In this post I'll provide a deeper insight into how Dispatcher works and introduce the three generic views that make up the "generic admin". After generating some code with Illudium, we'll have all the pieces to perform CRUD operations...
I introduced a lot of pieces to the puzzle during parts 1 through 4 of this series and with this post, I hope to put them together. We'll look at a file and folder setup, ColdSpring and Transfer XML configuration files and the other files that form application for the generic admin...
If you've been following along with this series, you might be wondering just what is Dispatcher? I like to think of Dispatcher as an Event Delegation package that provides some simple components to build event driven web applications. For those familiar with Colin Moock's seminal book on object oriented development for Flash "Essential ActionScript 2.0", Dispatcher is my attempt to port the Delegation Event Model example found in EAS2 to ColdFusion...
If you are not using Illudium to generate your application classes, I encourage you to check it out. Out of the box, the code generator comes with several templates for generating CFCs, Transfer and ColdSpring XML, Actionscript VOs (value objects) and TOs (simple transfer objects designed for Flex development). Modifying, or creating your own templates is encouraged and easy. The template I developed for this series uses ColdFusion templating, but you can also use XSLT or a combination of both...
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...
