Brad Wood talks about “CommandBox Workflow magic (modules to speed up CF development)” in this episode of the CF Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

Show notes

Why use Workflows in your CF coding?

You probably already do use workflows if you don’t call them that

Eg 

source control steps

Bitbucket Pipelines

Local dev → staging → production

Ticketing system

Shared tools for code formatting

Scripts to automate common tasks

Teams and Individual developers

What is CommandBox?

CLI = Command Line Interface for CFML

Lots of addons written in CFML

Built in help

Very colorful ASCII art too

REPL

Integrated shell

Run multiple CF virtual server on one machine, different versions of ACF and Lucee

Auto install

Fast test of different versions

Command line automation

Task runners

Batch Scripting in CFML!  - more powerful than BASH

Package management

Libraries used in your app install and correct versioning

ForgeBox integration

Modern CFML more powerful ecosystem than Node, Pyphon etc

Written in CFML, runs on top of JVM

Open source

CommandBox Modules to improve workflow

Bullet Train 

Saves time knowing what you are doing the CLI

Fun too!

Dotenv 

Makes personalizing passwords, databases, SMTP server etc for each dev easy

Keeps passwords out of your CF code and source control - more secure

Cfconfig 

Back up and restore CF Admin settings - even between different CF versions or ACF and Lucee

CommandBox and Docker instances create settings automatically 

Disaster Recovery - easy restore of settings

Save settings to source control (though careful about passwords for datasources)

Dev vs production settings quick for locking down a server

Diff of settings between two servers - diagnosis settings bugs

Host updater  

Easy management of local host names vs IP addresses - a local DNS override in effect

Keeps hosts file clean when you stop using that virtual server.

FusionReactor  

Adds easy support to enable FusionReactor on the servers you start inside CommandBox.

FR licensing covers multiple ComandBox CF servers on the same machine

FR Cloud license counts the time used in containers dynamically

Other cool modules we didn’t cover in the episode that Brad loves

CFFormat

Cfdocs

service manager (paid)

$49 per server (lifetime license)

Ngrok

What do CommandBox and these tools cost?

Free. Professional Open source (with optional paid support and training)

Mentioned in this episode

Bullet Train 

Dotenv 

Cfconfig 

Host updater

FusionReactor  

ITB conference

Modernize or Die podcast

CommandBox 

All CommandBox modules on ForgeBox

CommandBox 4 Deep Dive (new version revealed) with Brad Wood

Box Patreon levels

CFCasts

Lucee Discourse Forum

ColdFusion Programmers Facebook Group

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Brad Wood

Brad grew up in southern Missouri and after high school majored in Computer Science with a music minor at MidAmerica Nazarene University (Olathe, KS). Today he lives in Kansas City with his wife and three girls. Brad enjoys all sorts of international food and the great outdoors. Brad has been programming ColdFusion since around 2002 and has used every version of CF since 4.5. He first fell in love with ColdFusion as a way to easily connect a database to his website for dynamic pages. He enjoys configuring and performance tuning high-availability Windows and Linux ColdFusion environments as well as SQL Server. Teacher of the CommandBox Deep Dive full workshop at IntoTheBox ColdFusion conference. 

Links

CFML Slack Box Channel

Box Team Slack Channel

Twitter

Brad's Website

Interview Transcript

Michaela Light 0:03

Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Brad wood. And we're going to be talking about command box workflow magic and how you can speed up your ColdFusion development. And those of you don't know, Brad is I think he's the senior application architect or autists, or somesuch. fancy title. But he's an expert on command boxes. He actually wrote it

is an open source tool. We'll tell you more about that later in the show. He's from the Midwest. He's currently in Kansas City, grew up in Southern Missouri, and

as well as cold fusion programming for 20 years. He's also got three. I was gonna say three wives and one girl, but he's got three girls and one wife. Yes. Lexia. Reading.

Brad Wood 0:51

And it's really four girls total if you add them all up,

Michaela Light 0:54

but four girls complete? Yeah. My wife is yes. And he's a big contributor. The coefficient community has a very active blog, which I'll put in the show notes, and it's called coding revolution or code, coding. Coders revolute? Yes. With an S CODAs.

Brad Wood 1:16

Yes. It's our revolution. We own it.

Michaela Light 1:18

Yes, absolutely. And he's also a well known speaker at various ColdFusion conferences. Hopefully this year, there'll be some in person conferences. He can present tense but last year fully online, except for into the box. Oh, into the box was the brave conference.

Brad Wood 1:40

Yes. Crazy Ones who tried it?

Read more

 

Michaela Light is the host of the CF Alive Podcast and has interviewed more than 100 ColdFusion experts. In each interview, she asks "What Would It Take to make CF more alive this year?" The answers still inspire her to continue to write and interview new speakers.

Michaela has been programming in ColdFusion for more than 20 years. She founded TeraTech in 1989. The company specializes in ColdFusion application development, security and optimization. She has also founded the CFUnited Conference and runs the annual State of the CF Union Survey.

 

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