Added

• Github actions for LTS Releases

• LTS Updates

Bugs

• CFProvider ACF versions are Hard-Coded

• WireBox caches Singletons even if their autowired dependencies throw exceptions.

In this section you will find the release notes for each version we release under this major version. If you are looking for the release notes of previous major versions use the version switcher at the top left of this documentation book. Here is a breakdown of our major version releases.

• Version 6.0 - August 2020

• Version 5.0 - July 2018

• Version 3.0 - March 2011

• Version 2.0 - April 2007

• Version 1.0 - June 2006

WireBox Manual - Version 6.x

WireBox is an enterprise ColdFusion Dependency Injection and Aspect Oriented Programing (AOP) framework. WireBox's inspiration has been based on the idea of rapid workflows when building object oriented ColdFusion applications, programmatic configurations and simplicity. With that motivation we introduced dependency injection by annotations and conventions, which has been the core foundation of WireBox. We have definitely been influenced by great DI projects like Google Guice, Grails Framework, Spring and ColdSpring so we thank them for their contributions and inspiration

WireBox is standalone framework for ColdFusion (CFML) applications and it is also bundled with the ColdBox Platform.

Versioning

WireBox is maintained under the guidelines as much as possible.Releases will be numbered with the following format:

And constructed with the following guidelines:

• Breaking backward compatibility bumps the major (and resets the minor and patch)

• New additions without breaking backward compatibility bumps the minor (and resets the patch)

• Bug fixes and misc changes bumps the patch

License

The ColdBox Platform, WireBox is open source and licensed under the License.

• Copyright by Ortus Solutions, Corp

• ColdBox, CacheBox, Wirebox, LogBox are registered trademarks by Ortus Solutions, Corp

Discussion & Help

The WireBox help and discussion group can be found here:

Reporting a Bug

We all make mistakes from time to time :) So why not let us know about it and help us out. We also love pull requests, so please star us and fork us:

Jira Issue Tracking

Professional Open Source

WireBox is a professional open source library supported by . If you are interested in support please consider our or if you need consulting please purchase on of our . Here are some areas that we can assist you with:

• Custom Development

• Professional Support & Mentoring

• Training

Resources

• Official Site:

• CFCasts Video Training:

• Source Code:

HONOR GOES TO GOD ABOVE ALL

Because of His grace, this project exists. If you don't like this, then don't read it, its not for you.

"Therefore being justified by **faith**, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ: By whom also we have access by **faith** into this **grace** wherein we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God." Romans 5:5

In all reality we could be building our objects and its dependencies, , without any configuration just plain location and implicit conventions. This is great but not very flexible for refactoring, so let's do the best practice of defining a mapping or an alias to a real object.

We do this by creating a WireBox configuration binder wirebox.system.ioc.config.Binder, which is a simple CFC that defines the way WireBox behaves and defines object mappings. This binder is then used to initialize WireBox so it has knowledge of these mappings and our settings.

Whether you use WireBox standalone or within a ColdBox context a Binder gets a structure of configuration properties so it can use them whenever you are configuring it or declaring mappings. If you are in standalone mode, the Injector can be constructed with a properties structure that will be passed to the binder for usage. If you are in a ColdBox application the ColdBox application configuration structure is passed for you. You can then use these properties with the following methods:

• getProperty(name,[default]) : Get a specific property

This release was a ColdBox minor bump with no tickets affecting Wirebox

We have already seen in our previous section all the events that are announced by WireBox, but how do we listen? There are two ways to build WireBox listeners because there are two modes of operations, but the core is the same.

1. Listeners are simple CFCs that must create methods that match the same name of the event they want to listen to.

2. If you are running WireBox within a ColdBox application, listeners are Interceptors and you declare them and register them exactly the same way that you do with normal interceptors.

These methods can take up to two parameters depending on your mode of operation (standalone or ColdBox). The one main difference between pure Wirebox listeners and ColdBox interceptors are that the configure method for the standalone WireBox is different.

WireBox allows you to create your own DSL object builders and then register them via your configuration binder. This allows you to create a namespace or override an internal namespace with your own object builder. By now we have seen our injection DSL and noticed that we have internal namespaces. With this feature we can alter it or create new ones so our annotations and injection DSLs can be customized to satisfaction. This is easily done in the following process

1. Create a CFC that implements wirebox.system.ioc.dsl.IDSLBuilder

2. Register your custom DSL builder in your configuration binder

This is a feature where you can mark methods in your components with a special provider annotation so they can serve the objects you requested automatically for you. This is an amazing feature as it will take the original method signature and replace the method for you with one that will serve the provided objects for you automatically. How insane is that! You deserve some getting jiggy wit it (chapter 4) dancing!

public Espresso function getEspresso() provider="espresso"{}

Wow! That's it! Yep, just create an empty method signature and annotated with provider={mapping} and then WireBox will read these annotated methods and replace them for you at runtime so when you call etEspresso() it actually calls the WireBox injector and requests a new espresso instance and it returns it.

Caution Please note that the visibility of provided methods does not matter to WireBox. It can provide public, private, or packaged visibilities with no problem at all.

The mapDirectory() allows you to leverage closures or lambdas to influence and filter mappings. The arguments are filter to add a filter that MUST return boolean in order to process the mapping and influence that can influence the created mapping with any custom bindings.

// influence only certain components to be singleton
mapDirectory(packagePath="coldbox.testing.testModel.ioc", influence=function(binder, path){
    if( findNoCase( "simple", arguments.path) ){
        arguments.binder.asSingleton();
    }
});

// filter some components from registration
mapDirectory(packagePath="coldbox.testing.testModel.ioc", filter=function(path){
    return ( findNoCase( "simple", arguments.path ) ? false : true );
});

WireBox also comes packaged with our handy object populator that has been so successful in our ColdBox applications. The object populator object can populate objects with data from XML, JSON, WDDX, structures, queries and much more. So we highly encourage you to check it out as it will really help out in your applications.

The way to retrieve it is to use the getObjectPopulator() method on the injector and then call one of our populate methods on the object. You can also use the wirebox:populator injection DSL to retrieve it.

populator = injector.getObjectPopulator();

property name="populator" inject="wirebox:populator";

You can also request Java objects from the injection dsl.

property name="duration" inject="java:java.time.Duration";

Here are the release notes for WireBox 6.4.0

WireBox 6.1.0 is a minor release with small fixes and minor updates.

Release Notes

The following annotations can be placed in the component declaration to tell the WireBox injector where to persist the constructed object. If no scope annotations are found on the component or mappings then the object is treated as NO SCOPE or a prototype/transient object; one that gets constructed and discarded every time.

• singleton - A singleton object that persists for the entire life-time of the application

• scope="registered_scope" : Persist in a registered scope: session, request, singleton, custom, etc.

If you are using your configuration binder within a ColdBox application you will have some extra goodies in the Binder that come in very handy:

• getColdBox() : Retrieve the instance of the running ColdBox application

• getAppMapping() : Get the current AppMapping, the location of the application on th server, setting for the running ColdBox application

Release Notes

Since version 5.5.0 all mappings in WireBox will only be processed when they are requested for the very first time. This is to enhance performance and increase startup times. Processing means that the object's and its inheritance trail are inspected for metadata, which can be a very time consuming process.

process()

However, you can explicitly process a mapping right after mapping it via the binder's process() method.

mapPath( "com.app.Service" ).process();

That's it! If you call the process() method right after a mapping, it will be automatically processed. This means all annotations will be inspected.

mapDirectory( process=true )

If you are mapping using mapDirectory() then you can pass the process argument to true and all mappings in that directory scan will be processed automatically.

WireBox also sports a very nice event model that can announce several object life cycle events. You can listen to these events and interact with WireBox at runtime very easily, whether you are in standalone mode or within a ColdBox application.

Note If you are within a ColdBox application, you get the benefit of all the potential of ColdBox Interceptors and if you are in standalone mode, well, you just get the listener and that's it.

Each event execution also comes with a structure of name-value pairs called interceptData that can contain objects, variables and all kinds of data that can be useful for listeners to use. This data is sent by the event caller and each event caller decides what this data sent is. Also, remember that WireBox also can be ran with a reference to CacheBox, which also offers lots of internal events that you can tap into. So let's start investigating first the object life cycle events.

This minor release brings in some major performance enhancements for the way WireBox maps and creates objects. We highly encourage upgrading to it.

Release Notes

The injector can be constructed with three optional arguments:

An object that is scoped into request, session, server, cachebox or application scopes and if wired into a persisted object will remain around even when this object has expired from the scope. This is called scope-widening injection and is a problem that must be addressed by NOT injecting them into persisted objects directly but by using WireBox's provider approach. This guarantees that the object's scope lifecycle will be maintained and your singleton or other persistent objects will be decoupled from the scope by accessing the target object via its provider.

For example, let's say you have a handler that wires in a user object that is scoped into session scope, but the handler itself is scoped as a singleton:

So when the handler is created and persisted as a singleton, the user object gets created, stored in session and also referenced into the lifecycle of the handler object. So now, if the user expires from session, the handler does not know about it, because all it knows it that a direct reference to that out of context object still remains. So if the user needed things in session to exist, this will now fail. This problem is much like how Hibernate and detached objects work. Objects are no longer in session, they are detached. This scope widening issue is resolved by NOT injecting the user object directly into the handler but by using a provider.

You can use our mapping DSL to register influence closures or lambdas on a per mapping basis. This will allow a developer to influence the requested instance of any object/data element and decorate objects or even return different objects.

This is similar to object providers but instead of overriding the ENTIRE creation process of the object like a provider does, the user might want to simply influence the creation of a normal mapping with some additional flair. This is accomplished via the withInfluence mapping DSL function. It receives a closure as an argument and the closure has the following signature:

Here is an example of adding some nice pizzazz to an object:

In this instance, the instance is already built and then passed into the closure for additional influence. Please note, that the object is returned from the closure. You can make this optional, but if something IS returned, it will override the instance which will allow a developer to replace or decorate the instance as they see fit.

ColdBox 6.3.0 is a minor release that squashes lots of bugs and does tons of improvements for performance!

WireBox can be downloaded as a standalone framework or it is included with the latest ColdBox Platform release, so no need to install it if you are within a ColdBox application.

The WireBox binder will also be injected with 3 methods that will allow you to talk to your system environment or Java system properties. This will help you with container based applications or applications that rely on environment settings/secrets.

• getEnv( key, [defaultValue] ) - Get a Java system environment value

• getSystemProperty( key, [defaultValue] )

Let's get funky now! We have seen how to inject objects and how to scope objects. However, we need to talk about a cool WireBox feature called object providers. We learned that when you request an object from WireBox it creates it and injects it immediately. However, sometimes we need more control like:

• Delay construction of the dependency until some point in time during your controlled execution. Maybe you don't want to construct some dependencies until some feature in your application is enabled.

• You need multiple instances of a class. Like a User service producing transient users, or our espresso machine creating espressos.

The executor namespace is both available in ColdBox and WireBox standalone and it is used to get references to created asynchronous executor thread pools.

WireBox 2.0.0 supports entity injection via

• - for use in ColdBox applications

• Custom ORM Event Handler - for use in any CFML application

You can store a-la-carte attributes in a specific mapping so it can be retrieved at a later time by either an AOP aspect or Events. This is a great way to store custom metadata about an object so it can be read later for some meaningful purpose. Let's say you want to tag a mapping with a custom type that is not so easily determined from the object instance itself. You don't want to do all kinds of introspection in order to know what object you received in an aspect or an event.

This mapping declares that an object has some extra attributes that will be stored in the mapping, such as the location and if it belongs to a module. This is then incredibly useful when you have an attached listener to WireBox:

As you can see from this sample, the extra attributes are incredibly essential, as the listener just sends the target object. It would take lots of introspection and metadata inspections in order to determine certain metadata about an object. However, with the extra attributes, it is just a snap!

The mapping DSL is the way to configure object mappings in WireBox that will represent objects, factories or providers. All mappings DSL methods return back an instance of the binder so you can concatenate methods to create readable execution chains.

The chains are divided into three types:

1. Initiators - Start the mapping DSL process

2. Modifiers

Thanks to Phill Nacelli, you can reuse object definitions in your binder or via annotations. This means that you can declare an object with its dependencies and then create other definitions that use all of this parent object's definitions. This saves tons of time in declarations and provides you with great reusability.

Here is a small example:

The mapping destination toProvider() can also take a closure that will be executed whenever that mapping is requested. This allows you to add your own custom provider construction code inline without creating a standalone provider object that implements our provider interface. By leveraging closures you can really get funky and more concise in your coding. This closure will have the following signature and it must return the instance requested:

Here is an example of how to accomplish this:

WireBox bases itself on the idea of creating object injectors (wirebox.system.ioc.Injector) that in turn will produce and wire all your objects. You can create as many injector instances as you like in your applications, each with configurable differences or be linked hierarchically by setting each other as parent injectors.

Each injector can be configured with a configuration binder or none at all. If you are a purely annotations based kind of developer and don't mind requesting pathed components by convention, then you can use the no-configuration approach and not even have a single configuration file, all using autowiring and discovery of conventions. However, if you would like to alter the behavior of the injector and also create object mappings, you will need a configuration binder. The next section explains the way to create this configuration binder, below is how to startup or bootstrap the injector in different manners:

No Configuration Binder:

You can use the mixins() binder method or mixins annotation to define that a mapping should be mixed in with one or more set of templates. It will then at runtime inject all the methods in those templates and mix them into the target object as public methods.

This will grab all the methods in the base.cfm and model.cfm templates and inject them into the target mapping as public methods. Awesome right?

Tip The list of templates can include a

Now that we have constructed our injector let's discuss a little about injection idioms or styles WireBox offers before we go all cowboy and start configuring and using this puppy. The styles shown below are written in execution order.

Constructor (1)

Motivation: Mandatory dependencies for object creation

Each constructor argument receives a inject annotation with its required injection DSL. Be careful when dealing with object circular dependencies as they will fail via constructor injection due to its chicken and the egg nature

Thanks to our ColdBox Evangelist, Brad Wood, we have a feature in our Providers that you can leverage its onMissingMethod() to proxy calls into the provided object itself. So let's say our provided object has a method called sayHello(), then with an injected provider you must do this:

That is great, but you can proxy calls into the provider itself by removing the extra get() call and doing this:

The WireBox provider object (wirebox.system.ioc.Provider) has an onMissingMethod() function that will take all missing method calls and proxy them to the provided object. Now, this is great but be ready to lose on performance if you use this approach. That is the only caveat to this approach, is that you will be impacted by performance, not crazy, but try it.

Inject object providers, please refer to our in this guide.

WireBox allows you to create your own object persistence scopes so you can have full control on their lifecycle. This is easily done in the following process:

1. Create a CFC that implements wirebox.system.ioc.scopes.IScope

2. Register your custom scope in your configuration binder

If you would like to use CacheBox for persistence for you objects you will need to mark your CFC with the following annotation(s)

• cachebox="[provider]" - The default provider is called 'default', so this annotation can be empty or a named cache provider

• cache - Cache into the default provider, shorthand annotation, no value needed

Gives you the ability to easily inject base ORM services or binded virtual entity services for you:

The following chart shows you the most common methods when dealing with the WireBox Injector. This doesn't mean there are no other methods on the Injector that are of value, so please check out the CFC Docs for more in-depth knowledge.

You can also use our cool mapping DSL to create mappings that refer to provided objects by using the DSL construction type:

You can use the following mapping methods to map to virtual providers by using their dsl arguments:

• mapDSL()

customScopes = {
    ortus = "path.model.dsl.OrtusScope"
};

or
mapScope("ortus","path.model.dsl.OrtusScope");

Now I can use the ortus scope in my mappings DSL and even my annotations, isn't that cool!

component scope="ortus"{

}

// map it
map("Luis")
    .to("model.path.LuisService")
    .into("Ortus");

The scope interface can be found here: coldbox.system.ioc.scopes.IScope.

/**
 * Copyright Since 2005 ColdBox Framework by Luis Majano and Ortus Solutions, Corp
 * www.ortussolutions.com
 * ---
 * The main interface to produce WireBox storage scopes
 **/
interface {

	/**
	 * Configure the scope for operation and returns itself
	 *
	 * @injector             The linked WireBox injector
	 * @injector.doc_generic coldbox.system.ioc.Injector
	 *
	 * @return coldbox.system.ioc.scopes.IScope
	 */
	function init( required injector );

	/**
	 * Retrieve an object from scope or create it if not found in scope
	 *
	 * @mapping             The linked WireBox injector
	 * @mapping.doc_generic coldbox.system.ioc.config.Mapping
	 * @initArguments       The constructor struct of arguments to passthrough to initialization
	 */
	function getFromScope( required mapping, struct initArguments );


	/**
	 * Indicates whether an object exists in scope
	 *
	 * @mapping             The linked WireBox injector
	 * @mapping.doc_generic coldbox.system.ioc.config.Mapping
	 *
	 * @return coldbox.system.ioc.scopes.IScope
	 */
	boolean function exists( required mapping );

}

We have now coded our classes and unit tests with some cool annotations in record time, so what do we do next? Well, WireBox works on the idea of three ways to discover and create your classes:

So let's do examples for each where our classes we just built are placed in a directory called model of the root directory.

Implicit Creation

Explicit Binder Configuration

Explicit Creation

Scan Locations Binder Configuration

Set Locations Creation

The next step in our mapping DSL excursion is to learn about how WireBox will persist these object mappings into WireBox scopes. By default (as we have seen), all object mappings are transient objects and they belong to a scope type called NOSCOPE.

However, we need to specifically tell WireBox into what scope the declared mapped objects should be placed on in order for us to leverage caching, the singleton pattern, etc. This is accomplished by leveraging our persistence component annotations or the following methods if you prefer a non-annotation approach:

Note Please note that all WireBox configuration binders have two public properties:

this.TYPES - Enum class (coldbox.system.ioc.Types)
this.SCOPES - Enum class (coldbox.system.ioc.Scopes)

These classes have on themselves several public properties that are a cool shorthand way to link to construction types or persistence scopes

So just remember that these persistence DSL methods are not mandatory. If you are an annotations kinda developer, then you can easily add these persistence annotations to your classes.

When using WireBox inside of ColdBox, the binder CFC is located by convention in /config/WireBox.cfc. When using WireBox outside of ColdBox, you can create a binder CFC anywhere with any name using one of these two methods:

1. Create a configuration CFC that extends the WireBox configuration object: coldbox.system.ioc.config.Binder and has a configure() method.

component extends="coldbox.system.ioc.config.Binder"{

    function configure(){

    }

    function onLoad(){

    }

    function onShutdown(){

    }
}

2. Or create a simple configuration CFC that has a configure( binder ) method that accepts a WireBox configuration binder object

From the configure() method you will be able to interact with the Binder methods or creating implicit DSL structures in order to configure WireBox for operation and also to create object mappings. From the onLoad() method you can also use it for mappings with main distinction that the WireBox machinery is now online (logging, events, caching, etc). This is necessary for leveraging mapDirectory() calls.

When you instantiate the Wirebox injector, pass either the CFC path to your binder CFC or an instance of the CFC.

The injection DSL is a domain specific language that denotes what to inject in the current placeholder: property, argument, or method via the inject annotation. This injection DSL not only can it be used via annotations but also via our mapping DSL whenever a dsl argument can be used. This DSL is constructed by joining words separated by a : colon. The first part of this string is what we will denote as the injection DSL Namespace.

Property Annotation

Every cfproperty can be annotated with our injection annotations:

• @inject : The injection DSL

• @scope : The visibility scope to inject the dependency into. By default it injects into variables scope

Constructor Argument Annotation

You can also use annotated constructor arguments with the inject annotation.

Caution In full script components, annotating inline arguments is broken in Adobe ColdFusion 9. You will have to annotate them via the alternative annotation syntax in ColdFusion 9 via the javadocs style comments.

Setter Method Annotation

You can also annotate setter methods with the inject annotation to provide injections

WireBox offers a wide gamut of annotation namespaces you can use in your CFML applications and ColdBox applications. However, we took it a step further and allowed you to create your own custom DSL namespaces making your annotations come alive!

Ok, now that we know how to configure WireBox, let's get into the fun stuff of object mapping. How do we do this? By using our DSL mapping initiators that tell WireBox how to start the object registration process. You will then concatenate the initiators with some DSL destinations methods, DI data, etc to tell WireBox all the information it might need to construct, wire and persist the object. Here are the DSL initiators:

Major Updates

Here is a listing of all the major updates and improvements in this version.

WireBox Performance, Performance and More Performance

This release brings in a complete re-architecture of the creation, inspection and wiring of objects in WireBox in order to increase performance. Every single line of code was optimized and analyzed in order to bring the creation, inspection and wiring of objects to its maximum speed. This will be noted more on the creation of transient (non-persisted) objects more than in singleton objects. So if you are asking WireBox for transient objects, you will see and feel the difference.

In some of our performance testing we had about 4000 object instantiations running between 500ms-1,100 ms depending on CPU load. While with simple createObject() and no wiring, they click around 400-700 ms. Previously, we had the same instantiations clocking at 900-3,500 ms. So we can definitely see a major improvement in this area.

Release Notes

Each configuration binder has two public properties accessible in the this scope:

1. this.TYPES : A reference to wirebox.system.ioc.Types used to declare what type of object you are registering for construction or wiring

2. this.SCOPES : A reference to wirebox.system.ioc.Scopes used to declare in what life cycle scope the object will be stored under

These two classes contain static public members in the this scope that facilitate the declaration of persistence scopes and construction types for object mappings. Below are the valid enumerations for these two classes:

this.TYPES

• CFC : Construction of a CFC

• JAVA : Construction of a Java class

• WEBSERVICE

this.SCOPES

• NOSCOPE : Transient objects

• PROTOTYPE : Transient objects

• SINGLETON

This DSL namespace interacts with the loaded LogBox instance.

You can inject automatic object providers by using the provider injection DSL namespace. This will inject a WireBox provider class (wirebox.system.ioc.Provider) that follows our Provider pattern with one method on it: get() that will provide you with the requested mapped object.

The difference between custom providers here is that WireBox will create a virtual provider object for you dynamically at runtime, configure it to retrieve a specific type of mapping and then use that for you. The provider namespace will take everything after it and evaluate it as either a named mapping or a full injection DSL string.

For example, inject="provider:MyService" will inject a provider of MyService objects, so it will look for a MyService ID in the binder. However, you can also get mega funky and do this: inject="provider:logbox:logger:{this}" and WireBox will create a provider of logbox:logger:{this}.

Caution Remember that the value of the provider can be a simple ID or a full injection DSL.

That's it! You basically use the provider:{mapping} injection DSL to tell a property, setter or argument that you want a provider object instead of the real deal. This will allow you to delay construction of such an object or avoid the nasty pitfall of scope widening injection.

In computing, aspect-oriented programming (AOP) is a programming paradigm which aims to increase modularity by allowing the separation of cross-cutting concerns. AOP forms a basis for aspect-oriented software development.

I won't go into incredible software theory but pragmatic examples. What is the value of AOP? What does it solve? Well, how many times have we needed to do things like this:

component name="UserService"{

    function save(){

      log.info("method save() called with arguments: #serializeJSON(arguments)#");

      transaction {
         // do some work here
      }

      log.info("Save completed successfully!");
    }
}

As you can see from the example above, my real business logic is in the //do some work here comment, but our code is littered with logging and transactions. What if I have 10 methods that are very familiarly the same? Do I repeat this same littered code (cross-cutting concerns)? The answer for most of us has always been "YES! Of Course! How else do I do this?".

Well, you don't have to, AOP to the rescue. What AOP will let you do is abstract all that logging and transaction code to another object usually called an Aspect. Then we need to apply this aspect to something right? Well, in our case it has to apply to a target object, our UserService, and to a specific method, save(), which is usually refered to as the join point.

What does applying an aspect mean? It means that we will take that aspect you write and execute it at different points in time during the execution of the method you want to apply it to. This is usually refer to as an advice, "Hey Buddy! Run it here!!!".

There are multiple types of AOP advices like before, around, after, etc. We have seen in ColdBox event handlers that you can do a preHandler, postHandler and and aroundHandler methods. These are AOP advices localized to event handlers that let you execute code before a handler event, after a handler event, or completely around the handler event. The most powerful form of advice is around, as it allows you to completely surround a method call with your own custom code. Does it ring a bell now? The transaction code for Pete's Sake! You need it to completely surround the method call! Voila! The around advice will allow you to completely take over the execution and you can even determine if you want to continue the execution or not.

So how does this magic happen? Well, our WireBox AOP engine will hijack your method (join point) and replace it with a new one, usually called an AOP proxy. This new method has all the plumbing already to allow you to apply as many aspects you like to that specific method. So as you can see from our diagram below, the save method is now decorated with our two aspects, but for all intent and purposes the outside world does not care about it, they just see the save() method.

To register a custom namespace in WireBox, place the following configuration in the wirebox struct defined within the configure() method of your WireBox binder CFC. in a ColdBox app, this is /config/WireBox.cfc. Alternatively, you can use the mapDSL() call in the configure() method.

component extends="coldbox.system.ioc.config.Binder" {

    function configure(){
        wirebox = {
            // DSL Namespace registrations
            customDSL = {
                ortus = "path.model.dsl.MyDSL"
            }
        };

        // Or here...        
        mapDSL("ortus","path.model.dsl.MyDSL");        
    }
}

If you want to register a custom DSL namespace from a module, you can make the same call via the binder reference that is provided to your ModuleConfig.cfc.

Now I can use the ortus DSL Namespace in my mappings DSL and even my annotations, isn't that cool!

Dynamic Custom DSL Registration

Injectors allow you to register custom DSLs at runtime by using the registerDSL() method on any injector.

You can make two CFCs blend together simulating a virtual runtime inheritance with WireBox. WireBox will grab the target CFC and blend into it all of the virtual inheritance CFC's methods and properties. It will then also create a $super reference in the target and a $superinit() reference. This is a great alternative to real inheritance and allow for runtime mixins to occur. You start off by mapping the base or source CFC and then mapping the target CFC and declaring a virtualInheritance to the base or source CFC:

// Declare base CFC
map("BaseModel").to("model.base.BaseModel");

map("UserService").to("model.users.UserService").virtualInheritance("BaseModel");

This will grab all methods and properties in the BaseModel CFC and mix them into the UserService, then create a virtual $super scope which will map to an instantiated instance of the BaseModel object.

WireBox fully supports aspect-oriented programming (AOP) for ColdFusion (CFML) and any ColdFusion framework. Just note the different namespaces if using within the ColdBox Platform and standalone WireBox.

WireBox AOP RefCard

Our WireBox AOP RefCard will get you up and running in no time.

Code Namespaces

Requirements

• ColdFusion 11+

• Lucee 4.5+

AND

• Disk/Memory Generation

ColdSpring was the first dependency injection framework for ColdFusion in the good 'ol days. It was inspired by Java Spring and it rocked during its tenure. As a matter of fact, there is still quite a large number of applications leveraging it, even though the framework itself is completely legacy, unsupported and might not even work on some versions of Adobe 2018+ as well. If you are in this technical debt boat and want a quick win and recover some ground in the technical debt war, then this document is for you.

If you have an application that leveraged ColdSpring for your dependency injection, you can easily port it to WireBox. The first step is converting the ColdSpring XML file to a WireBox Binder. This will translate 1-1 the bean configurations to WireBox configurations.

Then it will be up to you to test your objects and get up and running really quickly.

Most of the time we believe our DI engines should be black boxes, but we try to think otherwise. We encourage developers to know what is going on so they can debug easily and not hit their foreheads against their keyboards. Believe me, I have done so before. That is why WireBox is tightly integrated with to provide incredible debugging information to ANY appender you desire so you can know what is going on. Another aspect of knowing what the DI engine does is how dependencies are resolved. Here is a typical flow of injection:

Instance Creation

Another aspect of our objects is when are they created? Good question!

By default all objects are created ONLY when they are requested, in other words they are lazy created. But what if you are spoiled and you want your stuff NOW NOW NOW! Well, you can, cry if you want to! Just tell WireBox that you want your objects to be eagerly created via the mapping DSL asEagerInit() function or a eagerInit annotation on the component.

The default namespace is not specifying one. This namespace is used to retrieve either named mappings or full component paths.

1st Level DSL

The source code for this book is hosted in GitHub: . You can freely contribute to it and submit pull requests. The contents of this book is copyright by and cannot be altered or reproduced without author's consent. All content is provided "As-Is" and can be freely distributed.

• The majority of code examples in this book are done in cfscript.

• The majority of code generation and running of examples are done via

A part from using the configuration binder, you can also leverage component annotations to dictate behavior on the object.

Please note the configure() method in the standalone listener. This is necessary when you are using Wirebox listeners outside of a ColdBox application. The configure() method receives two parameters:

• injector : An instance reference to the calling Injector where this listener will be registered with.

• properties : A structure of properties that passes through from the configuration file.

As you can see from the examples above, each Listener component can listen to multiple events. Now you might be asking yourself, in what order are these listeners executed in? Well, they are executed in the order they are declared in either the ColdBox configuration file as interceptors or the WireBox configuration file as listeners.

Caution Order is EXTREMELY important for interceptors/listeners. So please make sure you order them in the declaration file.

Instead of declaring data structures you can use the methods in the binder to configure WireBox for operation. All methods return an instance of the binder so you can concatenate methods.

WireBox's offers a wide gamut of life cycle events that are announced at certain points in execution time. Below are the current events announced by the Injector wirebox.system.ioc.Injector.

Note Please see our documentation to see all of CacheBox's events.

While the injector can help in many ways to secure the creation of your objects, it is ultimately up to you to create code that is both thread safe and tested. It is always a great idea to design your objects without the injector in mind for threading and concurrency.

DI is not a silver bullet, but a tool to relieve object creation and not to relieve the burden of good object design. Thread safety is much more complex and can be compromised when using persistent scopes like singleton, session, server, application and cachebox, as more than one thread will be trying to access your code and dependencies.

The only guarantee the injector can provide is the constructor and constructor dependency creation to be completely locked. The following object is to be guaranteed to be locked when created and wired with dependencies:

component{

     /**
     * @log.inject logbox:logger:{this}
     * @dao.inject id:MyDAO
     */
     function init(required log, required dao){
          variables.log = arguments.log;
          variables.dao = arguments.dao;
          return this;
     }

}

Caution The inject annotations are done in comments as ColdFusion 9 has a bug when adding annotations on scripted arguments.

An example of a flawed object could be the following:

Why is this object flawed? It is flawed because the majority of DI engines, including WireBox, will lock for constructing the object and its constructor arguments. However, once it is constructed, it will store the object in the persistence scope of choice in order to satisfy the potential of circular dependencies in the object graph. After it is placed in the storage, the DI engines will wire up setter and property mixin injections and WireBox's onDiComplete() method. With this normal approach, the wiring of dependencies and onDiComplete() have the potential of mixups or missing dependencies due to concurrency. This is a normal side-effect and risk that developers take due that Java makes no guarantees that any thread other than the one that set its dependencies will see the dependencies. The memory between threads is not final or immutable so properties can enter an altered state.

"The subtle reason has to do with the way Java Virtual Machines (JVM) are designed to manage threads. Threads may keep local, cached copies of non-volatile fields that can quickly get out of sync with one another unless they are synchronized correctly." From Dependency Injection by Dhanji R. Prasanna

Note This side effect of concurrency will only occur on objects that are singletons or persisted in scopes like session, server, application, server or cachebox. It does not affect transient or request scoped objects.

WireBox, can help you lock and provide thread safety to setter and property injections by providing you with the ThreadSafe annotation or our binder threadSafe() tagging method. So if we wanted to make the last example thread safe for property and setter wiring then we would do the following:

Note All objects are marked as non thread safe for dependency wiring by default in order to allow for circular dependencies. Please note that if you mark an object as threadSafe, then it will not be able to support circular dependencies unless it uses WireBox providers. ( See )

Our threadSafe annotation and binder tagging property will allow for these objects to be completely locked and synchronized for object creation, wiring and onDiComplete(). However, circular dependencies will now fail as persistence cannot be guaranteed for the setter or property dependencies. However, since WireBox is so awesome, you can still use circular dependencies by wiring instead our object providers. (Please see providers section). In conclusion, constructing and designing a CFC that is thread safe is often a very arduous process. It is also very difficult to test and recreate threading issues in your objects and applications. So don't feel bad, as even the best of us can get into some nasty wormholes when dealing with concurrency and thread safety. However, always try to design for as much concurrency as possible and test test test!

Luis Fernando Majano Lainez

Luis Majano is a Computer Engineer with over 15 years of software development and systems architecture experience. He was born in San Salvador, El Salvador in the late 70’s, during a period of economical instability and civil war. He lived in El Salvador until 1995 and then moved to Miami, Florida where he completed his Bachelors of Science in Computer Engineering at Florida International University. Luis resides in The Woodlands, Texas with his beautiful wife Veronica, baby girl Alexia and baby boy Lucas!

He is the CEO of Ortus Solutions, a consulting firm specializing in web development, ColdFusion (CFML), Java development and all open source professional services under the ColdBox and ContentBox stack. He is the creator of ColdBox, ContentBox, WireBox, MockBox, LogBox and anything “BOX”, and contributes to many open source ColdFusion projects. He is also the Adobe ColdFusion user group manager for the . You can read his blog at

Luis has a passion for Jesus, tennis, golf, volleyball and anything electronic. Random Author Facts:

• He played volleyball in the Salvadorean National Team at the tender age of 17

• The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit is something he reads every 5 years. (Geek!)

• His first ever computer was a Texas Instrument TI-86 that his parents gave him in 1986. After some time digesting his very first BASIC book, he had written his own tic-tac-toe game at the age of 9. (Extra geek!)

Keep Jesus number one in your life and in your heart. I did and it changed my life from desolation, defeat and failure to an abundant life full of love, thankfulness, joy and overwhelming peace. As this world breathes failure and fear upon any life, Jesus brings power, love and a sound mind to everybody!

“Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.” – Proverbs 3:5

Contributors

Jorge Emilio Reyes Bendeck

Jorge is an Industrial and Systems Engineer born in El Salvador. After finishing his Bachelor studies at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education , Mexico, he went back to his home country where he worked as the COO of. In 2012 he left El Salvador and moved to Switzerland in pursuit of the love of his life. He married her and today he resides in Basel with his lovely wife Marta and their daughter Sofía.

Jorge started working as project manager and business developer at Ortus Solutions, Corp. in 2013, . At Ortus he fell in love with software development and now enjoys taking part on software development projects and software documentation! He is a fellow Christian who loves to play the guitar, worship and rejoice in the Lord!

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! 2 Corinthians 5:17

Brad Wood

Brad grew up in southern Missouri where he systematically disassembled every toy he ever owned which occasionally led to unintentional shock therapy (TVs hold charge long after they've been unplugged, you know) After high school he majored in Computer Science with a music minor at (Olathe, KS). Today he lives in Kansas City with his wife and three girls where he still disassembles most of his belongings (including automobiles) just with a slightly higher success rate of putting them back together again.) Brad enjoys church, all sorts of international food, and the great outdoors.

Brad has been programming CFML for 12+ years and has used every version of CF since 4.5. He first fell in love with ColdFusion as a way to easily connect a database to his website for dynamic pages. Brad blogs at () and likes to work on solder-at-home digital and analog circuits with his daughter as well as building projects with Arduino-based microcontrollers.

Brad's CommandBox Snake high score is 141.

• Aspect: A modularization of a concern that cuts across multiple objects.

• Target Object : The object that will be applied with Aspects across certain methods or join points.

• Join Point : A point of execution in a target object that will be applied a specific aspect to it. This is usually the execution of a method.

• Advice : An action taken at a particular join point. Usually, before, after or around it.

• AOP Proxy : An object or method representation for the original join point or method.

WireBox has an amazing that can help you modify, listen and do all kinds of magic during object creation, wiring, etc. Our AOP implementation is just a listener that will transform objects once they are finalized with dependency injection. This means, our AOP engine is completely decoupled from the interals of the DI engine and is incredibly fast and light weight. So let's activate it in our WireBox binder configuration:

That's it! That tells WireBox to register the AOP engine once it loads. This listener also has some properties that you can tweak:

Overview

Welcome to the world of hierarchical dependency injection. We had the ability before to add a parent injector to WireBox, but you can not only add a parent, but also many children to the hierarchy.

Every injector has the capability to store an ordered collection (ordered struct) of child injectors via the childInjectors property. Child injectors are used internally in many instances to provide a hierarchical approach to DI where instances can be searched for locally, in the parent and in the children.

Child Injector Methods

Here are some of the new methods to assist with child injectors:

• hasChildInjector( name ) - Verify if a child injector has been registered

• registerChildInjector( name, child ) - Register a child injector by name

• removeChildInjector( name )

Child Enhanced Methods

• getInstance()

  • The getInstance()method has an injector argument so you can EXPLICITLY request an instance from a child injector by name getInstance( name : "service", injector : "childInjector" )

Getting Instances From Specific Child Injectors

The getInstance() has been modified to have an injector argument that you can use to specifically ask for an instance from that child injector. If the child injector has not been registered you will get a InvalidChildInjector Exception.

Child Injector Explicit DSL

The following is the DSL you can use to explicitly target a child injector for a dependency. You will prefix it with wirebox:child:{name} and the name of the injector:

We also provide an interface to create objects that adhere to our injector interface: wirebox.system.ioc.IInjector.

Then these objects can be used as parent injectors, which are great for legacy factories or creating hierarchies according to your specs. All you have to do is implement the following interface:

Once you create this CFC that implements this interface then you can call on the injector's setParent() method and you are ready to roll.

If you need to abstract old legacy code or have funky construction processes, we would recommend you build your own provider objects. This means that you will create a component that implements wirebox.system.ioc.IProvider (one get() method) and then you can map it. Once mapped, you can use it anywhere WireBox listens for providers:

• The Injection DSL →

property name="" inject="provider:{name or injectionDSL}";

• The mapping DSL

Here is the interface you need to implement:

The CFC you build will need to be mapped so it can be retrieved by name and also so if it needs DI or any other WireBox funkiness, it can get it. So let's look at our FunkyEspressoProvider that we needed to create since we have some old legacy machines that we need to revamp:

Finally we map to the provider using the .toProvider() mapping method in the binder so anytime somebody requests an Espresso we can get it from our funky provider. Please note that I also map the provider because it also has some DI needed.

Cool! That's it, anytime you request an Espresso, WireBox will direct its construction to the provider you registered it with.

We touched briefly on singleton and no scope objects in this section, so let's delve a little into what scoping is. WireBox's default behavior is to create a new instance of an object each time you request it via creation or injection (Transient/Prototype objects), this is the NO SCOPE scope.

Scopes allow you to customize the object's life span and duration. The singleton scope allows for the creation of only one instance of an object that will live for the entire life span of the injector. WireBox ships with several different life span scopes but you can also create your own custom scopes (). You can also tell WireBox in what scope to place the instance into by annotations or via the configuration binder. We have an entire section dedicated to discovering all the WireBox annotations, but let's get a sneak peek at them and also how to do it via our mapping DSL.

The dependencies DSL methods are mostly used to define dependencies and also to activate advanced features on target objects, such as runtime mixins, virtual inheritance, etc.

Note Please note that you can concatenate more than one of these methods calls to dictate multiple constructor arguments, setter methods, cf properties, and more.

The mapping destinations tell WireBox what type of object you are mapping to. You will usually use these methods by concatenating map() or with() initiator calls:

The scoping process must be done by using some of the referenced injector's methods:

• buildInstance(mapping, initArguments)

• autowire()

Populate an object from an XML packet

Returns

* This function returns any

Populate a bean from a JSON string

Returns

• This function returns any

Populate a bean from a query

Returns

* This function returns Any