Philosophy
The onTap framework has several key goals:
- Speed and improve rapid application development (RAD) by simplifying common or tedious web development tasks as well as providing convenient methods of accomplishing very complex tasks such as and/or keyword search filtering (this example is from the object-relational mapping (ORM) tool which has split into a separate project called DataFaucet ORM). The use of syntactic sugar is a primary method of achieving this goal.
- Enable better integration and collaboration between separate applications provided by different authors via a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The long-term goal is a software ecosystem similar to add-ons for the Mozilla Firefox browser in which plugin applications can be one-click installed via the existing browser-based interface.
- Enable easier customization of Software as a service (SaaS) applications by separating client customizations into their own directory structures thereby reducing conflicts between potentially incompatible customization requests. This is being described as a virtual private application (VPA) as an analogy to the web hosting term virtual private server (VPS).
These goals are similar to and overlap the intent of agile software development methodologies or the Agile Manifesto seeking a "lightweight" method of software development that can produce versatile working software very quickly.
To meet the objective of simplifying and improving the RAD process, the framework's core principles include Convention over Configuration (CoC) and Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY). One example of CoC and DRY principles can be found in the framework's form features. The form tools allow programmers to omit most of the code required to create common CRUD forms by relying on the database as the single point of truth for information about the type of data managed by the form. The following are examples of a form as created using the CFML native cfform tag as compared to using the onTap framework's CoC / DRY concepts for CRUD forms.
Read more about this topic: On Tap
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