Bender Expansion
I have just concluded a magnificent conversation with the brilliant Mark Mandel of Transfer fame – we spent about 25 minutes each trying to convince each other of pretty much exactly the same thing 
The upshot is that while I’ve been focused just on getting direct communication between flex and transfer, Mark has been asking questions about looser coupling to CF models – for example Bender being able to pass transfer objects to other gateway cfcs (or retrieve data FROM other cfcs) instead of talking directly to transfer. What I think I’ll do once I have the basics working, is set it up so that Bender can act either as a direct translation layer to Transfer, or as a proxy to other model cfcs in a coldfusion applications, via the mapping of transfer objects to cfcs and methods in an xml file.
This way Bender will allow you to setup a mapping that says, “When I try to save a Page object, send it to the PageManager’s save() method” instead of Transfer.save() directly. this will allow for further business logic without breaking existing models. The simplicity of simply throwing actionscript model data directly at transfer will still be there, and would be the default operation if no mappings are setup, but this will allow for much more flexible usage. Again – comments very welcome, I see lots of readers but no suggestions! :p
Thanks again Mark for the advice.
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Sounds like it’s going to be really cool!Do you want to show off some sample code of how it will work?
That usually gets some comments.
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Hi Toby,A few of us in CFFlex were talking about Bender and the potential architecture. Perhaps it was late where you are, but people are definitely interested. I put up a quick post here:
http://www.nodans.com/index.cfm/2007/4/9/Is-Bender-an-AS-generator-Is-it-a-service-layer-for-Transfer
please correct any inaccuracies as you see fit.
There is some good interest in the bender concept.
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I for one am very excited about this project. This will be an advantage Transfer has over Reactor. I also really like this change to be able to call a service cfc instead of the Transfer API directly. That is exactly what I would want to do.[Reply]
Thanks Kurt – glad to know it’s of interest![Reply]
yeah i’ll have some code up shortly, just working on some stupid bug I’ve got in the flex side of things – mostly likely noob mistake
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Hi Dan – thanks for the post
I can’t seem to post a comment on that blog post I’m afraid.[Reply]
Hi guys – check out the "Bender Explained" blog post, hopefully will clear a few things up.[Reply]
What functionality with Bender add that isn’t already addressed by ColdSpring?[Reply]