I’m certainly interested in your approach. My framework heavily uses base classes. I mean, ArticleController.List() is probably pretty similar to UserController.List, so why not have an object driven base controller with list (and add, edit, delete, approve, import, export, etc.) methods to get free scaffolding for the basic cases using dynamic generalized programming? Same for a BaseService, BaseDAO and even BaseObject so I get most of my scaffolding for free and just have to paramterize the business object data appropriately.

I DO see a place for core files in terms of base classes. I also have validation and transformation libraries, code for generating and handling lists (both static and object based – if you want a drop down list of categories displayed as an indented tree or a list of statuses for radio buttons) and I also have some default code to handle pages that have to be https, putting form and URL scope into a smart transient business object with dynamic getters and setters and the ability to overload by saying things like CategoryID = numeric (so it’ll regex whatevere.categoryID if it exists and then replace with a 0 if len < 1 to save all the boilerplate manual coding) so I do find that I have core files. I also have my LightWire DI engine for injecting dependencies and I can’t imagine a complex project without some kind of DI engine for runtime and mocking. I’m also adding AOP for cross cutting concerns and again think that is a useful thing to have and have a bunch of ORM features in the DAOs.

Oh and a psuedo page controller that’ll get page data from the db so it can automatically have the data to call the right controller for the sidbars and pods as well as the main content areas based on manually manageable business rules.

So, I do actually like core files, but I make each one work hard and save me LOTS of time for my (relatively simple) use cases (my DI engine is under 300 lines including lots of spacing and some commenting).

Real beatuy of all that is I can just use declaritive parameters to deliver 90% of my apps ad have code only the edge cases so I can do thing like generate a fairly custom commerce engine in an hour or two.

That said, looking forward to your presentation to see if there’s anything I’m missing – always nice to hear another approach!

Please, please, please post a screencast or powerpoint slides from your presentation. Probably the only reason I was trying to get to the conference was to see this.

Peter, my presentation is 90% code. I only have 10 Powerpoint slides because I think you’ll all get a lot more from looking at the code than hearing another sales pitch for yet another way to write software. I agree with you that the discussion will be half the fun, I’ll try and keep some free time for that. As far as base classes go, the more I think about them, the more I think they go against basic computer science 101. I had plenty of professors in college yell at me for creating global variables. I didn’t understand why they were problematic at the time, but I’m starting to see base classes as a similar issue as global variables.

Lately I’m trying as hard as I can to only run code that I need right then and there. This can be a pretty big discussion in itself. I’ll throw out these new ideas and we can all argue about them until we go blue in the face.

http://students.washington.edu/cwei/tools/binary.shtml#bin