Fusebox Conference 2002

By James Husum

The Fusebox 2002 Conference (held October 26 and 27 at the Disney Hilton) has come and gone. It was great getting to meet some old online friends for the first time and renewing past contacts. It was apparent that this community held much passion and enthusiasm for the subject at hand and energy levels were running high.

The organizers of the conference (Nat Papovich and Steve Nelson) deserve much thanks and credit for pulling this off. The whole conference went smoothly and if there were any problems, they didn’t show on the surface.

This year’s conference ran for two days, with most of the sessions being held on both days. This allowed for much greater flexibility in planning out what you wanted to attend and I hope this carries over to next year’s conference. Still, I missed a few sessions due to last minute schedule changes.

Jeff Peters handled the keynote speech duties this year. He encouraged developers to get away from focusing on specific implementation details and to look at some of the “big ideas.” He pointed out that Fusebox is more than just CFMX – it has been ported to PHP, Perl, ASP, and even Lasso. In addition it is not just Web apps – it also covers custom tags, system utilities, and other tools. The Fusebox community is international in scope too. Many attendees were from the States, but others came from Belgium, the UK, and South Africa.

Session topics covered a large range, from Intro to FLiP (Fusebox Lifecycle Process), to SQL discussions, multi-aliased circuits, content management, and security. Many of the attendees I spoke with thought the sessions were very informative.

Synthis, the makers of Adalon, sponsored part of the conference again this year. They released a freeware version of their wireframing tool. Wireframes are useful ways to gather initial requirements for your project and organize them into an easily understandable interface. Synthis’ new wireframing tool is available from their website (http://www.synthis.com/) for those that didn’t make it to the conference.

Steve Nelson ran a session for testing your applications using the Fusedocs that you have already written. Using his tool (as yet unnamed), you can make unit tests on each of your fuses, making sure each one works before they get put together in your application. Steve has plans to make the tool available to the community. You can contact Steve through his site (http://www.secretagents.com/) for more information.

Hal Helms ran a session on what he envisions Fusebox running under CFMX might look like. Working with John Quarto-vonTivadar and Ben Edwards, he has created a Fusebox core file as a .cfc (ColdFusion Component.) This file acts much like the current core but is much smaller. A very nifty idea that he had is ‘plug-ins’, a .cfc that will allow you to extend the core file with any customizations you want to make. So, instead of having the current set of incompatible extensions (FEX, FuseQ, etc.) they could all play nicely together as plug-ins to the core.

This is NOT yet Fusebox 4 or official in any way. This is simply a prototype of how things might be implemented using the new functions within CFMX. If you are interested in getting more information, you can contact Hal through his website (http://halhelms.com/)

Finally, this is all good information, but what of the Fuseball World Championships, I hear you say? Did the smack-talking dynamic duo of Helms and Nelson take the title? No, they did not. The ultimate team turned out to be Mark Richards and Adam Howitt, who defeated all comers to take the title. Following that, the two faced off against each other, leaving Mark Richards as the last man standing and holder of the title World Fuseball Champion.

• Subscribe
• RSS

• Editorial
• Specials
• Community
• News
• Tech and Tags
• Views
• Reviews
• Techniques
• Security
• Best of ColdFusion Talk
• Knowledge Base
• Blog Watch

• Tipical Charlie