(sorry b – i had to)

Before I start though, I should say that comparing CF to Grails really isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison as CF in this context is a programming language, and grails is an actual web framework built on top of the Groovy programming language.

You’re correct – my use of terms seems a bit contradictory, I suppose that I should have said that Grails / Rails provides facilities that make ReSTful web service deployment a little less wordy and a bit more intuitive without the use of any additional plugins or third party software.

This is most clearly illustrated in terms of ReSTful URL’s (which expresses an endpoint for a resource) and Representations – two very important concepts in the world of ReST. Grails provides a very straight forward approach to creating meaningful URL’s by generating a URLMappings.groovy file as a part of the application that allows developers to create custom URL’s that map to specific controllers and methods. Here’s an sample of what a static mapping in this file might look like;

“/product/$id” {
controller = “product”
action = “show”
}

A perfectly ReSTful URL (that’s straight from the documentation). The dollar-sign indicates a uri-variable who’s value is captured and provided to the target controller method. Of course, you can define any number of uri variables in a URL mapping. Grails also allows customization of these variables to be very granular – optionally providing regular expressions for each individual variable. As you can see, using only the native CF API (tags or script, doesn’t matter) and without using any third-party software, you would have to write a good amount of your own code to allow the configuration of, and parsing for such URL’s.

The same is true for Representations. Grails provides a very convenient set of converters that allow you to convert domain model information to meaningful representations in either JSON or XML – the syntax would look something like this (again, I pilfered this from the docs);

import grails.converters.*
…..
render Book.list(params) as JSON
render Book.get(params.id) as XML

With the serializeJSON() native CF API method, JSON representations are made much easier – but XML is a different story alltogether. Plus the Grails supported syntax again is very straight forward.

So as you can see, CF natively supports ReST in that you can get a handle on path-info for URL’s (as a part of the cgi scope), you can parse out provided request header information (for content-type negotiation and http authentication), you can return any information you like in the response header (via cfheader), you can create json and xml objects to return as representations – simply tying it all together is going to require more typing on the part of the developer when working with CF than with Grails with the caveat of not using third-party software.

I’m not the most skilled blog poster so I hope that this makes sense. I’m thinking I’ll provide my email address in the next podcast so if you have any other questions you can of course post them here or feel free to email me directly.

thanks.

Keep up the great work, and I look forward to working my way back through the first 3 episodes and listening to the rest as they come out.

Thanks for those links. I’ve installed it and have been playing around with it this morning. Some initial thoughts.

Although it’s nice that there is some form of line level debugging, it doesn’t feel as rich as I’d like it to be. for example, to view a variable you must scroll/search for it in the variables tab. This seems tedious especially when compared to other IDE’s where you can mouseover a variable and boom, you’ve got all the details pertaining to that variable before and even after you step over it – state + properties included.

Would love to see breakpoint conditions where we can break only if a condition is met or a step further, hook in test assertions.

Also didn’t see an option to watch debug – the ability to change variables/call methods on the fly during breakpoints.

Will try it out for a bit more. Let me know of any time-saving tips or tricks when using this.