Fancy Bread

Logging is one of the classic cross-cutting concerns one hears about when discussing Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP). Other common aspects are caching, security and data transformation. Over the past year, I've begun to apply AOP with ColdSpring to my application design. I was completely confused about just what was going on with AOP, when I first looked at it, then, by degrees, I came to realize that it is actually pretty simple if you can focus on the basics without trying to absorb all the terms associated with AOP. With the release of ColdSpring 1.2, Brian Kotek wrote an excellent quickstart guide, that I recommend (especially for the AOP tutorial which I borrow heavily from for this example). I'll briefly describe how I wrapped my head around the concept.

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I've started using Coldbox recently and really like the tooling it provides. I don't always have access to the ColdFusion logs for apps on shared servers and although I have worked with log4j, I didn't like property file configuration. The simplicity of the ColdBox logger is great, but I wanted to be able to set log levels and work with the standard debug(), info(), warn(), error() and fatal() methods. One way to achieve this is to mixin the desired behaviour. Another ColdBox plugin, methodInjector, allowed me to do just that.

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I'm pretty new to Ant, so I'm thankful that a lot of other developers have examples and sample build files that I can use as a guide to learning Ant. After writing a few small build files, I wanted to tackle something a little more ambitious. I like to keep all the frameworks that I use up to date from their respective repositories, and, when deploying a new site or project, I will typically include the framework dependencies as a minimal include at the project root. This requires a bit of work, exporting and stripping out documentation, examples and tests from my local checkout of the framework files. As a learning objective, I decided to write an ant build file to maintain my own "nightly build" of each framework customized to carry only the core files.

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