tracker issue : CF-3036944

Problem:

I believe restructuring of ColdFusion administrator settings (and the resources they describe) into a standardised model of resources, resource settings, resource security, resource monitors and resource apis would be allow a radical simplification and improvement of ColdFusion Adminstrator programming, maintenance, extensibility and flexibility.

At the moment in ColdFusion Administrator we manage an array of settings and configuration of internal and external resources - These include database connection settings, mail server connection settings, verity collections etc. New features commonly require more settings and have a knock on effect to requiring changes to the API, security model, administrator api and possibly even the server monitor.

Some settings are specifiable when the functionality is invoked in a tag; Others can only be specified on the tag, and can not be defined in Administrator. This is inconsistent. Sandbox security is resource based for datasources and all-or-nothing for every other tag. The Admin API varies in method signatures and base CFCs between the different addressible settings. The server monitor only monitors one type of configurable resource - datasources - whereas other remote resources play an increasingly large part in application performance. There is no way for ColdFusion administrator extensions to extend the Settings engine and take advantage of CAR files etc, nor for Server Administrators to abstract resource details from Programmers (and thus ensuring flexibility and deployability).

These are just a few of the inconsistencies and inefficiencies in the handling of Administrator settings and resources. I believe a fresh look at how resources and settings are handled in ColdFusion administrator - and especially at the aspects that are common to each resource type (security, api, the actual settings storage and serialisation, application/sandbox/invocation based overrides, etc) would yield a reduction in ongoing maintenance and support of the interface, a decrease in the cost of making changes as well as improving options for extensibility and future improvements.

This may enable (based on the implementation):-
- Standardised security with resource level granularity
- Standardised API for retrieving and saving configuration settings
- No additional changes to security, sandbox, CAR, application deployment sections as other features are added
- Enhanced server management and app deployment through application resource abstraction
- Extensibility and re-use of storage, security, api and common infrastructure. ColdFusion Adminstrator extensions become a lot more powerful.
- Standardised remote access
- Exposure of non-DB datasource resources to server monitoring

Related Requests

Create a standardised approach to allowing explicit resource identification on individual tags with the appropriate defaults that may be defined at the application, sandbox and server (administrator) level. (App Specific Tag Defaults ER #72305 )

Standardise and open the format of ColdFusion Administrator settings files for better server and application level management (ER #73421)

Roll into this model additional resource types and settings already requested (LDAP ER #72681 and Exchange Connection ER #72690  )


Method:


Result:

----------------------------- Additional Watson Details -----------------------------

Watson Bug ID:	3036944

External Customer Info:
External Company:  
External Customer Name: Ben Davies
External Customer Email: 447227C844C7765A992015A8
External Test Config: 12/03/2008

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