Pistachio Web Framework

Pistachio is a simple web framework for coldfusion, modelled to a fair extent after the CFML framework Coldbox, the Python framework Django, and the Ruby framework Rails.

Pistachio is a very light framework consisting of some features and conventions cherry picked from existing frameworks and worked into a pill that our existing legacy codebases would find palatable. If you want a full stack web framework written for ColdFusion then I would recommend taking a look at ColdBox (it's the only one I have any experience with), or, if you're not constrained by language choice then I would HIGHLY recommend taking a look at both Rails and Django.

Core principles of Pistachio

Modules, Plugins, Settings, and Forms. that's Pistachio!

Modules very closely resemble Django applications.

Plugins very closely resemble ColdBox plugins.

Settings are worked as a simple, flexible solution to listing a bunch of junk in your Application.cfc

Forms somewhat resemble Django forms, just stripped down, and without the rendering side of things. (I just wanted an easy way to do data validation and wasn't satisfied by the existing options)

Requirements

Pistachio has been written for ColdFusion 9 and nothing else, and has never tested on Railo, or any other CFML engine. You will also need to have the coldfusion dotnet library installed as Pistachio makes use of dotnet regular expressions for routing module requests.

How to setup the example application

You'll need to setup two mappings in your CFIDE administrator for this to work, a /pistachio mapping pointing to the pistachio directory and an /example mapping pointing to the example directory (this second one you can change, however it will mean fiddling with the project settings before you can get the application up and running.)

You'll need to setup a webserver to serve the application, setting the root dir to the example/published directory.

Then you'll just need to open you browser and point it at the location you from which your server is configured to serve the application and you'll be up and running.

What do I look at first?

I would suggest looking first at the example code for the contactform module, you can find it in example/modules/contactform. This should give you an idea of how modules work, and provide a good starting point from which to explore the codebase.

Questions

Send your questions to [email protected].