Frameworks and the GenericBean

As I am working on the application framework that I mentioned before, I noticed that I started repeating myself. Looking into other frameworks like Model-Glue you notice that there is a generic way of getting information out of an object (like the Event Object) so, for the configuration I created a GenericBean. This Generic bean can be initialised with a structure of key/value pairs, you can get a value, if the key doesn’t exist, it returns a empty string.

Bearing that in mind, I had other objects I started creating (lets call them Transfer Objects, they just carry some data from one place to another) and I realised that even though I started doing things like:

	<!--- insert gettters and setters here --->

</cfcomponent> </code> (the code above is just to give you an idea) Now, this was a bit annoying, I mean, it is just another transfer object, so out of coding lazyness I used a my GenericBean, I mean which code is "better"?

<cfset Age = Bob.getAge()> or <cfset Age = Bob.getValue('age', 0)>

</code>

I find the second more dynamic, it also allows me to set a default and this is coming in very handy.

I know it then stops you doing things like type checking, but then again, I could add a method (which I shall do later today) such as bob.isValid(stValidations) where stValidations is a structure with the keys/valuetypes that it should hold.

<cfset stValidations = StructNew()>

<cfset bValid = bob.isValid(stValidations)> </code>

What do people thing of this approach to coding? Should I make Bob and object? Or does a generic bean work for you?

(I should say that as an afterthought, I could store the validations in the BOB object so that later on I can validate it)