Building CF Applications with Fusebox Steve Nelson CTO, Zero-G Commerce, Inc. member, Team Allaire Chairman of Fusebox.org

A CF Programmer’s Dream World... Imagine if….  you could work in a team of developers and have all the code look like it was written by single person.  you could understand the structure of your co- workers code in 5 minutes, without asking questions  you could concentrate on solving the problem instead of thinking about how to write the application

What is Fusebox?  A Structured application architecture for building ColdFusion applications  Created by the ColdFusion community for the ColdFusion community  The best part…. It’s free

Why use a Structured Architecture?  File based applications get messy, a structured architecture helps to clean this up.  Multiple person development  Instant documentation of your architecture  Solve the problem instead of the Application’s Architecture

Before You Write Any Code  Talk to the client (or boss) about general ideas  Write down these ideas into a loose Specification  Create a tight specification from the loose specification, this means figure out all the sections of the application and all the actions required to do everything the client wants to do  Repeat this process until every action in the application is understood by everyone involved

Create the Directory Structures  Use the Tight Specification to figure out all the sections of the application.  Each section is given it’s own directory, each of these sections are known as “Circuit Applications”  Circuit Application - This is a section of the overall Home application example:

Create the Index.cfm Files  Every directory (Circuit application) has an index.cfm file  Index.cfm controls all the FuseActions of that circuit application  Is basically a single statement with multiple statements  Each CFCASE is a different FuseAction

Create the Fuseactions  A Fuseaction is made up of one or more.cfm files  Determine what types of files (display/action/query) are needed to create each Fuseaction  Create a CFCASE statement for each Fuseaction and CFINCLUDE each necessary file.

File Naming Convention (Fuses)  app_globals.cfm - Global variables, one per Home application  app_locals.cfm - Local variables, one per Circuit application  dsp_filename.cfm - Display files  act_filename.cfm - Action files  qry_filename.cfm - Query files

Create the Necessary Files (Fuses)  All links and forms in the display files should point to one of the index.cfm files in the application, not to the specific dsp or act files  All links and forms must specify which Fuseaction they point to  Use the “attributes” scope instead of form/url scope this allows you to call the index.cfm file as a custom tag (This is for advanced Fusebox techniques)

Putting it all Together  One Home application is made up of many smaller Circuits applications  One Circuit application is made up of a directory of files, it must contain an app_locals.cfm and index.cfm file plus other display/action/query files  One Index.cfm file is made up of one or more Fuseactions  One Fuseaction includes one or more display/action/query files plus any necessary CFML logic

Conclusion: Why use Fusebox  Fusebox is most likely very similar to how you may already build an application, thus it will be easy to learn  It is a well thought out process, and will continue to be improved by the CF community  It’ll save you time, which will save you money  Most importantly it will prevent hair loss.