An Architect's View

I've been asked this several times recently so I figured it was worth a blog post. First of, why would anyone want older versions of the framework? Well, if they're running on Adobe ColdFusion 9.0.0 or earlier, they can't use the 2.x release stream: they're stuck on 1.x. Also, if they're currently using an old version and don't want a major upgrade, they might want a minor upgrade for a bug fix.

Okay, so why haven't I blogged about this before? Truth be told, I thought it was "obvious" how to find specific legacy releases on any Github project. Apparently, it is not obvious for everyone so it is worth blogging about. Every properly managed project on Github tags every official release so that all past releases can be found on the 'tags' page. You can see FW/1's 'tags' page where you can find every release since 1.0. Unfortunately, my choice of naming for tags has not always been consistent and I forgot the 'v' prefix for a while around the release of 2.0. Oops. Unfortunately the typical naming convention for prereleases tends to sort them above their gold release versions - see Clojure's core.logic library's tags for a more striking example. At least Github provides an easy mechanism for provided tagged archive releases.

It's probably worth pointing out that downloading FW/1 directly from the FW/1 RIAForge project page will give you the latest stable release which is currently 2.1.1. That's because it downloads a ZIP file of the "master" branch from the Github site. All development is performed on the "develop" branch. The only time the RIAForge site will slip you something different is when a new release is in the Release Candidate stage and I update the RIAForge page to download a ZIP file of the "develop" branch - and I update the page to clearly state that! - and this is to increase adoption of the new release and help flush out any remaining bugs that haven't been caught during the alpha and beta testing phases.

To make it easier to manage collaboration on FW/1-related projects in future, several projects have now moved under a new FW/1 - Framework One - organization on Github. Your forks and watches should have been updated but if you have local clones of the old repos under my personal Github account, you'll want to update those. Here's the full list of Framework One projects:

• FW/1 - Framework One - simple MVC for CFML
• DI/1 - Inject One - simple Dependency Injection for CFML
• cfmljure - the magic bridge between CFML and Clojure
• FW/1 - Framework One - simple MVC for Clojure
• Leiningen project template for FW/1 - Framework One - for Clojure

If you were a collaborator on one of these projects before, you will no longer have commit access (because you were a collaborator directly on my repo). If you'd like to become a collaborating team member on one of these projects as part of the new organization, contact me directly to discuss that. I'd certainly like to see some of the regular contributors in the past become official "Team Framework One" members in the new organization!

Thank you to all the contributors who've helped get these projects to where they are now!

Thanks go to Chris Blackwell for this: if you rely on calling layout() explicitly, you'll get an exception in version 2.1. Chris provided a fix and version 2.1.1 contains that. Version 2.1.1 is the default download now from FW/1's RIAforge page as well as from the FW/1 Github repo.

If you don't use layout() directly, you should be fine with version 2.1.

FW/1 2.1 is now the official master release. Read what's new in this release!

[Read more →]

The next release of FW/1 has just hit Release Candidate status! As noted before, the main addition since the Alpha (October 21st) is a debugging feature: you can now enable tracing for the framework and see what it is queuing up and what it is executing. There have also been a number of bug fixes. See the commit list for details of changes. The wiki has been updated with the new features and API changes (no public API changes since the Alpha, just the addition of variables.framework.trace). Read more and download FW/1 2.1 RC 1 at RIAForge.

RC 1 includes a small bug fix for framework reloading. Beta 3 contained a bug fix for onRequestEnd() and unhandledPaths.

The next release of FW/1 has just hit Beta! The main addition since the Alpha (October 21st) is a debugging feature: you can now enable tracing for the framework and see what it is queuing up and what it is executing. There have also been a number of bug fixes. See the commit list for details of changes. The wiki has been updated with the new features and API changes (no public API changes since the Alpha, just the addition of variables.framework.trace). Read more and download FW/1 2.1 Beta 2 at RIAForge.

Update: Beta 2 replaces Beta 1 and contains a couple of compatibility fixes for Adobe ColdFusion in the new tracing code.

After a long period of gestation, FW/1's next release - 2.1 - finally hit Alpha status today!

[Read more →]

With Clojure 1.4.0 available and Leiningen 2 in preview, I felt it was time to update FW/1 and the FW/1 template to have updated dependencies.

FW/1 now uses Clojure 1.4.0, Ring 1.0.2 and Enlive 1.0.0. The FW/1 template has been updated and verified for use with Leiningen 2 (as well as Leiningen 1.x).

Both FW/1 and the FW/1 template are now at version 0.1.0 and available from Clojars. See the README on the respective Github repos for more details.

A problem was with reported running FW/1 1.2 on OpenBD 2.0.2. It turned out to be a bug in how OpenBD resolves Java method calls and it only manifests in two of the example Application.cfc files (not in the framework itself). You can now download v1.2.1.zip which contains the updated examples. Note that the User Manager example has never run on OpenBD (and, obviously, the Flex test in the remoting example won't run either).

Further, the problem with onError() still seems to be present in OpenBD 2.0.2 so if your FW/1 application hits an exception and triggers onError(), it'll fail with a message about "Variable EXCEPTION does not exist". Just rename framework.cfc's onError() method to disable it's exception handling (you'll see there's a comment above that method explaining this long-standing problem).

I was chatting with @iorayne a.k.a. Raynes (IRC) a.k.a. Anthony Grimes today in #leiningen about changes required for plugins in the upcoming Leiningen 2.0 release. I was interested in updating my lein-fw1 plugin so it would work with both Leiningen 1.x and Leiningen 2.0. Raynes pointed out that lein-fw1 was really just a template - it generates new skeleton FW/1 projects - and that Leiningen 2.0 was incorporating his lein-newnew plugin as the default 'new' task. He suggested I rewrite lein-fw1 as a template that would work with Leiningen 2.0 and, if you install the lein-newnew plugin for Leiningen 1.x, it will work with that too. The result is fw1-template. The usage instructions are on that Github page but it installs just like a regular Leiningen plugin (lein plugin install...) and if you already have lein-newnew installed, you're good to go. Since lein-newnew is part of the migration path for moving from Leiningen 1.x to 2.0, I'm declaring lein-fw1 deprecated and recommending folks use fw1-template instead (and, yes, use lein-newnew!).