2023-10-10 Weekly News — Episode 205

Watch the video version on YouTube at https://youtube.com/live/_K0cN5cQ-rY?feature=share

Hosts: 

Thanks to our Sponsor - Ortus Solutions
The makers of ColdBox, CommandBox, ForgeBox, TestBox and all your favorite box-es out there. 

 
Patreon Support (sensational)

We have 38 patreons:
https://www.patreon.com/ortussolutions.


News and Announcements

Hacktoberfest is here!
CELEBRATE OUR 10TH YEAR SUPPORTING OPEN SOURCE!
This year marks the 10th anniversary of Hacktoberfest, and we’re calling on your support! Whether it’s your first time participating—or your tenth—it’s almost time to hack out four pristine pull/merge requests as we continue our month of support for open source.

Hacktoberfest has grown from 676 participants in 2014 to nearly 147,000 participants last year. To help ensure Hacktoberfest can be sustained for another decade, this year we’re moving away from a free t-shirt reward to a digital reward.

All Ortus Repos will qualify, including our docs repos!

Discord: https://discord.gg/hacktoberfest
https://hacktoberfest.com/


New Releases and Updates

Adobe Updates

10/10/2023- Refreshed the Server ZIP and GUI installers, Lockdown installer, and Add-on installer for ColdFusion (2023 release).

https://helpx.adobe.com/coldfusion/kb/coldfusion-downloads.html#download0

Lucee 5.4.3.11-RC is out

This is a bug fix release addressing the all the regressions found in 5.4.3 (all the 5.4.4.x fixes are backported into this RC as well)

Plan is for a quick RC, as people have been testing all the fixes along the way.

Assuming there are no regressions found, we will be merging the private CVE branch back into the public branch a week after the stable release, so if you haven’t already upgraded to a CVE version, it’s time to update.

LDEV-4480 - "." should not be accepted/converted as/to a number
LDEV-4675 - admin Error: requested action doesn't exist
LDEV-4676 - SerializeJSON() produces invalid JSON when serializing some CFC instances
LDEV-4690 - admin: login prompt for every request
LDEV-4691 - 5.4.3.2 QofQ rounds decimal column type to integer when joining
LDEV-4693 - Integer BigDecimal values are converted to strings with trailing 0s
LDEV-4695 - 5.4.3.2 QoQ incompatible data type with subquery IN operator

https://dev.lucee.org/t/5-4-3-7-snapshot-ready-for-testing/13001

CBWire 3.1 Released

I'm very excited to announce the latest release of CBWIRE, version 3.1. This release contains a couple of bug fixes, but mostly new features that you can start using right away in your applications.

There's lots packed into 3.1 and we highly recommend upgrading, even if it's just for the bug fixes.

Enjoy and please let us know your thoughts on CBWIRE!

https://www.ortussolutions.com/blog/cbwire-31-released


Webinar / Meetups and Workshops

ICYMI: OOP & ColdFusion
Nolan Erck
Friday, September 29, 2023 @ 12 PM HAST (Hawaii Standard Time)

Object-Oriented Programming is a common term in programming languages. It’s a vast concept but to sum it up in a single line, it is a set of concepts and techniques that make use of the “object” construct, to write more reusable, maintainable, and organized code. Objects are implemented differently in every language. In ColdFusion, we have ColdFusion Components (CFCs) that can be instantiated to create objects.

Anyone who has ever studied OOP must know that there are four main concepts, which are:

https://www.meetup.com/hawaii-coldfusion-meetup-group/events/294629892/

Eric is doing a workshop on Inertia JS and cbInertia for Hawaii CFUG this month sometime.


CFCasts Content Updates

https://www.cfcasts.com

Recent Releases

Conferences and Training.

CFSummit Recap

Into the Box LATAM
November 30th
University of Business in El Salvador.
https://latam.intothebox.org/

Speakers and Schedules available

ITB 2024

More conferences

Need more conferences, this site has a huge list of conferences for almost any language/community.
https://confs.tech/

Blogs, Tweets, and Videos of the Week

09/28/2023 - Blog - James Moberg - How to Check SSL Certificate using ColdFusion & CURL.exe

A CFML developer in the ColdFusion Programmers Facebook Group referenced my DEV article regarding how to identify the SSL expiration date using ColdFusion as they were encountering some issues and thought it may be due to the version of Java that was being using.

Here's a UDF that I wrote a couple years ago that leverages CURL (open source) to fetch & identify the current SSL certificate data in use.

https://dev.to/gamesover/how-to-check-ssl-certificate-using-coldfusion-curlexe-2c92

09/28/2023 - Blog - Charlie Arehart - Testing if a port can be reached, using built-in tools other than "good ol' telnet"

Have you ever wanted to test (from the command line) whether a port on another machine can be reached from yours? When some app of your can't seem to connect to a given port, you may want to test things from the command line. (The problem may be that the service using that port has stopped or is blocked by a firewall--it may be that you're mistaken in the port you are trying to use, or perhaps even the ip address, domain name, or machine name.)
There are in fact many tools which can help with this task, some of which will be familiar to those on *nix systems, but Windows users who've been around a while (or who learned from such folks) may try to rely on the good ol' telnet command (as in telnet ). Unfortunately, they often find out how Microsoft has disabled that tool by default for over a decade (since Windows Vista), and while it can be easily enabled, they may be prevented or understandably reluctant to do that.

In this post, I want to show a couple of command-line alternatives which can do the job easily, one best suited for powershell users (Test-NetConnection), and and two of which would suit those who prefer the command line (cmd) and which are now built-into Windows (the past few years): ssh and curl. No, this is not their primary job but they will suit for this task and it may surprise some to learn they're even built-in options. I'll conclude with still other options available to those on *nix environments (who of course can also use ssh and curl), especially nc (netcat).

https://www.carehart.org/blog/2023/10/1/testing_port_reachability_with_other_than_telnet


10/02/2023 - Blog - Ben Nadel - Generating A Table Of Contents Using jSoup And ColdFusion

I'm authoring my Feature Flags Book using Markdown. Then, I'm converting the Markdown into HTML using Flexmark and ColdFusion. And, once I have the raw HTML, I'm using jSoup to augment the DOM for output. As part of this, I'm dynamically injecting a Table of Contents (ToC). In the book, I'm only including the h2 headings; but, it got me thinking about how I might use jSoup and ColdFusion to create a more inclusive table of contents.

https://www.bennadel.com/blog/4521-generating-a-table-of-contents-using-jsoup-and-coldfusion.htm

10/03/2023 - Blog - Ben Nadel - Understanding The TrimWhitespace() Function In Lucee CFML

The other day, when I was looking into which whitespace characters are removed by trim(), I came across a Lucee CFML function that I hadn't seen before: trimWhitespace(). The Function doesn't have an in-depth description; and, looking at the Java code didn't immediately clarify the function's behavior. As such, I wanted to try it out for myself in order to see if the function might be useful to me in the future.

https://www.bennadel.com/blog/4522-understanding-the-trimwhitespace-function-in-lucee-cfml.htm

10/10/2023 - Blog - Charlie Arehart - Solving failure in applying latest CF updates, or avoiding that failure

If you try to apply ColdFusion updates (including the latest released Oct 6) via the CF admin or command line and find that the update fails, the problem may be due to the JVM you're using (within CF or at the command line). There's a simple solution, which I discuss in this post.

https://www.carehart.org/blog/2023/10/10/solving_problems_applying_latest_cf_updates


CFML Jobs

Several positions available on https://www.getcfmljobs.com/

Listing over 99 ColdFusion positions from 63 companies across 42 locations in 5 Countries.

2 new jobs listed in the last two weeks

Full-Time - Software Engineer - Coldfusion at Pune, Maharashtra
Posted Sep 28 for Community Brands
https://www.getcfmljobs.com/jobs/index.cfm/india/Software-Engineer-Coldfusion-at-Pune-Maharashtra/11610

Full-Time - COLD FUSION DEVELOPER at Washington, DC (Onsite)
Posted: Sep 29 for tammina
https://www.getcfmljobs.com/jobs/index.cfm/united-states/CFDeveloper-at-Washington-DC/11611

Other Job Links
There is a jobs channel in the CFML slack team, and in the Box team slack now too

ForgeBox Module of the Week

ColdBox Metadata Exporter
by Gavin Pickin

Module to export ColdBox Metadata from the running Application. This will export to json files for VS Code and other external tools.

https://www.forgebox.io/view/coldbox-metadata-exporter

VS Code Hint Tips and Tricks of the Week

Pieces.app
Capture your work-in-progress journey.  Pieces is an intelligent, interactive, and indispensable hub for small developer materials and essential workflow context. Stay ahead with our cutting-edge code snippet platform and groundbreaking Workflow Copilot, integrated across your entire toolchain.

Effortlessly save, enrich, search, share, reference, reuse: code snippets, workflow context, and other useful developer resources.

https://pieces.app/
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=MeshIntelligentTechnologiesInc.pieces-vscode


Thank you to all of our Patreon Supporters

These individuals are personally supporting our open source initiatives to ensure the great toolings like CommandBox, ForgeBox, ColdBox,  ContentBox, TestBox and all the other boxes keep getting the continuous development they need, and funds the cloud infrastructure at our community relies on like ForgeBox for our Package Management with CommandBox. 

You can support us on Patreon here https://www.patreon.com/ortussolutions


Don’t forget, we have Annual Memberships, pay for the year and save 10% - great for businesses everyone.

And many more Patreons
You can see an up to date list of all sponsors on Ortus Solutions' Website
https://ortussolutions.com/about-us/sponsors

Thanks everyone!!!