Fusebox: Developing ColdFusion® Applications

Introducing Prototypes

Many engineering and development disciplines use prototypes, but not all mean the same thing when they use the term. Before we get too deeply involved in the nuts and bolts of application prototyping, we need to get a handle on the Fusebox definition of the term.

A Fusebox prototype is a working front end for the application that has no ColdFusion code working behind it. Whereas some disciplines use the term prototype to mean the first working version of an item in development, we use the term to mean a version that is non-working but identical in every other way. That is, the version looks and feels like a running application, but it doesn’t interact with a database, communicate with other systems, process credit cards, ...