An Architect's View

A minor bug fix update has been applied to both master (2.0) and develop (2.1_pre) to correct a small regression in buildURL() that was introduced late in the 2.0 cycle. Thanx to Seb Duggan for spotting this!

After a long period of testing out in the wild FW/1 2.0 reached RC2 back in October and no further bugs have been reported. Only documentation remained and that has now been completed. FW/1 2.0 is gold and can be downloaded from FW/1's RIAForge site. Happy Holidays!

I try not to pay much attention to popularity contests but I was just browsing Github today and happened to notice that FW/1 is both the "most watched overall" and "most forked overall" ColdFusion project on Github. Thank you!

It's pretty easy to get a Clojure web application up and running on Heroku. Heroku's Dev Center has a good Getting Started with Clojure article that shows you how to install the Heroku client and get your ssh keys setup. It has a very basic "Hello World!" Ring application as the example but you'll probably want something a bit meatier to play with. Here's how to get the FW/1 for Clojure example application running on Heroku...

Follow that Getting Started guide to get Heroku setup but when you get to the "Write Your App" section, do the following:

git clone git://github.com/seancorfield/fw1-clj.git
cd fw1-clj
heroku create --stack cedar
git push heroku master

You should see several screens of output flash past as Heroku downloads all the dependencies needed to build and run a FW/1 application and then you should see something like this at the end:

-----> Discovering process types
       Procfile declares types -> web
-----> Compiled slug size is 11.3MB
-----> Launching... done, v4
       http://some-domain-1234.herokuapp.com deployed to Heroku

Go to that URL in your browser and you should see the User Manager example application! (some-domain-1234 will be whatever domain Heroku has allocated for your web application)

After that, just edit your application, commit it, and push it up to Heroku. Heroku will update the dependencies if necessary and redeploy your application. It's that simple!

Now that FW/1 is available for Clojure, you might have looked at the examples that are in the FW/1 github repo and wondered how to create your own FW/1 application from scratch.

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After two years in the CFML world, FW/1 (Framework One) comes to Clojure!

Intended to bring the same simple, lightweight, convention-based MVC web application development that has proved so popular in the CFML world to the world of Clojure, FW/1 for Clojure is available on Clojars (0.0.2 right now). If you clone the github repo, you'll see a "user manager" example application which is a port of the same app from the CFML version of the framework. The documentation is, as always, a work in progress but covers the basic API and how to create a driver program for the framework in Clojure. More information on the rationale, approach and API of FW/1 can be found on the FW/1 (for CFML) wiki. I plan to adapt this for the Clojure version shortly...

This fixes some bugs in buildURL() but is otherwise identical to the first FW/1 RC - see the blog post about the RC for more details.

Framework One 2.0 just reached Release Candidate status. Apart from documentation updates, there no remaining open issues.

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Framework One 2.0 just reached Beta status. Apart from documentation updates, there are only two issues still open: adding some sort of lightweight tracing mechanism, and adding a structured API for request scope data.

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I just declared the official "2.0 Alpha" of Framework One. Although there are a number of minor issues still open against this release, all the major new features are in place and ready for extensive public testing.

The main new features (in no particular order) are:

• custom URL routes with parameter substitution are supported, along with HTTP method restrictions and wildcard routes
• setLayout() to override layout conventions
• view() can be called from a controller, as a way to render email or documents for PDF delivery etc
• controller/service execution can be short-circuited, providing more control over the request lifecycle
• populate() and autowiring now support property-based injection as well as setter-based injection
• additional lifecycle hooks for global before() / after() and pre-rendering setupView()
• complete rewrite of the code to use cfscript - for Adobe ColdFusion 9.0.1 and Railo 3.2.2 or later

In particular, note the last bullet - if you are on earlier CFML engines, you will have to stick with FW/1 1.2 (there will be a 1.3 maintenance release). The mix of tags and script was driving me crazy and I didn't want to add all this new functionality with the code as it is!