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Re: tartan version, reactor, coldspring
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Angus Johnson
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Jul 05, 2006 21:49 PDT
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Hi Paul.
I meant to reply much sooner to your email but neck deep in Flex projects.
Sorry :)
I agree there are a few things like Mystic, Flex, F/Builder RAD wizards,
etc that will impact on Tartan and other frameworks. It will be interesting
to see how it all washes out over the next 12 months.
I can tell you I'm quite thankful that we built our applications with
Tartan. It would have been much more painful if we hadn't swapped over to a
services architecture. I feel like I am just hot swapping the front end.
So far so good really. Flex 2 integrates well our Tartan CF services. We're
still using Tartan VO's but have dropped the DAO functionality in favour of
Reactor. As a fudge we're just getting a handle on the reactorFactory and
setting it as a property in each service.
I do like the command pattern that Tartan implements and having that
understanding has helped with implementing Cairngorm on the client.
Anyhow I am in danger of rambling on... will give you a holler if I stumble
across any ideas for Tartan.
Cheers
Angus
On 25/05/06, Paul Kenney <pken-@gmail.com> wrote:
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Angus,
Yeah, things have been a little quite in the last few months as I have
been trying to figure out where to take Tartan... especially with the
upcoming changes in Mystic. I have also spent the last few months working
with Flex and recently brushing up on OO modeling.
I have a lot of ideas that need sorting out, and I'm sort of waiting to
see where these other frameworks are headed. Additionally, I need to work on
removing Tartan from the data access part completely and perhaps offer
hooks that can be taken advantage of by frameworks like Reactor and Transfer
(off the top of my head). Remoting is not as bad, since VOs don't have to be
used by model code. However, I have spent some time working on a better and
more flexible translation scheme that could be used for more than just Flash
Remoting (think XML, JMS, Ajax, etc...) Another idea is to use ColdSpring to
handle the Flash Remoting aspects of Tartan. In general, I would like to
decouple Tartan from the VOs that are implemented by developers (in other
words, they do not extend a Tartan base class).
I have also entertained the idea of changing Tartan so that is runs on top
of ColdSpring for its factories, remoting, and AOP facilities. Doing so
might have the effect of focusing the efforts of the framework towards more
interesting enhancements, but the jury's still out on that one. In general,
the one thing that is (or soon will be) unique to Tartan is the
service/command infrastructure. This means that things like connecting
services together across applications, instances and the network might come
into the picture. Something else that has been a problem for me is the fact
that it is not very easy to test code written for Tartan (very much the
same problem with MachII listeners and filters). Changes to the way commands
are created and collaborate with the framework might change to make this
more feasible. Perhaps some extensions for cfcUnit to make it easier to test
Tartan-specific code. Another idea I have had for quite a while is to make
an admin console for Tartan to turn things on/off and change settings
without having to reload the all the services in a single application. This
would mean exposing an API of sorts to make these changes (very much
inspired by JMX).
Anyhow, these are just some of the things I have been thinking about, and
no I do not think Tartan and ColdSpring need to be mutually excluse. They
each solve different problems. I don't think that it is really stale (or
maybe it is, who knows), but I have not abandoned it. In fact, I have been
thinking about asking people what it is that they would like to see happen
with Tartan in the next year or so. If you have any things you would like
to see, I would love to hear what you have in mind. This goes for anyone
else listening, too.
Oh, and one more thing. Tartan needs a logo. Don't you think so. Any
self-respecting framework seems to have one nowadays. Maybe I'll have some
sort of contest.
Thanks for checking in... I really appreciate it.
Paul
On 5/24/06, Angus Johnson < gusjo-@gmail.com> wrote:
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Hi Paul,
We're about to port a html (Mach II) application to Flex so I'm
reviewing the code base here and taking another look at the frameworks used.
A couple of questions regarding Tartan and future development...
The version in cvs seems stable but is it something that we could use in
production? Are there any immediate plans to modify the code further? I see
some comments in cvs referring to user defined factories and it looks like
the current code relaxes the requirement to extend tartan.DAO and
tartan.VO. Is that functionality complete or are there more mods to the
framework to come?
We have been playing with Reactor and would certainly look to use it for
new modules. I've been toying around with how this would integrate with
Tartan. Perhaps the best way would be to write a reactorWrapper that
replaced the standard DAOFactory. That would keep current method signatures.
What are your thoughts?
The new mystic updates to Coldfusion will change the way flash remoting
works with the automatic mapping of value objects. I need to delve into that
side a bit more but have you looked at how the current remoteservice may
change?
We have a significant investment in Tartan and I have resisted the urge
to look into yet another framework but getting a bit tempted by some of the
coldspring add ins like AOP. I see I could hook into Coldspring with the
wrapper to build beans and possibly build tartan services. Do you think
Tartan and Coldspring are two mutually exclusive beasts?
Lastly I'd just like to say that Tartan has worked out great and allowed
us to share a hell of a lot of common code. If I can cherry pick the
functionality out of the other frameworks that would be fantastic.
Cheers
Angus
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--
Paul Kenney
pken-@gmail.com
http://www.pjk.us
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