Poor, Slightly Misunderstood, Squidhead

I finally got around to listening to the ColdFusion Weekly Podcast on February 12th. Squidhead was mentioned – WoooHooo! Wait a minute from the description it seems like Squidhead just creates CRUD + list stored procedures. The key to my disappointment is the word “just.” Squidhead doesn’t just generate stored procedures. It also reads in stored procedures that you create. So sure, it scaffolds the basic CRUD and list actions building stored procedures and CFC’s but also builds CFML from user defined stored procedures.

So for example, you have a table, person, with columns personid, username, password, first and last name. You run Squidhead once, you get the 4 CRUD procs, plus a DAO CFC to call them, then you get a list proc, plus a gateway CFC to call them. But then you go back and write a procedure “usp_person_select_by_username” because you would rather do that then select by identity. You run Squidhead again; it adds “select_by_username” function to the person DAO CFC.

But let’s take it one step further, suppose you write a stored procedure named “usp_person_auth” that takes the username and password and checks them as an authentication routine. Run Squidhead again. You’ll now have an “auth” function in your person gateway CFC.

The idea here is to do the database work in the database, and not have to do the manual work of writing the cfml calling code. Sure, it creates stored procedures, and that is a leg up, but it also lets those of us that like starting in the database an even higher leg up… (not sure if that’s the right modification of that metaphor.)

Anyway, don’t take this as a swipe at Matt and Peter. I’m glad to have some exposure in the ColdFusion Weekly Podcast. It’s my bad that I haven’t been publicizing Squidhead better.

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