BoxLang 1.13, BoxLang AI v3.1, ColdBox 8, customer modernization stories, and new developer tooling provide organizations with a practical path to modernize mission-critical ColdFusion and CFML applications without the cost and risk of a full platform rewrite.
WASHINGTON, May 12, 2026 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ --
- The release of BoxLang 1.13, alongside major updates to ColdBox 8 and BoxLang AI, provides a high-performance, modern alternative for organizations with significant ColdFusion/CFML investments, delivering a path to modernization at a significantly lower cost and risk than a full platform rewrite.
Ortus Solutions, the company behind ColdBox and the BoxLang Language, today announced the official release of BoxLang 1.13 and a massive wave of ecosystem updates including BoxLang AI v3.1 and ColdBox 8. These releases reinforce BoxLang's role as the leading modernization platform for mission-critical JVM and ColdFusion/CFML applications.
Across industries, organizations with long-standing ColdFusion, Lucee, and CFML systems are reaching a critical decision point. Many of these applications still power essential business operations, but the pressure around them is growing: aging architectures, unsupported runtimes, security exposure, cloud migration demands, shrinking CFML talent pools, rising integration complexity, and the accelerating need to bring AI capabilities into existing business workflows.
For many teams, the default options have been painful: keep maintaining fragile legacy systems, attempt an expensive rewrite, or migrate to platforms that force them to abandon years of proven business logic.
Ortus Solutions is offering a different path that bypasses the high costs and operational risks of starting from scratch.
At the center of that path is BoxLang, a modern, dynamic JVM runtime and development platform designed to help ColdFusion/CFML teams move forward without discarding the systems that still power their organizations. By providing a modern alternative to legacy runtimes, BoxLang eliminates the need for expensive replatforming. It is designed to parse multiple languages, including ColdFusion/CFML, and combined with a modular compatibility layer and 100% Java interoperability, mission-critical applications can be moved literally in days or hours, drastically reducing modernization budgets and timelines.
"For organizations with years of CFML investment, BoxLang offers something rare: a way forward that does not begin with throwing everything away," said Luis F. Majano, CEO of Ortus Solutions and creator of ColdBox. "Modernization should reduce risk, not create more of it. Our goal is to help teams preserve the value they already have while giving them the tooling, runtime, ecosystem, and support they need for the next decades."
- Customer Stories Show Real-World Modernization at Scale
At Into The Box 2026, Ortus highlighted customer stories showing how organizations are using Ortus technologies, services, and BoxLang to modernize real systems at real business scale.
In the government sector, Ian Clark, a contractor supporting the Small Business Administration, described the challenge of working with more than a million lines of ColdFusion code across more than 20 applications.
"Management was thinking about throwing everything out and starting from scratch. Then along came BoxLang," Clark said. "We had over a million lines of ColdFusion code, and BoxLang gave us a real path forward instead of starting from scratch. I would report an issue, and usually, the same day, the fix was in place. That is absolutely incredible."
For InstallNet, a project management company with a 30-year history, Ortus helped modernize a 26-year-old legacy ColdFusion ERP system and migrate critical workloads to an AWS-based architecture with BoxLang.
"Ortus helped us move a 26-year-old legacy ColdFusion ERP to a modern AWS stack," said Aaron Weinberg, CTO of InstallNet. "Our BoxLang system processes about 5,000 external transactions a month, and it just works. BoxLang was an easy drop-in, and with SocketBox, the performance has been great."
For Synaptrix, the story centers on high-value financial systems, production-grade reliability, and the ability to evolve critical platforms over time.
"With Ortus, CommandBox, and their toolset, we built a system that helped us sell the company for $30 million in 18 months," said John Wilson, CEO of Synaptrix. "Today, we manage over $4.1 billion in assets on a system built with Ortus. Our optimizer is now running in production on BoxLang, and it is performing fantastically."
For Avoya Travel, Ortus has been a long-term technology partner helping modernize systems, improve delivery, and support business growth.
"Ortus took us out of the Stone Age and helped us modernize the systems that power our business," said Ian Woodward of Avoya Travel. "Ortus helped us grow from $300–400 million to over $500 million in sales."
- BoxLang Moves from New Runtime to Modernization Platform
BoxLang is not being positioned merely as a new programming language. It is a modernization platform for organizations that need to keep business-critical systems moving while preparing them for the future.
BoxLang connects three ecosystems in one: CFML, Java, and BoxLang. This gives teams continuity with existing ColdFusion/CFML applications, access to the depth of the Java ecosystem, and a modern dynamic language designed for today's development and deployment realities.
With the 1.13 release, BoxLang has matured into a production-ready modernization ecosystem, delivering major improvements in CFML compatibility, concurrency handling, and runtime reliability. This version introduces a production-ready formatter with CI/CD support and expanded multi-runtime capabilities, including serverless deployments on Google Cloud and a new Desktop Runtime for cross-platform desktop applications.
BoxLang supports a wide range of deployment targets and architectural models, including CLI, web applications, Docker, CommandBox, AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Spring Boot, Jakarta EE, MiniServer, GitHub Actions, and emerging native and WebAssembly runtimes.
- AI, ColdBox 8, and Modern Application Templates Extend the Ecosystem
Ortus also unveiled continued progress across the broader BoxLang and CFML ecosystem, including BoxLang AI, ColdBox 8, modern application templates, and new tooling designed to help teams build, test, deploy, secure, and scale modern applications.
The newly released BoxLang AI v3.1 expands the platform with audio capabilities, async execution, and parallel pipelines, enabling developers to bring AI into real business systems via a unified API. Simultaneously, the launch of ColdBox 8 introduces native BoxLang support, AI routing, and virtual threading, while new modern application templates provide secure, container-ready architectures for immediate deployment.
To further support the AI ecosystem, Ortus has launched skills.boxlang.io, a central repository of curated and reusable AI skills. This open agent skills ecosystem allows developers to define and share structured AI knowledge across different tools, eliminating prompt duplication and providing a standardized way to power intelligent agents.
"AI is becoming part of the application layer," said Majano. "BoxLang gives developers a way to bring AI into real business systems while staying connected to the applications, data, and workflows they already manage."
ColdBox HMVC (Hierarchical Model View Controller), now celebrating its 20th anniversary, continues to evolve as a foundation for modern CFML and BoxLang MVC application development. The upcoming ColdBox 8 generation introduces native BoxLang support, AI routing, virtual threading, Java interoperability, custom executors, and new BoxLang-first capabilities.
Ortus is also delivering new BoxLang and modern application templates with secure architectures, Docker multi-stage builds, database migration support, monitoring and structured logging, modular design, enterprise tooling, CI/CD readiness with GitHub Actions, and frontend flexibility for both traditional and modern JavaScript frameworks.
- Investing in the Next Generation of BoxLang Developers
Ortus Solutions is also investing in the future developer community around BoxLang through a partnership with Florida International University in Miami, where BoxLang was introduced through a pilot course with more than 56 students this Spring.
The initiative helps students learn BoxLang while contributing to real BoxLang capabilities, including cloud runtime support, AI middleware, audio, image, and text-to-speech capabilities. The course is expected to become part of computer science studies across the FIU university network, with new classes in the fall and more than 100 students collaborating with BoxLang every semester.
- Full Into The Box 2026 Announcement Recap
Ortus Solutions has published a complete technical recap of the Into The Box 2026 announcements on the Ortus Solutions blog. The recap includes BoxLang momentum, customer modernization stories, BoxLang AI, the FIU partnership, ColdBox 8, modern application templates, CommandBox and BX-CLI, TestBox, CBWire, ContentBox, and additional ecosystem updates.
- Modernization with Continuity
For organizations running legacy ColdFusion/CFML systems, the question is no longer whether modernization is necessary. The question is how to do it without creating unnecessary disruption, cost, and risk.
Ortus is not asking organizations to start over. It is giving them a way to move forward.
"Modernization with BoxLang is not about abandoning the past," said Majano. "It is about protecting the investment organizations have already made and giving those systems a future."
- About Ortus Solutions
Ortus Solutions is a software development, consulting, training, and open-source company specializing in modern web application architecture, CFML, Java, cloud-native systems, DevOps, testing, and application modernization. For 20 years, Ortus has created and supported some of the most widely used tools in the CFML ecosystem, including ColdBox, CommandBox, TestBox, ForgeBox, ContentBox, and BoxLang.
Through its open-source products, professional support, enterprise modules, consulting services, and developer education platforms, Ortus Solutions helps organizations modernize legacy applications, improve developer productivity, reduce technical risk, and build scalable systems for the future.
- About BoxLang
BoxLang is a modern dynamic runtime and development platform built for the JVM and designed for multi-runtime, cloud-native, and AI-enabled application development. It provides CFML compatibility, Java interoperability, modern syntax, modular architecture, serverless support, container-friendly deployment, advanced tooling, and a growing ecosystem of open-source and commercial modules.
BoxLang is available as a free and open-source platform, with commercial subscriptions available through BoxLang+ and BoxLang++ for organizations that require professional support, enterprise modules, priority patches, SLAs, and advanced features.
- Media Contact
Ortus Solutions
Email: [email protected]
Website: https://www.ortussolutions.com
BoxLang: https://www.boxlang.io
Into The Box: https://www.intothebox.org
Media Contact
Cristobal Escobar H., Ortus Solutions, 1 888 557 8057, [email protected], www.ortussolutions.com
SOURCE Ortus Solutions
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