Up until now I had not come across any bugs in CF8 which would force me to upgrade to CF8.0.1, but I did earlier this week.

The bug was in onMissingMethod and came to light when I installed Bob Silverberg's ValidateThis! framework.

I'm running Windows XP and unfortunately my attempt to upgrade to CF8.0.1 failed and I had to do an uninstall and reinstall. The Uninstall also failed which then led me down the horrible route to registry editing. I always feel a little sick when doing things with regedit as its a bit like doing brain surgury in the mirror. One false move and you're dead!

Anyway its all over now and the ValidateThis! demo runs on my desktop machine. I am trying some new ideas in the scaffolding which will build validate this into one of the template sets.

On Thursday 17th i will be giving a short presentation on Fusebox Scaffolding to the CFMeetup Online ColdFusion User Group.

Its a preview of a longer presentation I will be doing at CFUnited Europe on 12th and 13th March 2008.

If you would like to see it please sign up at CF Meetup site.

I finally got time to work on this again after a few weeks of hectic madness, which included passing my Coastal Skipper exam and visiting my sister for a weekend. I spent Sunday afternoon and yesterday evening generating code using the ColdSpring Templates and finding the bugs in the generated code. Then I found the place where the bug was generated and fixed the template.

Its quite tedious as on my laptop it takes a couple of minutes to regenerate the application with my test database.

I have uploaded what I have done so far to SVN as it makes my life easier to download it all from SVN onto the various machines I have to test it on. There are probably still bugs in the ColdSpring templates and I know that in the process I have broken the Reactor Templates.

I also changed the order that code is generated in. This is mostly for my own benefit as I was finding it difficult to find things. In the past code in the circuit.xml file was generated in order of fuseaction then object. Now its in alphabetic order of object then fuseaction. This means that all the fuseactions related to a particular object are next to each other.

The new Fusebox 5.5 will be realesed on December 1st so I am working to get my changes and fixes complete by them but I suspect the scaffolding will still be in Beta at that point as I haven't had as much opportunity to test as I would have liked. I been installing new servers or updating old code to later versions of CF rather than developing new code.

You can get the latest code version from SVN at: http://svn.fuseboxframework.org/framework/branches/dev/extensions/scaffolding

A couple of fixes have been posted to the scaffolding code alpha on the fusebox website. The most important was a missing template file for the coldSpring templates.

Anoter addition is the documentation which got missed off the original release. The word doc contains instructions on how to write your own templates. It still has some big omissions and will be updated with a complete API in future releases.

There is still an unfortunate need to change the directory that the code is installed in, but I am planning to fix that by the time the next release is available. For the present please be sure to read the readme.txt file.

If you do experience any issues please try to be specific about the problem, as I can't help if you tell me only that it does not work. If you need help please send me a copy of the error message and it also helps if you can send a copy of the generated sacffolding.xml file too.

Remember this is still an alpha version so all bugs are not yet found and tracked down.

Good Luck!

If you read Part 2 of the series you might have seen Peter Bell's comment about the best way to use the code generated by scaffolding. Ok, so wouldn't it be great if the scaffolding was good enough to use without any change? Unfortunately the current templates available with the Fusebox scaffolder are likely to produce code that is less than complete. There are several areas where you will find it possible to improve the code. Lets look at each in turn because this situation is one where the answer may vary slightly in each case.

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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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