There was a Twitter conversation today where Ben Nadel mentioned that one of the continuing issues with ColdFusion was bad JSON support.  I assume by that, he's referring to CF's tendency to change the datatype of variables while serializing them. I mentioned that Lucee Server has much better support for this and I'd like to show very quickly why this is.

So this is a short one to just showcase how one of our new features in the CommandBox 3.7 beta works.  What does it do?  The new command is testbox watch and it will stay running in the foreground and monitor your app for any file changes.  When a file change it detected, it runs your tests from the console and outputs the results so you can get instant feedback on save as to whether you just broke something.

So this post is a response to some blog comments on this post I made today extolling the features of creating native CLI scripts in CFML with CommandBox.  I mentioned in passing that Node is a popular tool for this, but I felt CommandBox had improved the mousetrap so to speak. I also acknowledged by bais as the lead developer of CommandBox, but I stand by my comments. Adam Cameron, in his eternal quest to keep me honest was a little incredulous though, and wanted to see some better proof of my claims.  Instead of elaborating in the comment section, and since I'm well into the "opinion" territory, I decided to respond in a blog post on my personal blog.  

Here's a quick post on a somewhat-undocumented feature of CommandBox.  I say "somewhat" because if you type "config set" and hit tab from the interactive shell, we'll auto-suggest this setting, so it's not impossible to find but I've not put it in the official docs.

So, here's the setup.  You can pretty much do anything you want with the ForgeBox website entirely through the CLI.  That includes creating accounts, logging in, publishing packages, updating packages, listing packages, and searching packages.  This is made possible by our nice (Coldbox-powered) REST API that's part of the ForgeBox site that the CLI interfaces with.  

Sometimes you may wish to play around and try out the commands to create users and packages, but you hate to create a lot of dummy data that clogs up the database or shows on your profile.  The fix is to point your local CommandBox CLI over to our staging instance of ForgeBox.  This is as simple as setting a single config setting from the command line and the change takes instant effect for all your ForgeBox interactions.  Just remember, this setting is remembered until you change it back so don't forget.