We are glad to announce another release to our Adobe ColdFusion Builder Extension: ColdBox Platform Utilities.  This release focuses on updating the core engine with updates, fixes and the following features:

Version 1.4
- Updated Application template versions to meet ColdBox 3.0.0 standards
- Lots of syntax updates and fixes to internal core and utilities
- Compatiblity of generated content to ColdBox 3.0.0 standards
- Ability to generate coldbox modules

So now you can generate ColdBox modules, use the latest ColdBox 3.0.0 generation schemas and more.  Also, please note that the application templates included with the extension are fully customizable.  Not only that, you can package your own templates and use them seamlessly.  This update also packages the module template so you can tweak it to your needs.  As always, the full extension documentation can be found here: http://wiki.coldbox.org/wiki/CFBuilderExtensions.cfm

 

The eclipse help plugins have been updated for this 3.0.0 M4 release. So update now.

How To Install

Please follow the following directions in order to install the ColdBox eclipse plugins:

1. From the Help menu, select Software Updates > Find and Install to open an Install/Update window.
2. On the Install/Update pop-up window, choose Search for new features to install, and click the Next button.
3. Set up a new remote site to scan for updates.
   1. Click the New Remote Site... button to open a New Update Site pop-up window.
   2. Type the name of the new plug-in in the name text box. ColdBox Framework
   3. In the URL text box, type the URL: http://www.coldbox.org/distribution/eclipse
      
   4. Click OK.
   5. Click the Finish button to open an Updates window.
4. On the Updates window, check the box next to the name of the plug-in, and click the Next button.
5. Choose the option to accept the terms of the license agreement, and click the Next button.
6. Click the Finish button.
7. Click the Install All button.

How To Open Help Contents

To open the documentation plugins, go to Help > Help Contents

WOW! This one took a while but finally our M4 release is now available. So is this a final release, beta, or what? Well, we are taking off the beta name and will use our Milestone release as it is now deemed production ready even though I see a lot of users already running production sites with 3.0.0 Beta. Anyways, this milestone release has tons of fixes and updates in preparation for our next milestone which we should introduce in the coming months in preparation for a Release Candidate in Mid or Late April. Our milestones are evolving as planned and our core is getting more solid and solid with each release. This one especially really tightens the bolts on a lot of features introduced since the first betas. So let's start looking at what we did. However, please look at the tickets that have a (COMPATIBILITY) tag on them, if they do, then this means that this release has changed behavior from previous releases and you must see if you use that particular piece of code because most likely it needs to be updated. Please bear with us as all our docs are been reviewed for updates and more are added every day. Our new wiki is also online, powered by CodexWiki of course, and it will contain only 3.0.0 documentation. The 2.6.4 and less docs will remain in the orginal location. Here are the tickets for this milestone:

Read more...

Welcome to another week of wonderful releases.  We start of with our two awesome logging and mocking frameworks LogBox and MockBox.  They have both just graduated to version 1.1 and can be downloaded today as standalone frameworks or via the 3.0.0 M4 bundle, ahh yes, another blog post after this.

So what's new with LogBox 1.1, well here are the tickets:

890	add all appenders to a logbox category by default even from coldbox apps	Fixed
891	category definitions should allow the * for appenders when definining them, instead of listing them	Fixed
907	Async Appenders need way to distinguish between threading and not	Fixed
910	LogBox standalone is now refactored to work under the logbox namespace	Fixed
941	new properties for EmailAppender: useTLS and useSSL	Fixed

The most important considerations are that we now have a utility that distinguishes when you are within an executed cfthread in any CFML engine.  LogBox uses this now for all of its asynchronous operations.  We also have refactored the download so LogBox can be installed alongside any ColdBox version or any other framework.  If you want to use LogBox in your ColdBox 3.0.0 applications, you already have it installed, so don't worry. 

Category definitions can now use '*' to define that you want ALL appenders for a specific logging category.  You can also omit them and LogBox will add all of them too.  However, be precise and use '*' if you want all appenders.

The last ticket was contributed to us and it is a great addition to the Email Appender, so now you can set the flags for SSL and TLS a-la-carte.  So enjoy LogBox 1.1!

Now to our mocking and stubbing library MockBox! So what's new with MockBox 1.1:

911	Standalone version should be refactored into its own namespace	Fixed
940	new method querySim() to help simulate queries	Fixed

We have also refactored the standalone download so it can be used alongside any ColdBox version or framework.  We have also added a nice UDF to simulate queries called querySim().  This way you can easily simulate and mock queries from your tests by doing things like:

mockQuery = querySim("col1, col2
val1 | val2
valrow2 | valRow2
valRow3 | valRow3");

That's it, just use the first line of the call to put your columns comma delimited and then a break and you rows separated by breaks and columns separated by '|'.  A very cool way to simulate queries. 

And finally, it has some minor fixes and tweaks, nothing extraordinary apart from the library itself!

So enjoy these two new standalone releases which can also be found in our upcoming ColdBox 3.0.0 Milestone 4 release!

Thanks to Henrik Joreteg we have now our very own ColdBox JSMin Compressor for js/css assets.  This plugin is a cool java/coldfusion integration and will compress your css and js assets on the fly and produce compressed versions of your assets.  It will also cache them and concatenate multiple assets into a single js/css file for even more optimizations. How easy?

<head>
#getMyPlugin("JSMin").minify('includes/js/myscripts.js','includes/js/jquery.js')#
#getMyPlugin("JSMin").minify('includes/css/site.css','includes/css/boxes.css')#
</head>

So thanks Henrik, we now have ColdBox JSMin and what would a plugin be without documentation :) http://wiki.coldbox.org/wiki/Projects:JSMin-Compressor.cfm