An Architect's View

A problem was with reported running FW/1 1.2 on OpenBD 2.0.2. It turned out to be a bug in how OpenBD resolves Java method calls and it only manifests in two of the example Application.cfc files (not in the framework itself). You can now download v1.2.1.zip which contains the updated examples. Note that the User Manager example has never run on OpenBD (and, obviously, the Flex test in the remoting example won't run either).

Further, the problem with onError() still seems to be present in OpenBD 2.0.2 so if your FW/1 application hits an exception and triggers onError(), it'll fail with a message about "Variable EXCEPTION does not exist". Just rename framework.cfc's onError() method to disable it's exception handling (you'll see there's a comment above that method explaining this long-standing problem).

I was chatting with @iorayne a.k.a. Raynes (IRC) a.k.a. Anthony Grimes today in #leiningen about changes required for plugins in the upcoming Leiningen 2.0 release. I was interested in updating my lein-fw1 plugin so it would work with both Leiningen 1.x and Leiningen 2.0. Raynes pointed out that lein-fw1 was really just a template - it generates new skeleton FW/1 projects - and that Leiningen 2.0 was incorporating his lein-newnew plugin as the default 'new' task. He suggested I rewrite lein-fw1 as a template that would work with Leiningen 2.0 and, if you install the lein-newnew plugin for Leiningen 1.x, it will work with that too. The result is fw1-template. The usage instructions are on that Github page but it installs just like a regular Leiningen plugin (lein plugin install...) and if you already have lein-newnew installed, you're good to go. Since lein-newnew is part of the migration path for moving from Leiningen 1.x to 2.0, I'm declaring lein-fw1 deprecated and recommending folks use fw1-template instead (and, yes, use lein-newnew!).

About a week ago, I blogged about how to get started with ClojureScript and FW/1 and I showed some basic DOM manipulation functions that go down to the JavaScript metal. In any real world project, you're not going to want to do that - you'll want to leverage a battle-tested, industrial-strength library for that... something like jQuery for example. Using an external JavaScript library with ClojureScript isn't entirely straightforward, unfortunately, mostly due to how names are exported and how the Google Closure compiler munges them in its efforts to produce minified code.

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There's been quite a bit of buzz about ClojureScript since it's launch last July but it is a fast-moving target and a but daunting to get started with. Fortunately, there's a simple Leiningen plugin called lein-cljsbuild that can make it pretty simple to get up and running!

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