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There was a Twitter conversation today where Ben Nadel mentioned that one of the continuing issues with ColdFusion was bad JSON support.  I assume by that, he's referring to CF's tendency to change the datatype of variables while serializing them. I mentioned that Lucee Server has much better support for this and I'd like to show very quickly why this is.

So this is a short one to just showcase how one of our new features in the CommandBox 3.7 beta works.  What does it do?  The new command is testbox watch and it will stay running in the foreground and monitor your app for any file changes.  When a file change it detected, it runs your tests from the console and outputs the results so you can get instant feedback on save as to whether you just broke something.

So this post is a response to some blog comments on this post I made today extolling the features of creating native CLI scripts in CFML with CommandBox.  I mentioned in passing that Node is a popular tool for this, but I felt CommandBox had improved the mousetrap so to speak. I also acknowledged by bais as the lead developer of CommandBox, but I stand by my comments. Adam Cameron, in his eternal quest to keep me honest was a little incredulous though, and wanted to see some better proof of my claims.  Instead of elaborating in the comment section, and since I'm well into the "opinion" territory, I decided to respond in a blog post on my personal blog.  

Here's a quick post on a somewhat-undocumented feature of CommandBox.  I say "somewhat" because if you type "config set" and hit tab from the interactive shell, we'll auto-suggest this setting, so it's not impossible to find but I've not put it in the official docs.

So, here's the setup.  You can pretty much do anything you want with the ForgeBox website entirely through the CLI.  That includes creating accounts, logging in, publishing packages, updating packages, listing packages, and searching packages.  This is made possible by our nice (Coldbox-powered) REST API that's part of the ForgeBox site that the CLI interfaces with.  

Sometimes you may wish to play around and try out the commands to create users and packages, but you hate to create a lot of dummy data that clogs up the database or shows on your profile.  The fix is to point your local CommandBox CLI over to our staging instance of ForgeBox.  This is as simple as setting a single config setting from the command line and the change takes instant effect for all your ForgeBox interactions.  Just remember, this setting is remembered until you change it back so don't forget.  

Adobe released some new security updates for ColdFusion 10 and 11 yesterday.  This brought with it the usual flurry of twitter activity from security-minded accounts who pounce on the opportunity to retweet every vuln report on the internet.  It's too bad no one takes this much effort to focus on positive news from other languages.  Among the landslide of tweets were also a few people poking at ColdFusion such as this person who went as far as to say businesses should scrap all use of Adobe products in general due to the number of vulnerabilities.

I've been just giddy testing the new Multi-server support in our latest CommandBox 3.1.0 beta.  I never knew starting up a ColdFusion 9 server could be so exciting.  Well it is when you just have to type:

CommandBox> start [email protected]

That's it. You don't need a single thing installed prior other than CommandBox.  Everything necessary will be downloaded and, depending on your internet connection speeds, you'll have a new server running in less than 60 seconds.  Don't worry, it's not limited to ColdFusion 9.  We also are supporting Adobe ColdFusion 10, 11, and 2016 as well as Railo Server 4.2 and Lucee Server 5.0 rc!

Michael Smith has released the full results of this year's State of the CF Union survey over on the TeraTech blog.  I enjoy seeing this data every year as a framework author since it helps us know what engines and types of OS to target with our products.  This year, there's a full write up and a little commentary on each graph.  Note the write up is spread across two blog entries:

http://www.teratech.com/blog/index.cfm/2016/2/19/State-of-the-CF-Union-Survey-2016--Results

http://www.teratech.com/blog/index.cfm/2016/2/19/State-of-the-CF-Union-Survey-2016--Results-Part-II

Notable bits of data were:

• CF9 is finally falling behind CF10 and CF11.  This is good since we'll be dropping support for CF9 in ColdBox soon
• Lucee has left Railo usage in the dust, and a solid amount of people are already using Lucee 5
• Still a lot of people out there using no framework at all or FuseBox!  Of course, I assume this isn't new dev, but rather the same old legacy apps that have been around for years
• A lot of people not using a DI framework. Kind of curious if they're not using CFCs at all.
• Really surprised how many people still use Notepad++ for dev.  
• The "How many years have you used CFML" graph is very depressing.  Very little new blood coming into CFML.
• Love how many people are using CommandBox.  I'm so pleased to see it being useful for the CF world
• A decent chunk of Amazon EC2 users, but it's clear most CF shops aren't doing cloud deploys. Not sure if Adobe doesn't focus on cloud because their users don't care, or if it's the other way around.
• Surprised to see how many home-grown REST frameworks there are. I can't imagine a world in which you wouldn't waste more time doing that from scratch than to drop in something quick and easy like ColdBox 4's REST routing.  There's so much out of the box to be gained.
• There's a decent chunk of CF devs in very large companies, but the majority are in small business's with 1-20 total employees.  That's interesting since it's not where I would have pegged most CF devs to be.
• The comments are very interesting too.  Lots of love for Lucee and lots of frustration for Adobe.  

OK, well there's my thoughts. Head over and check out the data yourself. 

I'm super excited for dev.Objective() coming up in a week.  I originally only had one dev.Objective() session, but due to a cancellation I was able to get a second.  My first session will be 

GO COMMANDO, WITH COMMANDBOX! CLI + REPL + PACKAGE MANAGER FOR CFML

This will be similar to what I gave at CF Summit last year, but with a lot of new and exciting additions. If you're not familiar with CommandBox or not using it, this will be a great session to get started with.  

My second session (the late addition) is

RASPBERRY PI A LA CFML

A Raspberry Pi is a $35 credit card-sized computer that runs Linux.  I have been playing around with running CFML on a Pi which has resulted in a Pi-hosted CFML blog as well as some fun CFML-controlled hardware.  I'll be showing how to easily and quickly get CFML running a Pi as well as demoing some of my projects.  

Ortus will also be giving away a Raspberry Pi at our booth during dev.Objective() so please stop by.  I'm looking forward to seeing everyone!

In the beginning was the Web, and the Web was with CFML, and the Web was CFML. It was with CFML in the beginning. Through it all websites were made; without it no websites were made that had been made. In it were tags, and those tags were the productivity of all programmerkind. The productivity shone in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

Ok, maybe I'm overstating CFML a bit, but when it was created it was revolutionary.  It redefined how websites were built and set the bar for other web programming languages.  And though CFML led the pack for a while, there were soon others to follow.  These languages were also productive, came with compelling frameworks, and made building sites fast and fun.  Many of these servers were also free and open source and around them large communities grew.