Presentation tomorrow: Migrating existing applications to CFWheels

I’ll be presenting about migrating existing applications to the CFWheels framework tomorrow night, February 10, on the Online ColdFusion Meetup.

I’ve been working on a plan for migrating a Fusebox application to CFWheels, and it’s been a pretty challenging task to think through it all. I don’t care what framework or platform you’re migrating to. It;s not easy. It’s much easier to start anew, but most of us do not have that leisure.

The good news is that CFWheels gives you a few tools to help out:

• Object relational mapping allows you to tell CFWheels into using a database structure that doesn’t quite meet CFWheels’s expectations for conventions
• URL routing enables you to build sub-applications and then bubble them up to a single giant application (if that’s the path that you’ve chosen to take)
• Different methods of refactoring, inheritance, and plugin development give you the ability to start with messy code and make it cleaner and DRYer with each iteration—when you need it (and as you learn more about the CFWheels framework)

To be quite frank, I’m not sure what all I can share in 45 minutes. But I hope whatever I present will get the ideas flowing and the conversation going.

Also, if you subscribe to my posts, I’ll share more of my experiences as I get deeper and deeper into this migration project. It involves moving a FoxPro database to SQL Server (which isn’t my responsibility, thank the Lord), translating it to match CFWheels conventions, and building an application layer with some pretty convoluted business logic.

Isn’t that the way it always is?