Why Aren't More CF Developers Using OO Methodologies and Frameworks?
I have just finished reading Bob Silverberg's blog posts on Transfer ORM. It's a five part (thus far) series on how Bob has been using Transfer over the last year. Bob is a great writer and has done an excellent job of describing what he has been doing, which left me wondering why "I still don't get it".
My overall impression is that Bob's posts were not designed as an introduction to using Transfer, but more of a way to validate how he has been using it. So, if you are wanting to learn how to use Transfer its probably not the post for you. If you've been using Transfer and want to hear someone else's experience then it's probably going to be an excellent read. As someone who has a basic knowledge of Transfer (and ORMs in general) and how it works,but being fairly new to OO development in general, I found it to be significantly enough over my head that it was not applicable to my current needs. That being said, I wanted to express my opinions on why I believe the vast majority of CF developers are still writing procedural code and not using frameworks.To be clear, I am relatively new to OO development. I started writing "OO" CFML about a year ago and have a fair feel for what I am doing. I have written a few CFML applications using OO methodologies. Unfortunately in the last year I've written very little CFML so I've not been able to practice this as much as I would like. I learned the basic principles of OO CFML development via CFOOP. Nicholas Tunney, Phil Nacelli and Chris Turner did an excellent job of creating tutorials for procedural coders that made sense and made you feel like you actually grasped the topic. However, the the site hasn't been updated in ages.In reality, I have learned far more about OO development from writing ActionScript applications (Flex and Flash) and the Flex community than I ever have from the ColdFusion community. This is definitely because Flex will force you into doing OO development, but there's also a larger community of developers who are proficient with OO methodologies,and to a certain degree, are better at explaining these concepts to the procedural coder. Here's the primary problem I have found with the blog posts and tutorials on frameworks and OO CFML development methodologies to date: There's an assumption that the reader has knowledge of many of the concepts and principles being discussed. Given that the community is ColdFusion, I feel this is often far from the truth. Talking with fellow CF developers who are not utilizing frameworks, OO principles and/or additional methodologies such as ORMs, dependency injectors and the like, I find that they have been discouraged by these facts.While folks such as Brian Rinaldi, Dan Wilson, Matt Quackenbush and (many) others have been extremely generous in giving their time in writing articles and tutorials on advanced CF topics designed to help others learn these methods, I am certain that the intended audience has has been left with the impression that this is far more difficult than it really is. In the end, it ends up alienating the intended audience more and more because they are left to believe that they may just never get it. It is only the stubborn few who truly want to force themselves to learn these concepts and methods that actually do make it to the point of putting it into practice on a daily basis.To be clear, OO is not easy. I realize this. It does require more effort than procedural code and is significantly more complex. However, I feel that often times terminology is the primary stumbling block. By the way, Doug Boude has a great resource for learning and memorizing OO terminology.I would like to hear from developers who are not writing OO code. What do you think are the primary reasons for this?
