Objective Bias

I just registered for the jQuery Camp 2008, to be held in Boston, Massachusetts on September 28, which I found out about from Rey Bango's blog. I've started using a sprinkling of jQuery recently, and just from that I'm understanding what the hype is all about. So it's time to get a bit more serious about it. I've recently started working through the Learning jQuery book, so hopefully I'll be a bit less green by conference time. Hopefully, I'll bump into more than a few CF'ers. Who knows --- maybe if you just register, I'll see you there!

Last night, Gert Franz and Michael Streit from Railo Technologies paid a visit to the Boston CFUG on the last stop off their Railo US Road Show. Unless you've been under a rock these last few months, of course you know that Railo 3.1 will be released as open source later in the year (projected for November, according to Gert). Although Gert had to cut his preso short due to time constraints on the use of our venue, it was a great meeting.

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Allright, so I've always known that to instantiate a component using the createObject function, you have to provide the dot-delimited path of the component. Like so:

<cfset myObject = createObject("component","path.to.component") />

Today, I was looking through the ColdBox framework documentation and I came upon this line of code:

var oConfigService = CreateObject("component",getSetting('AppMapping') & ".model.ConfigService").init(getDatasource('myDSN'));

I thought that this couldn't be right because the getSetting("AppMapping") gives you the slash-delimited path from the root of your site to your app. So I tested out the code myself expecting to get an error and guess what -- it worked!

So then I thought I'd try just hard-coding the slash-path that is returned by getSetting("AppMapping"):

var oConfigService = CreateObject("component","path/to/app.model.ConfigService").init(getDatasource('myDSN'));

It still worked. Even though now the path was a combination of slashes and dots. So I went ahead and just hardcoded all slashes.

var oConfigService = CreateObject("component","path/to/app/model/ConfigService").init(getDatasource('myDSN'));

You guessed it -- works fine!

So it seems like using dots, slashes, or a combination of the two works. Is anyone else surprised by this besides me?

I'm a big fan of the ColdBox framework. I think the core MVC part of the framework is very intuitive and easy to get started with (the loads of documentation also doesn't hurt). And then as you get more comfortable with it and want to implement more advanced techniques, you can take advantage of the vast array of tools and extension capabilities that it provides, which is why (as Luis Majano frequently points out) it's more than just a framework, but a also a software development toolbox.

Be that as it may, I believe it's always helpful to look at different frameworks and methodologies for ideas and inspiration. The other day, I was checking out the ColdFusion on Wheels site.

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At the age of 3, my son Eli was diagnosed with PDD-NOS, which is a "mild form" of autism. Although his condition is not as severe as those on the other end of the autism spectrum, he definitely has challenges (mostly in the realm of social skills with peers and language) that we are helping him overcome. The great thing is that he has deinitely made a lot of progress since his diagnosis (he is now 4 and a half).

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