Spines/Fire is one of Homecoming's premier farming Brutes. Spines delivers relentless AoE via Quills, Spine Burst, and Throw Spines, while Fiery Aura brings strong resists, Healing Flames for sustain, and Fiery Embrace for burst damage. Cap fire defense at 45% (Weave, Maneuvers, Fire/Plasma Shield, set bonuses) and you're nearly untouchable on fire-only farm maps. Fast Fury generation, minimal downtime, and huge influence-per-hour make it the classic "bootstrap" alt to fund your other toons.
BoxExpress adds server-sent events and full WebSocket support for pushing live updates to clients — dashboards, progress bars, chat, notifications. Built from scratch, since BoxExpress skips BoxLang's built-in web layer. Along the way: a concurrency bug in broadcast connections, a header-injection-style hole in SSE metadata, a BoxLang update that broke page rendering, and a STOMP bug letting one client hijack another's subscription. All caught by trying to break it.
bx-graphql brings GraphQL to native BoxLang via graphql-java, wrapping it in a schema-agnostic module with convention-based resolvers and zero framework lock-in. To prove it out beyond source code, Robert built a fully offline demo pairing it with boxlang-express — a JSONPlaceholder-style schema, thin resolvers that mostly fall through to `PropertyDataFetcher`, and a no-build-step query console. Both modules are live on ForgeBox: `box install` and go.
BoxExpress 0.1.15→0.2.1: five patch releases fixed empty-value crashes (query/cookie/multipart), hardened proxy-IP trust for real platforms, fixed session data loss against non-memory stores, added response outcome accessors and opt-out session writes, and closed a trailing-slash bug hitting nearly every request. Then 0.2.0 replaced the JDK's HttpServer with Undertow entirely (breaking), verified at full parity and load-tested. 0.2.1 added live HTTP-layer metrics via getConnectorStatistics().
Reference guide to City of Heroes: Homecoming IO enhancement sets, organized by power type (melee/ranged/AoE damage, defense, resistance, healing, holds, pets, travel, etc.). Explains set bonus mechanics (ED, Law of Fives, attuned/Superior ATOs), highlights ⭐ best-in-slot and 🔴 rare/expensive sets, and lists universal must-have globals (LotG +Recharge, Panacea, Numina's, Steadfast +3% Def) plus per-archetype ATO procs and a quick-reference table of top bonus sources.
This site runs on one 1-vCPU DigitalOcean instance with no APM vendor — just a self-built page reading JVM metrics directly, and the habit of watching it. Covers which numbers actually matter (GC time ÷ uptime, not raw seconds), a real bug caught along the way (the JVM thought it had 8 cores, not 1), load-testing to find the real throughput ceiling, and trimming the Docker image 60% by dropping CommandBox entirely.
Robert Zehnder