Without a framework, CF’s strength becomes its weakness: too many pages get flirted out without regard to structure and maintainability. Rail’s strength (site structure) becomes its weakness when you really do just need a few static or nearly-static pages.

One other built-in weakness of Rails is that it really, really wants to be the root. If it isn’t, you’re constantly fighting the structure, I find.

Anyway, my hope for CF on Wheels is that it will combine the best of both: not only the elbow-room to slap a few pages out there fast, but also the wisely-chosen conventions to put rigor into the site design.

I do have plans to use object pooling for the controller (as we currently do with model objects) but so far it’s not been a high priority.

Rails/Wheels is all about re-using code and keeping DRY. As Adam mentioned helpers and partials are some of the ways you can use to achieve this goal.

The fact that you only fire one controller/action per request also makes things simple (you can tell exactly where to find your code by looking at the URL bar for example)

I’m not too sure there’s a way to reuse controller without redirecting, but at least that’s an option. You can use redirectTo() to forward the user onto another URL in a nice way for one.

The other option is to put that reusable code in your helper — either the application_helper, or the controller specific helper. Seems like they’re basically local functions at that scope you can reuse code in. It does complicate reading over code having it in that many places, especially when there are model/service layer calls in both, but at least it can be centralized.

As for reusing views there is some mechanism in there for it at the moment. For instance, if in you’re making a form for adding/edit users you might create that form in the views/user directory and call it _form.cfm. That file can be included from other views using something like , which will output that page. This is one great way to make the code from those add/edit forms reusable.

Another option is from inside your controller. Say for instance you access the /post/list page in an application and it generates the html list of blog posts. Now assuming you add the necessary route, you could go to post/list.xml and it would go to that same controller function with that “xml” defined as matches your routes. Inside your post/list controller you could add a line like and that’ll output the xml equivalent. I think there are a few more render() options like , so if you wanted to render a different view within the current controller you could do so with . That won’t stop page processing of the rest of the controller, but the default post/list.cfm page won’t be included in that case.

Definitely think it’d be great for a frameworks presentation. I bet with more people supporting them there might be a call for a talk on them.