InFused: the Cold­Fu­sion blog on Sitepoint

In late 2007, I started writ­ing for the Cold­Fu­sion blog on Site­point. After a few gen­eral items, I hit on the idea of doing a weekly roundup of things that are hap­pen­ing in the Cold­Fu­sion blo­gos­phere. As of the begin­ning of July 2008, I’ve done 25 weekly roundups which I call “The Week in ColdFusion”.

I’m also attempt­ing to get the devel­oper of each Cold­Fu­sion frame­work (or at least one of the team) to answer the same 10 ques­tions. So far I have posted:

Geoff Bow­ers on the Far­Cry Frame­work
John Far­rar on COOP
Mark Man­del on Trans­fer ORM

Inte­grated Report­ing and the Cold­Fu­sion Report Builder

In 2006, I worked on a project that used Cold­Fu­sion MX7’s built in report­ing fea­ture exten­sively. In the process I learnt some dis­turb­ing and enlight­en­ing things about inte­grated report­ing, and in par­tic­u­lar the Cold­Fu­sion Report Builder appli­ca­tion. Sub­se­quent to some rant­ing and rav­ing on this site, Judith Dinowitz, edi­tor of Fusion Author­ity, asked me to write an arti­cle for the first edi­tion of the Fusion Author­ity Quar­terly Update.

While the arti­cle was being writ­ten, the 7.0.2 updater was in beta test­ing. This updater included fixes for some of the issues I dis­cussed in the arti­cle, but unfor­tu­nately due to the print pub­lish­ing sched­ule, I was unable to include full details. A fur­ther update to the Cold­Fu­sion Report Builder was released in mid-July, just two weeks later, squash­ing some more of the bugs. A follow-up arti­cle explor­ing the changes appeared in Vol­ume II issue 1 of the FAQ-U.

Fusion Author­ity Quar­terly Update

Fuse­box

Fuse­box Basics

Back in the dark ages, I was very involved in the Fuse­box com­mu­nity. I wrote an arti­cle for the Macro­me­dia Devel­oper Cen­tre on Fuse­box — an intro­duc­tion to the basic prin­ci­ples, using a Fuse­box 3 appli­ca­tion as an exam­ple. I’ve often thought about writ­ing an updated ver­sion cov­er­ing Fuse­box 4, which I now use exten­sively, but I haven’t had time and there’s plenty of other resources avail­able. Still, for a very sim­ple overview of the core of Fuse­box — the Fuse­box itself, cir­cuit, fuse­ac­tions and fuses — it is still relevant.

Fuse­box Basics: Intro­duc­tion to the Fuse­box Framework

Fuse­box Form Reuse

Search­ing for a clean solu­tion for form reuse and server-side val­i­da­tion in Fuse­box 3 led me to cre­ate this sam­ple appli­ca­tion, which illus­trates the sys­tem I adopted (a mish-mash of best prac­tises and ideas from other devel­op­ers). It no longer applies as Fuse­box 4 allows fuse­ac­tions to exe­cute other fuse­ac­tions, but I’m keep­ing it here for his­tor­i­cal interest.

Fuse­box Form Reuse

Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver Fuse­docs

Fuse­doc is the doc­u­men­ta­tion stan­dard for Fuse­box. Fuse­docs are com­prised of XML-formatted data in a pre-defined for­mat, that sit in a com­ment block at the top of each indi­vid­ual file in a Fuse­box appli­ca­tion. If you use Dreamweaver as an IDE — and I know for a fact that I’m not the only one who does this — and you use Fuse­docs, you will want most likely some code com­ple­tion and color cod­ing to make work­ing with them eas­ier. I wrote up an overview of how to do this back when Dreamweaver MX was first released.

Dreamweaver Fuse­docs

CS-RCS Tool­bar for Dreamweaver

CS-RCS is a revi­sion con­trol pro­gram that I used to use. I now mostly use Sub­ver­sion instead, which sadly does not yet have any inte­gra­tion with Dreamweaver. But, should you need a free (for sin­gle users) revi­sion sys­tem that can hook nicely into most IDEs, check it out (and also my toolbar).

CS-RCS Tool­bar for Dreamweaver