Documentation is Key

One of the best features of ColdBox is its Documentation. What is a software foundation without proper documentation? ColdBox will always provide you with the latest and most up to date documentation that will help your development team stay ahead of the technology game. With over 450 pages of documentation and guides, you will be on your way to ColdBox development in no time. There are over 30 step by step guides on almost every topic that ColdBox Development will lead you to. Finally, a framework that has documentation.

Talk About Samples!

There are over 13 full blown sample applications on the ColdBox distribution and growing. You will get a sense of how to build simple or complex applications from these samples.

Visual Debugging & Self Documenting Framework

Talk about being visual! ColdBox will give you incredible debugging tools and self-documenting features found in no other framework. Finally know what the framework is doing and what your application is doing.

No XML Dialect! Conventions baby!

ColdBox introduces pure CFC controllers called event handlers, no more XML dialects to dictate your application logic. Write your logic in ColdFusion, like it should be. ColdBox will find your event handlers and register their events, no messy or incredibly long XML configuration files. Code controllers and conventions will increase your applications' reusability and extensibility. Create several applications within one main application, no need to include or separate configurations, just organize your event handlers into packages. Same goes for your views and layouts, ColdBox knows where to find your HTML and how to render it. You can even configure implicit rendering of views in different layouts, thanks to ColdBox's unique layout rendering manager.

Application Layouts a la Carte!

With ColdBox conventions, you get to choose your own application layout if you so desire. You are not tied to specific conventions, ColdBox gives you dynamic conventions. This can help create custom methodologies with your development team and increase adaptability.

More than a Framework!

ColdBox is more than a framework, it is also a toolkit. It introduces several software application aspects that will help you build your applications faster, debug with ease and much much more!!
Highlight each icon for more information:

Some Included Aspects are:

Aspects are extensible and configurable

You said Caching?

Yes, ColdBox provides you with a rock solid caching solution for data, events, views and objects. You heard that right, events and view caching and its so easy. You can even configure server settings or override them per ColdBox application, how cool is that! But is it easy? ColdBox makes use of metadata in your objects such as handlers, events and plugins in order to tell it what to cache and for how long.

What can I configure?

Does it have an API?

Yes, you have a very well documented API to interact with the cache and use it for anything you want. From expiring the entire cache, to just one item, to doing lookups, etc. It even includes a fancy event/view purging mechanism, great for CMS applications.

Extensible!

ColdBox was built with the Developer in mind. You can extend this framework via plugins, interceptors, decorators and much more. You can tap into the lifecycle of the requests and modify them in whichever way you want. You are definetely not constrained.

Extend Your Applications with Plugins

With the ability to create plugins, you can extend your application into reusable pieces of code. You can create plugin libraries and even share them with friends.

Extend Everything With Interceptors

You can even extend the framework by creating ColdBox Interceptors that can be plugged in to a request lifecycle, and by the way, they work by conventions! Not only that, use them for your own interceptions. You can use the ColdBox Interceptors to create a publisher-consumer methodology in no time, just announce all you like.