ColdBox vs CFWheels

Question

I am migrating a site built in Coldfusion (no framework) to a coldfusion framework. Right now it looks like a choice between ColdBox and CFWheels.

The database is MS SQL.

I was wondering if anyone has migrated an existing site over to either of these frameworks and if they could recommend one framework over another?

This is pretty subjective - not really suitable for a "right" answer. — Jake Feasel, Dec 12 '11 at 19:19
There are other frameworks out there besides the 2 you mentioned. There is also Model-Glue, FW/1 (which Henry mentioned below), FuseBox (the oldest CF framework out there) and Mach ii. I am sure there are others, but the ones I mentioned, as well as the 2 you mention cover a lot. — Scott Stroz, Dec 12 '11 at 20:19
Good point. I think this blog post on the first page of a Google search scared me off somewhat: http://www.jeffryhouser.com/index.cfm/2011/3/1/How-Model-Glue-Failed-Me — redconservatory, Dec 13 '11 at 01:30
Anyone know where can questions like these go? Stackoverflow has high traffic but not ideal for questions like this. :S — Henry, Dec 14 '11 at 00:00
@henry - the cf-talk mailing list might help and all the frameworks have google groups or equivalent mailing lists — Antony, Dec 14 '11 at 01:58
@Antony Cool. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/coldfusion-talk — Henry, Dec 14 '11 at 17:40

Henry · Answer 1 · 2011-12-13T23:58:44.057

1

I might be wrong here 'cause I've never really used CFWheels.

As far as I know CFWheels is a different kind of framework because it is very RoR-like. ColdBox is a more traditional MVC-like framework.

If you're not looking at redoing the persistence layer, maybe ColdBox or even the simpler FW/1 would be easier to migrate to.

edited Dec 13 '11 at 23:58

answered Dec 12 '11 at 17:37

Henry

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score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 12 '11 at 21:35

I'm in the process of doing basically exactly what you describe - porting an older CF app that was written without any real framework to a cleaner CF codebase (also using SQL Server, BTW). We are using CF Wheels as the framework for this effort. We chose wheels because of a number of factors - we prefer the style of the framework, since it is similar to several other highly regarded application frameworks (Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET MVC, CodeIgniter, etc...). Also, the ORM layer wheels provides is quite nice, and will allow us to refactor much duplicated and verbose code.

I can't really comment much on ColdBox, since I haven't used it. Prior to Wheels, we were heavily into Fusebox. We were using Fusebox in a very structured MVC-oriented fashion, but as the Fusebox core lost momentum, we found that Wheels offered a similar organization to Fusebox (for how we were doing things) but in a nicer, more modern package, with lots of bells and whistles. So that is now our go-to framework.

ColdBox vs CFWheels

2 Answers2