Recap: Modernize or Die Podcast Ep. 245

Victor Campos November 19, 2025

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Victor Campos

November 19, 2025

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Modernize or Die Podcast #245: Recap, Transcript and Resources!

In this episode of the Modernize or Die Podcast, hosts Daniel Garcia and Jacob Beers discuss the latest updates from Ortus Solutions, including the release of ColdBox 8 and BoxLang 1.7. They delve into new features such as server-sent events, serverless capabilities with AWS Lambda, and the introduction of SocketBox for WebSocket integration. The conversation also covers upcoming events, training opportunities, and important updates regarding CFML, including the end of life for ColdFusion 2021. The hosts emphasize the growing impact of BoxLang within the Java community and its new PDF handling capabilities.

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Listen to the Episode:

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Show Notes & Overview

Hosts:

Daniel Garcia - Senior Developer at Ortus Solutions
Jacob Beers - Senior Developer at Ortus Solutions

Summary

Takeaways

ColdBox 8 introduces groundbreaking capabilities for web development.
The upgrade path from ColdBox 7 to 8 is smooth and efficient.
Server-sent events allow real-time data streaming from server to client.
BoxLang is making strides in serverless architecture with AWS Lambda.
SocketBox simplifies WebSocket integration in ColdFusion applications.
BXCompatUI facilitates easy migration from CFML to BoxLang.
BoxLang is gaining recognition in the broader Java community.
The new PDF handling features in BoxLang enhance document manipulation.
ColdFusion 2021 has reached its end of life, with no further updates.
Into the Box 2026 is a must-attend conference for developers.

Resources

https://www.ortussolutions.com/ortus-ai-services

Ortus News / Products

BoxLang Updates

BoxLang Community

CFML Updates

Ortus & BoxLang Events

Transcript

Daniel Garcia

Hello and welcome everyone to the Modernize or Die Podcast. I am your host, Daniel Garcia, along with my co-host.

Jacob Beers

Jacob Beers.

Daniel Garcia

Thank you. so how are you doing, Jacob?

Jacob Beers

I'm doing great. It's a lovely Tuesday afternoon here in Kansas City.

Daniel Garcia

let's kick things off. So he got lots of Ortus news coming up. First up is the Ortus and the BoxLang recap from 2025. The October recap. We had a lot of things going on. We released ColdBox 8, The Ocho.

a new version of a ColdBox that is, works with a BoxLang native. I don't know I'm getting tongue-tied with that. so excited still about the Ocho. we did talk about it last episode So if you want to catch up on all that, but lots of cool things, they're coming. So as we mentioned, the Ocho, whether you're rest API, full stack web apps, microservices, even desktop applications.

ColdBox 8 brings groundbreaking making capabilities that will supercharge your web development workflow. I just like read that off the script, it sounded like it.

Jacob Beers

No, no, no, it was totally natural.

Daniel Garcia

Totally natural, okay.

Along with those sorts of things, we've got the ColdBox Tips and Tricks series, ColdBox free tip number 10, Whoops, better exception tracking. And Whoops is our error page, if you're in ColdBox and you wanna get an error it's much nicer than the regular. And so as always, our episodes are sponsored by somebody in this case, again, Ortus Solutions, imagine that. what specifically in Ortus Jacob is sponsoring us?

Jacob Beers

This episode is backed by Ortus AI Services, where smarter software meets real world impact. Cut the busy work, automate what slows you down, and turn your data into clarity with AI crafted specifically for your team.

Daniel Garcia

Nice.

Okay, so moving on.

Jacob Beers

Well, actually, really quick before we move on, I want to draw a little bit more attention to ColdBox 8. Before it's too quick, I've actually had the privilege of upgrading a couple of apps from 7 to 8, and I just wanted to throw out that the upgrade path was super smooth. I basically just had to do a Box install to get the latest dependencies because there were a couple breaking changes, but other than that, in my application, it worked first try, no issues.

If you're worried about it, maybe just go give it a shot and it might turn out better than you think.

Daniel Garcia

Nice.

That's the spirit. It might turn out better than you think. No, go try it. It's going to be awesome. Woo. That's the kind of excitement we need Jacob on a Tuesday afternoon. Okay. We'll get there. Did you have your coffee today?

Jacob Beers

Hahaha

I've had two. You get what you get.

Daniel Garcia

I guess. man. Awesome. Okay. And so going up to the BoxLang news, if you have not heard BoxLang 1.7 is out. BoxLang 1.7 introduces server sent events, SSEs, real time streaming, JDBC cache store for distributed caching, AST generation tools for code analysis, byte code compatibility versioning, and significant performance improvements across the runtime.

I think Jacob, this is one of the releases that you're really excited about. You're excited about every release to be, to be fair, which is a good thing. but there's a lot of performance improvements that you're very excited to see in this one, I believe.

Jacob Beers

Yeah, absolutely. They mostly pertain to application startup. If you're using a ColdBox application, they mostly pertain to application startup because it has to do with when the templates are being compiled and cached. And so that's really gonna happen on like the first time you hit the site, but faster startup times are always a good thing.

Daniel Garcia

And then I think under the hood there are some changes too.

Jacob Beers

Well, the fine under the hood, that's a little bit broad with BoxLang. But yeah, I mean, there's been a lot of great changes.

Daniel Garcia

Okay.

Look at the show notes.

Jacob Beers

The show notes. Yep, we've increased the performance of our parser and bytecode generation pipeline. That's mostly the part that I was talking about with hitting the first compilation of it. So that's pretty great. And then we've had a lot of other additional like bug fixes and feature additions.

Daniel Garcia

Okay.

Nice. And along with that BoxLang service and events consumers are coming. Do you want to tell us what that it what that really means?

Jacob Beers

Yeah, absolutely. So server-side events are actually, if you're not familiar with them, I wouldn't blame you. They've been around for a really long time. Yeah, but they did not... Sure. They've been around actually for a long time, but they didn't get very much traction when they were first released. And it hasn't been, at least in my mind, until the past couple of years that they've begun to get more popular. But it's basically a way for the server to send events back to the client.

Daniel Garcia

I did. That's why I'm having you tell everybody about it.

Jacob Beers

but it doesn't use like AJAX long polling or, and it doesn't use WebSockets. It actually creates an HTTP connection. And then instead of closing it, it streams data back as it goes. So it's kind of like a, it's kind of awkward because the client or the server can send data back to the client. But once that connection is open, the client can't send data to the server through that connection. So it's one way from the server.

to the client. And it's kind of been adopted by a lot of AI tools as a simple way. If you have access to HTTP, you automatically have access to server sent events. You just have to process the data, certainly. And so they've taken advantage of that to give the experience of like streaming tokens as soon as they're ready, kind of things like that. this is something that Luis has put some work into to give BoxLang native support for server sent events and make interacting with AI

models a little bit easier.

Daniel Garcia

Nice. And I think with version 1.8 is going to ship with the consumer server sent events.

Jacob Beers

Mm-hmm.

Daniel Garcia

So I'm not sure when 1.8 is going to be available knowing our team and probably very soon, but I believe it's also in the snapshot right now if you want to go check that out.

Jacob Beers

Yeah, absolutely. Yep. If you install BoxLang at BE, you'll be able to test it out right now.

Daniel Garcia

And BE stands for Bleeding Edge. So maybe don't use that one in production if you don't have to, but. True, true, true, true, true. So next up, we've got a really nice article from our own Dan Caahd Dan Card, if I say Dan Caahd because he's from Boston, breaking the CF “CFM” barrier, going serverless on AWS Lambda with BoxLang.

Jacob Beers

bleeding edge.

Or maybe give it a shot and maybe you'll be surprised. Who knows?

Daniel Garcia

so like most of the CF community, Dan's heard about serverless for years, but never really dove into it for whatever reasons. But one of these, and a pretty big one was an irrational avoidance of all things Java and being used to the ease of spinning up a CF instance at other hosting locations. Now, when I say that I'm actually reading what he wrote. I'm not making fun of Dan. but yeah, just, but I feel his pain because I've always been kind of like, Ooh, Lambda, that sounds cool, but what does that even mean? And so he's got a blog article that talks about how to get started with that.

And it's a, it's a nice little intro into it and to ease yourself into the, the, the kiddie end of the pool and get going.

Did you paste that?

Jacob Beers

did not, sorry. I was enthralled by your narration. Yeah.

Daniel Garcia

It's okay.

My dulcet tones.

man. Are you posting it now?

Jacob Beers

No, I saw Sorry, I'm completely slacking my bad. All right, I'm doing it right now. Don't do it for me. All right

Daniel Garcia

Ha ha ha!

Okay, I

need you to close Slack and focus on the podcast. man. Well, Jacob has his third cup, starts getting his third cup of coffee. Next week is Thanksgiving week. And of course that means BoxLang Thanksgiving week where we want you to code smarter and modernize faster. And we've got a special discount coming up.

We're doing more than just offering free deals or discounts. We're helping developers and companies modernize their CFML apps and take the next big step into the BoxLang era. If you ever wondered how ready your code base is to move to BoxLang this is your chance to find out directly from our experts like Jacob, who is one of our many experts.

Jacob Beers

and thank you.

Daniel Garcia

and me,

although more Jacob. Did you paste that link? Okay. You know, I'm going to give you a break from pasting if you want to talk about the next couple of things.

Jacob Beers

Well, I can't even pay, I did get that one, it took me three tries, but there we are.

I will gladly accept that break. So we've got SocketBox. This is a new blog post on the Ortus Solutions blog. This is SocketBox deploying behind a load balancer. I actually had the opportunity to write this article. And this is number two of our four-part series on using SocketBox in production. And it's a really exciting piece of technology. I didn't personally write SocketBox. That's from Brad Wood. But I've got the...

the privilege of getting to use it and tell everyone about it through these blogs. so there are traditionally some challenges to, in the past, WebSockets and ColdFusion have been a little bit difficult to get working together, but SocketBox completely solves that. It makes it very, very easy to get WebSockets up and running in your application BoxLang and ColdFusion, as long as you're using a CommandBox hosted server.

Daniel Garcia

You

Jacob Beers

And then it even provides some patterns for solving some of the issues that you run into when using WebSockets. Like if we almost 100 % of people deploy behind a load balanced architecture, and when you're using WebSockets and that has a persistent connection to a specific server, that can lead to some issues, making sure you're communicating with the right pieces of data and it gets everywhere it needs to be. And so Socketbox actually provides patterns for

making sure that WebSockets work in a clustered environment. And as you can see in that article, it's really, really easy to set up. So if you're interested in that, go check it out. There's even an included repo that you can pull down and run to see things in action. So go check that out and look forward to the next ones that we have coming out.

Daniel Garcia

Nice.

Awesome. You know, I always appreciate that when there's a GitHub repo, just pull it down and run it and it just works. Then you can start tweaking it and playing with it. And it's nice. Well, along with that, we've got the, well, no, you're gonna talk about this one.

Jacob Beers

Mm-hmm.

the BoxLang CompatUI.

Daniel Garcia

because I think you love

the UI modules, don't you?

Jacob Beers

I don't know about that.

Another bridge from CFML to BoxLang. We're thrilled to announce that the release of the BXCompatUI, a comprehensive UI compatibility module, makes migrating your Adobe ColdFusion and Lucee applications to BoxLang seamless and straightforward. If you've been hesitant about moving to BoxLang because of your existing UI components, this module is your answer. So there you go.

Daniel Garcia

No, I know

there's a couple of different schools of thoughts when it comes to using things like this in general. some developers are like, never keep your UI out of my code. And then they prefer to do everything, you know, manually with JavaScript or whatnot. And, but there's some developers that like, Hey, this is great. Why not a couple of tags and get everything I need and go. And so, historically there's been issues over the years with some engines and support and

Jacob Beers

Mm-hmm.

Daniel Garcia

providing old libraries, don't get updated and all that. I don't think that's really the case with us because we're modern. But it is kind of interesting to see some of the very smart people that we work with and it's using BoxLang and just kind of going back and forth on it. But you know what, it's there. If you love it, use it. If you don't, don't, just use BoxLang.

Jacob Beers

yeah

Daniel Garcia

And so we got one more announcing the BX LDAP Enterprise LDAP for BoxLang. It is available for BoxLang Plus and Plus Plus subscribers.

This is a LDAP module brings enterprise grade directory access to BoxLang. It goes above and beyond traditional CFML LDAP implementations offering more features like connection pooling, event server programming, multiple return formats and clean intuitive APIs. And so a lot of people are like, wait, wait a second. I thought BoxLang is open source. Well, BoxLang is open source for most everything that you need or most everything that most people need.

But there are some modules that are going to be commercial. That's just, that's just the way it has to be. And, and this is one of them. And other ones like Redis and some of the other things, but for most people, if you don't need LDAP support, it doesn't matter. You don't need to worry about it, but someday you may grow big enough where you need it. And then know that we've got it because Ortus is always trying to be forward thinking.

Jacob Beers

Mm-hmm.

Daniel Garcia

Okay, speaking of which, we got your modernize your apps with a team that supports you every step of the way, the team behind the revolution. And this is, let me paste that link. Just a blog post that kind of talks about who we are at Ortus, what we do, why we do what we do, and inviting you to become a pioneer with everything BoxLang Plus.

I feel like we're just talking the same thing over and over again, which is good because we want people to become BoxLang pioneers. And we're all very excited about all of this.

Jacob Beers

Mm-hmm.

Daniel Garcia

But coming up here, Java Pro. What is Java Pro? Jacob.

Jacob Beers

So Java Pro is a website dedicated to sharing information about the Java ecosystem. So it's kind of cool. We've gotten published there in Java Pro just recently announcing the BoxLang 1.7 release. If you have been following along either with our podcast or with the Ortus News and things like that, there probably isn't going to be any new information for you here in this article.

But the thing that's really exciting about it is that it demonstrates that the BoxLang reach is extending out to the broader Java community. We have goals and aspirations to make BoxLang the next step for ColdFusion development. But we also want to make it something that contributes to the Java ecosystem as a whole and makes it easier for all.

all Java developers of all persuasions to be able to deliver faster. And so this is demonstrating that we're taking steps towards that and it's gaining traction.

Daniel Garcia

Yep. Just like you've heard of other Java implementations like Kotlin or Scala. Well, BoxLang kind of fits in with that, with that spirit of what we're doing with it as well.

So very exciting. I went to DevNexus for the first time earlier this year, and we were talking about BoxLang with Java developers. there was a lot, you're there, Jacob. There was a lot of excitement from people like, Ooh, what is this BoxLang? Ooh, it's another this, another, you could do that. It's that easy to do that. So there was some genuine excitement. I know Luis has gone to Japan. He's gone to some other conferences and overall, I think it's been a very positive response just for the Java community and completely outside of CFML. So it's very exciting.

Jacob Beers

I was.

Mm-hmm.

Absolutely.

Daniel Garcia

So another feature, if you wanna paste this, BoxLang's improved PDF handling. Ray Camden has a nice little blog post about it. Basically BoxLang has introduced a premium, again there's premium PDF plus module, part of its BoxLang plus plan that adds powerful PDF manipulation capabilities going beyond just creating PDFs. With this you can perform advanced tasks such as add attachments, insert and remove watermarks, headers, footers, delete pages, merge documents, really a lot of PDF manipulation.

Jacob Beers

Mm-hmm.

Daniel Garcia

And then if you look at Raymond's article, he kind of shows a real world workflow example of the scan of folder PDFs, trim long documents, generate thumbnails, things like that. And so definitely go check that out. Again, you can do a lot of cool things with BoxLang out of the Box, but some of these more niche things are going to be plus modules. And you know what, if they're going to save you time and solve problems, and that's what we're hoping for.

Jacob Beers

Yeah.

Daniel Garcia

And then mention it one more time, deploying BoxLang in the cloud video series on CFCast and BoxLang Academy, led by Oscar Tisnado. It's basically a step-by-step video series showing how to deploy BoxLang servers in AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, a series designed for developers and DevOps engineers seeking efficient modern cloud deployments.

And that wraps up our Ortus section.

Okay, let's move on. Let's got some CFML updates. And so a big reminder from our buddy, Charlie Arehart the CF 2021 is end of life as of Monday, November 10th. So last Monday. It reached the end of life. They're no longer providing updates or security patches.

You cannot buy extended support to get additional updates beyond the end of life. So that is a common misconception. Perpetual CF 2020 licenses will not be deactivated at through the end of life date. All the subscription based policies only remain active while payment continues. The 2023 license can no longer be purchased from Adobe, but you can buy a 2025 license, um, and backward license it for 2023. And as they, I think they

announced at the summit. Adobe is moving to annual ColdFusion releases going forward. Though it's unclear whether these annual versions will remain the traditional five-year support life cycle. A lot of that's to be determined. But if you need that 2023 installer and you can't find it on this website, there is a CFMLrepo.com website that you can get that from.

Uh, next up, it's a Docker blog post. And since you're the Docker guy, why don't you tell us about that?

Jacob Beers

All right, well, this is a post from Ben Nadel about using custom font, making sure that they're available to the ColdFusion runtime within your Docker container. So this is important if you're going to be using like CF image or PDF tools or something like that, and you want to be able to generate an image using a particular font. Normally, if someone goes to your website and you load a font on the web, you don't necessarily have to have that font.

If they're using it like from a CDN or something like that, they can get it from Google or whatever. But if you're generating an image, that font needs to be available to the runtime to be able to use. And so this blog post just covers how to make sure that you have those resources available to your application when you deploy it.

Daniel Garcia

Nice. And then we also have another article, which apparently I don't have the link for it. If you want to tell us about it.

Jacob Beers

Okay, sure. So this is kind of an interesting thing, something I haven't heard of before. I'm interested in looking more into it. So this is about, this is from James Moberg. It's an article about something called token oriented object notation, which I guess, TOON for short, is a file format used for structuring data to pass it off to an LLM for processing. And it is

I guess kind of specifically for formatting tabular data so that the AI is able to process it and do things like rag or answer questions or stuff like that. So I haven't heard of token-oriented object notation before, but it sounds interesting. And sounds like maybe that might be an opportunity for a new module or something like that.

Daniel Garcia

I think this was something that last episode, James was talking about where, I heard of this thing and let me make sure that's message packs. same thing as message pack support. Nope. but as usual, when James finds something like this, he's like, this is really cool. Let me do it in ColdFusion Then he just writes a module and they do it. And then the community, thanks them for it. So thank you, James.

it's less complex than nested data and JSON style objects. So that would be nice. Okay. Let's see if that wraps up the CFML community. We are rolling right along on a Tuesday. Events. We've got some events coming up. The first one is a CBWire free webinar, CBWire 5. It says it's a live launch and feature deep.

Jacob Beers

Mm-hmm.

Daniel Garcia

for December 3rd, 2025, it's official CBWire 5 launch event. We're gonna walk through the most exciting new features, be real components, and much, much more. As you can probably guess, who's gonna be there for that one.

Jacob Beers

Mr. Grant.

Daniel Garcia

our buddy Grant,

our buddy senior CBWire, Grant Copley.

they updated the event. So he's going to showcase the dot notation data props, locked data props, improved file uploads, BoxLang support, the on secure lifecycle method and the smarter lifecycle, lazy loading. really something if you're curious about CBWire or even if you're using a little bit, come on in there. There's always going to be great stuff. Grant is kicking butt and taking names and he's doing an awesome job with CBWire.

Jacob Beers

Mm-hmm.

As always.

Daniel Garcia

Yep. Coming up after that, we've got ColdFusion security training online from Foundeo. It's gonna be December 9th. I believe you could still register. Let me just double check that. As always, we can't say enough nice things about Pete. He's one of the security experts in the CFML community. When you go to conferences, if Pete's presenting, you should go and listen to his presentation because it's very informative. If not, sometimes a little scary, but in a good way. And so go check that out.

Okay. Then following that, Jacob, since you're the only, you know, conscientious person of the group, what's, what else is next?

Jacob Beers

Well, we've got Into the Box 2026 coming up. I am extremely excited about this. It's probably, I'll admit, it's probably because I'm extremely biased, but this is my favorite conference to attend throughout the year. But I'm not the only one who has said that before. I've heard even non-Ortus people say that. So if you don't have plans to come to Into the Box 2026, you should go visit the website and you should make plans.

to come to Into the Box 2026. We'll have a lot of great speakers and a lot of awesome announcements, and you're sure to get a lot out of it.

Daniel Garcia

Speaking of speakers, the Call To Speakers open, just post the link out there. We've only got, well, we're still getting some, but internally we're also supposed to be posting and Jacob's posted like what, 12 of them now? Seems like 12. That might be a lot, but he's definitely leading the Ortus team on sessions. And I was telling Dan, got a session in there too. And I was looking at him like, Dan, I can't believe it. Everything I wanted to present on Jacob already put in there. So I have to figure something else out. It's crazy how that works. I'm like, man.

Jacob Beers

You

That's not true

Daniel Garcia

Great minds definitely thinking alike.

Coming up after ITB, CF Camp, they've got to save the date for June 18th through 19th, 2026 with a pre-conference on June 17th in Munich, Germany at the Atomis Hotel in Munich. And so that's great. I think they're still getting things together, but at least if you want to pencil in the dates for that. I know it's about a month and a half after Into The Box, so plenty of time to come Into The Box and then go home, relax, and then go back out.

And then finally, we've got, we mentioned this earlier, but we got Black Friday deals for the modern BoxLang developers, the whole BoxLang Thanksgiving week code smarter, modernized faster. mentioned that earlier, but we'll post thinking there again, because maybe you missed it or David was having a siesta, but he's back.

Jacob Beers

you

Daniel Garcia

Okay. And I think that pretty much wraps up today's episode of the Modernize Or Die Podcast. We'd to thank to all our Patreon supporters. These individuals are personally supporting our Open Source initiatives to ensure great things like CommandBox, ForgeBox, ColdBox, ContentBox, TestBox, BoxLang, and all the other Boxes. It keeps getting longer to say, I gotta take bigger breaths. Their contributions fund the cloud infrastructure in our community relies on like ForgeBox for package management with CommandBox.

Now, if somebody wants to support us, what can they do Jacob?

Jacob Beers

They can support us on Patreon. And as always, when you support someone on Patreon, there's usually some associated benefits with that. for us, Bronze Patreons and Up get a ForgeBox Pro and CFCast subscription as a perk for their Patreon subscription. All Patreon supporters have a profile badge on the community website. All supporters have their own private forum access on the community website.

and all supporters have their own private channel access to BoxTeam Slack. So you can talk directly with us if you have any issues or if you just want to tell us how good of a job we're doing.

Daniel Garcia

Haw, nice. Jacob, you're doing a good job, buddy.

Jacob Beers

Mm.

thanks, Daniel. You too.

Daniel Garcia

Just in case, I wanna make sure you got that feedback right away. And as always, you can see an update list of all our sponsors on the Ortus Solutions website, ortussolutions.com slash about us slash sponsors. And with that, we'd like to thank everybody for tuning in, whether you're watching us on the YouTube or the LinkedIn, welcome. It's good to see everybody. Jacob, it's my buddy. It's always good to see you and all the cool things you're doing and keep doing.

kind of waiting for the next VS code extension update too. I feel like there's always something coming. And so if we don't see you, everybody have a happy Thanksgiving next week for those in the US and we'll see you before too long. Take care, bye.

Jacob Beers

Me too.

All right, see y'all.

Recap: Modernize or Die Podcast Ep. 245

Modernize or Die Podcast #245: Recap, Transcript and Resources!

Watch/Listen the Episode

Catch the full episode on YouTube:

Show Notes & Overview

Hosts:

Summary

Takeaways

Resources

Ortus News / Products

BoxLang Updates

BoxLang Community

CFML Updates

Ortus & BoxLang Events

Transcript

12 Days of BoxLang - Day 4: TestBox

12 days of BoxLang - Day 3: SocketBox!

12 Days of BoxLang - Day 2: CommandBox

Blog

Recap: Modernize or Die Podcast Ep. 245

Modernize or Die Podcast #245: Recap, Transcript and Resources!

Watch/Listen the Episode

Catch the full episode on YouTube:

Show Notes & Overview

Hosts:

Summary

Takeaways

Resources

Sponsor of the Episode: Ortus AI Services

Ortus News / Products

BoxLang Updates

BoxLang Community

CFML Updates

Ortus & BoxLang Events

Transcript

12 Days of BoxLang - Day 4: TestBox

12 days of BoxLang - Day 3: SocketBox!

12 Days of BoxLang - Day 2: CommandBox

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