Fusebox Importer Plugin

Last year I posted an entry about a CMS plugin for the onTap framework (and I'm still surprised at how much traffic it got). Unfortunately that particular project hasn't become a reality yet, but after having just finished up a revision of the onTap framework and the DataFaucet ORM that both now include integration with the new CacheBox cache-management framework, I decided to start working on plugins again.

Something that came up in that talk about a CMS plugin was how the Sava CMS has managed to create integration with a variety of other ColdFusion frameworks, including Fusebox, ColdBox and Mach-II. I think that shows marked resourcefulness and is a direction I'd like to see the ColdFusion community move more toward. And it's something I've thought about off and on over the past year, but I've not gotten around to doing anything practical about it until now.

Amazingly it's only taken me two days to put together a first release of a Fusebox Importer plugin. Tony Garcia mentioned before that integration between apps in the PHP world actually has a name, they call it "bridging". And that's a fairly good description of what I'm doing here. You install the Importer plugin and from that point, you can then manage fusebox applications that are imported into your onTap framework application through the importer, which acts as a kind of bridge between the Fusebox framework and the onTap framework.

I was hoping that I might be able to find a full-fledged application to test this with, but unfortunately didn't actually find that. I thought maybe there would be a blog or a forum or something available that was written in FB5, but couldn't find one. I did of course find examples of both of those things, but only in older versions of Fusebox (4.1 or 3). So I ended up testing this with a copy of the CatClub sample application that Sean provided when he was lead on the Fusebox project.

I did have to make a few small, yet important modifications to the framework core to get this bridge to work. So if you're interested in trying it out, you'll have to download the latest framework core release (which I just uploaded a few minutes ago). Then use the search form in the plugin manager to find and download the Fusebox Importer.

I'll probably have a look at ColdBox and Mach-II soon for the same thing. If they're similarly easy to integrate, I'll be a very happy man indeed. :)