I've been using Brian Rinaldi's Illudium code generator for a while now and I would be lying if I said it hasnt saved me TONS of time in writing alot of repetitive code. Since almost all of my projects are in Fusebox, I decided to write myself some Fusebox 5 XSL templates for the generator when I started working on Trac_Fu to handle most of the CRUD stuff for me. These templates generate the following files for a database table:

• Controller Circuit.xml.cfm
• View Circuit.xml.cfm
• List Page
• Form Page (handles creation and editing)
• Bean cfc
• Service cfc
• DAO cfc
• Gateway cfc
• Coldspring config

Keep in mind that just as Brian states, Illudium is not designed to generate a complete application and these templates follow that same direction. However, you should be able to generate the files and have a working set of CRUD files when added to a Fusebox 5 application. If you have any suggestions for the templates or ideas on how to improve them, or run into any problems please let me know as Im always up for improving them! Download them from the Software Pod on the right or grab them here: Fusebox5 Illudium Templates UPDATE: This link has been updated, the first release files has some major issues.

I've been using Fusebox for well over 6 years now. Its the only framework I have have ever used when developing applications for clients or myself. Its served its purpose well and has always seemed to fit my needs. However, lately I have been running into some things that are frustrating me about it. Mostly when it comes to working with other frameworks for CFC's and throwing in an ORM here and there. I have been working on an application over the last month or two that I wrote in FB5 and ColdSpring. At first it was fine. Mostly due to the custom lexicons written by Nathan Strutz to instantiate ColdSpring and get beans from the factory right in the XML control file. Then after seeing Mark Mandels Breezo on the Transfer ORM, I decided I wanted to give it a whirl and throw it into the mix. Now this is where things started to get interesting (read aggravating).

Read more...

Im a recent CFEclipse convert. I have tried to make myself use it many times before but after a few days I didnt feel like I was being very productive so I would always go back to either Homesite+ or DreamWeaverMX and never look back. Over the last 2 weeks I installed CFEclipse and removed DreamweaverMX and Homesite from my box completely in an attempt to "make" myself get used to coding in it. At first it was a little rough as usual, but once I started playing with all of the settings and tweaking things the way I want it, I really found myself enoying using it. I have found a few plugins that make it easier to do some development and discovered a few tweaks that really helped me to get over the "hump". I will be doing a few entries of some of the things that I have found to make my life a little easier with Eclipse. Today after talking with a few guys on the Fusebox 5 mailing list and playing with the code coloring options, I finally found a way to get my fusebox.xml.cfm and circuit.xml.cfm files to use syntax highlighting. By default Eclipse just uses the CFEclipse editor for them since there is a file type of *.cfm in the file associations preferences. So I thought that I could just add a new file association called *.xml.cfm and point it to my xmlbuddy plugin editor. Well that didnt work. So after maybe 30 minutes of digging through settings, I realized that you could put a whole filename into the file associations and assign an editor to it. So I added both of those file names and assigned xmlbuddy as the editor. Now my xml configs in fusebox are all syntax highlighted! Stay tuned for more.

Sean Corfield has just released the first "official" build of the brand spanking new Fusebox 5 core files. You can download them at Fusebox.org. There is also a skeleton application offered up for download on the same page to help kick start your first FB5 project. I have been working behind the scenes on a Bug/Issue tracking system written in ColdFusion that is basically a port of Trac and its using FB5 as the framework. All the development so far was based on a general release candidate build that Sean sent me a few weeks ago and so far it has been rock solid. I really like some of the new features that were added and the cool thing is that FB 4.1 apps are completely backwards compatible!! What are you still doing here??? Go grab the files and start coding something!!