Spatula Framework

Spatula is a simple ColdFusion MVC framework. The purpose of this framework is to allow an application to serve up content with the following features:

• Application configuration storage and retrieval.
• Object caching and retrieval.
• Support for markup parsing for views.

The name for the framework comes from a comparison that much like a spatula is used to serve up food, a framework is used to serve up content.

Text Parsing

One of the big features baked in to the framework the ability to create views using markup other than HTML to get formatted content. Currently only some simple wiki markup is supported, but additional types of markup are planned.

Wiki Markup Parsing

The wiki parser is based on the markup and behavior from MediaWiki. The supported markup can be found here.

The only difference from a design-standpoint between the wiki markup for the Spatula framework versus what MediaWiki uses is the markup for bold and italic characters.

For example:

MediaWiki Markup

This would be '''bold'''.
This would be ''italic''.

Spatula Wiki Markup

This would be *bold*.
This would be _italic_.

I made this change based on my own experiences with using the MediaWiki markup. Any time I needed to make something bold or italic, I could never remember how many apostrophes to use. The result was I would pick one set, preview the changes, then correct anything that was wrong.

When Google+ came out, I noticed that their markup syntax used * for bold and _ for italic. This was much easier to remember since not only was it different characters completely, but the characters chosen seemed to make sense for the style that came out of it. Later on, I discovered this was also used for Markdown, so I decided I would also use it for my wiki parsing.

Source Code

The Spatula framework can be found in this GitHub repository.