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.

In this video Brad Wood introduces the CommandBox Host Updater Module written by Chris Schmitz: https://www.forgebox.io/view/commandbox-hostupdater which allows you to automatically add host entries to your operating system and starting servers all on port 80 for you using CommandBox. It is really a great example of a CommandBox module, but also a great tool to have for ALL your ccustom development work. Enjoy!

Video

Installation

To get started with this module, simple use your CommandBox console to install it and running: box install commandbox-hostupdater. That's it, enjoy!

Ortus Solutions' very own conference, Into the Box conference, has expanded in 2017, from 1 day of conference content, to 2 days of conference content + 1 day of workshops. We are hosting Into The Box 2017 in Houston Texas in April. Wednesday the 26th has 5 great workshops, Thursay April 27th and Friday 28th is 2 full days of great conference sessions, with 2 tracks to choose from… over 30 sessions.

We are so excited to finally unveil the schedule lineup for our Into The Box conference.

This is a guest post by Eric Peterson.

I had a unique use-case the other day, and I wanted to share the solution with you all.

I use a custom Collection component to handle many higher-order functions like map, reduce, filter, etc. Basically, it wraps an array or a query and lets you continue chaining these functions, kind of like wrapping a value with lodash in Javascript.

ColdBox modules have revolutionized the way that CFML developers can reuse and organize code.  Modules follow an HMVC, or Hierarchical MVC pattern that allows you to not only break apart your CFML app into smaller chunks, but to stack those pieces into a hierarchy that really makes sense of your code.  We also call this module inceptions-- the act of nesting modules inside of each other.  

So, a question came across the ColdBox Google group today asking about how to access events from within nested modules and how that manifests itself in the URL.  Before I responded, I spun up a quick site in CommandBox to test and I found to my dismay that the answer was very difficult to find in our docs.  As such, I figured a quick blog post was in order since it's fairly easy to set up if you know what to do.

ContentBox 3.1.0 is a minor release with over 40 issues, improvements and new features addressed. Below you will find the detailed release notes about this release but also the major areas of improvement and new features introduced. Enjoy!