Anyone familiar with fusebox?

[ncttrnl]

I normally don't use it and really I don't like it.

It seems like alot of extra stuff to me. It also seems to be a somewhat limiting.

What does everyone else think?

[madajb]

Looks like another of those "Program using our metaphor and don't try to think outside it" things.
Like all of them, it probably works great if you think that way, but is very constraining when you don't.
-ajb

[ncttrnl]

Yeah... thats basically what it is.

You have a fusebox that contains circuits with fuses in them.

Thats all fine and good and using it will make your code easier for another developer to pick up but its easy to break the metaphor if you're not careful.

It does have its advantages though. Its easier to debug a fuse at a time and its easier to break up work into individual fuses and circuits to team code things. I just don't see too many other advantages and it seems to tag your performance a bit.

[madajb]

How is that any different from just programming in small discrete functions without the fancy metaphor?
-ajb

[ncttrnl]

How is that any different from just programming in small discrete functions without the fancy metaphor?
-ajb

It came out of ColdFusion and, up until fairly recently, CF didn't have any concept of functions outside of custom tags and later cfscript.

Web programming is kinda the great equalizer in the programming world. Its like best practices and architecture and data structures and all kinds of fundamental programming concepts just get thrown right out the window by people that probably shouldn't be coding. Even some of the languages just don't seem to facilitate good practices.

Models like Fusebox help put people into a common framework that kinda forces some coding practices but limits others to keep their code clean and hopefully reduce bugs and errors.

[jwilker]

Never liked fusebox. if you lacked structure it was probably good in that it provided it, but the model was just not very conducive to RAD, or being able to ramp up new developers quickly.

Sure is popular though, in V3 now I think and spun out Mach II, IIRC.

[ncttrnl]

My big issue is the whole breaking up all of your code into distinct bits. They are supposed to do one thing and one thing alone like run a query. That is fine. The problem is a fuse isn't supposed to call another fuse. So when you need a query in the middle of an action fuse and the query params are based on the first part of the action, things get a little wierd and you find yourself recoding to not violate the fusebox best practices.

The other issue is that fuses are very small. So small that they lack the error checking that they would have had in larger scripts. So this means you have to wrap each fuse in its own security or someone could potentially attack any one of them. Unless, of course, you keep them in a directory that is not accessible from the web.

Fusebox actually is in version 4 although I am using 3. 4 makes heavy use of XML. Since we are still migrating all of our severs to MX, XML is not a viable option until we are done. Besides, I have the intent to move us off of coldfusion and fusebox 3 seems fairly simple to convert to another language. Fusebox for PHP is already done and ready to go with version 3.