Well I'm, writing this on the train home after battling through the ever so friendly people on the london Underground. I'm coming back from the UKCFUG meeting tonight where the topic was Coldspring(CS) and what it does presented my Mark Drew. This is his part 2 speak after the Model Glue(MG) and Reactor(RC) preso the other month.
Though fairly short (about 60/70 minutes) he covered a lot of ground and answered concisely the question of "What the hell does CS do?"
ColdSpring uses Inversion of Control (IOC), dependency injection to wire your CFC's together and is based the Java Spring framework. This still probably hasn't helped you much. To make this simple (maybe to simple) Coldspring runs you init() methods in your components and injects any dependencies. Dependencies can be other other CFC's that are required or even settings. For example a shoppingBasket() is dependant on a taxCalculator(). It doesn't really care about the calculator, but for displaying tax on a product it needs it - its dependant on it. This is where you get Separation of Concern(SOC), component should only needs to know about itself, it doesn't care about its dependencies. So how do you tell shoppingBasket() that it needs taxCalculator(), (as with EVERYTHING nowadays) via a XML config file. Coldspring though can also inject settings as well and you can see this in Model Glue:Unity where's its used to hold(inject) the setting into Reactor and Model Glue.
And this is what Mark broke down over the session. I won't go over the presentation too much as Mark has already hosted his presentation online.
From the last two sessions i've learnt a lot, mainly that Mark Drew can't code when a crowd of people are watching him, but also how MG, RC, and CS all interact, how they all help you separate your code into maintainablem understandable chunks. The other thing i've learnt is to go to your local CFUG when you get a chance. For me its about an hour and 45 minutes+ journey into east London by car/train/tube but its been worth it. I've had the chance to meet some new friends and even managed to get free beer off them - i'll pay ya back next time Alistair. honest ;o)
Also I managed to win my first bit of free swag from a meeting - a cracking Adobe Sim Card Backup keyring. Why its on a keyring i don't know? so far i've never been in a situation where i've need to back my contacts on the move or in an emergency. Either way cheers Nicholas and Adobe.
Plus Mark hinted to look out for CFEclipe 1.3 beta soon, real soon!