ColdBox Plugins have graduated to become just models. The plugins convention has been removed and all references to plugin injection or DSL's are gone. You must now place all your plugins in your models directory and request them via getInstance() or getModel() calls.

Plugins are an old ColdBox convention but their baggage doesn't really serve a purpose now that we have modules for easy packaging of libraries and WireBox for easy creation of CFCs. Neither of those existed back when Plugins were birthed. It's time to say goodbye to the concept of plugins, but all their functionality will still be here, just with a slightly different (and more standardized) way of creating them.

One of the most useful features of CommandBox is the ability to start an ad-hoc server quickly and easily. Any folder on your hard drive can become the web root of a server. To start up the server, cd into a directory containing some CFML code, and run the start command. An available port will be chosen by default and in a few seconds, a browser window will open showing the default document (index.cfm).

CommandBox> cd C:\sites\test
CommandBo...
						
						
					

If you have a ColdBox config setting UDFLibraryFile, then you'll want to change it when upgrading to ColdBox 4.0. It functions the same, but is now called applicationHelper.

applicationHelper is an optional setting where you can declare the path to a UDF template to load for usage in the views, layouts and event handlers. You can use relative paths to your application's root or ColdFusion mappings.

For example if I have my udf templat...

CommandBox is a whole system in itself, and when developing for CommandBox, like you would other applications, debugging is important. By default if you have any errors in your code, CommandBox outputs the error message, and a stack trace to the user in the console… and they will be returned to the prompt. This is great for you as a developer of said command, but its not very user friendly, so how can or should you handle errors in CommandBox.

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.  

There are two ways to run commands via CommandBox: inside the CommandBox interactive shell, or one-at-a-time commands from your native shell.

Multiple Commands

If you open the interactive shell, you will see the CommandBox splash screen (ASCII art) and then you'll be presented with the CommandBox> prompt. You can enter as many commands as you wish in order and after each command is finished executing, you will be returned to the CommandBox prompt. If you have multiple commands you want to execute manually, this is the fastest method since CommandBox only loads once. This is also the only way to make use of features like tab complete and command history.

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...

One of the features we really wanted to see in CommandBox is OS integration to be able to execute CFML as part of the OS like any other binary.  Me personally, I wanted also to script in CFML instead of convoluted BASH or any type of shell scripting language.  In CommandBox you have several ways of executing via the command line.  Let's investigate a few.

Running CFML Files

You can very easily create ANY cfm file and put any code in it and execute it via CommandBox

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...