Blog

Finally, Oscar Arevalo of Home Portals, ColdBox Reader and a constant ColdBox contributor is finally blogging. So welcome to the blogosphere Oscar, and put out some of your usual funky topics.

The ColdBox Dashboard application is now fully functional on Railo 2.0RC and will be distributed as the Railo Archive is prepared for it. As of now, Railo fans will have to wait somewhat for the inclusion of the archive. So please bear with me as the Archive is included. As of now, the dashboard is compiled to work on Adobe ColdFusion 7 & 8, and BlueDragon 6 and 7.

Thanks

Well, yet another ColdBox release!! This one is an exciting one as we approach the 2.1.0 release. More unit testing capabilities, less restrictions, more fixes and more great stuff. This release thanks to God's grace on permitting me do thing I though I could not do. So here is the list of fixes, features and updates. Ohh by the way, a whole new Dashboard is also release, version 2.2.0 with full Railo support, more application generation capabilities, BlueDragon 7 support, and more.

ColdBox 2.0.2

* Full Railo 2.0 Support

* Full BlueDragon 7 support

* Application Template updated with new Unit Testing Suites, and new base unit test handler.

* New and Updated Eclipse Snippets with unit test skeletons.

* Docs updated to reflect changes

* Discovery of CFML engine and version and store in ColdBoxSettings

* BlueDragon 7 Charting - Enable for OCM

* Samples Gallery updated with i18n Fixes.

* Logger plugin compliance to coldfusion 8 eclipse plugins.

* Customizable event variable name via config.xml, no more only 'event' you can now choose your own.

* ExceptionService - if custom bug report fails, error calling exception handler Fixed.

* Unit Testing Controller, Base Test And Test Suites,You can even use the setnextevent method now.

* Request Context - New Methods for DefaultLayout, DefaultView, and ViewLayouts

* BugReport use new event methods for reporting.

* Default View Setting alongside Default Layout, you can now also choose a default view.

* IncludeUDF() method for handlers/Plugins - You can now programmatically mix-in methods into any handler and plugin. Advanced OO features.

* Critical Fix for Concurrency issue on config reloads

* Concurrency locks for OCM - friendlier locks

* ColdSpring ColdBox Proxy Factory: ColdboxFactory.cfc, you can now use this factory in your coldspring declarations to get a reference to the current running coldbox controller, instantiate plugins, and configuration beans.

* setnextEvent - proxy updates to grab the last part of the cgi script_name Fix

* ColdBox OCM - expireAll() new method, will expire all objects in the cache.

* Code optimization and cleanup.

* Now includes a cheat sheet.

As you can see, action-packed like always.

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Dashboard 2.2.0

* New Application generator, with unit test suites, event names and much more.

* Railo support finalized, will be released later as a railo archive.

* Cosmetic additions

* Cleanup and optimization.

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As always, thank you for your support. Please support open source. You can download the bits from the Downloads location.

I have been working with Charlie Griefer as co-manager of the IECFUG to get it started and he has named me Manager as he will be leaving us soon, just when it starts to get interesting. Anyways, thanks to Sami Hoda's contact at Cali Poly University, we have been

assured a room to hold our CFUG meetings starting on July 6th, 2007

with the crew from Railo CFML engine, http://www.railo.ch. They will

be here from Germany to demonstrate Railo and all its features. It

will also be a great meeting to get our CFUG organized, see what

direction we want to take and the presentations we would like to see.

Hope to see you there and get the first official IECFUG off the

ground.

The Pomona location is a great central location for both the IE and LA area. So if you are in the LA area and not part of the IECFUG mailing list or considering where to go, please go do so by registering via the mailing list.

Regards,

Luis Majano

I just read this iPhone New Features by the Onion and it is really funny.

I have been using more and more cfcUnit and find it really essential now. So I have uploaded the documentation to my site for easy reference that anybody can get access to.

Just point your browser to: http://www.luismajano.com/cfcunit/documentation and you can read to your eyes content.

Well, ColdBox is finally 1 year old. Actually it was yesterday, but I have been moving to my new house so it has been really really hectic. Here is the blog post I did back in June 16, 2006 on an introduction to ColdBox. I would have not believed this project would have gotten so far and so quick, but with the help of God it has. I am really excited about ColdBox and the direction it has been heading into. The community support for it has been overwhelming in the little time the framework has been open source. I am glad to report that there has been over 1200 downloads of the framework so far and counting. Development on this project has been going strong and will continue to be even stronger now that Brian Legros is on the team. I am a firm believer in quick and small updates in order to maintain the fixes as quick as possible and be integrating tested new features in slow amounts. This has been incredibly successful.

So watch out for the upcoming updates this week for both framework and Dashboard. Again, I am really happy to say that this project has crossed the year marker and with incredible numbers. Please leave a comment about your success with ColdBox, how it can be better or if you are interested on it. This next year will be filled with even more excitement, new features and YES PRESENTATIONS, I have had no time for this, but will soon free up for it. As always, please contact me if you would like to contribute to this project.

As you all know by know, ColdFusion is an excellent OO platform for web development and as our systems grew in complexity and maintainability we need to plan REALLY WELL!! The best way we can is UML, the Unified Modeling Language. The purpose of the Unified Modeling Language is to provide a language-independent and platform independent modeling notation. UML tools are as versatile as the UML is foundational.

I am so used to modeling in UML now that it is a REQUIREMENT for any project, no matter how small or how big. In that sense, some of you may be beginning to see the benefits of object modeling and may wonder how in the world to start. Well, I found a great article in the NetBeans website that touches on why to use UML and provides some great samples. Although it is directed to the Java developer, I believe a ColdFusion developer can gain some benefit from it.

Why Model with UML?

As always, more documentation so you can get to expand your knowledge on ColdBox. The following guides have been created and some have been updated:

New Guides

* Reserved Words & Methods Guide

* Load Custom ColdBox Config Files

* Plugins Guide

Updated Guides

* FAQ

* Start Page

As you all now, Apple release a beta of Safari for Windows. Hooray!! This brings me some sanity as at work we use PC's, really really really frustrating, but I am not the owner and well, they make me use it. Anyways, I love my .Mac because on my mac's I can synchronize my bookmars and well all that other stuff. Now with the advent of a Windows Safari, does anybody now if there is a synchronization feature I am missing?? I would love for my windows safari to have all the bookmarks my Mac has? Does anybody know??