Building Your First Package on ForgeBox

ForgeBox is the CFML equivalent to Node’s npm package registry. ForgeBox is a growing collection of reusable open source CFML code available for anyone in the community to use.

I know what you’re thinking: “Hey I’ve got this open source idea I want to share but it’s not a full blown ColdBox app, it’s just a library, or handful of useful functions. Or some other thing I wrote ages ago.”

The truth is you only need to add a tiny bit of machinery around most non-ColdBox code to make it shareable via ForgeBox! We can take collections of functions, or legacy CFincludes or custom tags and other non-ColdBox things and make them usable via ForgeBox without much hassle. Let’s learn how!

Description of Target Audience: CFML developers who’ve used CommandBox for the basics, have CFML code they’d like to share and need those next steps in order to do so.

Assumed knowledge for the topic: Developers should be familiar with CommandBox and have a reasonable amount of CFML exposure. Full blown experience writing MVC apps is not required but certainly very helpful.

Objective for the topic: Attendees will learn how to adapt various CFML code examples into something usable and sharable via ForeBox.

Main Takeaways:

• A brief overview of ForgeBox and how to use it.
• Building a basic package for ForgeBox, deploying and installing your new package.
• Putting a CFincludes and CFFunctions into a ForgeBox package.
• Using ForgeBox to deploy legacy CFML code that’s not in ColdBox.
• Best practices and where to go from here.