Circuit Maker is about to become an active project again, instead of a mere passing reference. What is Circuit Maker? It makes Fusebox circuits automatically. Given some simple settings, it creates Model, View, and Controller for a given entity in your Fusebox program. The concept is similar to Ruby’s scaffolding, except for two things. First, it wasn’t developed by Ruby developers so it’s not the same. Second, it doesn’t (yet!) model itself based on the contents of the database. One of the great things about it, though, is that it abides by a very organized structure and set of best practices which help application developers develop faster and better.
So tonight, I loaded up the svn dump to a new repository. It wasn’t easy though, because Circuit Maker used to be in a repository along with a bunch of other projects. As I found out, SVN does not have a feature which allows the user to split, or separate, a repository into more than one repository. Instead, the SVN dump file has to be run through svndumpfilter to remove irrelevant paths, and then it must be hand-edited to correct unwanted paths or changes in path structure (moves or renames to the directory containing the code). It turned out to be easier than I expected, but that was partly because CircuitMaker does not yet contain any octet-encoded files. This guy had worse luck.
Now that we have a workable repository, it is on! Roy and I are pretty excited to finally get this thing out there in the Fusebox community where it belongs. In a way, we’ll hopefully beat Fusebox to the punch when it comes to this kind of thing. There has never been a free/open source tool which is as sexy as this, and all Fusebox has is an inactive Trac page and some ColdFusion code. But if they do get something together, it might lead to some interesting fusion of concepts between Circuit Maker and it.
That’s all. Have a good weekend.