Best practice/method for developing in Fabrik

[chris.paschen]

I've seen several VERY old threads here (from 2009 era) about how to 'deploy' a fabrik 'app' from a dev site to a production site; however, nothing more recent.

What is the present 'proper' means to develop a fabrik app and then get it deployed to a live server?

(Is the 'package' system at all working at this point?)

I couldn't find anything in the wiki either. :-(

 

[troester]

http://fabrikar.com/forums/index.ph...oving-your-development-site-to-your-live-site

This is for moving/replacing a complete Fabrik setup.

'package' is still very, very work in progress.

 

[chris.paschen]

Thanks. I missed that in my searching.

Are there any instructions on how to handle things if you already have a different Fabrik app on the live server (that you are not updating - and may have had changes on the live site that are not on the dev site)?

 

[cheesegrits]

The answer is, unfortunate, that basically you can't. That's why we are trying to get the 'package' concept working, but it's proving to be somewhat intractable. So this may be an issue which never gets resolved in Fabrik 3.

We never really envisaged Fabrik getting to be so powerful, it started life as a simple for generator almost a decade ago, on Mambo (Joomla's ancestor), and by the time it became clear that it could be used to develop much more complex apps, and would require sandboxing to develop ... it was already past the point where "packaging" was going to be anything but a major problem.

As part of developing the JED, we've basically rebuilt Fabrik's framework from the ground up, for Fabrik 4, in such a way that it will be much easier to "package" apps.

But in 3.x ... :/

-- hugh

 

[chris.paschen]

Is there any ETA or roadmap for Fabrik 4?
I can wait for a while if it's going to relatively soon (i.e. yet this year), but I'm starting to feel that I'll need to just start creating custom code (which I've been avoiding since I first tried fabrik many years ago )

 

[cheesegrits]

No roadmap on Fabrik 4, no.

There comes a point where Fabrik isn't a fit, if what you need is more than a relatively simple app with a finite lifespan. While Fabrik can be used to create very complex apps, that was never our main focus. The exact trade-off point, where it becomes more work to maintain a Fabrik app than to write the code yourself, is up to the individual. Although I will say this - when you start building your own J! apps, you may be surprised at how much work it is, and how much time Fabrik does save you.

-- hugh

 

[Johannes]

I just started out with fabrik, but planned to use it with all my future projects due to its endless possibilites. What worries me a lot is that there is nowhere any roadmap nor futureplan for fabrik. Since the JED was developed with fabrik it made me believe the project is right for me, but reading the lines above and seeing that no plans for a new version exist makes me think if I would do my customers and me any favours using fabrik.

Johannes