Peter Bell

Often the hardest part of developing an application is getting agreement on what exactly it should do. Intent Driven Design (IDD) is an approach that simplifies and standardizes the process of getting detailed technical requirements from non-technical business users so you can develop more complete and consistent requirements in less time. The Importance of Intent One of the most frustrating elements of application development is having to continually change the way an application works because of conflicting requirements from different stakeholders. Most such problems come from the lack of a clear focus for a site. You have to agree, in writing, with all of the stakeholders - why you're building the site, who will use it, and what their motivations will be - before you can even start to discuss how the site should work. If you don't, you are guaranteed weeks of wra... (more)

Architecting Your ColdFusion Objects

Once you've learned the syntax of cfcs, one of the hardest things to do is to figure out exactly how and where to use them. The goal of this article is to run you through the most common (and useful) ways to use cfcs to make your applications easier to maintain. The main benefit of cfcs is that they can make your applications more maintainable. If you're just creating a page with a form that saves user input to a database, you probably don't need cfcs. However, as your applications become more complex, cfcs can make them easier to maintain by breaking your code down into smaller... (more)

Encapsulating Recordsets

One of the first things that you encounter when moving to object-oriented (OO) programming are beans. Beans are simple representations of a business object (like a user or a product) that hide all of the information stored in the bean behind methods (functions) for getting and setting the information (called, unsurprisingly, getters and setters). Typically, if you want to display a product view screen, you'll get the product information from the database, load the resulting query recordset into a bean and then, instead of displaying the variables from the query, call the methods... (more)