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My Experience with Plum

by Stephen Ansari

The impression I received when I first heard about Plum was that it did everything, it came with hundreds of tutorials, and that you had better read the instructions for this is not something to jump right into. This did not sound appealing to a seasoned developer who's been around the business a while. I've been to seminars, workshops and user groups, and every time it's the same story: promises of free code, do-it-all widgets and online resources that solve every problem. But every so often - as a result of either clever marketing or perhaps my persistence to believe there are still truly great, free products out there - I look a little more deeply.

I had a prototype due in two days for a real-estate application to showcase a new approach to online mapping. It needed module-level security, roles-base user administration and quite a bit of heavy-lifting functionality. This was a proof-of-concept site, completed rather quickly, using an arsenal of smoke and mirrors, hard-coded fixes and beloved all-out fakes. A perfect opportunity to try out PLUM, but I would be too busy rolling up my sleeves trying to get this application from magic show to the production server.

So I settled on giving Plum a busy man's run for the money. I downloaded the .exe, didn't read one readme and began a journey that would last two days. This was Beta version 6.

The initial setup walks a user through several questions and procedures. You name your application and point to a database; it has cute screenshots of CF administrator, webserver, etc., showing what to fill in. Done. Eight minutes had passed since I downloaded the exe, and the button on the page said, "proceed to website".

As a skeptic, I opened up the directory only to find everything laid out like a military inspection (components, custom tags, layouts, verity, etc.). There were also several familiar folders related to my application: PropertyMapping and BluePointMaps. But what about my actual application - the core of which was not even written in ColdFusion but rather several dot net webservices?

That is when I realized that this lineup of directories was really a roadmap to customization. I added a ColdFusion component of my own to handle all of the BluePoint Map webservice calls; I wrapped my existing CF pages with the Plum-created header and footer tags, and I added links to these pages on the navigation template. Finally after all that time - 30 minutes so far - I truly saw the beauty and simplicity of Plum. I had a working application with correctly written user management, admin site, exception handling and Verity, all with my own application logic seamlessly integrated, and I hadn't even opened up the database.

Of course, automation is the bane of flexibility and customization. This site would not do for my client as is. The large real estate company had strict style guides, precision headers and footers with an array of client-side DHTML menus. The PLUM-created forms - while they worked perfectly - were not formatted to client specs. I met up with the old conundrum: you build something so modular and so reusable, and you end up with something so inflexible and not very useable. So I turned to the tutorials to see if I missed anything and alas I had missed something big. That peculiar layout folder I had seen earlier would be the answer to this client's design needs as well as a boost to my bottom line.

Plum allows you to add your own front end and, more importantly, to create multiple layouts easily by just copying the standard layout. Every layout you create has its own headers, footers and navigation templates, its own image and js directories and its own collection of stylesheets. I quickly was able to import all of the client's front-end code, and now I could easily roll this parcel-mapping engine to various clients without touching any of the core code. Simply drop a different layout in for each client and the application is affectionately skinned to suit. (All of this information can be found in the tutorials that come with the Plum help tool.)

I have not touched more than twenty percent of what Plum says it can do, but that is the point. I am very busy at Blue Raster working with new on-demand mapping technologies, so having a tool that does so much without requiring I learn hundreds of tags is ideal. Plum lays out all the code intuitively, and all of Plum's custom tags come with GUI tag editors, so when I feel like tinkering, I don't have to look up the reference guide, I just right click and modify as needed.

I would recommend PLUM to anyone with some knowledge of ColdFusion, and at some level even to users who want to learn ColdFusion. The hundreds of pages of code that PLUM generates are in themselves a training class on ColdFusion best practices. They'll teach you user management, bulletproof exception handling, isolation of display and business processes and even how to lay out a site correctly using CSS.

Applications built with PLUM and showcasing Blue Raster's BluePoint Map technology, as well as an all-new www.blueraster.com built with PLUM, will be going live soon.

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Stephen Ansari is Vice President of Blue Raster LLC. Blue Raster provides custom ColdFusion/.Net web applications and interactive mapping services for every industry with specialized solutions for real estate, travel and retail clients.

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