Skin Spider : A Testament To Application Portability
Posted October 20, 2006 at 8:55 AM by Ben Nadel
I haven't blogged much about this before, but I am a HUGE fan of highly portable application development. If you know me, you know I avoid all sorts of special programming elements, such as:
- Mapped Paths
- Installed Custom Tags (CF's custom tag folder)
- CFX Tags
- IIS Filters
- Registered COM objects
- Centralized Framework Code (grumble grumble)
I don't like the idea of having to set up things that I cannot do programmatically. Just about the only thing that I will do via the ColdFusion administrator is set up a data source. I know that this, now, can be done programmatically, but I like to do it in the Admin. Call this hypocritical... oh well. And, of course, I am not daft; if a project requires something special to get it done, I will do it. If I need some sort of upper level PDF COM object, then, yes, it gets installed. But, my philosophy is such that I should exhaust all other methods first before then creating a server-setting.
Skin Spider is going to be a testament to this development philosophy. Since it doesn't use a standard database, I will be making this 100% portable. By the time I am done, you should be able to pick it up and drop it anywhere and just have it work. In fact, just the other day, I moved it from one computer to another, opened it up, and it ran perfectly. I knew this would happen, but I was pretty pumped up to see it actually take place.
I have been asked before about how I configure my applications without XML and without hard coding any thing like URLs and Root directories and this project will demonstrate all of this. Please be patient, as it is coming in development iterations, but rest assured, it's gonna be pretty sweet in the end!
Also, just an FYI, for you convenience, I have set up http://www.skin-spider.com which should forward you to the Skin Spider section of my site. Just making it a little easier. I see that people have been going on and having it spider things. Glad to see some people are using it and getting a feel for how it works. Right now there is a cap on how many videos you can download, but I will go in ever few days a clean it out so more people can experiment.
