Fusebox: Developing ColdFusion Applications (Voices That Matter) (Paperback)

by Jeffrey Peters (Author), Nat Papovich (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Developers face a constant struggle to launch projects on time and under budget, especially without pulling all-nighters. Fusebox helps ensure successful projects by providing a framework that serves as a base for applications. It's a standard process that makes projects more manageable and simplifies maintenance and requests for change during development. With this book, you'll learn to make ColdFusion applications reliably successful by following a standardized system. In addition, relying on the Fusebox framework to help plan and organize your ColdFusion code will allow you to write increasingly complex and specialized applications.

Jeff Peters and Nat Papovich, both members of the Fusebox Council, share their extensive experience in this book. They'll teach you to use Fusebox with your ColdFusion applications and develop a set of best practices for managing web projects. Read this book if you want to eliminate frustrations and roadblocks in your projects, such as unmanageable complexity, wasteful redundancy of effort, time-consuming code maintenance, and slow development speed.

From the Publisher
Jeff Peters and Nat Papovich have carefully crafted this book into the most comprehensive Fusebox resource currently available. Whether you've been using Fusebox for a while or are just getting started, you're sure to find information here that will expand your skill set. Jeff and Nat are members of the Fusebox Council, and are actively involved in the Fusebox community. If you're using Fusebox with your ColdFusion applications (or have been considering it), you'll avoid pitfalls by using this book.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 456 pages
• Publisher: New Riders Press; 1 edition (June 28, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0735712697
• ISBN-13: 978-0735712690
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #649,917 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars THIS IS FUSEBOX 3 !!!, August 23, 2004

By	J. Driller - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Fusebox is on version 4 as of 8/2004. This book is for Fusebox 3 ONLY!

Get a Fusebox 4 book if you are starting from scratch with FB4 as 3 and 4 are VERY different.

I will let others discuss the quality of this book - it is mostly a moot point for someone wanting the full benefits of FB.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Big picture to lines of code: this is a great resource, August 19, 2002

By	Heidi L. Schmidt (New Castle, Va United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book goes from theory to nuts-and-bolts and back again on how to design, implement, use, manipulate, and manage code written in the Fusebox method. While I particularly like Wireframes and FLiP, my favorite Fusebox piece by far are FuseDocs.

The book spends a fair amount of time explaining each piece of the Fusebox methodology and gives plenty of examples. There is a companion website, which is more than handy. The book is broken into two sections: coding and the life cycle of the code. Each section seems to have a bit different focus, and I imagine that the Life Cycle Process section is more immediately attractive to managers and independent developers. Yet I am glad to find both pieces here, juxtaposed. It keeps me from losing the forest for the trees in the coding section, and from getting too far removed from the actual work at hand in the FLiP section.

According to the authors, Fusebox was developed for use by small teams with a theoretical manager somewhere. I can see how this methodology would bring focus to and demystify any application development. But I have to write that while teams might have been the target audience, contractors will come to love this. Fusebox and especially its FuseDoc element empower the novice contractor to tackle the Big Project that has been landed at long last and produce results without becoming overwhelmed. Far more importantly, though, it allows a developer familiar with FuseBox to speak a fluid language about time, task, and integration. As someone who finds herself after lunch looking over code written before breakfast and wondering what the heck I was trying to do, FuseDocs are a godsend.

Fusebox methodology, while written for ColdFusion, isn't limited to the ColdFusion world. One could easily pick up any FuseDoc and translate it to PHP. This portability of the process renders the Fusebox methodology a staying power we haven't seen in a long time. And while extreme programming has much to recommend it, it doesn't result in a task-oriented product in the same way that Fusebox does. The Fusebox process seems to lend itself to real world applications, development and concerns in a way I haven't found in other methodologies. It also has the added bonus of becoming widely known, and could approach a standard for web-based application development.

As a developer, I found the book well written as well, and one that addresses each area discretely. I personally read it form front to back, but the material seems to hold up to a piecemeal reading as well (this chapter, that section, or this reference). All this means that the Fusebox book will be kept close at hand and used often. Buy it, and don't be afraid to write in it, dog-ear it, and put flags where they make the most sense for you. I truly believe that use of the Fusebox methodology singly or by whole teams will result in programmers who get to spend more time doing what they love, and doing it in an environment they enjoy.

10 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent. A must read for anyone interested in Fusebox, November 3, 2002

By	Perry Woodin "pwlw" (New York) - See all my reviews

Whether you want to learn about the intricacies of the Fusebox core files; or you want to understand how Fusebox can help you become a better ColdFusion® developer, the book Fusebox: Developing ColdFusion® Applications by Jeff Peters and Nat Papovich is well worth the read.

This book covers the basics of the Fusebox framework and FLiP (Fusebox Lifecycle Process) methodology to the more advanced features of Fusebox such as nested circuits and layouts.

Beginners will appreciate the authors' abilities to convey complex ideas through examples that relate to real-world development experiences. Through their examples, it is easy to see how using FLiP and Fusebox can ease and even eliminate the common pitfalls that developers go through when coding their applications.

The book starts out by explaining why a framework and methodology are beneficial to creating successful applications, and will give the reader some insight into the relationship between the developer and the client. This is a recommended read for all managers.

The expertise of the authors really shows in chapters 3 and 4 as they delve into the complexities of the Fusebox core files. This section may be overly complex for the Fusebox beginner, but is an insightful read for those who already have experience creating Fusebox applications. If you were ever curious about the functionality of the code that makes up the Fusebox core files, this section will give you greater understanding of how Fusebox works.

Chapters 5-10 walk the reader through all of the parts that a developer is responsible for when creating a Fusebox application. The basics such as the fuses (ColdFusion templates) and XFA's (eXit FuseActions's or Triggers) are covered in chapters 5 and 6.

Chapter 7 covers Fusedocs, a documentation standard developed by Hal Helms. Even if you are not going to adopt the Fusebox framework for application development, learning Fusedoc's is time well spent. The Fusedocs chapter is a great reference tool that should be kept near your keyboard as you learn the names and attributes of the elements that make up the documentation. Appendix C details the Fusedoc dtd for those interested in the nitty-gritty of how Fusedocs are structured.

Chapters 8-10 detail the advanced features of Fusebox that make it such a powerful and useful framework. The chapter on nested circuits discusses how to set up an application to take advantage of the way in which circuits communicate with each other. With nesting comes inheritance, and nested layout which is the subject of Chapter 9.

Nested layouts are one of the more difficult concepts for new Fusebox developers to grasp. The book walks step-by-step though the concept of nested layouts and shows code examples of how nested layouts could be applied to an application.

Because nesting of both circuits and layouts can be difficult to put into practice, Chapter 10 looks at some of the issues that developers may encounter when utilizing these advanced features.

Part 3 of this book goes into the details of the Fusebox Lifecycle Process (FLiP). Developers who are responsible for the initial requirements gathering and architecture of an application will find Part 3 a useful read. For project managers who have struggled with bringing an application from concept to completion, chapters 11-16 are an important read.

The remaining chapters in Part 3 (17-19) describe some Fusebox best practices, and sum up why Fusebox is useful in a dialog between two of the characters introduced at the beginning of the book

Fusebox: Developing ColdFusion® Applications is very well written, and a must read for anyone interested in using Fusebox to develop ColdFusion based applications.