Fusebox Conference Report

Saturday, October 20, 2001

Highlights: The Third Fusebox Conference, held in conjunction with the Macromedia DevCon. Jeremy Allaire, Keynote speaker! Release of FB3 white paper and technical standard.

Participants of the FuseBox list on Topica had been waiting all summer for the collaborative effort of key members of the FuseBox community to wade their way through a volunteer effort to analyze, re-write, test and document a new way of doing Fusebox. We kept hearing that the new specs were going to be released at the FuseBox conference before the Macromedia DevCon, and everbody wanted to see them! I have been using FuseBox myself for the last year on a variety of Web applications, and I had always been impressed with the way Fusebox helped me systematize my web code writing, and I could only imagine how the Fusebox methodology could be improved.

The result? A very organized, well documented and easy way to write fusebox code called the FuseBox 3.0 standard.

Hal Helms kicked off the meeting with an introductory session going over the key features of the new spec, which I am pulling directly from the white paper (released at the Fusebox conference).

• A new nested model for communications between circuits created to make code reuse and distributed development easier.
• A new nested layout model that opens up possibilities for highly dynamic, flexible layouts.
• XML-based Fusedocs, providing both PDL (Program definition language) and documentation for fuses. (Called FuseDocs 2.0 standard, not to be confused with the new FB3 standard)
• A stable set of key files that form a fusebox skeleton, making the learning process easier for people new to Fusebox, and making it much eaiser to generate a new Fusebox application.
• XFAs (eXit FuseActions) for greater reusability of fuses and circuits.
• An API exposing key variables within a Fusebox structure defined by the key fusebox file.

The main thing that impressed me with the new spec was how easy it is to create nested circuits! The other main promise of the new spec is the complete compatability of FB3.0 applications to re-use (literally drag and drop) circuits, even from completely unrelated applications. It is conceivable that Fusebox programmers will be trading FB3 fuses and entire circuits as easily as they currently trade and use custom tags.

One other benefit: Layout can be completely separated from content, which adds to the ability to re-use circuits.

One other thing: The core Fusebox file has been written and optimized for the three main versions of CF: CF4, CF4.5.2, CF5. So, if you want to upgrade your Fusebox app, just drop in the correct file.

Next, Jeremy Allaire spoke about how frameworks like Fusebox can help programmers write better and more professional code. He spoke about how impressed he was with the strength and endurance of the Fusebox community (over four years and several thousand adherants), and what it has added to the CF community in general. Jeremy also gave us some peeks into how the new NEO code might work, and how CFML will be a framework for writing Java code. We also talked a lot about how the web is moving toward "Rich Clients" like Flash, and how FB helps to organize the loading and receiving server data to/from flash files on the client.

For the rest of the conference, I attended sessions that increased my understanding of the new FB3 spec. Introduction and Migration to FB3 by Erik Voldengen, FuseDocs 2.0 by Jeff Peters, Nested Circuits by Patrick McElhany, Nested Layouts by John Quarto Von Tividar, and Large Scale DB driven security in FB3 by Drew Harris.

Other sessions that I heard raves about included using Flash with Fusebox by Kevin Towes, and using XML and SOAP with FB to make web services by Brett Suweyn.

The night ended with a CF_SCHMOOZE party, that included raffles and fooseball compeitions.

You can read-up on the new FB spec by downloading the files from www.fusebox.org. New content will appearing in the days following DevCon.

All the presentations from the conference will be available as a package called "Conference in a Box", including videos of the keynote sessions. You will be able to purchase this package from the fusebox.org web site as soon as video editing and package finishing are complete.

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