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 revisited the Metro ServiceFactory after John Whish's recent question about how Metro instantiates concrete classes. After a bit of trial and error, I'm happy to announce that the ServiceFactory now supports the creation of concrete gateways without requiring a concrete service in the same package. Before I outline how Metro resolves the class path for instantiating a Service and composed Gateways, I'll describe the basic conventions one must follow to use Metro.

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The Transfer ORM Event Model provides an API for notifying components in your application of events in the Transfer object life cycle. You can use it to setup your component dependencies as demonstrated by Brian Kotek's TDOBeanInjectorObserver (part of his ColdSpring Utils library), or set specific properties on the Transfer object prior to creating or updating the object (see Bob Silverberg's post on the subject). Depending on your application needs, you can also tap into other Transfer events to create an audit trail and history for specific classes in your model. That's where the idea for the TransferAuditObserver (which is included in the Metro security package) was born. Setting CreateDate or LastModifiedDate properties on an object didn't sit well with me, because the observer was acting on the object state. Instead, I wanted an observer that recorded the events and state of of the object when those events were fired. Therefore, the TransferAuditObserver registers itself to listen for AfterCreate, AfterUpdate and BeforeDelete events, depending on a simple configuration map.

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While in the process of generating documentation for Metro (using Mark Mandel's excellent Colddoc), I realized that I am generally remiss about using hint. Therefore, I embarked on a mission of adding hints to the Metro library. During the course of this exercise, I chose to re-factor a few items that I wasn't completely happy with. The result is Metro 0.3.1.

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