FW/1 Is Back, Baby!

The invisible framework Sean Corfield pioneered ages ago was discovered left adrift and considered lost for several years.

Even though I had moved on to mostly ColdBox driven applications myself, fw/1 was still a useful framework when I wanted something that just gave my applications structure and injection without much of anything else, and it has long been the onramp MVC framework to ColdBox for many devs. Especially when they were faced with projects that required a more complex, robust and complete ecosystem for engineering #ColdFusion applications.

When a recent conversation came up about frameworks in ColdFusion on CF Slack, I suggested fw/1 was still being maintained as I was still under the impression that fw/1 was being maintained. As it turns out, Sean was quick to point out that nothing had really been done with fw/1 in several years. I still use it every day, so I was surprised to learn it had been that long since I'd seen an update. I mean, if it ain't broke don't fix it, so we never really looked for updates for our systems - which I guess is a good thing because there haven't been any.

After some back and forth discussion on the matter, Sean has agreed to let me take over the framework one ecosystem. That said, fw/1 is now back in maintenance - if you have PRs that you've been holding onto for lack of a maintainer, feel free to submit them on GitHub and they will be looked at.

I have merged the existing PRs, have begun looking at the issues, which appear to be some beginnings of a potential roadmap left by the former maintainer after Sean, and I am building a roadmap of features and improvements that will be made to fw/1 in the near future.

What I do not want to do is overcomplicate the framework. That it is 'invisible' is the reason I like it and the reason most devs use it. That said, however, there are some improvements that can be made - the core code itself hasn't really been looked at since ACF 11 I think (I could be wrong, but that seems right) and the language has evolved since then so there are likely to be areas where the code can be improved for performance, thread safety and security.

With all that being said, if you have things you would like to see improved or implemented in fw/1, please visit the Framework One GitHub Organization and file an appropriate issue with either the core fw1 repository, or if your suggestions are specific to di1 or aop1, then file an issue with those repositories.

I will be collecting these issues over the next few weeks, aggregating it with already planned changes on my end and putting together an official roadmap of development for the next major release, with some minor releases along the way.

To that end, development of fw/1 is being sponsored and the official roadmap will be funded by our sponsor and executed upon by myself and others. Announcement of the sponsor will come later on, but suffice it to say they use fw/1 extensively and have a vested interest in its future.

I want to personally thank Sean for letting me have this opportunity to continue his work. To walk in his footsteps feels a lot more like riding on the shoulders of a giant. I am humbled and appreciate being able to steward this project into the future.

So, framework one... Welcome back baby!