In my previous post on porting one of my Fusebox applications over to ColdBox, one of my readers asked the question in the comments: "Hey Russ, Curious as to why you are porting from Fusebox to Coldbox? What about Coldbox do you like more than Fusebox if anything?" I actually started replying to his question in the comments and then I realized I had about 3 paragraphs in my reply already and this might get buried in the comments. So I decided to make it a post to explain my reasons for choosing to use ColdBox over Fusebox for this application and most all of my new applications.

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In my previous post of this series I showed you how I ported my Fusebox 5 controllers over to Coldbox event handlers. It was quite an easy task and didn't take much time at all. In this post I want to show you a few changes that I made to my views when porting this particular application. Now I will mostly be focusing on CRUD type views from the admin system since this is where most of the work was involved. Before we talk about views though, let me take a few minutes and talk about some of the things that I do in my Fusebox apps that have made porting to Coldbox VERY easy. First, I always use MVC patterns. That is, I separate my business logic from my views and I use controllers to handle tying them together. This has always been a strong point in Fusebox and one of the things that has kept me using it for so long. By doing this, its much easier to port components of your application to other frameworks. If you have queries intermingled in your views its going to be much harder and more time consuming to port.

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I started poking around Coldbox a couple months ago but only had enough time to see how it operates from a 10,000 foot view. So I decided that I wanted to take another crack at it and really see what it was all about. I figured the best way to do that was to port one of my existing Fusebox 5 apps over to Coldbox so I could get a good comparison. After creating a new application via the Coldbox dashboard and importing it into CFEclipse, I was on my way to porting bliss. In my opinion, the two frameworks aren't really all that different. Of course I develop all of my Fusebox applications using MVC so that helps quite a bit. One of the biggest differences that I noticed right away is that Fusebox 5 uses XML based controllers where Coldbox uses CFC based controllers. I have to admit after writing literally thousands of XML fuseaction's over the last couple years, I am finding myself smiling every time I write a new method in one of my event handlers for Coldbox. This has been the one single feature of Fusebox that has bugged the crap out of me since it was introduced. And to be fair, I know that Sean Corfield and Team Fusebox are working hard on the new Fusebox 5.5 release which will allow you to use CFC based controllers. Going into a full feature comparison is beyond the scope of this post so lets look at a couple examples of what I did when porting my application over to Coldbox.

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My first release of the Fusebox 5 Illudium-PU36 templates has some issues. Actually, somehow I managed to upload the wrong zip file! I have updated the templates a bit more today to work out-of-the-box with the Fusebox 5.1 skeleton application and uploaded a new zip file which you can download from the software pod on the right or here: Fusebox5 Illudium Templates. Sorry about the mix-up. Stay tuned for a screencast on how easy it is to generate these CRUD operations.

After releasing my templates, I decided I would throw together a quick screencast on how easy it is to generate CRUD operations using the templates and the Fusebox 5.1 skeleton application. Be kind, its my first screencast ever. BTW, IShowU for Mac ROCKS! and at $20, it simply cannot be beat! Watch it on YouTube or you can view the uncompressed original recording using Quicktime here (16MB).