We've released a very small patch release to CommandBox 5.0.0 which is 5.0.1 and has only 5 tickets.  Most all are related to tweaks for the new server start bash script functionality that we've been rolling into our Ortus CommandBox Docker images.

In honor of International’s Women’s Day, we wanted you all to meet our exceptional team of women coders. While we are grateful for them and their work every day, we wanted to highlight how essential they are for the success of our company.  We started by asking them a few questions. As I compiled their stories, a common theme emerged, that being how happy they are doing what they love.

We are pleased to announce a major release of the official ContentBox Docker image. It now ships with the latest CommandBox image as well and sports a much more detailed versioning strategy:

{variant}{contentbox_version}_{image_version}

This will allow you to visualize that each ContentBox version can be paired with new image versions. This will also allow for rollbacks and rolling upgrades if necessary; all following semantic versioning. So let's dig in to this release!

We've been publishing all stable Lucee builds and select release candidate builds to ForgeBox for some time now.  This allows you to use CommandBox CLI to start up a Lucee server running the version of your choice.

server start cfengine=lucee@5.3.4.77

Publishing these CF engines has been a manual process in the past, and was something we'd do after Lucee issued a release announcement.  This has changed last week now with three major additions to our process aimed at giving you faster builds, easier testing, and more deployment options.

In a previous blog post, we mentioned the Zero to Hero workshop. As some of you may have deduced given the title, this is a continuation of said workshop. This two-day advanced Hero to Superhero workshop will feature CEO of Ortus Solutions, Luis Majano. In this API edition, you will be creating an API from scratch, then you’ll secure it, you’ll leverage it, and then build a little object model. 

Ortus Solutions took the difficult but necessary decision to cancel the D.C. workshop titled “Build Secure MVC ColdFusion Applications,” amidst growing concerns over coronavirus. The two-day workshop was scheduled for April 20^th and 21^st at the Regus in Washington, D.C. 

“While we were really looking forward to coming to D.C. this year since we were also going to attend the Adobe CF Summit East, we understand that we must be proactive and take the necessary precautions and steps to ensure the safety of our community,” said Luis Majano, CEO of Ortus Solutions. “We are closely monitoring the situation. Our priority is the wellbeing of our attendees and staff. Tickets will be fully refunded and we hope we can come back soon!”

Ortus Solutions has a variety of workshops and conferences scheduled for this year, including another one in D.C. in June. Given the current environment, there will be updates in the coming weeks regarding the status of these events. Into the Box 2020 is still scheduled for May 5^th -8^th, but Ortus will continue to evaluate the situation and react accordingly. 

We are pleased to announce the release of CommandBox 5.0.0.  This is a major release of our CLI package manager, REPL, and server tool. In this version are many library updates, new features, and bug fixes.  All in all, there were 77 tickets closed for this release.

Our Into the Box workshops are carefully selected so that you can the make the most out of your time and investment in the conference. It might be redundant to highlight the importance of this workshop since troubleshooting is a problem everyone goes through. 

Next up in our podcast series we have Brad Wood, who’ll lead the Intro to BDD Workshop. To begin with, let’s start by defining a few terms. BDD stands for Behavior Driven Development, which builds on top of TDD. In Brad’s words, “BDD is kind of a natural evolution of coming up with your user stories first, your business scenarios first, and then out of those inherently grow your unit testing suite or your integration testing suite. So, reorganizing your development shop to first appreciate the value in the utility of testing and the actual cost savings that you get in the long run and implement, meaning that is often times the first step for people.”

The aim of this workshop, with the above as evidence, is to highlight the importance of creating tests, and how they’re essential for the eventual success of your coding. While it may seem as a hassle to some, said tests will eventually save you lots of valuable time. As such, the one-day workshop will give you an understanding of how TestBox works and how to write effective tests.

If this is of interest to you, make sure to check out the full interview on your podcast provider, our website, or our Youtube channel. 

This year we have exciting, new projects under our belt and one of the first ones that was unveiled was our new Modernize or Die Podcast – Conference Edition. In order to keep our projects alive, we rely on the help of generous patreons who contribute in different ways to sustain our community and modernize CFML.