Use ColdSpring, Transfer, Illudium and Dispatcher to Scaffold a Generic Admin - An Introduction

Generating scaffolds for list, edit and view pages for business objects is an essential part of a many frameworks (in many languages) available to developers. I've done a little window shopping with RoR, Symfony, and MG:U, but have never committed the time to make a go of any one framework. When recently faced with a "quick and dirty" build for trivia game for a friend, I felt that familiar dread of building a "back-end" administration system. Fortunately, I had spent enough time working with ColdSpring, Illudium, Transfer and my own Event Delegation based front controller (which I call Dispatcher), that I was willing to give building my own scaffold based generic admin a go...

A word of caution before I begin. In order to work with generic list, view and edit screens for Transfer Objects, I needed to i) use conventions for Primary and Foreign Key names, ii) use Transfer's XML configuration to decorate Transfer Object with "self-describing" mehtods, iii) accept that classes generated via database introspection would require some (albeit minor) manual updates to make it all work.

To get started, here is a list of the frameworks (and the respective versions) that I am using. If you are so inclined to follow along, I will post both code snippets and archives of the files required with each post in this series.

1. ColdSpring 1.0 Final Release - ColdFusion mapped as /coldspring

2. Transfer 0.6.3 (Stable Release) - ColdFusion mapped as /transfer

3. Illudium PU-36 Code Generator 1.0 Beta (Build 11) - run under localhost/cfcgenerator.

4. Dispatcher (beta)

I won't go into installation and/or configuration of the above software projects as those steps are beyond the scope of this series (with the exception of Dispatcher which I will explain in further detail later as I progress). For more information, please see each project's respective documentation.

Finally, we will need to connect to either MSSQL or MySQL to persist data. We'll look at the data model as a next step.

Stay tuned!