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With the advent of so much more functionality in modules, in ColdBox 4 we added the ability to group modules in a single directory we lovingly call The Module Bundle.  This feature became a reality due to a real client's need of being able to logically separate modules into logical buckets.  His application had an extensive amount of modules and he wanted to further segregate them, thus module bundles became a reality.  

If you have been following our series here on ColdBox 4.0, you are probably sensing a theme.  

Another major change in ColdBox 4.0 was the removal of plugins as a thing.  They were just model objects anyway and we had treated them as such within the framework for some time.   However, because of that, we needed to do something with some of our various "core" plugins.  So sticking with our...

ColdBox 4.0 is a major release for the ColdBox line. The most major since its original release in June 2006. To boost efficency and open up options, we've removed a lot of non-necessary items from the core installation and made them available through modular architecture instead. However, there are some thing that we've kept - and for good reason. This post discusses what we kept in the core of ColdBox 4.0 and why.

Welcome to the jungle

Remember a time when the internet was a safe place. Where your email wasn't getting hacked every 3 months, nobody wanted to XSS something malicious to you or through you, and no one conceived of encrypting your hard drive for money?

I don't either. Since its inception, the internet has been a jungle of security complications.

CSRF: not the good kind of surfi...

ColdBox allows you to store the details of your CF datasources in your configuration file.  This prevents you from needing to store usernames and passwords in  your actual code, and allows you  to easily switch an application to another database, even with the environment control.  In  the past this datasource information was presented to you as a CFC object with getter methods.  

In ColdBox 4.0 we recognized that the datasource bean was really just a value object with no behaviors-- only data.  In the spirit of simplification,  we've replaced the datasource bean with a standard struct of data.

If you've ever worked with jars or raw java in ColdFusion, you will love the JavaLoader module for ColdBox. The JavaLoader module will interface with Mark Mandel's JavaLoader to allow you to do a network class loader, compiler and proxy. You can keep jars with your application's code instead of putting them in ColdFusion classpath, and you can even dynamically compile java co...

Since the early ColdBox 2 versions we had the ability to declare helpers for our layouts and views by creating a file right next to the view and adding the suffix Helper to it.  This would allow the framework to bind the two templates together at run-time.  This is a great way to provide further separation by convention.  However, there was no way to affect layouts and views globally.  You only had the global application helper which injected functions and...

Looking to secure your ColdBox application?  The Security Module can be your security rules engine for your application.  It provides flexible options to rules based security for you to use.

We have often talked about how a module can be either complex or as simple as an interceptor.  Our Security Module is basically just an interceptor that gets registered in your application to enforce rules you define.  Installing it is easy u...

As part of the core cleanup for ColdBox 4.0, the internationalization aspects (i18n) have been moved out into their own module. Up until ColdBox 4.0,  i18n was a plugin, like messageBox, and Logger, and Validator. All of these plugins have been reworked into ColdBox 4.0 modules and are available on ForgeBox.

Without i18n being in the core, your smaller, focused applications that don't leverage i18n's features won't have i18n weighing down your server.

But, for the i18...

ColdBox's ORM services have always been a very compelling part of the framework for those using ORM in their applications.  The provide you with an automatic, extendable service layer for an ORM entity complete with common methods, pagination and really sweet syntactical sugar such as dynamic finders:

user = userService.findByLastName("Majano");
users = userService.findAllByLastLoginBetween( "01/01/2014", "01/01/2015" );
count = userService.countByLastLoginGreaterThan( "01/01/2013" );