Command Box
Last updated
Last updated
CommandBox (CB) developed by OrtusSolutions () is a Command Line Interface (“CLI”) which makes many routine and complex tasks easier. If you have used any modern JavaScript tools, particularly node, CommandBox has many of the same functions as NPM. If you have never used those tools, that is perfectly ok as well.
While CommandBox has a number of features built in to it, we are going to focus mainly on two of them which are
The embedded server
The package manager
In order to use your web site truly as it is intended to be used by the rest of the world, it is important to view your site being served from a web server rather than just clicking on FILE —> OPEN in a browser. In order to develop scripted applications, it is essential to have a server to handle the scripting language used. This is comparable to needing a PHP server to process PHP scripts, the Java RunTime Engine to run Java commands and Node server to handle server side Javascript code. CB allows us to solve both of these problems very very easily. In this class, we will be using a scripting language called BoxLang so we will need a BoxLang scripting engine on our local machine.This is very straightforward to do with CommandBox.
There are basically three steps to installing and using CommandBox
Downloading the software
Unzipping and running the software for the first time
Testing the software to become familiar with it.