October 2025 was a wild ride at Ortus. We released ColdBox 8.0.0, The Ocho, a version that redefines CFML architecture from REST APIs to full-stack microservices. At the same time, BoxLang evolved with bx-ldap, bringing connection pooling and event-driven authentication for enterprise environments, along with BX-Charts, a new way to transform raw data into stunning visuals without relying on external libraries.

Beyond the code, we faced real-world lessons in modernization: legacy crashes, failed audits, and teams on the edge. Proactive DevOps turned that chaos into control, proving that the human factor determines whether a project succeeds or fails. Ignoring it is the fastest way to watch your budget disappear.

Product Releases & Tools

• Is Your Legacy Platform Holding You Back? 6 Fixes Only BoxLang Delivers!

  BoxLang breaks legacy barriers: no growth penalties, 40%+ savings, full CFML compatibility, zero-downtime assisted migration, direct creator support, and a modern ecosystem with native integrations (Redis, PDF, FS, etc.). Includes the Pioneer Program (open until Dec 1, 2025) with a 1-year free non-production license, dedicated Slack channel, and guaranteed discounts.

• Security First: Why a ColdFusion Audit Should Be Step Zero of Any Modernization

  A ColdFusion security audit is essential before modernization: it identifies critical vulnerabilities, prioritizes fixes, and ensures a secure foundation for migration. Ortus Solutions offers comprehensive audits that assess configurations, code, dependencies, and infrastructure, providing a clear roadmap for secure modernization.

• From Chaos to Cadence: How On-Demand DevOps Standardizes Your CI/CD in 30 Days

  Ortus Solutions offers a structured 30-day playbook to transform disorganized CI/CD pipelines into a reliable, automated release process. The plan progresses through four phases: auditing the current system, implementing quick wins, establishing guardrails, and scaling the solution across services. This approach minimizes downtime and integrates seamlessly with ongoing development efforts.

• ColdFusion 2018/2021 End of Support: What Happens If You Don’t Move Now

  Running ColdFusion 2018 or 2021 after their End of Support (EoS) dates exposes your organization to security vulnerabilities, compliance risks, and operational inefficiencies. Ortus Solutions outlines a strategic approach to modernization, including comprehensive audits, phased migrations, and the adoption of future-ready platforms like BoxLang to ensure long-term stability and compliance.

• Ortus State of Our Products – Recap

  Ortus Solutions provides a comprehensive overview of recent advancements across its product suite. Highlights include ColdBox 7.4's full BoxLang compatibility, TestBox's native BoxLang support, and ContentBox's evolution into a BoxLang-first CMS. The recap also touches on upcoming features like CBWIRE's native BoxLang support and CommandBox PRO's enterprise enhancements.

• From Legacy Deployments to Modern Pipelines: DevOps Acceleration for ColdFusion and Lucee Applications

  Ortus Solutions offers on-demand DevOps services to transition ColdFusion and Lucee applications from manual deployments to modern CI/CD pipelines swiftly and securely. Their approach automates builds, integrates testing and security checks, ensures consistent environments using infrastructure as code, and minimizes downtime with progressive delivery patterns. This service enhances reliability, speed, and scalability for legacy applications.

• ColdBox Free Tip 7 – ENVIRONMENT Environment Variable

  ColdBox simplifies environment management by auto-detecting the ENVIRONMENT variable from your .env file. This allows dynamic configuration for development, staging, or production setups without modifying code. ColdBox will execute corresponding methods in ColdBox.cfc and ModuleConfig.cfc, enabling environment-specific configurations. Additionally, ColdBox 7 introduces helper functions like inDevelopment(), inTesting(), and inProduction() to streamline environment checks.

• ColdBox Free Tip 8 – Which ColdBox Version Am I Using

  Ortus Solutions provides three straightforward methods to determine the version of ColdBox you're using:

  • CommandBox Method: Run the list command in your terminal to display the installed ColdBox version.
  • ColdBox Application Method: Use the #getColdBoxSetting('version')# function within your ColdBox application to retrieve the version directly.
  • Module Configuration Method: Access the version via variables.coldboxVersion in your ModuleConfig.cfc file, useful for module development and compatibility checks.

  These methods assist in ensuring compatibility, debugging, and adapting modules to different ColdBox versions.

• ColdBox Free Tip 9 – Mastering Email Configuration with cbMailServices in ColdBox

  This blog post guides you through simplifying email-handling in ColdBox using the cbMailServices module: from setting up the mailsettings struct in your ColdBox.cfc, to defining environment-specific protocols (e.g., logging instead of sending in development), to customizing properties like tokenMarker, protocol, to, from, and more.

• ColdBox Free Tip 9 – Part II: Sending Emails Using cbMailServices – Tokens, Protocols and Logs

  In this follow‑up article, discover how to use the cbMailServices module in ColdBox to send emails with dynamic content (bodyTokens), multiple protocols (e.g., CFMail, File) and environment‑specific behaviors (e.g., logging in development).

• Scaling Smart: When It’s Time to Bring in an On-Demand DevOps Engineer

  As organizations grow, infrastructure challenges often emerge. Ortus Solutions highlights six signs indicating the need for an on-demand DevOps engineer:

  1. Deployments lag behind release cycles: When deployment processes become bottlenecks, they hinder team velocity.
  2. Inconsistent environment replication: Reliance on "it works on my machine" suggests scalability issues.
  3. Incident response is limited to a few individuals: Dependence on a small number of engineers for fixes increases vulnerability.
  4. Reactive monitoring: Discovering issues only after user reports indicates insufficient observability.
  5. Onboarding challenges for new hires: Inconsistent or undocumented environments slow down new team members.
  6. Stalled modernization plans: Efforts to transition to containers, CI/CD, or cloud solutions are hindered by manual foundations.

  Ortus Solutions' on-demand DevOps engineers provide immediate relief by assessing pipelines, implementing automation, and establishing scalable infrastructures, ensuring sustainable growth without the overhead of full-time hires.

• ColdBox 8 : The OCHO!

  This major release of ColdBox 8.0.0 introduces native integration with BoxLang (via the bx-coldbox module), AI-powered development features (documentation search, code generation, error fixes), virtual thread executors for high-performance async workloads, revamped CLI tooling, and new application templates for both greenfield and enterprise scenarios.

• The Hidden Human Factor in ColdFusion Modernization

  Modernizing isn’t just about technology — it’s about people.

  Highlights:

  • Legacy fatigue can demotivate teams and stall progress.
  • Understanding why systems were built — not just how — bridges the knowledge gap.
  • Strong communication practices and culture-first leadership are key to successful transformation.
  • At Ortus Solutions, modernization includes team enablement, collaborative planning, and mentoring for future-ready workflows

• From Reactive to Proactive: How On-Demand DevOps Prevents Outages Before They Happen

  By shifting from firefighting to foresight, this blog post outlines how on-demand DevOps engineers from Ortus Solutions help build resilience through four pillars: observability, automated testing, infrastructure-as-code, and continuous feedback loops. These strategies reduce outages, improve deployment velocity, and elevate team confidence.

• Lessons from the Trenches: What We’ve Learned Modernizing Legacy ColdFusion Apps

  After two decades of helping organizations modernize their Adobe ColdFusion and CFML systems, the team at Ortus Solutions shares real‑world lessons: many projects begin in crisis, maintenance becomes a burden, and incremental modernization (rather than full rewrites) often delivers the best results

• Lessons from the Trenches: What We’ve Learned Modernizing Legacy ColdFusion Apps

  Every ColdFusion modernization project tells a story — and not all of them start well.

  After two decades of helping organizations modernize their ColdFusion and CFML systems, the team at Ortus Solutions shares what they’ve discovered: some projects begin in crisis — an app failure, a compliance audit miss, or the departure of a key developer. Others begin simply when someone asks, “Why are we still on ColdFusion 11?”

BoxLang Updates

• BoxLang v1.6.0 – Performance, AI-Powered Docs, and Advanced Async Monitoring

  BoxLang 1.6.0 introduces significant performance enhancements, achieving up to 65% faster execution. The integration of AI-powered documentation via the Model Context Protocol (MCP) allows developers to access language references and best practices directly within their workflow. Additionally, the new BoxExecutor class provides comprehensive health monitoring and activity tracking for asynchronous operations, offering deep insights into async tasks.

• SocketBox: Hello, WebSockets

  SocketBox is a new WebSocket library designed to simplify real-time communication in CFML and BoxLang applications. It integrates seamlessly with CommandBox and BoxLang MiniServer, enabling bidirectional communication through WebSockets. SocketBox provides tools like WebSocketCore for basic usage and WebSocketSTOMP for advanced features such as message routing and authentication. This library facilitates the development of interactive applications by enabling real-time data exchange between the server and clients.

• Unleashing the Power of Data Visualization – Introducing BX Charts for BoxLang

  Enhance your BoxLang applications with the new bx‑charts module: a full‑featured charting library offering 10 chart types (bar, line, pie, doughnut, radar, polar area, area, horizontal bar, scatter, bubble) with responsive design, custom styling, multiple data sources (queries, arrays), and seamless integration with BoxLang’s tag syntax.

  It’s built by Ortus Solutions and enables devs to turn raw data into interactive, high‑quality visuals without heavy client‑side code.

• Unleashing the Power of Data Visualization – Introducing BX Charts for BoxLang

  Enhance your BoxLang applications with the new bx‑charts module: a full-featured charting library offering 10 chart types (bar, line, pie, doughnut, radar, polar area, area, horizontal bar, scatter, bubble) with responsive design, custom styling, multiple data sources (queries, arrays), and seamless integration with BoxLang’s tag syntax.

  Built by Ortus Solutions, it enables developers to transform raw data into interactive, high-quality visuals without heavy client-side code.

• Announcing BX Spreadsheet – Excel Made Elegant

  The BX Spreadsheet module delivers a modern BoxLang‑native solution for Excel file handling—create, read, manipulate spreadsheets with clean, fluent APIs designed for developers.

• Announcing BX Spreadsheet – Excel Made Elegant

  The BX Spreadsheet module delivers a modern BoxLang‑native solution for Excel file handling—create, read, manipulate spreadsheets with clean, fluent APIs designed for developers.

• Announcing BX CSV – Premium CSV Processing for BoxLang

  The BX CSV module provides high‑performance CSV handling for BoxLang: streaming support for large files, fluent APIs for reading/writing, conversion to/from JSON/Query/array formats, and full control over delimiters, quotes, escapes, and line endings.

• BoxLang Redis Has Landed – Enterprise‑Grade Caching, Pub/Sub and Distributed Locking

  This release introduces the bx‑redis module for BoxLang, offering high‑performance Redis‑powered caching, pub/sub messaging, and distributed locking support. It enables scalable, resilient architectures by leveraging Redis’s real‑time data structures and the BoxLang enterprise cache engine.

• BoxLang RSS – Full-Featured RSS/Atom Feed Module for BoxLang

The bx-rss module brings enterprise-grade feed capabilities to BoxLang: support for RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0 (RDF), and Atom feeds; full feed creation (metadata, iTunes podcast extensions, media RSS); aggregation of multiple sources; and a powerful alternative to CFML’s cffeed tag, with its own BoxLang-native implementation.

• BoxLang Compat UI: Another Bridge from CFML to BoxLang

  This article introduces the bx-compat-ui module, which eases the transition of CFML-based user interfaces into BoxLang. It provides compatibility tools that let developers reuse CFML tag syntax, layouts, and event wiring while gradually shifting into BoxLang’s modern runtime, minimizing rewrite risk and accelerating adoption.

MoD Podcast

• Recap: Modernize or Die Podcast Ep. 242

  In this episode, Daniel Garcia and Jacob Beers discuss the latest updates from Ortus Solutions, including the upcoming ColdBox 8 release, the new Box AI module, and BoxLang 1.6. They also share insights from the recent CF Summit 2025, strategies for modernizing legacy systems, and the importance of community support through Patreon. The episode highlights the significance of AI integration in software development and the ongoing efforts to enhance developer tools and resources.

• Recap: Modernize or Die Podcast Ep. 243

  In this episode of the Modernize or Die Podcast, hosts Eric Peterson and Jacob Beers from Ortus Solutions discuss major releases and updates — including the launch of ColdBox 8, the new BoxLang 1.6, and the introduction of SocketBox for WebSockets. They also explore AI‑powered development tools, upcoming community events, and strategies for modernizing legacy architectures.

Ortus Upcoming Events & Webinars

• Into the Box 2026 is Here: Learn All the Details!

  This edition of the conference — themed “Modernization in Motion: Building a Dynamic Future” — is now open for early registration.

  Here’s what to expect:

  • A multi‑day in‑person event (Apr 29–May 1, 2026) in Washington, DC.
  • Deep‑dives into modernizing with the BoxLang ecosystem, including cloud‑native, microservices, AI, WebAssembly, real‑time UIs, DevOps and security.
  • Exclusive perks for attendees: premium swag, networking (Happy Box event), optional workshops, lunch/snacks/beverages, lifetime access to recordings and slide decks.

• Call for Speakers: Into the Box 2026

  Join us for the next edition of the Into the Box 2026 conference — themed “Modernization in Motion: Building a Dynamic Future”.

  We’re inviting speakers to submit topics that cover: modern CFML practices, cloud‑native apps, AI integration, microservices, WebAssembly, real‑time UIs, and more.

  Deadline for topic submissions: November 15 2025, with the event scheduled for April 29‑May 1 2026 in Washington, DC.

• Free Webinar: Inside ColdBox v8 – The Ocho!

  Join this free live webinar hosted by Ortus Solutions to explore the major enhancements in ColdBox v8. You’ll gain insights into performance upgrades, advanced async features, and modern REST capabilities.

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