upgrade to model-glue unity complete

Last week, my team had Joe Rinehart come to help us upgrade to Model-Glue Unity and to have him experience, if only for five days, a real Minnesota winter!

The application that I work on just plain worked on Model-Glue 2.0! Once we changed the mapping to the new Model-Glue Unity directory, but, because we did not want it to be a legacy application, we moved it to use the Unity core.

Some things I REALLY like about Model-Glue 2.0 (Unity).

1. The new <include /> tag in the ModelGlue.xml file rocks! Before, we had to use the <!ENTITY> tag for including other XML files into the base file. We also had to use ANT to change the pathing when it was pushed to production. No more thanks to the <include /> tag!

2. Having Model-Glue use an already existing ColdSpring bean factory! In the index.cfm page use the built-in configuration setting for Model-Glue like this: <cfset ModelGlue_PARENT_BEAN_FACTORY = application.myBeanFactory />. I load up ColdSpring in my Application.cfc and just have Model-Glue load itself into that same bean factory, and now it also has access to all of the beans in that bean factory!

3. And finally, I like that Model-Glue uses ColdSpring to configure itself and load itself into memory. To me it just makes more sense and rather than have a separate set of config settings, why not use ColdSpring to do it for you!

So now, my application has been migrated to Model-Glue Unity and the regression testing is going very well, actually I have not found one issue with the upgrade. As we are probably one of the last teams to upgrade to Model-Glue Unity, none of this will shock anyone, but if there are others out there who have not upgraded, it is worth the little time it takes to do the upgrade.