Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Have I used CF8 to its fullness?

box_coldfusion8_150x150Our team is starting on a new project, and we will be in the low level design phase soon.  One question that popped in my mind over yesterday's meeting: Have we used CF8 to its fullness?

CF8 brought a lot of new and improved features to the table.  Some of them I don't see us using any day, like .NET integration & Microsoft Exchange Server integration, while some of them we have tried, but then realize that they are not as useful as they seem at first.

Here are some CF8 functionalities that we tried or looked at but didn't get to use:

  • Ajax tags are cool at first, but they turn out to be a big turn-off when...
    • we realize how many .js files the client need (20+ on average from Ext JS 1.1.1, YUI 2.3.0, & custom CF js from Adobe).
    • there are only so many additional theme available for Ext 1.x (1 to be exact) and none of the 2.x themes work with Ext 1.x. CF8 comes the following themes in /cfide/scripts/ajax/et/resources/css:
      • default (ext-all.css)
      • aero (xtheme-aero.css)
      • gray (xtheme-gray.css)
      • vista (xtheme-vista.css)
    • we realize how many hacks it takes to add functionalities to CFGRID that Adobe missed (calendar picker for type datefield anyone? context menu?).  For all hacks, at least 2 CF tags are needed: <cfsavecontent> and <cfhtmlhead>
    • the documentation of Ext 1.1.1 is not even linked by the main ExtJS page anymore and took us a while to find.  Good luck with the download link of Ext 1.1.1. :)
    • <cfwindow> doesn't work inside a <cfinclude>, so it becomes a mess when you use any template system provided by your MVC framework.
    • <cflayout type="border">cannot be nested, and css inside the <cflayoutarea> can be problematic.
    • <cflayout type="tab"> looks funny for a split seconds when the JS has not been processed by the browser
    • <cfsavecontent> fails to save functionality of tags that generate JS scripts to head in order to function (e.g. cftooltip)
    • <cftooltip> would sometimes show up on the lower left corner of the browser.
  • Server monitor, as cool as they seem, do not work well with our framework of choice (i.e. Model-Glue)
  • <cfinterface>, anyone use it when one can duck type?
  • <cfpresentation> (demo), anyone uses it on a public site?  Somehow I can see it getting obsolete in the same rate of <cfform format="flash">.  It provides only limited customization on the look, and therefore very hard to incorporate it into a site.

Then after a while, we come to the conclusion that we only like CF8's native JSON support, easier to cfloop an array, and the improvement in performance...

What is your answer to the question: Have you used CF8 to its fullness?

5 comments:

Todd Sharp said...

cfpresentation is used on http://slidesix.com

Sparky said...

I think the straight AJAX integration stuff has been a huge advantage, although i do get what your saying but it's not designed for frontend websites but full blown web applications, my application speed improved after we implemented it, yes i took 0.8mb to load but then we had no other loading of objects and reduced our bandwidth by using AJAX calls and not loading the framework again.

I don't see the cfgrid things as a hack either, before CF8 i had to write all my Ext stuff in JavaScript, now all the hard stuff is done for me and if i want something extra then i can add to the functionality like i had to before i was using cf8

Alirio Boquín Aguilar said...

Hi Henry.

In my experience I am working with CF 5, I use every day with DreamWeaver.
Four months ago, I started a project to administrate the content we build a administration section this is build entire en CFAjax, we have to deal with a lot problems "Ajax Kunfu"
The cfgrid is a nice tag, but sometimes is slow. But was so helpfully because we write less code.

If you need to use efects in your site like Ajax I recomend you Flex
is the best partner CF for back end and Flex for front end.

And Flash using AMF with CF is a high speed. I hope this will help you.

Sparky said...

Flex vs AJAX i would go for Flex yes, but i think for quick systems where i have to use AJAX, ColdFusion have made it easy for me. I would like to play around more with Flex, at the moment i only have write in .NET CF using AJAX, Flex being Flash has given me some issues with accessibility and users, but then i am still new at Flex so i have not looked in detail

jones said...

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