Fancy Bread

Coldspring was the first Coldfusion-based "framework" that I integrated into my application development process. I can't claim to be an expert, but today I'll step up and try evangelism. Based on the popular Java Spring framework, Coldspring provides a solid foundation for applications with features like dependecy injection, aspect-oriented programing, remote proxy generation and more. If you already use ColdSpring, or want to learn how to use it, I highly recommend the new Quickstart Guide and Examples written by ColdSpring guru Brian Kotek. In addition to a new look and documentation update, version 1.2 is now final! Get ye to the Springery...

If you haven't tried out the cfUniForm tag library by Matt Quackenbush, I highly recommend it. Version 2.3 includes some nice updates proposed by Bob Silverberg, including the addition of optgroup to select lists. I don't like the default italic style for an optgroup label, so when I use it, I add a simple css selector to make them a little more visually appealing. For example: optgroup {
   font-weight: bold;
   font-style:normal;
} Don't let default optgroup styles drag you down. Make them great with a little CSS.

Confidently unit testing code that relies on a database is troublesome. There are many different approaches and many opinions on the matter. I've previously written about using transactions to safely rollback the database after every test. This worked well for me at the time, but there are pitfalls in using that approach. Recently, I've done some more research on the subject and even attempted, without success, to integrate DBUnit into my database reliant unit tests. After some trial and error, I landed on the following approach that is a culmination of a few ideas I'd previously heard of, but never tried. The goal of this approach is to:

1. Run tests against a known data set.
2. Reset the entire database prior to each test.

The example code that follows requires a test database, test database user and a test datasource targeting the test database.

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