Archive for the ‘Tips & Tricks’ Category

CFWheels Fully Embraces ForgeBox Packages

Friday, April 29th, 2022

As you may know, many years ago CFWheels embraced the distribution of Plugins via ForgeBox packages instead of maintaining our own directory. But the framework itself remains illusive. There was some work done in the last few months to put up packages for the framework but those packages were being maintained by hand which made them a show stopper for a long term solution.

Well, thanks to a new CI workflow based on GitHub Actions we now have the building and publishing of the packages fully automated. Giving credit where credit is due, the new workflow borrows heavily from the ColdBox workflow. It used GitHub Actions, Ant, and CommandBox to automate the process.

So what does all this mean for you, let’s cut to the chase. This means you can now install a fresh copy of the framework using the following command:

box install cfwheels-base-template

This will pull down a copy of the latest stable release of the template files and then pull down a copy of the latest stable release of the framework via package dependencies. In fact the CI workflow mentioned about publishes two packages cfwheels which is the core framework directory and cfwheels-base-template which is all the other files you need to scaffold the framework.

We’ve even backfilled all the prior released versions of the framework all the way back to version 1.0.0. So you can install a particular version of the framework using the following command:

box install [email protected]

In addition you can install the bleeding edge which includes all the work in process towards the next major release using:

box install cfwheels-base-template@be

And if you ever just need to get a copy of the latest framework files simply use the following command:

box install cfwheels

All this means that upgrading to a newer version of the framework should be much easier going forward. Frankly you should just need to modify the version of the dependency in the box.json file and issue a box update command. But we’ll document that more fully when we make our next release.

For now please feel free to play with all this package goodness and let us know if we fumbled anything.

Posted in CLI, Community, Documentation, Releases, Tips & Tricks | 2 Comments »

TodoMVC Implementation with CFWheels and HTMX

Tuesday, March 29th, 2022

Recently I’ve been playing around with HTMX and really starting to love it. So what is HTMX? From their website:

htmx gives you access to  AJAX, CSS Transitions,  WebSockets and Server Sent Events directly in HTML, using attributes, so you can build modern user interfaces with the simplicity and power of hypertext

Introduction to htmx

And also:

Why should only <a> and <form> be able to make HTTP requests?
Why should only click & submit events trigger them?
Why should only GET & POST methods be available?
Why should you only be able to replace the entire screen?

By removing these arbitrary constraints, htmx completes HTML as a hypertext

Motivation behind htmx

So what does this all mean? Well, in its simplest form, it means being able to build modern web applications with the UX that users have come to expect, with the HTML, CSS, and the backend technology of your choice which in our case is CFML and CFWheels.

So I decide to see if I could build the TodoMVC project using no hand written JavaScript and only relying on HTML, CSS, and CFWheels. I downloaded the template project and took a look at the application specs to get an idea of what to implement.

Here is the video of the running app:

So if you want to run the app locally, you’ll need to have Commandbox installed and the CFWHeels CLI commands for CommandBox installed as well. With those two items taken care of, launch a CommandBox and issue the following commands.

wheels g app name=todo datasourceName=todo template=cfwheels-todomvc-htmx --setupH2
package install
server start

Let’s look at those lines and talk about what they do. The first line wheels g app will download the template app from Forgbox.io and create a CFWheels application and name it todo. It also create a H2 database and configures the datasource for you. The next line will install all the dependencies of our app. These include, a few CommandBox modules to make development easier, the CFWheels core framework directory and place it into the wheels folder, and install the H2 drivers into our Lucee server for out application. The last line will start our Lucee server. I’ve also added a setting to automatically run the Database migrations on application startup so the database schema is created.

You can checkout the code on GitHub. Let me know what you think.

EDIT: The Lucee server that starts up will have cfwheels set as its admin password.

Posted in Community, Tips & Tricks, Tutorials | 12 Comments »

Starting a New CFWheels Project with the CLI

Thursday, March 24th, 2022

If you’re not using CommandBox for your CFWheels development, you’re in for a treat. This is a quick post to show case how easy it is to start a new CFWheels project with the help of the the wheels command for CommandBox.

If you have CommandBox installed and have the cfwheels-cli module installed, then simply launch CommandBox by typing box and then issue the command wheels generate app myApp . This simple command will take care of the following:

  • Create a folder in the current working directory for the project and name if myApp
  • Copy the cfwheels-template-base package from ForgeBox and expand it in the root of the myApp folder
  • Copy the cfwheels-core package from ForgeBox and expand it into the wheels folder in the root of the myApp folder
  • This command also takes care of naming your app myApp or whatever name you pass in

You may be asking yourself, what are all these packages you’re talking about? Well, we are starting to use the package management system provided by ForgeBox and CommandBox to make distribution of sample apps easier as well as installing and updating projects based on CFWheels. More to come on these topics later but this is just to whet your appetite.

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Screencast: Introduction to Unit Testing in CFWheels 2.x

Saturday, May 5th, 2018

Update: (2nd part on controllers)

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Testing Plugins on CFWheels 2.x and Travis CI via commandbox

Wednesday, May 31st, 2017

One of the nicest things about CFWheels 2.x is the tighter integration with command-line tools such as Commandbox. We can take advantage of the new testing suite JSON return type and the new CFWheels CLI in Commandbox 2.x to easily build a Travis CI test. It’s perhaps easiest to just show the .travis.yml file – this goes in the root of your gitHub plugin repository, and once you’ve turned on testing under Travis.org, will run your test suite on every commit.

In sum, this:

  1. Installs Commandbox
  2. Installs the CFWheels CLI
  3. Installs the master branch of the CFWheels repository
  4. Installs your plugin from your repository (rather than the forgebox version which will be the version behind)
  5. Starts the local server
  6. Runs the test suite, pointing only at your plugin’s unit tests

Naturally, you could do more complex things with this, such as multiple CF Engines, and maybe even multiple CFWheels versions, but for a quick setup it’s a good starting point!

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Unit Testing your new 2.x app in 2.x beta

Tuesday, May 30th, 2017

Hands up if you’ve ever found a bug in your application..

Upgrades, feature enhancements and bug fixes are all part of the development lifecycle, but quite often with deadlines, it’s difficult to manually test the entire functionality of your application with every change you make. What if there were an automated way of checking if that change you’re making is going to break something?

Enter the CFWheels test framework!

In the past, writing an automated test suite against your application meant downloading, configuring and learning a completely separate framework. To help address this issue, CFWheels includes a small, simple, yet powerful testing framework. Whilst this has been part of the core in 1.x, it’s never been properly documented, and with 2.x, we’ve introduced lots of new features to help test your application.

Here is a simple example of unit testing a helper function that adds two numbers.

The same idea can be applied to just about any function in your application. Here are some of the things you might want to test:

  • Global helper functions return the values expected
  • That custom model validations return error messages when a value is not valid
  • Model callbacks are fired and produce the expected result
  • Controllers produce the expected output
  • Controllers redirect to the correct location

Once you have a comprehensive test suite, you can make code changes with a greater sense of confidence that you have not introduced bugs (regressions) into your application. This gives you the opportunity to implement automated test runners into a continuous integration platform like Jenkins or TravisCI.

Don’t just take our word for it.. well actually, DO take our word for it as CFWheels 2.0 has been developed exclusively against the inbuilt test framework.

For those of you who have been using the testing framework in your CFWheels 1.x applications, the 2.0 framework has a number of improvements around setup, teardown and a super handy processRequest function:

You get lots of handy information back, like the body contents, the status code of the request, and more.

Want to get going? Check the comprehensive tutorial at guides.cfwheels.org

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Calling all plugin authors! Time for 2.x…

Thursday, May 18th, 2017

With CFWheels 2.0 beta around the corner, it’s time to have a cold hard look at the CFWheels plugin ecosystem.

With 2.x, we’ve taken the opportunity to modernise how we deal with plugins. If you’re a plugin author who has previously released something for 1.x, you’ll be pleased to hear there aren’t that many changes required to get your plugins playing nicely with 2.x, but it’s definitely a good time to revisit what you’ve got out there.

Introducing Forgebox.io

One of the main problems we had previously was a lack of a centralised repository of CFwheels plugins. The old system relied on a bit too much manual updating, and over time got a little long in the tooth. So now, all plugins should be added to forgebox.io, specifically in the CFWheels Plugins category. If you go and have a look now, you’ll see a few added by the core team as examples. Adding your plugin shouldn’t be too much hard work, but it’s definitely worth setting yourself up properly to publish to forgebox automatically via the commandline. There’s an extensive tutorial over at guides.cfwheels.org which we recommend you follow. In short, you ideally need a properly configured box.json file and for your plugins to use git tagged releases (ideally). If you’ve not installed commandbox and the CFWheels CLI, now is definitely the time to try it!

Easier for other developers too

Once your plugin is in the forgebox system, other CFWheels users can install your plugin with a single CLI command: install slugName; If they’ve got the CFWheels CLI installed, it will automatically create appropriate .zip files with the correct version number (which you’ll have set in box.json) too. They’ll also be able to view all existing plugins with wheels plugins list  making it extra quick to find the plugin they need. Dependencies are then tracked in that user’s box.json file, so they can even distribute an app without your plugin, and then simply run install to go and download the correct version later: they can even update to the latest version of your plugin via the CLI too, or freeze it to a specific version.

Automatic Java Mappings

One of the nice new features of 2.x is the automatic java library mappings which plugins can now take advantage of. Previously, you had to rely on the developer to manually add an entry into this.javaSettings.loadpaths if your plugin required use of a .class or .jar file. Now, we scan the plugin folders on startup, and automatically add any folders which contain .jar or .class files. One less step for configuration! You can see an example of this in the CFWheels bCrypt plugin, which adds a quick wrapper around the bCrypt java class.

Don’t forget your comments!

In a previous post, we talked about the new embedded documentation: plugins can now take advantage of this. For plugin authors, we’re recommending you comment all public functions – here’s a quasi code example below.

The important part is the [section: Plugins] and [category: Plugin Name] part, which will automatically sort your functions in the correct place in the internal documentation. It’s a good habit to get into, and will help other users of your plugin too.

Oh, and unit tests 🙂

Don’t forget to write some unit tests too (hey, don’t we all do TDD?); there’s been some changes to the test suite in 2.x, and writing unit tests is loads easier. More to follow on:

  • New functions for testing in 2.x
  • Running plugin tests via command line,
  • How to add your plugin to Travis CI for continuous integration testing

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