I'm a few days late on this, but I wanted to be sure my readers knew about the release of CommandBox by Ortus Solutions, the same fine folks behind the ColdBox series of products. CommandBox provides probably the number one feature missing from ColdFusion - a command line and package manager.
The CLI tool lets you quickly run CFML from the command line and build extensions for the command line with ColdFusion. Along with just running CF at the command line, CommandBox can quickly generate code for ColdBox and other products - essentially acting as a scaffolding tool from the command line.
On top of being able to run CF from the CLI, CommandBox also provides package management. If you've done anything at all with Node then you realize how big of a deal this is. At a high level, it lets me develop code that requires other parts, let's say Alpha and Beta. Alpha can define what it needs. Beta can do the same. But from one command, I can simply ask for my code and the tool handles getting all the dependencies down the line. This makes installation of code a heck of a lot easier. You can browse the list of available packages at ForgeBox.
As an example, via CommandBox I could install ColdBox like so: forgebox install coldbox-platform. Nice and simple, and what I've grown accustomed to with Node.
All in all, a very cool product and something ColdFusion has needed for a very long time. You can watch Brad Wood demonstrate the product below.
CommandBox Demo from Luis Majano on Vimeo.
Archived Comments
Hi Ray, thanks for the quick blog entry on CommandBox. I wanted to let you know that we recently renamed the slug for ColdBox to from "coldbox-platform" to just "coldbox" in case you want to update the little sample command in your entry.
install coldbox
We're just trying to get some better parity with how NPM does stuff, where the name of the package is the default folder name the package is installed to.
I got into Rails development for some personal projects and fell in love with the command line tools and console to run code. Package management with ruby gems and bundler was great. Gems would require other gems for dependencies and things would just work.
I have had CommandBox installed for a while but haven't played with it too much. As our company transitions !ore to Coldbox, I imagine it may become especially useful, especially with running tests.
Others should check it out if they haven't had exposure to CLIs and package management.