So you want to use an architecture to avoid those nightmares. Unfortunately its not easy to get started. Unlike building a single page web site you have to create a lot of stuff before you even see anything. In Fusebox 5.1 with MVC you have to create a view directory with a dsp_ fuse, a controller directory with a circuit.xml, in the root goes a fusebox.xml and you define your application name in index.cfm before you get close to seeing the magic words "Hello World". If the words are going to come from a database you have to create a model directory and a qry_ fuse too.

So what if your application does more than output "Hello World"?

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Yesterday at MAX Sean Corfield announced the release of Fusebox 5.5 Public Beta.

There is a new page on the Fusebox web site with links to all the modules.

One of the modules vailable on the beta page is my scaffolding code which is not strictly a Beta as its currently in Alpha. If you would like to take part in Alpha testing please let me know. I am keen to see people using the tool to generate applications and to get as many of the bugs as possible in the current code tracked down before we start adding the features for the next Alpha 2 version which should include some other databases.

Sean has also put the Fusebox 5.5 release notes on Share so demostrating the usefulness of the new service.

You need scaffolding!

So you read something somewhere that said you should be using scaffolding and want to know how? Let me tell you a story.

ColdFusion has been developed to make creating applications easier right?

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I had some time this weekend to do more on the scaffolding project. I know its been slow but I seem to have too many things to do and often when there is time there may be none of the inclination which is needed for good code.

Anyway for an update I decided that Reactor was a problem with no solution in many ways. There is really no way to do some of the things I wanted to in Reactor, so I decided to take another route and generate all the DB access code myself. I've spent a few days over the last three weeks creating templates for all the usual DAO, Gateway, object, service and so on.

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OK, So I know you think I spent the summer enjoying myself and forgot all about Fusebox Scaffolding!

Actually spent a lot of it in my Girlfriends Bathroom where I fitted a new Bathroom Suite with help from a plumber. On top of that the expected flow of work did not slow down.

One customer who have been using CF5 for many years finally decided to upgrade to CF7 a week after CF8 was released. So we have been installing a bunch of CF7 instances and also getting out first CF8 customer going.

Enough of the excuses....

This week I finally got around to working out how to make the Scaffolding work with multiple sets of templates and moved the existing reactor templates to a subdirectory of the templates directory so that there can be any number of templates for different purposes or frameworks.

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Michael asked us all to discuss three questions with two of our neighbours in the conference.

• What do I want to get out of the conference?
• What needs to change in web development?
• What can I do to improve the web?

We were also asked to contribute the answers to the survey on the CFUnited web site. Michael will report back on the themes he discovers from the answers posted.

One of the great things that has been growing on the web is use of wikis. CFUnited has a wiki and the team has set up a wiki for the conference. All attendees were invited to contribute to the wiki and link their conference notes.

Michael announced the new Fusebox web site and thanked the mebers of Team Fusebox fro their work on the web site and the new version of Fusebox (5.5) which is now in Alpha.

Michael also asked people to contribute their photographs to the CFUnited group on Fliker.

Originally many sites on the web told you what to do. Now you often combine your input with others to create web content on a site. More users are getting involved with web applications such as You Tube and Second Life. Michael highlighted Spiral Dynamics as a technology for thinking about the future of the web.

There are only two hours left before the contest closes, so if you're thinking of entering you better be quick.

There are now four pages of entries and they all look great to me. I don't envy the judges.

There have been lots of nice entries in the Fusebox WebSite Design Contest.

You can see them at: http://trac.fuseboxframework.org/fusebox/wiki/WebsiteDesignContestEntries1 and http://trac.fuseboxframework.org/fusebox/wiki/WebsiteDesignContestEntries2

There's only a 6 days left so if you are thinking of entering get in quick.

In case you didn't see it. There is a design contest being run to develop a new look and feel for the new Fusebox web site which is in development.

If you feel like trying your hand at a design you already have some stiff competition.

Introduction

This document is a proposed specification for a Fusebox plug-in which will allow a basic maintenance application to be created for a database table. The application will provide facilities to list records from the table, to display individual records, to add, edit and delete records.

The scaffolder is intended to be the first of a number of applications that will provide a facility to generate code automatically, based on a high-level domain specific language.

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