cfwheels-template-hellodynamic

This app extends the ubiquitous Hello World application by adding a few more framework elements and ultimately diaplays a dynamic time variable on each page reload.

As an Application

As an application, this is the most basic app you could build. We basically take the Hello World app and add a dynamic element to the page. It consists of a controller component, a single view page, and a route definition to load up that view page as the default page. That's all there is to it.

\config
  routes.cfm
\controllers
  Main.cfc
\views
  \main
    index.cfm

The routes.cfm file tells the framework what controller action to load as the default root route. If we look inside the routes.cfm page we'll see a line that identifies the root route and where to send the requst. In this app that is identified as main##index. Which basically reads as when the root route is called, send the request to the index action of the main controller. In a typical CFWheels request lifecycle, the controller's action method could run some arbitrary code, make calculation, interact with the database, or whatever else we may need to do, but ultimately it calls the corresponding view for the controller action. In this simple app the index action of the Main controller which is created as a function in the Main.cfc component in the controllers/ folder and simply creates a variable and sets it to the current time. That variable is then automatically available in the corresponding view file. The index.cfm is that view page for our simple app and is located in the main/ folder inside the views/ folder. The names index, which is the action method, and main, which is the controller name, are arbitrary and could be anything you like as long as the root route setting is updated to reflect the new names the app will continue to function.

As a Forgbox Package

As a Forgebox package there is some interesting things going on here. The package contains the minimum files needed for this app to work which is basically two folders the config/ folder and the views/ folder. Note that in our finall running application both of these folders contain more items and there are a handfull of other folders the framework needs to funciton properly. These folders are pulled in via the two dependencies:

"Dependencies":{
  "cfwheels-core":"^2.2",
  "cfwheels-base":"^2.2"
}

The core and base files are put into the wheels/ and base/ folders respectively acording to these settings.

"installPaths":{
  "cfwheels-core":"wheels/",
  "cfwheels-base":"base/"
}

The next part of the package that is interesting is that your application files are merged into the base files, and finally the contents of the base/ folder is copied into the root of your application and the base/ folder is deleted. This is all acomplished via a script setting in the package:

"scripts":{
  "postInstallAll":"rm base/box.json --force && cp config/ base/config/ --recurse && cp views/ base/views/ --recurse && cp base/ ./ --recurse && rm base/ --recurse --force"
}

This lets us keep our package limited to just the files needed for our application and allows us to use the package management system provided by Forgebox and Commandbox to pull in the necessary core and base files need to complete the framework.

To install

To install this package you'll need to have a running CommandBox installation. Then you can install this package with the following:

box
mkdir cfwheels-hellodynamic --cd
install cfwheels-template-hellodynamic

This could be shortened to a single command run in an empty directory:

box install cfwheels-template-hellodynamic