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ColdBox Developers Week has been progressing along nicely with one great session after another.  We're excited to announce that we've finalized a special BONUS session presented by guest speaker Gert Franz!  Gert ...

Ortus is the company that has brought you the ColdBox MVC Platform, TestBox, CacheBox, WireBox, etc and we're still coming out with cool new stuff like our NoSQL library and CommandBox.  And while we offer...

We are pleased to announce that ColdBox Developers Week (CBDW) is back for the third year now.  CBDW is a full week of completely free webinars (4-a-day) put on by Team ColdBox and other smart ColdFusion bods from around the world.  We've got some great topics this year that...

Ortus Solutions is proud to announce the general beta availability of ColdBox 4.0.0 and CommandBox 1.0.0.  This has been over 6 months of hard work from the engineering team to bring you two revolutionary new product releases that we are sure is going to change the ColdFusion (CFML) landscape.  

ColdBox 4 has ...

This is the second half of our two-part conversion of a FuseBox 5.1 sample app to ColdBox MVC.  If you haven't been following our blog series on converting your legacy FuseBox apps over to ColdBox MVC you may want to back up and read the

This August 13th at 6:30 pm Brad Wood will be presenting an introduction to the ColdBox MVC Platform to the Chicagoland user group.  If you're in the area, please attend in person.  For everyone else, I'll be presenting via Adobe Connect and you can join the room to listen in.

Welcome back to our blog series on converting your legacy FuseBox apps over to ColdBox MVC.  In our

Come get trained in sunny California!

We will be holding a ColdBox and TestBox bootcamp in sunny California this October 1-3rd, 2014.  This bootcamp will include a medley of our professional training courses and lead by ColdBox creator

In our last installment, we talked about the benefits of converting legacy FuseBox applications over to ColdBox MVC.  In this entry we'll actually convert the Fusebox 3 sample app available from fusebox.org to show you the similiarities and differences between the two frameworks.  

• The finished ColdBox code is here: https://github.com/bdw429s/Fusebox-3-Sample-App-Conversion/
• The original Fusebox code is in the root of the above repo in a zip called "FB3SimpleApp.zip"

Overview

Here's a screenshot of the files in the Fusebox and ColdBox code side-by-side. Both are pretty self-explanatory, so we'll work our way through the contents of each file as we go.

Fusebox is one of the oldest frameworks for ColdFusion.  My first real ColdFusion job was working on a large intranet site built upon Fusebox.  The framework has changed hands several times and though it has now gone cold in terms of new development but it is still used by 1 in 3 ColdFusion developers according to the State of the CF Union survey results from 2014.  

Party like it's 1999

There's a lot of legacy code out there still running on FuseBox, but that doesn't mean it has to stay that way.  The Internet has moved on to design patterns like MVC and more-object oriented approaches for code reuse and testing.   The thought of reworking your old codebase might seem scary, especially if you're not familiar with MVC and you aren't using any OO principles.  Don't despair though, it's often times better to make incremental improvements to code instead of trying to throw it out and rewrite it from scratch.  The old adage says, how do you eat an elephant? "One bite at a time!"