As previously announced, ColdBox is in the midst of a transition from an Open Source Software project to a Professional Open Source Software project. It is with great pleasure that we are able to announce yet another step in this transition: a new strategic partnership between Ortus Solutions, Corp and Rachel Queen Services Group, LLC, which will oversee ColdBox Platform Official Training Seminars and curriculum development.

ColdBox Platform Official Training Seminars will provide 16+ hours of intense, hands-on training featuring:

• 2-Day Introduction to ColdBox and ColdBox Platform Development (ColdBox Platform 101) or
• 2-Day Advanced ColdBox Techniques and Application Development (ColdBox Platform 201)
• Official Training Seminar Workbook + Goodies.
• Limited Seating will be available, providing a more intimate learning atmosphere (10-15 people max)
• Regional Training Seminars (off-site, schedule TBA)
• Private Training Seminars (on-site)

The first ColdBox Platform Official Training Seminar set to cover Introduction to ColdBox and ColdBox Platform Development will be held in Dallas, Texas, and is tentatively scheduled for October 11-12, 2008. To reserve your seat and/or seats for your development team, please contact us at training@coldboxframework.com. Please be sure to let us know how many seats you would like to reserve, as seats are limited!

ColdBox nightly builds are now available at http://www.coldboxframework.com/downloads/nightlybuild/coldboxNB.zip

It was easily accomplished using ANT, not sure why we didn't do this before.

Enjoy.

When I first read Luis's entry on ColdBox Beta 2: Flex/AIR Integration this is pretty much that immediately went through my head ...

Gotta be honest: at first I didn't buy into it... You have to be careful on separating your logical layers... if ColdBox is a front-controller, why would a Rich Front End talk to it? It should talk to your Service Layer... and your Service Layer doesn't need ColdBox ...

However, after talking to Luis I discovered, what if, what if you make ColdBox become your enhanced service layer manager? What if your ColdBox Handlers become part of your Service Layer API? What do we have? We have a Service Layer with built-in environmental settings, logging, error handling, event interception and chaining, you name it ... Now it all makes sense...

This is good; real good ... perhaps you'll see a full 60 or 90 minutes presentation on this at CFUnited or CF.Objective() 2008.

Keep it up.

ColdBox 2.5 Beta 1 is out with tons of new goodness:

• Application.cfc support
• OnSessionStart/End support
• Interceptors
• Request Context Decorators
• Request Context Persistence for NextEvent
• White Space Control
• Unit Tests Updates
• Much more...

This release is the first one to include contributed content from Tom de Manincor, Brian LeGros, Sana Ullah, Aaron Roberson, and myself. The ColdBox Team and contributors are growing. The following is a list of what this release is composed of:

• Documentation updated and more guides
• New Sample Apps:
  
• Lightwire Sample
• CCTApp by Tom de Manincor  and myself. CCT is actually an application template with ColdBox, ColdSpring, and Transfer, that works with MS-SQL, My-SQL, and PostgreSQL. It contains some more goodness such as a transfer base decorator to enhance your transfer objects, account management, security interceptors and services, a UI table manager, and more... this is just the beginning my friend; wait till you see what's coming for ColdBox 2.1.
  
• #169 Structure variable declarations in the config updated, you can now also use = and : when declaring complex variables.
• #178 LightWire is now fully supported and included with ColdBox for out of the box IOC. You can now develop your applications using a dependency injection framework right out of the box. Thanks to Aaron Roberson & Peter bell for contributing this key feature
• #200 queryHelper new methods: getColumnArray(), getCountDistinct(), getRowNumber() thanks to Sana Ullah
• #205 Critical Concurrency fix in the coldbox.cfm template.
• #206 Removal of client variable references.
• #207 clientstorage plugin syntax updated
• #208 sessionstorage plugin syntax updated
• #209 ColdBoxFactory.cfc updated with new method - getColdboxOCM(). To get a reference to the cache manager from within coldspring. Now you can take advantage of the ColdBox Advanced Caching Control without having to inject the instance of the framework into your business/service layer.
  
• #210 Samples Gallery Content Updated.
• #211 Var scoping optimizations
• #212 Illidium Scaffolding Templates
• #213 Configuration file now named: coldbox.xml.cfm or config.xml.cfm
• #214 Testcontroller - When unit testing relocations, the setnext event will now save the event and querystring
  in the request collection for assertions.
• #215 Significant Performance Optimizations, you thought ColdBox was fast, well now you will fly!! If you are running ColdFusion 8, the performance boost is SUBSTANTIAL
• #217 Eclipse Dictionaries and snippets Updated
• #218 ColdBox Cheat Sheet Updated
• #219 Samples with JQuery updated to 1.1.3.1
• #220 rc scope can now be found natively in all layouts and views. No need to declare it. This does not apply to handler/plugins.
• #221 Logger plugin has been optimized and its 50% faster. You can also define the maximum number
  of archives to keep in the rotation, you can configure it via the settings.xml
• ColdBox Dashboard 2.2.1 is also now included to take care of all setting updates.

For a more in depth overview, look at the Trac Site

So enjoy this release. The ColdBox website is also being renovated and will be launched soon. Development is now strong for version 2.1.0 and we have some extraordinary features coming your way.

The past: Luis Majano and I go way back; I remember the first time we met was when I interviewed him at iChameleon. That that he showed me the framework he developed, which would be equivalent to ColdBox v0.1. It was already pretty interesting; he showed me all kinds of documentation, which immediately made him unique ... Which developer out there actually loves documentation? Name one, please! So at the end, Luis ended up leaving sandals and moved to California, but the framework kept going.

The present: ColdBox has gained some popularity lately, perhaps because of it's vast documentation, because it does not use XML, because it has tons of plugins built-in, or just because slowly people see how nice the framework is. Luis did his first Adobe Connecto last week for cfframeworks and got a decent amount of attendees, many of which started blogging about their interest in the framework. Currently, at version 2.0.2, ColdBox is extremely stable and plays well with ColdSpring, Lightwire, Transfer, cfcUnit.

The Future: I joined the team and will start blogging about it more and more. I'm contributing directly with the core with architecture, refactoring, and many new additions and tools to be announced. I'm really happy to be part of ColdBox, and I hope to help taking it to the next level.