An Architect's View

RTW - Reinventing The Wheel - is normally a bad thing. I'm said several times that the main reason we have no truly great open source software in ColdFusion is because when we see an open source project that doesn't do what we need, we go off and build our version, which we may or may not open source, instead of collaborating on the existing project to make it better.

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I spent an afternoon with the extremely smart, creative folks at Blue River Interactive today, the minds behind the wonderful Mura Content Management System. We mostly focused on the FW/1 Plugin Template they've created, looking at ways to make it easier to use for Mura developers.

The end result was a couple of enhancements, one suggested by Steve Withington (thank you!) and one suggested by Matt Levine of Blue River, and a new version of the FW/1 Plugin Template on the Mura App Store (version 1.1). If you're building plugins for Mura and you're looking for a little structure, take a look at this plugin. The familiar $ object that provides access to the whole Mura ecosystem is now available directly in FW/1 views and layouts so the techniques you've learned for working with Mura in display objects can be applied to plugins you create with FW/1. Similarly, techniques you've learned for FW/1 - such as relying on the buildURL() and redirect() APIs - will work seamlessly in the Mura plugin, both in the admin and in user-facing pages.

I've posted the PDFs of my two CFUnited 2010 talks on my Presentations page.

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If you're at CFUnited, swing by Potomac A on Friday at 5:30pm for our Birds of a Feather session:

FW/1 (Framework One) is a relatively new framework but rapidly gaining mindshare. It's designed to be simple to use, just like ColdFusion itself! Come to this session and hear how people are using FW/1 in production and what's coming in version 2.0. We'll discuss best practices, look pragmatically at migrating legacy applications to FW/1 and gather all your feedback for 2.0 and beyond. We might even talk about DI/1, the extremely lightweight dependency injection / inversion of control framework that will accompany FW/1 2.0!

From the CFUnited website.

Now that the Saturday schedule is available on the CFUnited site, I can confirm that I'm speaking three times in total:

• Thursday 9:00am - ColdFusion and the Open Source Landscape
• Friday 2:00pm - FW/1: The Invisible Framework
• Saturday 4:00pm - ColdFusion and the Open Source Landscape

Two FW/1 users ran into a problem with error handling where methods from the wrong subsystem could be called if an exception occurred. I considered this an important enough issue to provide hotfixes for previous releases. You can now download tagged releases for 1.0.1 and 1.1.1 which incorporate the error handling changes into the earlier releases (1.0, 1.1). I have to say, git made that very easy since I was able to create a hotfix-1.0.1 branch from the v1.0 tag, apply the changes, tag it as v1.0.1 and then apply those same fixes to the hotfix-1.1.1 branch (from the v1.1 tag) and tag that as v1.1.1 and also master (what will become 1.2).

Based on my experience with this, I'll probably move to adopt the git branching model described on Vincent Driessen's blog. That'll mean that the default download will become the stable branch (master) and there will be a new develop branch which represents the bleeding edge. Given that 1.2 is already in progress, I'll probably defer that change until 1.2 goes Gold on master.

The latest stable release of Framework One is now available for download from github! The previous stable release is still available on that page.

This release features a large number of enhancements suggested by the community including:

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I just updated this site with the latest FW/1 build and the latest public BER Railo build. Mango powers this blog but FW/1 powers the rest of this site.