From an object oriented development perspective ColdFusion 9′s most interesting feature is it’s integration with Hibernate which provides Object Relational Mapping (ORM) capabilities.
When starting new development one of the typical earliest steps is to start planning the database schema. Working out the relevant tables, fields and their relationships. Once the schema has been decided then the coding starts.
Using ColdFusion 9′s ORM and an object oriented development approach you have a choice to reverse this process. You can design your components and start writing code first and the ORM will generate your schema for you.
The interesting point here is that when designing your applications your focus will move away from schema design and toward object design. This is a good thing.
Whan you focus on schema design you are focusing on data and its relationships. When you focus on object design you focus on object behaviour, object relationships and the data contained within your objects. This inclusion of “behaviour” in the design process means that you broaden your thinking about how to solve the problems in your application.
So what impact will ColdFusion 9′s ORM have on our development? I think that in time it will significantly help ColdFusion developers understand the process of building object oriented systems. It will help us move away from using objects as function libraries into objects that have state and bevaviour. It will encourage thinking about objects and solving business problems more directly without the focus on relational data structures. And with a generated schema and little to no sql to write we can develop our systems much more quickly.
To get us started Mark Mandel has put together a great introduction to ORM in Adobe ColdFusion 9 beta.
ColdFusion 9 · Hibernate · OOP · ORM
