What is LightFront?
LightFront stands for Lightweight Front-end controller. That's LightFront's name, and that's what it's designed to be.
LightFront is designed to be an extremely lightweight controller when compared to some of CFML's major frameworks, such as Mach-ii, Model Glue, Fusebox/FuseNG and ColdBox.
It is similar in some ways and very different in others to Sean Corfield's recently created FW1 framework.
LightFront is designed to be light in setup. There is no XML controller/config file, such as Mach-ii, Model Glue and the XML-based Fusebox have (no-XML Fusebox is similar to LightFront, although heavier). Instead, you set your configs in Application.cfc. The framework has defaults, so only set the ones you need.
For more, check out Brian Meloche's Blog, where he goes into LightFront.
FAQ
The FAQ's are a work in progress... Some of these may be not found, incomplete or out of date...
- What is LightFront?
- What are LightFront's features?
- How is LightFront different than other MVC frameworks?
- What are "Flexible Conventions"? Why do I care?
- How do I install LightFront?
- What do I need to configure in LightFront? Where? How?
- Some frameworks require you to know a lot of extras to use them. What functions or commands do I need to learn for LightFront?
- How do I setup my LightFront controllers?
- How do I define my actions?
- What is callAction()?
- How do I call views directly as events?
- What is displayView()?
- What is relocate? Is that like <cflocation>?
- What about LightFront and ColdSpring or Lightwire?
- What about LightFront and ORM, like Reactor, Transfer, DataMgr, DataFaucet and ColdFusion 9's Hibernate functionality?
- How do you call the model from LightFront?
- I see that LightFront can support switch controllers, like Fusebox 2 & 3 had. Does this mean that LightFront is 100% Fusebox 3 compatible?
- Are views an example of conventions?
- I don't like all of my pages going through index.cfm or whatever I've called the default cfm page. Can I still use LightFront?
- What about calling LightFront events from a view page, either in or out of the framework?
- Can LightFront handle search engine safe (SES) URL's?
- Download the zip file.
- Browse the LightFront repository
- Follow the LightFront Framework on Twitter!