I've now been using Transfer for about a year, and I've built up a bit of a standard way that I use it in my apps. I'm not suggesting that this is the best way (by any means), but I thought it would be worth posting about it to share my experiences and learn from others. So I'm starting a new series, simply called "How I Use Transfer".
I'm not sure how to best go about describing all that I do. A lot of it is really architectural and isn't specific to Transfer. To a certain extent Transfer could be switched out for another ORM without requiring a lot of code changes. So I suppose this is also about my approach to OO design with ColdFusion. Like others, I have found this to be a long and hard learning curve, and I still have a long way to go. It may be that much of what I'm about to document will change over the next several months, as I learn other ways of doing things, but hopefully it will still be of value, particularly to anyone just starting down this road.
So again, I'm not trying to document any kind of best practices. I already know that there are ideas I've read on other people's blogs that I'd like to implement but haven't yet. This is a snapshot, a point in time, something I'll probably revisit months or years from now and laugh about. But if others are going through the same thing as me, then maybe we can all learn together.
In my next post I intend to describe a high level overview of the architecture of my model.