I’ve been a long-time Fuse­box coder (since ver­sion 2) and have always asserted that for most small scale web appli­ca­tions, a pro­ce­dural approach is 100% fine. I could never be both­ered with the over­head that object-oriented code takes, con­sid­er­ing the size and sim­plic­ity of the projects I typ­i­cally did.

That is what I still believe. How­ever, of late I’ve been work­ing with other people’s code that is more OO in approach, and I can see the ben­e­fits, espe­cially for larger and more com­plex projects. I’ve been get­ting more and more Cold­Fu­sion projects recently and it’s a lot of fun. I had two projects about to start, and although nei­ther of them were huge, I decided to try and go the whole OO hog, and maybe learn some new stuff in the process.

Part of the rea­son I thought I’d give it a try was Illudium PU-36 Code Gen­er­a­tor, which is actu­ally a crazy name for a pretty cool tool that gen­er­ates all the fac­tory, ser­vice, DAO and bean CFCs directly from your data­base tables — in other words, sav­ing you a ton of typ­ing, cut­ting and past­ing and then more wasted time track­ing down errors caused by typos (cool screen­cast here). I hap­pened to be talk­ing to Andrew Mer­cer, CFUGWA’s OO Guru, and as well as answer­ing some of my noobish ques­tions he pointed me towards Russ Johnson’s Fuse­box 5 tem­plates for Illudium PU-36. They gen­er­ate Con­troller and View circuit.xml files plus list­ing and form pages in Fuse­box 5 friendly for­mat, giv­ing you a mas­sive head start on cre­at­ing admin­is­tra­tion appli­ca­tions. What impressed me most, how­ever, was that the forms and tables that are gen­er­ated are nice, seman­tic, valid HTML. Although I changed the forms a bit — I’m hop­ping on the lat­est trend which is putting each label and input pair into an ordered list item — they were so close to what I’d nor­mally cre­ate myself that I was lit­er­ally rub­bing my hands together with glee.

How­ever, there was another hur­dle. Russ’s Fuse­box 5 tem­plates are designed to be used with Cold­Spring. So I had to get a han­dle on that too. After read­ing about Cold­Spring I can see the ben­e­fits of that too, and at the sim­ple level it’s not hard to inte­grate. All in all, I can see what I prob­a­bly should be doing, framework-wise.

How­ever, time­lines and scopes started to creep, as they do, and some atyp­i­cal staffing issues meant that in the end, I didn’t have the time I would have liked to work on those projects. The crunch started and it started to look tight. I came across some con­cep­tual hur­dles — which was not sur­pris­ing, really — so I went back to doing what I know: pro­ce­dural Fuse­box 5.

So is that bad? It’s clean, under­stand­able, framework-compliant code. It works, it’s easy to debug, and it was easy for me to write. So no, I don’t think it’s bad at all.

The next project I have with more time, I will have another crack at an OO approach. In the mean­time, thank your deity of choice for good ole’ depend­able Fusebox!