Hello and welcome everybody to the Modernize or Die Podcast.

is episode number 242.

Today is October 7th, 2025.

My name is Daniel Garcia.

I am a senior developer here at Ortus Solutions and I am joined by...

Jacob Beers, I'm also a Senior Developer at Ortus Solutions.

Fantastic.

We are excited to be here.

It's October already.

how are doing, Jacob?

I'm doing good.

Yep.

let's jump in and talk about Ortus news.

So the first thing we want to get to is the summary.

have a state of our products recap.

Um,

Um, they said, talks about what we've been up to or different products.

just recapping, um, the Coldbox 19th Anniversary, celebrating right now.

we've got, some other things we're going to be talking about soon.

I think Jacob, were saying today is it's either today or this week is a special
anniversary of.

uh our Ortus Solutions YouTube channel.

Ortus Solutions YouTube channel and it's how old today?

It looks like 11 years.

11, Ortus YouTube goes to an 11, woo!

Spinal tap.

And anyway, so we're excited.

We've been around, well, Ortus has been around a lot longer than that, but the YouTube
channel has been around for 11 years.

Next up, we also have the Ortus and BoxLang September recap.

about what's new in ContentBox some of the ColdBox tips and tricks.

I guess we can never get around to getting Brad to write that book.

172 CommandBox ColdBox tips and tricks.

We got them out there for you.

some BoxLang news updates.

What's doing, we're talking about some of that coming up here and, but yeah, that's
definitely lets you catch up.

So exciting.

ColdBox version eight.

We talked about this last episode with Luis ColdBox version eight.

The Ocho is officially coming soon.

I don't know the release date.

Have you heard when that's coming exactly?

Jacob.

no, I don't, I don't know the specific release date, but I know that I'm very excited
about it.

Me too.

ColdBox eight, the Ocho I think one of the big improvements is native, BoxLang support
where you don't have to have the CFML compat module.

Mm-hmm.

And, um, some, you know, docs, WireBox all the good stuff that we always do with every
release and a CB Wire five is getting released soon.

I don't know when I didn't miss it.

Did I?

ah I don't believe so.

I don't think so.

I'd be kind of embarrassed and I don't want to get a side eye from Grant.

Next time I see him, it's like, uh-huh.

Yeah, not out yet.

Nope.

I will say, going back to the ColdBox thing though, the 8.0 snapshot is available on
ForgeBox.

So if you wanted to try it out, you could update to that temporarily and see how it works
in your app.

Get a little bit of a head start.

Nice.

Nice.

There's you can either specify at snapshot or is it at bleeding edge.

um I think you can actually do both.

So you can try Coldbox at BE and that will just use the latest one um or you can
specifically point it to the 8.0 snapshot if you want to give that a shot.

Yep.

Yeah.

Usually if you're just messing around locally, bleeding edge is fun because you're always
getting the latest no matter what.

But, don't do that in production.

Uh, you don't want to haze in bleeding edge of production and realize something got pushed
that wasn't properly tested for you, for your environment locally.

And, and so, yeah.

so what do we have coming up here?

We've got the ColdBox tips and tricks.

You want to tell us about those

All right, sounds good.

Yeah, we've got some awesome tips and tricks series that have been coming out on our blog.

They range across all kinds of different topics.

It's a little bit like a box of chocolates.

You never know what you're going to get, but it's always delicious.

So I've been reading through those every time I get a chance to, and it's one, a really
great refresher if you already know it, but every now and then you find a little edge case

that you weren't familiar with.

So definitely go and check those out.

Nice.

And then did you do the second one?

said.

Yeah, so we've had a couple come out.

So the first one was routing with wildcard domains.

So if you're familiar with the ColdBox router, uh it's extremely powerful, very flexible,
and this goes into some of the features for that part of ColdBox.

And then our second tip ah is environment variable usage, which if you're not using
environment variables, I'm sure most developers at this point have heard of them, but if

you haven't started using them, they can add a lot of portability to your application.

to make it easy to configure in different environments.

So definitely go check that out and see how easy that is in a ColdBox application.

what?

there's probably going to be another free tip number, eight blog post coming out today,
this afternoon, according to our marketing team.

Um, so.

Look for that.

That'd be exciting.

So some services we're really quick to talk about.

We've got some blog posts about proven steps to modernize your legacy ColdFusion Systems
If you have an urgent project, here's how you can have a DevOps engineer by tomorrow.

And it's probably talking about engage Ortus and we can help you with things.

We've got some talks about, you know, security first, why you should always do an audit at
the start of any modernization project.

m If you want to upgrade and modernize, we love it, we support it, that's what we want you
to do, but you need to do an audit first.

We have another on how to do on demand DevOps standardize your CI CD, as well as, know,
ColdFusion 2018 and 21 is going to be coming to the end of support and what happens if you

don't move.

And so, tell us a little bit about today's, I know our sponsor is, Ortus Solutions as
always, but today it's got another, something a little extra special.

Cause I know this is something you really like, Jacob.

Do you want to tell us who's sponsoring today's episode?

today we are sponsored by the illustrious Box AI module.

So this is an official first-party BoxLang module that brings AI integration into BoxLang
to help you power your application with AI, which in the tech world these days, we can't

go more than 30 minutes without saying the word AI.

I said how it's pronounced.

Maybe.

And you've actually played around with some of this stuff.

You built a permanent proof of the concept once for this.

Yeah, I've had the opportunity to be a small contributor to this project, so that's pretty
exciting.

And it's really Luis' baby.

He's been going crazy with it.

But there's a lot of really great tools in there to be able to integrate with different AI
providers, know, Gemini, OpenAI, Claude, so on, so forth.

And then we also have some of the more advanced concepts like tool usage.

ah things for rag, stuff like that.

Nice.

So if you haven't played around with AI, I hear BoxLang makes it very easy for you to do
that.

Yep, it absolutely does.

Getting into the BoxLang news.

Version BoxLang 1.6 is out.

Woo hoo.

I need sound effects.

Do we have sound effects?

Yeah, we need a macro pad so you can instantly pull up all those crazy radio host sounds.

Boxlay 1.6 is out.

there you go.

Yeah, see, we're stepping up our game.

And so what are some of the new things in BoxLang 1.6?

man, so much stuff.

we've actually got a blog post that covers all of this stuff.

So you should go there and get it straight from the horse's mouth.

But I'll kind of summarize it for you here.

So we've got improved documentation, actually integration into the editor.

We've released um partnered with a service that makes our BoxLang documentation accessible
via an MCP.

Gotta mention the AI integration.

So now you can get better documentation available to your AI chat buddy and help you while
you're programming a BoxLang application.

We've also made some significant performance improvements.

The call out here on the article actually says up to 65 % faster in some use cases.

We've just been going through the runtime and...

profiling it over and over and over again as we're running and making each little
incremental change that we can.

And those have been piling up to make the runtime much faster than it was before.

So that's super exciting.

We've got some advanced monitoring for async processes using our new box executor health
checks.

They can help you when you're doing async programming and figuring out all of the
complexity that's going on there.

We've also got a new mini console framework for an enhanced REPL experience.

So if you are a REPL user, you'll find that really exciting.

and module public mapping support.

I don't actually know what this is.

This is a new thing to me.

So we're finding out about it at the same time.

say go read the blog article.

There's so much in there.

It's a pretty significant release.

I feel like we say that with every release, but this one really is like more significant
than some of the others.

Really just the performance improvements.

know the team's been hard at work and trying to tweak a lot of that.

Mm-hmm.

So check that out.

also, so next up we've got a blog post about is your legacy platforms holding you back?

your legacy platform is honing you back, six fixes that only BoxLang delivers.

Go ahead and post that.

And do you want to talk about that while I post it?

Yeah, you know, I think, you know, full disclosure, this is our sales pitch for why you
should be using BoxLang.

But if I do say so myself, it's a pretty good sales pitch.

Honestly, every time or obviously every time that you're looking at potential choices for
your software future, you're to want to make sure that you're making a good decision.

And so we've tried to lay out some of the things that we think makes BoxLang an obvious
choice.

So there's

There's six things there, and honestly, they're all really great points.

Things from, you know, we're a very software developer oriented company, right?

And so we try to make that, we try to come up with contracts and pricing plans that make
sense for the developers and for the company.

We don't want to penalize you for your software being successful.

So the first point we have is no more penalties for growth.

and we cut costs without cutting performance.

Modern ecosystem migrations without headaches and a lot of great stuff like that.

So please check that out and see what we're all about.

Yep.

And then going along with that, when you modernize your apps, you're doing it with a team
that supports you every step of the way.

We've got a proven track record for success.

You see us all over the place.

Some of us you see more often than others.

The Brad's like everywhere.

I don't know when he sleeps.

You've got a problem.

We'll listen.

We'll solve it.

We'll see what we can do.

Now we're very reactive with you.

And so that is something that we take a lot of pride in.

If you watch our socials, especially on Facebook, that we posted some profiles and some of
the team members.

but yeah, we asked that if you want to become a pioneer, you get some special pricing and
kind of get in on still, it's still kind of the ground floor.

I think Jacob.

on getting ahead of the curve on what we do and what we offer and getting some nice
discounts and getting us in there for you.

I like to think that Ortus has a really good reputation for building great products and
offering great support.

And we're just still doing what we do with BoxLang.

I agree.

Yeah.

so that's my sales pitch.

So a little bit left here with the BoxLang.

Going to the community, we got Ray Camden.

He's got a couple of blog posts.

One is about 'Testing with BoxLang' and the other is about integrating Algolia with
BoxLang.

So with the testing with BoxLang, he's just talking about getting things set up with
BoxLang, how he sets his app up, how he does his basic testing using TestBox.

If you never use TestBox, it's a pretty simple setup on what he talks through.

It gives lots of code examples and you can see how he does it all.

And if you've been using TestBox with ColdBox with

CFML, a lot of it's going to look very similar, be very familiar to you.

Yep.

Yep.

And I just want to take a moment to call out a really great quote from Raymond Camden's
'Testing with BoxLang' article.

I'm going to read it for you all really quick.

is directly from his article, "Testing your tests because testing is good.

So test".

Raymond Camden, 2025.

Excellent advice.

Yeah.

Nice, nice, nice.

So I posted the link to the next article about, Algolia.

It looks like it's an AI integration.

Over a REST API.

To round out, we do have a series about deploying BoxLang in the cloud led by Oscar
Tisnado.

Just talks about it's a whole series that's going to be out there on CFCast, I believe, as
well as the BoxLang Academy.

If it's not there.

it is there.

think because right now all BoxLang content on those sites are, I believe free.

So you go on there, um you might have to register to create an account, but once you have
that account, you can watch the content for free.

Yep, I think you're right.

Let's move on to CFML updates.

CFML updates.

So Jacob, you were in Las Vegas recently at Adobe CF Summit, and I kind of wanted to hear
your thoughts.

Let everyone know what you thought.

Yeah, I had a great time.

The CF Summit Conference was, it was really great.

Actually, I think it was one of the, I think it was even better than last year.

So I had a great time and I didn't get to attend as many of the talks as I had wanted to
personally.

I only got to go to a couple, but I did get to talk to a lot of people who came by our
booth or who stopped by after my talk, just to chat with me.

And I...

I always tried to ask them what was their favorite session so far.

And I had lots and lots of great responses from people.

It seemed like everybody had a great time.

actually consistently people told me that there was like information overload.

There was so much great stuff that they were just having to process everything.

So I think that by pretty much everybody's measurement, it was a great conference.

That is awesome.

Yeah.

I heard this.

heard similar things from other people too.

That was just so much great content and you do get that with conferences.

That's, know it's a really good conference is when you kind of walk out there kind of
glassy eyed and information overload.

And, I know it'll look well.

Cause I see a lot of, come back from ITB a lot.

People are walking around like, and same thing with summit, just so much good stuff.

Nice.

Yeah.

How was the venue with the, cause they changed, used to be.

Well, it's been a few years since I've been, and I know they had to switch venues and I
heard it was a really nice venue too.

Yeah, they've actually, so it was at Resort World, which it's been there for at least two
years now, but maybe a couple more, yeah.

And yeah, it's a great spot.

The food is really great there.

It's conveniently located with some hotels that are associated with that conference
center.

So it's a good spot.

Nice, nice, nice, nice.

Okay, so moving along.

Speaking of Summit, we've got a great blog article from Pete Freitag, ColdFusion Summit
2025, 30 years of ColdFusion.

Now, if you don't know Pete, Pete is an awesome community member.

He's kind of like one of our security experts in the community.

It's if you get a chance to go to any conference, whether it's your Summit or Into The Box
or CFCamp or whatever, and you see Pete there.

take his sessions.

it'll be extremely, it might scare you a bit to be, to be fair, but, be very informative
and you'll, say this all the time.

Any conference you see Pete take a session, you see Charlie take a session.

But anyway, though this is talking about Pete, he's got an article about, 30 years of
ColdFusion and he just talks about returning from, summit where he talked about boosting

coverage security.

He's got the slides of his talk listed on his site.

So I would definitely go recommend checking that out.

If you didn't go to summit, go check out the slides anyway.

He is giving a developer security training, which we're to mention in the events coming up
as well.

But I can't say enough nice things about Pete.

Just one of those people, go read his blog, go read his content.

He's got great products like Fixinator and HackMyCF and FuseGuard.

And it really...

really worthwhile to get up there.

Yeah, absolutely.

Now these next two, Jacob, I don't know if you had a chance to look at the two from
Matthew Clemente.

uh I but you should take it away.

I'm going to paste the links.

Well, I just wanted to give you a chance to because it looks like it's related to Claude
and I know you're like this with Claude so Yeah

you're kind of becoming one of our AI people because you're doing a bunch of cool things.

So basically, Matthew Clemente wanted to try playing around with Claude.

If you don't know Claude is one of the more popular, I think that's fair to say, AI
offerings along with, know, ChatGPT and Gemini and I don't even know who else, what people

use.

personally, I like ChatGPT and I like Claude.

And when I do, I of use Claude for more development stuff and ChatGPT for other stuff.

But, in his articles here, He talks about how to write a quick little ColdFusion page to
go through and interact with Claude and make it do some stuff.

And so, these skits set up, he talks about using prompts.

Because prompts are the way, please correct me if I'm wrong, Jacob.

I might not be saying the cool right way of it, but when you interact with these AIs, it's
really through a series of prompts where you ask it to do something and it returns

something and then you respond back.

Kind of like a back and forth chat.

Is that a proper way of describing it?

No, I think that's a fair characterization.

mean, we have a few other tools at our disposal.

Prompts by far are the most, that's the front door of interacting with an AI.

So, yeah.

about getting things set up.

Then he had everything set up and then they like change the, their engine.

think it went from three, five to, to something new or there will be changing it to
something new.

And so now I had to go through and do some updates on it.

And yeah, I definitely check that out.

Okay.

Next, this is a fun one.

Ben Nadel talking about why code should have end tags.

And so we always appreciate Ben.

He always, has lots of insightful thought provoking blog posts.

And in this one, he's talking about how, he's always been a big fan of custom tags, but as
you use it more and more, he'd like to see some, explicit closing tags.

And so there's some tags you have to use with, closing tags, but some of them you don't.

And so I think he's talking about,

When he sees code, he wants to see the closing.

That's just kind of interesting.

Over the years, you can always tell Ben code because he formats it a very specific way.

Although I think it's gotten a little bit better.

Back in the day, Jacob, Ben would do a lot of code examples and the way he would put like
everything on its own line and you'd get this great code example, it's like, oh, it's got

like tons of extra lines.

I think somebody, I don't even remember who, even wrote like a De-Nadelizer or something.

that would take Ben's code and strip away everything and compact it up.

Yeah, good times, good times.

And then finally, this other one from James Moberg, I don't think I even realized he's
talking about when using CF scripts, there's a nuance in place with using custom tag CF

script.

James is another blogger that's interesting.

He always says something worthwhile to read and he's talking about when you use the, you
want to make sure that your tags are only running once.

So like for example, he did a custom tag, the tag way, and then he did the script way.

And then the tag way, it only ran once.

CF, you know, underscore whatever with his parameters, that worked fine.

But in script, when he did it, it ran twice because they didn't have a

a way to break out of it so it only executed once.

So the nuance is that CFM based custom tags are always executed twice via script.

It's not documented.

It isn't documented on the only Adobe documentation that discusses it.

It's just something that you should be aware of.

I don't know if you're really using the custom tag concept in scripts, but if you do, that
is something to keep in mind and go check out that article.

Yeah, it's one of the things that I wouldn't have even thought about it.

And I might've been like, why am I getting duplicates here?

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, so moving on.

We are got some more events coming up.

As mentioned earlier, we've got the Pete Freitag's, ColdFusion security training.

It's online, so you don't have to actually go anywhere.

Just go online to do it.

That's gonna be December 9th, 2025.

I highly recommend, I keep saying, I had a lot with Pete.

highly recommend, checking that out.

it's not too crazy.

think it's like 600 bucks a student, although that might've been the early bird pricing
that might've ended.

I'm on a site right now and it's still listed.

So maybe just didn't update the site yet, or maybe he's given people a chance to, to still
get it.

I think regular price 800 either way, it's going to be a hands on CFML.

security training class for developers.

And so it's going to be like 11 a.m.

to 2 p.m.

on, oh, it's two days, December 9th and 10th, 11 to two, six hours total.

And the class will be recorded as well.

So if you do attend but had to like miss part of it, you can also get the recording and
you will, if you can't attend, you have full access to it.

So I would definitely recommend checking that out.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yep.

what's coming up in about, let's see what it's to October.

Can't believe it's October, November, December, January, February, March, April, May.

What's coming up in eight months, Jacob.

Into The Box.

Into The Box and what's special about Into The Box.

Well, that is Ortus Solutions premiere conference where we talk about all things Box

Yep.

You're a man of few words, Jacob, but you don't waste them.

I'll say that.

I'm probably a little bit too much fluff and you're a little bit to the point.

It's all right, balance.

ah

don't write superfluous code either.

You're just like, boom.

Will I try?

oh

Hahaha.

ah Yeah, so that's in eight months, but if you go out to the Into The Box website Into The
Box dot org You can actually get a very precise counter there that says that it's in 203

days 11 hours 24 minutes and 40 seconds as of right now And you'll also see that there's a
button for call for speakers So if you're interested in attending, you should definitely

go click that button and fill it out

Yep.

Now I hear that we don't have too many speakers yet.

Well, I know that we are ringing the gong for internal speakers as well as external ones,
but I haven't checked the external speaker metrics.

I don't think I'm privy to that information, but uh we should always use more, yeah.

Well, internally, cause if you ever been Into The Box, we have a series of Ortus people
that do presentations on all sorts of fun stuff, good stuff, and then also community.

it's really, we get everyone involved and, internally so far, Jacob's the only one that's
actually submitted a bunch of, topics to consideration.

Sorry, I about scratching my nose.

It wasn't applying anything else.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But, um, so yeah, when they announced and turned to the like, you know, just Jacob, Jacob,

Yeah, well honestly, you know, we've been asking for those internal submissions for so
long that I'm considering putting even more in.

ah But we'll see.

I don't know.

You can go for the record on how many sessions you can do at one Into The Box.

I'm not sure what the record is.

Eric might know two, three, four.

I bet it either Luis, Jon or Brad that probably did it though, or Eric.

Okay.

So speaking of Into The Box, we also have the video series on CFCast.

If you attended.

Online on site, ticket holders, you should get access to it.

If you don't have it already, reach out, Patreons get free access to the series as a token
of our appreciation.

You could still purchase it if you really want that content now.

It's only $250 for on demand lifetime access.

then CFCasts subscribers will get access on November 1st.

So if you can wait a few more weeks and you know, I don't know why anyone that could wait
a few more weeks for this content, but if you, if you have to, you'll get it.

If you subscribe otherwise, you know, go get it now.

Okay.

And then, um, let's see here.

Ooh, Hacktoberfest 2025 is still ongoing.

If, um, you haven't gone out and gotten your pull requests in, go do it.

go do it really anywhere, but, you should be able to do it on many of our Ortus, repos.

Do your pull requests, do your whatevers.

if for some reason you're trying to do it and it's not in there, then you should let us
know and we'll, and we'll make sure that we get that updated for you.

The last thing we've got here is the Inside The Box series is now up and running on
CFCast.

Do you know what these are, Jacob?

Actually, I'm not familiar with these.

You're not familiar with these.

How can you not be familiar with these?

I'm a little offended that you're not familiar with these.

You probably should be.

Please enlighten me.

These are,

the Inside The Box stories, insights and BoxLang perspectives are series of interviews
with different presenters.

So people like Jon Clausen, Kevin Wright, Luis Majano, Michael Hayes, Scott Steinbeck,
Guust, Tony Shaffer, Sana Ullah and Ujas Vaghani.

And you know what makes his even more special, Jacob?

I'm the guy interviewing them all.

Nice.

So when you're Into The Box as you're going, doing all your, you know, helping, you know,
Nick get his stuff set up and doing everything else and being cool.

I was interviewing a bunch of, And so, uh, you go check those out.

We had some really good conversations are all about, you know, anywhere from five to 10
minutes, depending on who I talked to.

And I'm talking about all sorts of stuff.

And so was really excited to be able to do that.

spent a lot of time doing some of that stuff.

That's why I ended up just doing the workshop with you.

which I thought was fun.

And then, was just kind of doing interviews the whole time.

And yeah, it was good.

It was fun.

We'll go check them out.

'Cause I always like seeing myself on camera.

I don't, but you know how it is.

You kind of like, I don't want to see myself, but it was kind of cool.

But, okay, well, we are getting to be about that time.

We just want to say thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you to everyone that's tuned in and watching us live.

Thank you.

If you're on, whether you're watching us on YouTube or LinkedIn or Twitter or wherever
else we have to be streaming at the moment, cause we're still figuring this out.

Thank you so much for being a part, having us be a part of your day.

We also want to say thank you to all our Patreon supporters.

These are the individuals who are personally supporting our open source initiatives to
ensure the great toolings like CommandBox, ForgeBox, ColdBox, ContentBox, TestBox, all the

other Boxes, BoxLang So your contributions fund the cloud infrastructure in our community,
that we rely on for things like ForgeBox, which is our package manager with CommandBox.

So you can support us on Patreon and what did they get if they do that, Jacob?

They get access to all kinds of goodies.

So with the bronze package, you get a ForgeBox Pro and CFCast subscription.

You get a profile badge on the community website.

You get access to a private forum, as well as the community website.

And then you also get a private channel on our BoxTeam Slack, which is very exclusive.

Yeah.

always feels like we're always kind of talking about new and cool things to be adding to
it.

So you always see a stick around and you never know what might come up.

Maybe you like, you know, win a free consult with Jacob, it'll come to your house and
either like help fix your code or maybe mow your lawn or something.

I don't know.

Yeah, I think we want to give them good prizes for it though.

So it's probably why that one's not on the list.

Oh man, but it could be, it could be.

um Anyway, so just thank you so much for what you do.

If you want to become a Patreon as well, we would love to have you and we would love to
thank you there as well.

But you can go to ortussolutions.com slash about us sponsors to see all the people that we
appreciate and love.

Actually, we appreciate love everybody.

What are we talking about?

But we, know, a little bit more of these people as well.

especially the Patreon.

especially been another episode of the Modernize or Die Podcast.

If you are checking us out for the first time on some of these other channels, I'm Daniel,
this is Jacob.

We kind of rotate through some different co-hosts and so you'll definitely see some
people.

We do it on the first and third Tuesday of the month, the news edition of the Modernize or
Die Podcast.

We might be having some other things coming out.

in the future.

So thank you to everybody and we'll see you in a few weeks as well.

Take care everybody.