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Brad Wood

January 18, 2016

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There are a lot of people out there in the CFML world managing legacy codebases.  Some of them use frameworks that are no longer maintained, and many  use no framework at all.  A common question that I get is whether an app can be slowly converted over to  ColdBox without having to rewrite everything at once.  The answer is YES!  ColdBox will comfortably live alongside your legacy code, giving you the chance to slowly convert it over as you get the chance.  

Since this has come up at conferences and in the CFML Slack team so often I created a demo app that shows legacy pages living alongside MVC as well as some tricks to even keep you old files in the URL even though the requests are being routed through a modern MVC framework.  This can be important for companies dealing with a lot of bookmarked pages out there.

The code is on GitHub here:

https://github.com/bdw429s/coldbox-legacy-app-demo

 To get this working sample app  up and running literally in seconds, even on a computer with no server installed, just grab CommandBox and run the following commands from the interactive shell:

mkdir coldbox-legacy-app-demo --cd
install bdw429s/coldbox-legacy-app-demo
server start

In a few seconds a browser window will open and you can click around through the menu items, reading the descriptions on each page that details how it works.  Then peruse through the small codebase to see how everything is set up.

There's many ways to set up ColdBox MVC inside your legacy application, and hopefully this sample app will give you some ideas and understanding to get underway.

 

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