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!

Im a little late on this and certainly not the first to post it but Luis has announced the release of ColdBox 2.6 RC2. I have been using the latest builds for all of my applications and I can tell you that they have been rock solid. I expect more of the same from the RC2 release.

Head over to the ColdBox site and check it out. Still not using ColdBox? I would be curious to know why.

Luis has just posted over on his blog that ColdBox 2.6.0 Beta 1 is ready for download. I have been testing this on several of my apps and so far I have been extremely impressed.

Head on over to the download page and get started!

I was chatting with Luis the other day and I had asked a question about how he would handle a certain situation using ColdBox. He promtly replied, "Viewlets!".

Viewlets? Why havent I heard of viewlets? I have read most of the documentation on the ColdBox wiki, seriously, probably 90% of it! Why dont I remember anything about viewlets.

Well, it turns out that Viewlets are discussed on the very bottom of the Layouts and Views Guide. So Luis sent me a link and I headed over to check them out.

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All of the testing is complete. All of the documentation has been updated. And now its time to enjoy it! Luis has just made available the fastest, most feature rich version of ColdBox to date. Thats right, version 2.5.0 has been released!

Here's a few links that will help you out.

Whats New In 2.5.0
Compatibility Guide
ColdBox Cheat Sheet
Downloads

Luis Majano has just announced on his blog that the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory has adopted ColdBox as their framework of choice for developing ColdFusion applications! This is indeed great news for the ColdBox community!

Luis has also announced that there are not one but two ColdBox books in the works as well.

All this coming just before the release of the best version of ColdBox yet, 2.5.0 which should be released within the next few days!

I have spent most of the day today working on Skweegee trying to finalize the port over to ColdBox. During the port I decided there were quite a few things I wanted to change or update so that has undoubtedly slowed me down. That coupled with the insane amount of time we have been putting in the last couple months trying to wrap up some projects at work.

I hope to spend most of the day Sunday working on it as well in hopes to get a beta out by the end of next week. I will post some screenshots of some of the new screens and features later in the evening Sunday. Its too late to worry with tonight.

I meant to post this last week, but time just eluded me due to work and family holiday obligations.

I have officially joined Team Coldbox. Im super excited to be joining Luis, Rob and Brian in helping to make ColdBox one of the premier ColdFusion frameworks.

Im doing some testing right now of the 2.5.0 RC2 release and believe me, its great! I dont think it will be long before Luis puts the official stamp on the final release and then its on to 2.6.0!!

So, if you are using or interested in using ColdBox and have some questions, add me to your gTalk and feel free to ask away!

russ.cfcoder {at} gmail {dot} com

Don't forget, Luis has rescheduled his ColdBox preso tonight covering the new features of 2.5.0. Luis has is hardware and connection issues worked out now so this preso should be awesome!

You can check it out at 6pm EST here.

Luis has just announced that the SES URL support for the ColdBox 2.5.0 release has been added to the nightly build. Lots of people have been looking forward to this one so go grab the latest nightly and test it out.

As you know, no ColdBox feature would be complete without some documentation, Luis has posted teh SES docs here.

Since I have made the switch to using ColdBox, I never get tired of discovering features that are already built into the framework. I find myself so caught up in the framework "just working" that I sometimes forget to look into all of the plugins for features that I could really take advantage of. Luis calls ColdBox "A next generation Framework and Development Toolkit" and I really keep forgetting about the development toolkit part. There are so many built-in tools to help you out with your application that its almost dizzying.

One such plugin that I have found myself using quite often lately is the BeanFactory plugin. This plugin makes working with Transfer extremely easy by automatically populating new beans with data for you among other things. Im not going to go into full detail but I wanted to show an example of populating an empty Transfer object with data and saving that Transfer object back to the database.

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