Skin Spider : The "No Framework" Framework
Posted September 26, 2006 at 6:05 PM by Ben Nadel
As I start my first phase of Skin Spider, the iterative demo for ColdFusion application development, I am going to be using what I think Hal Helms refers to as the "No Framework" framework. I will be hacking together parts of strategies that I have used before with no real amount of super planning. Hopefully, this should lead to issues, poor code reuse, and horrible maintainability. The idea here is that in the next phase, I can refactor, explore what problems arose in the first phase and explain how a framework would fix these issues.
So basically, this phase of the Skin Spider is going to be crap. It's basically going to be a proof of concept for the idea of crawling sites and capturing videos and storing information in an XML database. Please do NOT take this a best practices approach. I want to almost go "worst practices" approach first so that I can then really explore the way things should be cleaned up.
Reader Comments
This is great Ben!
I've only been developing in CF for a bit over a year now (on the same application actually). And now, of course, i'm finding that code reuse and maintainability is ridiculous. So a framework almost surely seems to be in order. But you can imagine the task ahead for me to overhaul the entire application (if I decide to do it at this point). What a nightmare!
Also, I have no idea or any experience in any of the CF frameworks. So it's difficult for me to make an educated decision on what to choose.
I look forward to seeing what comes out of "Skin Spider".
-Gary
Gary,
I am really happy that you are excited about the outcome of the project. I am as well. It's part learning project, part teaching project. I am almost done with phase I of the project which is the shot-gun, get-her-done, phase. Nothing too pretty about it, some cool stuff, but LOTS of room for cleaning it up.
I'll be keeping everyone updated. Also, I will probably get ZIP files available today for download.
