Fusebuilder has been around for a while now - essentially it’s a web based Fusebox application builder. You can start by building your wireframe and then take the project right through to architecting individual fuses. Being web based obviously has distinct advantages, I can be sitting at my desk and being working on a wireframe whilst in a conference call with clients who are looking at the same wireframe as i build it on my website.
Over the past few days I’ve been talking with the creator of Fusebuilder, Mike Ritchie on MSN Messenger and he’s been kind enough to show me the next installment of Fusebuilder - wow, it’s impressive! Being as Fusebox 4.1 is about to release Fusebuilder has been upgraded to take advantage of all the new features in Fusebox. It’s been an interesting couple of days as I’ve been building a project on one of Mike’s servers and then when i run into a problem or something that doesn’t quite work right he nips in, jigs the code for Fusebuilder and i carry on - for more major problems he works on them in the evening whilst I’m asleep (the joy of cross time zone developing) and then it’s all fixed for me in the morning whilst he’s sleeping.
Right, so if you’ve never seen Fusebuilder, here’s a look at a typical fusebuilder screen
In the screenshot above you can see ‘blog’ circuit beneath the controller along with the fuseactions that exist within the circuit. Circuits and fuseactions can be added using the links in the side bar or by using keyboard short cuts eg, to add a new circuit just press ‘c’ and if you want a new fuseaction just press ‘f’. If you go into a fuseaction you see the following:
What you now see is all the ‘elements’ that make up the particular fuseaction, in this case blog.show - what’s really nice is the ‘Preview Fusebox Code’ link which as expected will show you the code that will be generated when you generate code - which incidently can be either PHP of CF in various guises of Fusebox.
In the fuseaction screenshot above you’ll see an INVOKE and that’s where things start getting fun. What you can now do in Fusebuilder is register CFC’s so they appear in the CLASS element in your fusebox.xml.cfm, but Fusebuilder goes one step further and allows you to actually register methods (complete with arguments) that exists in your CFCs - the idea is that when you generate code ’stub’ CFCs will be created for you *OR* if you’ve got existing CFCs you will be able to import them into Fusebuilder for use in your application design
Here’s a couple of CFCs I’ve started to define (just for testing) along with a couple of methods and the arguments they take. So now, when I add an element in to a Fuseaction we see the available element types;
Selecting an INVOKE element takes us to this screen;
You can see all the CFCs and associated methods are retrieved allowing the developer to select which ever they require. On selecting a particular method Fusebuilder prompts you for whatever arguments are required for that CFC as previously defined.
Notice here, I’m now prompted for a blogID argument. That is just cool!!!!
Fusebuilder uses a similar technique for custom lexicon - we register our individual pieces of lexicon along with parameters they take
so then when we add a Custom Lexicon element to a particular fuseaction we can only add predefined pieces of lexicon and make sure an attributes that are required are entered.
So that’s a brief look at what’s to come and it sure is looking rosy for Fusebuilder. At the moment you can download the Fusebox4 version, Fusebuilder is honourware so if you download it you’ll get the full version but if you like it you’re expected to pay for it. The new FuseBuilder for Fusebox 4.1 has taken a stricter approach, but any previous license purchases will be honoured towards the full price of the 4.1 version. Talking with Mike he’s also considering a new ’subscriber’ based model so developers don’t need it installed locally - develop on his servers, generate a project and out pops a ZIP file containing all the stubs etc.
In all the excitment I forget to mention one important thing, Fusebuilder does not use a database - project information is saved into a file on the server so they’re fully portable between Fusebuilder installations!!!!
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