I have used the past few months to approach ColdBox in two different ways:

1. Existing Applications - Consider porting, or continuing development in ColdBox.  Like any re-factoring, there are pros and cons to this, the main part being cost in time, and fixing something that isn’t really broken.  So I wait for a reason to do it…
2. New Applications - I’m happy to say that I haven’t regretted using ColdBox for my new projects.  The few times I’ve felt I could get i it done quicker with a framework I already know and have some code built up in is quickly offset by realizing once I figure something out, it’s a one time thing.  Blog about it, and I have my search engine for “how did I do that again?”

This approach has had me learning and playing with ColdBox to learn the best way of how I want to do things, and why.  Along the way I have been writing posts (while coding) to quickly document any discoveries where the examples and documentation was found to be a bit lacking.  My idea was to come in later and ColdBox has excellent documentation but I have found that there could be a lot more examples provided to get developers up and running even quicker.

In the past few months I have written a few dozen tips/discoveries.

I thank everyone who has sent in their questions and responses, please keep them coming and I’ll get through them as best as I can.

I’ll publish this post to the blog but not advertise it until I have a solid few tips that I can publish on a regular basis.

My ColdBox 101:

Here’s the problem… I couldn’t get the ColdBox Platform Extension installed in ColdFusion Builder with the existing instructions in the link above.   I suspect the older version of the ColdFusion Builder allowed you to do it from more than one location.

In any event, you have to Click on Window > Show View > Other > Extensions , and allow the extension pane to appear at the bottom of your screen (as my default installation shows).  Then, click on the (+), select the ColdBox Extension zip file and go through the normal setup.

If you’re interested in a quick screencast, all 1 minute of it is below!

http://screencast.com/t/YzdhMjI1M

The things it helps you handle include (Quoted from page above):

• Create handlers, plugins, interceptors and model objects with awesome wizardry
• Create an event handler and have it auto-generate the views, etc.
• Plugin Wizard
• Interceptor Wizard
• Model Object Wizard.. and more

ColdFusion builder is in late-ish beta and it’s great to see some of the plugins that we have for it already.  It’s nice to see such a tool evolving.

Happy ColdBoxing!