Help Shape the Quick 13 Release

Box Modules
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Quick 13 has reached beta, bringing a substantial collection of new persistence, relationship, testing, and performance capabilities—and now it needs some real-world mileage.

New Features and Improvements

Highlights include:

  • Automatic timestamps and built-in soft deletes
  • New upsert(), createAll(), replicate(), and touch() APIs
  • Laravel-inspired model factories for testing
  • Richer belongsToMany pivot models
  • New relationship helpers such as whereBelongsTo() and whereHasValue()
  • Improved entity state tracking, lifecycle hooks, and refresh-on-save support
  • Better compatibility across Lucee, Adobe ColdFusion, and BoxLang
  • An upgrade to qb 14

Performance Improvements

Quick 13 reduces repeated metadata, hydration, and attribute-state work on several frequently used code paths:

  • Qualified-column caching reduced qualification calls from 6 to 3—a 50% reduction in the regression fixture.
  • Hydration now resolves attribute bindings once per result set instead of once per row. For a 1,000-row result, that eliminates 999 repeated resolution passes.
  • A bounded, process-local entity definition registry reduces repeated metadata compilation across instances of the same entity.
  • Additional optimizations reduce allocations during attribute tracking, refresh queries, qualified-column lookups, and runtime attribute overlays.

Focused microbenchmarks measured the following improvements over Quick 12.0.12:

Operation Lucee 6.2.8.20 Adobe ColdFusion 2021.0.23 BoxLang 1.17.0
Entity creation 39.1% faster 28.1% faster 36.0% faster
Single-entity hydration 26.9% faster 31.5% faster 38.2% faster
Hydrating 100 entities 7.1% faster 36.6% faster 44.3% faster
Hydrating 1,000 entities 11.3% faster 42.5% faster 27.2% faster
hasMany relationship construction 64.1% faster 24.6% faster 26.3% faster

Each result is the median elapsed time from 15 samples of 50 iterations after warm-up. These figures describe reductions in repeated internal work, not equivalent reductions in total application request time. Actual improvements will vary by CFML engine, JVM, entity definition, and query shape.

Breaking Changes

As a major release, Quick 13 includes several behavior changes to review while testing:

  • Quick now requires qb 14.
  • Automatic timestamps are enabled by default for declared createdDate and modifiedDate attributes.
  • reset() now clears the cached query builder along with entity and relationship state.
  • Loaded primary keys are now immutable.
  • Duplicate entity property names now throw QuickDuplicateProperty during initialization.
  • Custom casts now receive null values, and BooleanCast@quick preserves null instead of converting it to false.
  • Relationship getters on new entities now return null, a configured default, or an empty collection without querying the database.
  • The second positional argument to appendVirtualAttribute() is now defaultValue; excludeFromMemento has moved to the third argument.

See the Quick 13 Upgrade Guide for examples and upgrade instructions.

We Need You (And Your Apps)

Install the beta, check out the docs, and let us know how it runs for you. Testing existing applications, large hydration workloads, relationship-heavy queries, and custom casts would be especially valuable!