For a quick and easy ColdFusion ORM, it’s hard to beat Reactor. The setup and syntax of it are easy to grasp, although more difficult to master. Reactor is based on the Active Record Pattern, a pattern recently popularized by Ruby on Rails. What does that mean exactly? Well it creates object that are used to manage your database objects with relative ease. The heart of a Reactor setup starts with a single, easy to read xml file that sets up the relationships between the objects within your database. The idea is that if a post has multiple comments, you define a “has-many” relationship between posts and comments within this file.

Reactor offers very simple ways of retrieving data from your database. It also offers the ability to retreive these in multiple ways. Want an array of Post objects? Sure! How about a database query with all the post data? No problem! This gives the developer a lot of flexibility out of the gate, and can ease those bottlenecks that can popup when instantiating too many objects at one time in ColdFusion.

One more nicety of Reactor is that it will introspect your database and create validation based on your database column types. You can run these validation rules automatically when an object is saved, and edit what messages each validation rule responds to. This is not just nice for the programmer but nice for the end user as well.

These are the basic building blocks of Reactor, but in my presentation I’ll show how to put them together to create something useful without too much work involved.