Still wiring up Webpack at 2am the night before launch?
There is a moment, somewhere between the third Redux refactor and the fourth "just one more npm install," where you ask yourself a question. Do I actually need a separate frontend codebase, a REST layer, a state management library, and a build pipeline... just to make a checkbox feel snappy?
If that question hit a nerve, this session is for you.
Join me at Into The Box 2026 for Under The Wire, a hands-on look at how CBWire lets ColdBox developers ship genuinely reactive, modern user interfaces without leaving CFML. No build step. No node_modules graveyard. No two-language tax. Just your ColdBox app, doing more.
What this session is about
CBWire brings the "HTML over the wire" model to the BoxLang and CFML world. The server renders HTML, the client updates the DOM, and you write components that look and feel like miniature MVC apps living right inside your views. Data, actions, and template, all in one file. Reactivity baked in. Zero JavaScript required.
In this session we will cover:
- A quick CBWire refresher for newcomers, so everyone starts on the same page
- What is new in CBWire 5, including full BoxLang support, dot notation data properties, the upgraded Livewire engine, event object access, and five new template directives
- Two live demos: building a reactive live search component from scratch in under five minutes, and rescuing a legacy form on stage
- Modernization patterns for incrementally upgrading existing ColdBox apps, one component at a time
- Lessons from the trenches, the hard-won kind, including which forms to tackle first and how CBWire fits alongside the handlers and views you already have
Presentation & Demo Application
The slides for the talk are in ITB2026-Under-The-Wire.pdf.
The demo is a small but complete admin application for a fictional company, Sparky, Inc., built to support the Into the presentation. It shows how to take ordinary, server rendered ColdBox pages and convert them into reactive CBWIRE components with very little code and no hand written JavaScript.
This repository is designed to be cloned and run by anyone with Docker. On first run it stands up MySQL, builds the schema, and seeds a realistic data set (100 customers, 100 products, 100 orders with line items, payments, and status history, plus customer notes) automatically.
