The late half of 2008 was par­tic­u­larly busy time for me, and between all the con­fer­ences and awards pro­grams, not to men­tion all the stuff hap­pen­ing in my own busi­ness, I didn’t end up hav­ing a lot of time for actual coding.

The last few days I’ve had a quiet sit down for the first time with Fuse­box 5.5. It’s been an inter­est­ing expe­ri­ence and while there’s some things I like, there’s also some things I’m not so fond of. I’m going the No XML route — not because I thought the XML was in some way bad, but because writ­ing Cold­Fu­sion code seems more nat­ural when its, you know, in ColdFusion.

Help­ing me in my explo­rations were Jeff Peter’s book How to Drive Fuse­box 5.5 and Sean Corfield’s Cat Club sam­ple appli­ca­tions. Jeff’s book was handy for explain­ing all the six bil­lion pos­si­ble con­fig­u­ra­tions for Fuse­box apps these days, and where I had ques­tions that the book didn’t answer, Sean’s sam­ple apps jumped in and showed me things like how the dif­fer­ent lev­els inter­act with the new CFC cir­cuits and fuseactions.

It’s prob­a­bly too early for me to be mak­ing an sweep­ing gen­er­al­i­sa­tions, but in short: what I like is the implicit cir­cuits, use of Application.cfc, and assign­ing the results of model oper­a­tions to vari­ables within the con­troller (at least when using CFCs for cir­cuits). I was never com­fort­able with the model layer sim­ply cre­at­ing vari­ables avail­able in the cur­rent request with­out pass­ing them explic­itly back to the con­troller. This may be a styl­is­tic thing that was pos­si­ble within FB4, in which case please dis­count this lit­tle gush.

What I don’t par­tic­u­larly like is that there are a num­ber of things that seem rather repet­i­tive and tedious. But I’m sure I’ll work out what’s required and what’s not soon enough.

I read today on Adam Haskell’s blog that he’d taken some time off but is now back work­ing on Fuse­box. Which is great news – it’s good to see for­ward progress, and I can’t wait to see how it will be improved even further.