Design Patterns at TVCFUG

On October 2, 2008, in ColdFusion, by Anuj Gakhar

Last night, I got a chance to attend the Thames Valley User Group about Design Patterns, by Sean Corfield.  It was an excellent presentation and I am very glad I decided to make the time to attend it. Also, since, this was my first time listening to Sean in person, I was excited to attend it and because the venue was a place where I have worked for over 2.5 years, I wanted to catch up with old mates as well.

Points taken from CS4 presentation :-

  • Fireworks CS4 can generate valid CSS for you , I dont use Fireworks at all but I think this is a good feature as it looks like you can now design you page layout and export as valid HTML/CSS.
  • I know Fireworks could be used for skinning your Flex apps but now with CS4, you can also build AIR apps from within it. Havent tried yet, but these 2 things make it worth giving it a try, I think.

Points taken from Sean’s presentation  :-

  • Knowingly or unkowingly, we all use design patterns in some way or the other. But its best to know what pattern we are using and most probably it already has a name assigned to it and its best to find out more about these patterns in order to make communication easier. Sean spoke about Singleton and Facade patterns with an example.
  • Design patterns are not “the solution” to a problem. They are just one of the few possible ways of solving a problem at hand and should not be mistaken as the final solution.
  • While reading about Design Patterns, try and stay away from some of the “java focused” design patterns as some of the problems they try to solve,  dont even exist in the CF world.
  • Its common to use a combination of a few design patterns to come up with an elegant solution to a problem. Most frameworks like Fusebox, Coldbox etc are already doing this.

And then there were book recommendations from Sean which I am going to try as well. Overall, it was a good presentation and I walked away with more information than I expected to learn. The preso is available as a PDF from Sean’s blog.

I am absolutely amazed by the wealth of knowledge Sean has. At the end of the presentation, I was saying to myself “Is there something he hasnt done? he seems to know everything in so much detail” 🙂

Thanks, Sean and thanks to Kevin Roche for arranging it.

 

2 Responses to Design Patterns at TVCFUG

    • Sikiz says:

      I don’t leave comments on blog posts usaluly however I had to comment on yours. You write with such interest. It has been an awesome read. Thanks for posting

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