Mike Benner: Coldbox 2.6.0 Beta 2 and My Week So Far

Coldbox 2.6.0 Beta 2 and My Week So Far

Apr 29 by Michael Benner

First, Coldbox 2.6.0 has gone "Beta 2". Go get it, I'll wait.

Back? Good, so I as I was saying my company is currently rewriting our

our core software from the ground up and have elected to move from our own homebrew framework to Coldbox and figured why not jump right into it with the 2.6 beta.

The conversion has been going better than expected. Coldbox has some really great features that have made the transition rather simple. My current "love" is the plugin system and the core plugin "messagebox".

I took my custom messaging system out and have rolled it all over. And with the 2.6 release you can now set and array of messages, as well as, append arrays and individual messages. This helps us when we have several items processing and want to show results after all processing is finished.

The other aspect of plugins that has been very nice is the custom plugin ability. I used this to convert our concurrent user login system and converted it to a custom plugin and it works great.

As usual, Luis has done an amazing job with the documentation (even released a cheat sheet PDF) and I have run into only two issues.

1. I couldn't find the correct code usage for getPlugin("messagebox").renderit(), but through trial and error (and looking at the messagebox.cfm in the system folder) I finally figured it out and place it in the view where I wanted the box to render.

2. Was in the coldbox.xml.cfm file. "ConfigAutoReload" was set by default to true and this cause my onAppInit to get called every time a request was made. Luis quickly corrected me and all was as it should be.

This framework is great and I can't recommend it enough. The documentation is amazing and made it very easy for someone willing to read to pick it up and learn. As I continue to rewrite this app I will post all that learn of Coldbox, both it pros and cons and hopefully release some plugins for it as well.