So let's get an overview of the major aspects of this release and where you can get it:

• Download RC2
• API Docs for RC2
• What's New with 3.0.0
• Compatibility Guide
• RC2 Milestone Review
• Github Source Code
• New 3.0.0 CheatSheet

Sample Applications

Thanks to Curt Gratz and the Computer Know How crew, all sample applications have been update to 3.0.0 standards and several new sample apps have been added to the mix. We have now over 25 full blow sample applications in our bundle release where you can learn from and even use for your apps. So Kudos to Curt and Crew for all the great support and help.

Stability & Performance

Thanks to the thousands of users around the world who have contributed their time to testing, load testing and performance tuning this core is the fastest release we have seen and the most stable. We have also done extensive optimizations to the core where we have seen tremendous performance increases for requests.

WireBox

WireBox is our new addition to the family. It is our enterprise dependency injection and AOP framework for ColdFusion 8 and above. This project has been part of ColdBox since its early version 2.0 releases but now it has been released as a standalone framework that can be used in any ColdFusion application. WireBox's inspiration has been based on the idea of rapid workflows when building object oriented ColdFusion applications, programmatic configurations and simplicity. With that motivation we introduced dependency injection by annotations and conventions, which has been the core foundation of WireBox. We have definitely been influenced by great DI projects like Google Guice, Grails Framework, Spring and ColdSpring so we thank them for their contributions and inspiration.

WireBox alleviates the need for custom object factories or manual object creation in your ColdFusion applications. It provides a standardized approach to object construction and assembling that will make your code easier to adapt to changes, easier to test, mock and extend. As software developers we are always challanged with maintenance and one ever occurring annoyance, change.

Therefeore, the more sustainable and maintainable our software, the more we can concentrate on real problems and make our lives more productive. WireBox leverages an array of object, function, and property metadata annotations to make your object assembling, storage and creation easy as pie! We have leveraged the power of event driven architecture via object listeners or interceptors so you can extend not only WireBox but the way objects are analyzed, created, wired and much more. To the extent that our AOP capabilities are all driven by our AOP listener which decouples itself from WireBox code and makes it extremely flexible. We have also seen the value of a central location for object descriptions and behavior so we created our very own WireBox Programmatic Mapping DSL (Domain Specific Language) that you can use to define object construction and relationships in pure ColdFusion (No XML!). WireBox has been running and powering mission critical ColdFusion applications since 2009 and now you can too. We truly hope you enjoy WireBox!

For the 3.0.0 release your ColdBox applications can be used in two modes: 1) WireBox 2) CF7 compatible wirebox. The latter will be removed by 3.1 so we encourage you to read our compatibility guide to migrate your applications to use the new WireBox standards. We have also added a WireBox adapater to the IOC integration pieces. This means that if you have already built an application using lightwire, coldbox enhanced lightwire or coldspring, you can easily migrate them to use WireBox instead by doing the following:

ioc = { framework = "wirebox", definitionFile = "config/WireBox" };

Please note that the latter support is only for quick migrations to WireBox without modifying your "ioc" injections. For full support, please use the integrated settings and not the ioc settings.

Around Advice AOP for Handlers

We have introduced two new conventions when creating event handler functions: aroundHandler() and around{Action}() which introdue localized around aspect advices for event handlers. You can now take complete control of one or all methods in a handler without actually modifying them. This is great for cross-cutting concerns like logging, threading, transactions, RESTful services and much more.

function aroundHandler(event, targetAction, eventArguments){ // start transaction transaction{ // execute the targeted action results = arguments.targetAction( arguments.event ); } // check for results and send back if found if( NOT isNull(results) ){ return results; } } Another example: function aroundHandler(event, targetAction, eventArguments){ try{ // execute the targeted action results = arguments.targetAction( arguments.event ); } catch(Any e){ //log it log.error("Error executing #getMetadata(targetAction).name#: #e.detail#, #e.message#"); // place exception on request collection for display rc.exception = e; // Take them to an error page screen for nice display. event.setView("exceptions/generic"); } // check for results and send back if found if( NOT isNull(results) ){ return results; } }

New Interception Points

You can now intercept at onInvalidEvent to take control when invalid events occurr in your application the interceptor way.

ColdBox Programmatic Configuration Enhancements

• The ColdBox.cfc programmatic CFC is now also an interceptor. WOW! You can now use the configuration object to add ANY interception you like. Once the application starts up, ColdBox will register the CFC as an interceptor for you. You can put any of your bootloading procedures here now in one centralized location.
• A reference to the programmatic CFC is now stored in your application settings for retrieval and usage as 'coldboxConfig': getSetting('coldboxConfig')

Request Context Enhancements

• New method: getHTTPContent() to retrieve the http body contents, useful on RESTful services. Also great for mocking capabilities.

ORM Services Revisions

• We have revised all ORM services to allow for further usage of query caching.
• Enabled DLM style batch updates to several new functions
• Allow for strict java-cf type conversions when removing or using internal hibernate "id" keywords on HQL
• save() now has a transactional attribute to allow for non-transaction saves
• New saveAll(entities) method that can take in an array of entities to save in chronological and transaction order
• New TransactionAspect interceptor to allow for AOP annotations on model objects, handlers, etc. You can now make any method use native hibernate transactions without worrying about nesting anything by just adding an annotation to any cffunction. The annotation is "transactional=true" and your handler action, or your service method magically becomes transactioned.

function saveUser() transactional=true{ }

Modules Enhancements

• The ColdBox modules have been enhanced to leverage WireBox and its new features. You can now declare a new module configuration structure "wirebox" which is the wirebox DSL or you can use the injected "binder" in the variables scope to leverage the WireBox Mapping DSL.
• The SES interceptor has been enhanced to allow for modules to be accessed much like packages in SES routes. Before if you wanted to hit by convention a module called "MyModule" with a handler called "Home" and an action "sayHello", you would do this:

http://myapp.com/index.cfm/MyModule:Home/sayHello

Which is ok, but not great. So we added module discovery to our package resolver.

http://myapp.com/index.cfm/MyModule/Home/sayHello

So now you can use the default route in your application to do ANY kind of URL to any module, package, nested package etc via nice Pretty URLs.

SES Enhancements

• Invalid HTTP method exceptions standardized to 403 status codes
• New method setThrowOnInvalidExtension() to tell the interceptor to throw a invalid extension exception or not
• Module discovery added to package resolver when using the default :/handler/:action? route
• New convention for your routes.cfm file: pathInfoProvider(). Thanks to Aaron Greenlee for this gem that allows the developer to override the retrieval of the cgi.path_info the interceptor automatically provides the interceptor. By just creating a method called "pathInfoProvider(event)" the SES interceptor will call your provider for the cgi.path_info instead of the normal avenue. Check out the what's new for examples.
• The addRoute() method has a new argument: ssl=[boolean=false] to allow you to tell the interceptor that certain routes can only be accessed via SSL. If the incoming request to that route is not in SSL mode, the interceptor will redirect the user (302) to the same requested route but in SSL mode.

If you would like to see all the tickets then go here: https://coldbox.assembla.com/spaces/coldbox/milestones/312453-3-0-0-rc2