Chris Peters: Web Developer

I’ve always loved the idea of MVC frameworks. But I don’t like the super long query strings these frameworks usually add to your URLs. I’m starting to find some appeal in what ColdFusion on Wheels does to meet the need of having better URLs, yet providing the benefits of a MVC framework for coding structure.

Technorati Tags:
rails, ruby, coldfusion, adobe, web development, rubyonrails

The problem with MVC patterns: URLs

With most MVC frameworks, you often end up with URLs that look like this:

http://www.example.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=main.employees&mode=edit&id=12 (example from the Fusebox framework)

Primarily, this is a problem if your app needs to face the public and you want Google to index the content it generates. Google often waits until you have a higher PageRank before it decides to sort through the URLs with the complex query strings. When you launch a new ecommerce site, you don’t want Google to wait six months before it starts trusting your complex URLs.

Secondarily, the URLs in MVC are usually quite an ugly prom date, if I must say. If you want people to communicate your application’s URLs to each other, then you’re looking at a mess. These lengthy strings often wrap to multiple lines in emails, making them hard to copy and paste into the browser.

Imagine someone trying to communicate something similar to my previous Fusebox URL example over the phone:

Yo, Caprice! You gotta see this sweet car I found on the Internet. Go to www dot cars dot com slash store slash index dot jsp question mark mode equals view car ampersand car ID equals ahq995b1j ampersand onsite equals 1.

Ruby on Rails for ColdFusion

ColdFusion on Wheels, currently at version 0.5ish, is a ColdFusion-based port of the Ruby on Rails framework. It promises rapid development and good database abstraction. It also offers way friendlier URLs. Consider a possible port of my Fusebox example into the Rails-like framework:

http://www.example.com/employees/edit/12/1

Much better, isn’t it? And guess what, the framework is set up so that you can easily find what you’re looking for in the file tree of your application. The other frameworks sometimes require for you to poke around a little before getting a footing on what you should be editing.

I’m looking into using CF on Wheels for an application I’m currently building. Perhaps I’ll have some wisdom to share with you’s guys once I learn more. Stay tuned.