JohnBs personal blog

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!!!!

BarneyB has posted an interesting take on architecting Fusebox 4.1 applications - it’s always interesting to see what other folk are doing and Barney’s post certainly gives you food for though.

Brian Kotek has just published a great Fusebox4.1 sample app based on the same sample application he’s done in Fusebox3, FuseQ, Fusebox4 and now Fusebox4.1 - the bookstore. It’s available to download on his site, here.

Brian uses some of the new XML that was introduced in Fusebox4.1 to invoke CFCs within circuit definition files although i would like to see some of the code he’s used in fusebox.init.cfm to define classes moved into fusebox.xml.cfm and then have CFCs instatiated using the new INSTATIATE verb just to leverage all the new functionality in Fusebox4.1. Great job, Brian!

I have been invited up to Scotland in January to talk at the Scottish CFUG on Fusebox, the tentative date is January 20th so if you’re about in bonnie Scotland, you’re gonna have a welsh man in your city! I’ll post a confirmation when all is confirmed.

Those two pieces of custom lexicon for Fusebox 4.1 are now available for download,

lock.zip
transaction.zip

You’ll need to register a custom lexicon folder in your fusebox.xml file, eg

Where path is the folder name beneath the ‘lexicon’ folder. You would then call the custom lexicon like this:

in your circuit.xml files around the calls you want to be wrapped in a CFLOCK tag. The same applies to the lock lexicon too, there’s a usage note in the header of each file

REMEMBER: Use of these is at your own risk, this feature may and probably will change in later versions of Fusebox

Just in case you haven’t seen we’ve now released the second Fusebox 4.1 beta. It now runs on BlueDragon, i’ve been testing on 6.1 and 6.2 - remember there are some coding differences between CFMX and BD so you’ll need to adhere to them for a fully portable application. Something else you’ll notice is that the core files now only have the major number in the actual filename - this is a convention we needed to adopt now that we’re using a CVS repository. There’s also a DTD for the circuits.xml and fusebox.xml file. Looking at the filestamps in the repository we haven’t touched the actual core files since 15 Oct - incidently this site is always using the most recent copies from the repository!

As far as the stuff we snuck in for Fusebox 4.2, ie the custom lexicon - a number of UDFs have been added as well as new structure fb_.verbinfo which contains info you’ll need to use inside your lexicon verbs, I’ll be updating my lexicon tags i’ve previously posted.

Following a recent email from Hal I’ve now taken over responsiblity for the fusebox.org website revamp that’s been in the works for ages but has never come to life. I’ve been posting quite extensively in the fusebox.org category in the forums seeking input. I’ve started building a wireframe which you can view at http://www.beynon.org.uk/fusebuilder, login as anonymous to view. If you want any input into the project then please get in touch with me.

The conference had ended so a bunch of us including Steve Nelson, Ray Muradez, Perry Woodin headed out to allegedly ‘the best Chinese restaurant’ one of the other guys had ever eaten at. We met Michael Smith in the lobby but despite living in Rockville had never heard of Joe’s Noodle House. It was just a short walk away and soon we were sitting round a table. The menu had only 1 item on it that i recognized from Chinese restaurants in the UK, Crispy Shredded Beef. Ray Muradez took a fancy to the ‘Duck Feet’ in the appetizer section thinking that they couldn’t possibly be real Duck Feet, boy he was wrong! This plate turned up with about 20 yellow cold Duck Feet in a sauce - his comment was “cold, sauce is good, a little chewey and all i can taste is cartelidge!”, only 3 were actually eaten, two by Mike Ricthie. NICE!!! Least he didn’t order the ‘Duck Tongue’ too!

After dining we headed over the road to a well established US chain where waitresses walk round in little shorts and tight tops only to find that unless you carry a USA driving license or a foreign passport they wouldn’t serve you drinks…who visits a foreign country and carries their only ID to get home with them??? In the end the manager came out with a ‘driving licence book’ which had a picture of the UK drivers license and the British Columbia license in so the ale began flowing.

Now for some time now, Steve Nelson and Erik Voldengen have for some strange reason thought that I resemble Harry Potter - Steve persueded our waitress (who also hadn’t heard of the Noodle bar directly opposite!!!) and another to cover my eyes and draw a lightening bolt with a magic marker on my forehead….thanks Steve! I sure got an odd look from the cop in the washroom when i was washing it off! Sorry, no picture evidence sadly the picture didn’t come out!

Time to wrap my reports up from the Fusebox conference with a report from the Sunday.

Despite the  8:30am start Sean Corfield got an excellent turn out at his ‘Blackstone and what is means for Fusebox’ session. It’s really great to see people like Sean coming round to the idea of Fusebox, I remember reading some of his quite critical posts back in 3.0 days but now with 4.0 and 4.1 he’s very enthusiastic about it. As expected Sean did a fine job in a relatively short period of time demonstrating some cool features in Blackstone, the event gateways using a cell phone to update a blog, cfdocument producing PDF/Flashpaper versions of a website and other Blackstone stuff.

Matt Liotta then chaired a Mach-II birds of a feather with Ben Edwards, Hal and Sean. I was a little disappointed as I was expecting it to be a Mach-II primer as it’s not something l’ve had time to look into yet so didn’t pick up much from this session…except that people were talking about listeners and annoucing events, blah blah blah….

The session before lunch, John Paul Ashenfelter gave an inspiring session on ‘Leveraging Java Tools for FB4‘ which has given me plenty of food for thought. He spoke about ANT and how he’s using it for deploying FB4 apps using tasks which (for instance) change the application mode from development to production (he did mention other uses but i’ve forgotten them now ). He went on to speak about logging and leveraging the Jakarta Commons-Logging (JCL) log4j which is already used by MM in CFMX in the CFTRACE tag. John showed a Fusebox4 plugin which he’s written to use log4j for his application logging.

After lunch Matt Liotta chaired a session on Fusebox Tools where Steve Nelson demoed Fusebox Explorer, Wells Burke demoed Adalon 3.0, Mike Ritchie demoed Fusebuilder and Matt demoed He3’s MachII support. The session after, Steve Nelson spoke about ‘Fusedocs in the Real world’ using the clockmakers Tempus and Hora as analogies of how to write code and also a number of examples of how not to document code. Matt then chaired a final session ‘Selling FB’ before Michael Smith wrapped the 2004 conference up and dished out a heap of raffle prizes to those who had filled in the conference surveys and handed their raffle tickets in.

As with previous years the team from Synthis were there with their Adalon product, an *ALL* new 3.0 version. I grabbed a demo disk in between a couple of sessions and i must say i’m very very impressed. It’s fast, easier to use, now supports Fusebox 4.0 (MVC or not). In fact, I built my entire website in it (just for fun) in under an hour (about 4 circuits and 100 fuses) and the code it produced was pretty spot on. You can control application properties from within Adalon, stuff like fuseactionvariables, defaultfuseaction etc (the parameters section of fusebox.xml.cfm). Remember, it is a BETA release, there a number of things missing - eg no plugin control, default fuseaction list returns only fuseaction names (although stores using circuit.fuseaction syntax), I suggested to Wells that it only returns ‘public’ circuits/fuseactions. The forms for data collection are now all defined in simple XML so it’s super fast to customize a form, eg adding contentvariable support to the include verb in 4.1.

If you’ve used a previous version of Adalon then you’re going to be amazed at how much better is 3.0 is - i’d encourage you to check it out on the new Adalon website, www.adalon.net (download still to be released).