year at this years CFUnited.

    Hope you find it as invaluable a tool as we do. Tom Woestman

    Posted By Thomas Woestman : Posted At 10/11/09 12:54 AM
  9. I would be very interested in learning about which framework you wound up going with and why you picked it.

    Posted By Lola LB : Posted At 11/5/09 1:22 PM
  10. Thanks for the tips all and for the prod to tell you what we went with Lola! We ended up going with Mach-ii. One initial evaluation involved a google search for tutorials and articles for each framework to get a sense of the breadth of developer support. Mach-ii blew away all but Fusebox. Mach-ii starts far slower than most frameworks I've used as it loads up everything it needs but once it's running the load is really low as the customizable caching mechanisms were really easy to set up. The MVC implementation seemed more straightforward but the event listener architecture took some getting used to. The app is live and serving tens of thousands of requests every day. Very satisfied. Only wish that it started up quicker.

    Posted By Adam Howitt : Posted At 12/31/09 1:38 PM
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