An Architect's View

The Fusebox 5.1 public beta is now available so I figured it was a good time to talk about the "flagship" new feature in this release. First off, let me caution that I've made some sweeping changes to how file paths are handled in the core files to enable a new feature. That means I've probably introduced a number of compatibility bugs. That's what the public beta is about - please download it and run your current Fusebox 4, Fusebox 4.1 and Fusebox 5 applications against it! I need your feedback (via the bug tracker preferably). So, what is this new feature? Fusebox 5 introduced the ability to run multiple Fusebox applications within a single ColdFusion application so that you could share application and session data (and do things like single signon). This increased the desire in the community for the ability to share circuits, plugins, lexicons and errortemplates between multiple Fusebox applications so that you didn't have to have a separate copy inside every single application. Fusebox 5.1 allows absolute (or mapped) paths for circuits, plugins, lexicons and errortemplates as well as fully supporting the ability to override the default locations of the parsed/, plugins/, lexicon/ and /errortemplates using fusebox.xml parameter values (you've been able to do this partially since Fusebox 4 but it's never been officially sanctioned!). I'll be adding documentation about the new features to the documentation wiki over the next week to explain how the absolute / mapped paths work (circuit declarations get a new relative="true|false" attribute but otherwise you should just be able to use a path that begins with "/" to indicate an absolute / mapped path that can be shared between applications).