JohnBs personal blog

I got to play with FusionDebug for the first time the other day and i’ve got to say i’m impressed. Since the year dot i’ve lived without step debugging in ColdFusion - it’s always been present in Visual Studio but we were always limited to dotting CFDUMPs around cf templates to aid in debugging. No more…or rather, I’m just catching up!

FusionDebug 2.0 was released not so long ago, I never saw v1.0 but the sales team at Integral say that 2.0 is leaps and bounds better that the first release.

Anyway, my first playing with it was with a Fusebox5 application i was building - I’d set it all up as the instructions say and all worked great, even going cross project in Eclipse to a project of CFCs - as i stepped through code it jumped between my open projects in Eclispe. Anyway, at one point i put a breakpoint in a layout file and that caused FusionDebug issues with looking up the source code - due to the parsed files that Fusebox uses. So i pinged the FusionDebug mailing list and found out about a feature of Eclispe I never knew about - linked folders in projects. It’s only accessible via FILE > NEW > FOLDER and then you click the Advanced button you enter a folder alias but then a path to the folder. In my case, I removed the existing ‘parsed’ folder and added a new parsed folder linked via a UNC path to the parsed folder on the file server - and now when i debug FusionDebug is all happy as it has access to the source code that it requires.

Just in case you haven’t already seen Sean’s post - Fusebox 5.1 beta is available for download at http://www.fusebox.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=downloads.listDownloads so go grab it and give it a try. It contains a number of backwards compatibility tweaks as well something I added to the feature list - the ability to use lexicons/errortemplates and plugins from a mapping or absolute path. This is great for corporate use - because with fb5 we could have multiple FB applications in the same CF application namespace but lexicons/plugins/errortemplates still lived with the application but now with 5.1 we can have a single collection of lexicons, plugins and errortemplates. Great job Sean!!!

When Sean makes the public Beta on Fusebox 5.1 available he’ll also be adding to the release notes to say it’s not compatible with BlueDragon.NET 6.2.1 - due to the new way of determining last modified dates of file on disk using a Java object. Anyway, all is not lost as I’ve just tested it on the upcoming BlueDragon 7 release and it works just fine - and damn is that thing fast!! I’d seen various blog entries recently regarding performance of upcoming BlueDragon, Railo release but hadn’t yet tried it for myself - worth checking out if i were you!!!

For the benefit of those folk that don’t subscribe to Hal Helms’ newsletter (shame on you….) you’ll have missed the annoucement regarding the future of Fusebox

“In recent years, John Quarto-vonTivadar and I have been the “custodians” of Fusebox. As of today, I’m very happy to announce we’re given that trust to TeraTech (www.teratech.com). Michael Smith, CEO, has been a long advocate and contributor to Fusebox and will now hold the reins. John and I will be helping as time allows, but feel certain Michael will do a great job. Special thanks are also due to Sean Corfield and his team of developers who built Fusebox 5.”

All of us closely attached to Fusebox have spoken to Michael regarding the news and all feel that this is excellent news for Fusebox and moving it forward - Michael has long been a promotor of the fLIP methodolody which will I’m sure make a great new custodian of Fusebox - My thanks go to Hal and John for their great work thus far and I’m sure it’s not the last we’ve heard of them with Fusebox!

This message;
This is the template “errortemplates/fusebox.badGrammar.recursiveDo.cfm”
An Error of type “fusebox.badGrammar.recursiveDo” has occurred
Recursive do is illegal
An attempt was made to compile a fuseaction ‘v.intro’ that is already being compiled, in fuseaction v.intro.

had me stumped for a while, I couldn’t figure out what the heck i’d done - turned out I’d dropped my controller circuit.xml.cfm into my views circuit!!! Just a word of warning

If you want to find out what’s new in Fusebox 5 then head over to fusebox.org to find out more.

I thought I’d share my first Fusebox 5 custom verb with you, this mimmicks the behaviour of the cfthrow tag within your circuit.xml.cfm files. Grab it using the download link below.

One of the main reasons I’ve not been blogging all that much about Fusebox for over a year now is because quite simply, I’ve not been using it. Almost all my work has been building sites using our CMS of choice (iCM from Goss interactive) which provides a framework/API to building sites so there has been little need to use Fusebox or indeed any framework. But now I’ve got a growing pile of project specifications for Intranet applications which, despite needing to interface with the intranet can exist as their own entities.

So what’s the problem here? Bearing in mind we’ve got an existing Intranet running in it’s own CF application name with Fusebox4 an application would create a ‘fusebox’ structure in the application scope - all well and good if you’ve only got a single Fusebox application but as soon as you introduce a second Fusebox application then the second Fusebox application will overwrite the first Fusebox application in the application scope. Yes, it was something that could be fixed by ‘tweaking’ the cores but we decided to wait until the cores supported these environments out of the box.

Fusebox 5 now lets you run multiple FB applications without overwriting each other by setting a new variable in your index.cfm;

To confirm this behvaiour I used the Skeleton application (in a folder skeletonA) which just displays how long the application has been running. In the index.cfm supplied with the skeleton application I replaced

with the Fusebox_Application_Key line as above and removed the application.cfm from the folder as the application name was already being set from a parent Application.cfm. I then took a copy of the skeleton folder and named it skeletonB and changed the fusebox_application_key to AppB. So now, hitting either the /skeletonA or /skeletonB showed differing times for how long each application has been running for, and just to be double sure - a cfdump of the application scope shows the two applications living in application.AppA and application.AppB - woooohooo!

If you haven’t checked it out yet check out helmsandpeters.com new podcast. It’s a light hearted discussion on frameworks complete with canned laughter, a doctor…..and is that JohnQ as the receptionist? :). But it certainly leaves you with food for thought!

If you’ve recently created an account on the forums you’ll have found that you can’t login once you’ve registered - not much use huh? Well i’ve just tracked the problem down and fixed it (at last!) so you should be able to login now and post with no problems.