On Thursday, August 29, 2002, at 03:13 , [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> For reasons that elude me, some people devote great energy to evangelizing
> Fusebox. When you ask them, it almost always turns out that they have
> never
> actually used anything else. Fusebox is about brainwashing developers,
> about
> advancing a particular brand of religion and so I recommend that people
> evaluating Fusebox ignore developers who have not actually *use* it.
Couldn't resist rewording that! No offense at my gentle teasing I hope.
As I have said repeatedly, I am not anti-Fusebox per se, but it does tend
to live in its own little bubble and it takes words, concepts and phrases
from the much larger world of IT and misuses them in a way that causes
confusion. As ColdFusion moves into more mainstream programming and OO,
this confusion will be particularly detrimental.
On the subject of dsp files vs layout files, yes, I can see it is a
powerful piece of machinery but I feel that it is more a clever
contrivance made possible by the 'black box' inside the Fusebox core files
than an intuitive, well-architected programming style. OTOH, I would
expect that most people who use it are really only doing fairly
straightforward header and footer additions with it.
Note what I actually said:
> No, Fusebox recommends you do it and provides a well-defined way for you
> to do it. Fusebox itself does *not* implement this for you - you have to
> write your code in a very specific manner in order to do this. Fusebox
> again provides a *convention* for it
This was in response to a Fuseboxer claiming that separation of logic and
display is automatically implemented by Fusebox - it most certainly is not,
the programmer still has to think about the issue and separate the code
out themselves.
I also said:
> It's somewhat contrived and, IMO, somewhat unnatural.
> All it's doing is forcing you to partition your code, it isn't creating a
> tiered architecture like MVC for example.
I am not bad-mouthing Fusebox by saying this, merely trying to temper some
of the wild claims made for it.
My problem is not with Fusebox per se - again, I refer people to the page
on my site where I discuss Fusebox - but with the wild and sometimes
inaccurate claims made about it by some of the near-religious Fuseboxers.
I don't think I have ever, in over twenty years of software engineering,
met such fervor about a particular style of programming. People claim
Fusebox "saved" them like it was Jesus. They jump on anyone who dares
criticize Fusebox ("Heretic! Heretic! Burn the heretic!"). For some of
them, Fusebox is no longer *a* solution, it's *the* solution.
I'm one of life's natural cynics. I don't take anyone's claims at face
value. As soon as my current project deadline is passed, I plan to rebuild
my PHP site using Fusebox and write up my experiences. As folks ought to
be able to figure out from the URLs of several pages, it already uses a
style that is somewhat similar to Fusebox so I don't expect it to be a
difficult conversion. The question to answer will be whether I feel the
end result was worth the effort: the current site has existed in various
forms for nearly seven years and has been redesigned three or four times
with minimal content changes each time (originally flat HTML, then frames,
then flat HTML again, then PHP wrappers). Some of those redesigns were
tedious but all were fairly straightforward. I know that the PHP version I
have today allows me to easily change the navigation and look'n'feel. It's
very simple. We'll have to see what benefits, if any, Fusebox brings to my
little site.
"If you're not annoying somebody, you're not really alive."
-- Margaret Atwood
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