What's New in 3.5.0

This release we're focusing on feedback from ContentBox 3.x customers and the ability to containerize ContentBox. Building on top of the SEO updates in ContentBox 3.1.0, we're continuing to make ContentBox more SEO friendly, Search Engine Friendly and Social Media Friendly. This update has a tremendous amount of updates and bug fixes for your current installations. So let's start investigating all the major areas of improvement:

No doubt you're familiar with one of the buzzwords of the moment: “microservices”. Familiar with the word at least, if not in practice. If you've been doing CFML development since the before Adobe bought out Macromedia, possibly even before Macromedia bought out Allaire, you've no doubt slogged through your share of procedural, template-based CFML. You know just the app(s!) I'm talking about…

This morning, we released the official Docker CommandBox image v3.6.0, which adds support for customizing your server using environment variables in your build, including support for the conventions used by the cfconfig CommandBox module. While the module is still in alpha, it is already proving to be a powerful way to provision and configure CFML servers at runtime.

Why use Docker?

If you're not up to speed with what Docker is and how it can benefit you, throughout the dev-ops lifecycle of your application, have a look at this summary article on the benefits or dig in to the official documentation. As we get further in to the weeds with configuration, we'll assume you're up to speed on the basics.

More after the jump…

Leveraging the Coldbox REST Application Template

In February, we quietly released an updated version our our Coldbox REST Application Template. The enhancement aimed to consolidate a number of best practices and enhancements in RESTful API development that were worthy of being included in the template.

We are proud to announce the general availability of CommandBox 3.6.0.  This is a minor release of the CLI tool that contains mostly bug fixes and small enhancements.  You can download the latest version from the CommandBox download page.  We've updated the GitBook docs and Command API docs as well.

We're very excited to unveil a brand new project we've been working on called CFConfig.  It's a command line tool that can help you manage the configuration for any CF server in a simple, portable, and automated fashion.  CFConfig is a CommandBox module that can be used to set, show, import, export, and diff configuration on Adobe CF and Lucee servers.  This project is still in an alpha state, but it ready for people to start kicking the tires and providing feedback.

We are in need of a DevOps Engineer at Ortus Solutions and we would love to have you join our 100% remote and global team! So it doesn't matter if you live in a beautiful Hawaiian beach or an icy patch of land in New Hampshire. If you know your DevOps, we need to talk. Below you can find the opportunity and you can send us your resumes to lmajano@ortussolutions.com.

Dev Ops System Engineer

This is a part-time to full-time contracting position with the Ortus Solutions team as a dev ops system engineer. You will be joining a team of engineers and software developers focused on building scalable software and mobile solutions for customers around the world. This position will require hands-on knowledge of highly scalable web infrastructures and implementations, along-side server and application maintenance, debugging and implementations.

Responsibilities

• Installing hardware and software, maintaining appropriate maintenance levels and tuning. Performing system software upgrades including planning / scheduling, testing, and coordination, and maintaining integrity of the operating system environment.
• Problem solving for interoperability of systems
• Responding to outages both during normal business hours and in an after-hours, on-call capacity.
• Evaluating, recommending, installing and configuring hardware and software to meet customer requirements
• Provide project leadership and develop solutions to improve the environment and enhance service reliability
• Manage Nginx load balancers and web servers
• Mange ColdFusion (Adobe+Lucee+CommandBox) and servlet container (tomcat/undertow) application servers
• Do weekly server patching, hardening and software audits
• Help the engineering team diagnose and solve issues that involve hardware or OS level binaries
• Log management, server monitoring and visibility
• Manage Bitbucket/Gitlab servers
• Manage Jira Cloud servers
• Manage and direct our container strategy via docker containers and Kubernetes
• Managing our virtual infrastructures based on Xen Server
• Co-Designing networks and system solutions based on customer requests and needs with our engineering team
• Producing documentation for use in configuration, repair and troubleshooting of hardware, software and network operating systems

Desired Skills & Experience

• Strong understanding of Linux especially Ubuntu, CoreOS, CentOS, Hypervisors and containers
• Strong understanding and usage of web servers like Apache and Nginx
• Strong understanding of load balancers either hardware or software, preferably software via Nginx+ and/or HAProxy
• Strong understanding of docker, containers, and Kubernetes.
• Strong understanding of cloud services like Amazon AWS, Rackspace, Open Stack, Google Cloud etc.
• Experience with servlet containers like Tomcat, Undertow, Jetty
• Experience with CFML Engines: Adobe ColdFusion, Lucee
• Experience with RDBMS but mostly MySQL Databases with replication
• Experience with NoSQL databases but most specifically Couchbase NoSQL server
• Experience with Jenkins, Travis and automated deployment solutions and continuous integration solutions
• Experience with source control systems like Git and SVN
• Network Diagramming tools and experience
• Having programming skills is highly recognized either Java, ColdFusion, PHP, Groovy, Python, Ruby, etc.
• Experience with Software Development Life Cycles based on Agile/Scrum development

Non-Technical Skills

• Excellent communication skills both verbal and written
• Good organizational and planning skills
• Good problem solving and team player
• Proficiency in other languages other than English is highly desired

Minimum Qualifications

• BA/BS degree or equivalent experience (5+ years)
• US citizen, resident or green card holder
• Flexibility in working hours

Compensation

• Hourly rate to be determined upon qualifications
• Remote Worker

There's a lot of command tools out there written by developers to help them automate all sorts of tasks from code refactoring, linting, and builds. Node has become a popular tool to write reusable tools that can be run from the command line, but many CF developers don't realize that CommandBox has allowed developers to do this nativley in CFML for years now.

One of the cool things that CommandBox allows you to do is run CFML code directly from the command line via the execute command, or on Unix as a natively-executable hash bang script. This opens up all sorts of doors for scheduling cron jobs and whatnot that you can write in CFML much faster and esaier than using bash or shell scripts. One common question is how to access the database from one of these scripts.

We are excited to announce an update to our quick docs API module. You can find our new UI and new API docs collections in the same address apidocs.coldbox.org. However, we will be migrating them to the Ortus Solutions website in the coming weeks. The update includes lots of visual and searching improvements for any API documentation created by DocBox, our API documentation library.