ColdFusion Alive

Ray Camden talks about “Anxious about AI writing CF code (and how to overcome your fears)” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive Podcast with host Michaela Light.

“...that is the big shift I’ve seen over the last year, is that with all of the guardrails around things, it is so much more efficient and easier to trust AI to build what I want…” 

https://youtu.be/cObnRO_4lKQ

Show notes

Anxious about AI writing code?

Vibe-coded horror stories

Skills

Your coding style, steps and guardrails

Alternative AI tasks if you don't want to let AI code

Plan

Test

Review writing and code

Ideation to overcome writers block

Use your own judgment and sense

Confidence in AI-generated code

Hallucinations

Unit tests

Human read (some) of the AI-gen code, eye

Critique this code prompt - ideally with a different AI

Blog as a static site

Hugo, to Jerkel, to Eleventy

Astro

Learning new languages

Learning Typescript

Does this code make sense

Coming from other languages to CF

Webawesome web library - similar idea to Bootstrap CSS

AI sanity checking of my code

Better syntax checking

Break down my line(s) of code

Stackoverflow developer vs AI assisted developer

Entry-level jobs

Software development new career paths

AI IDEs and vibe coding

VS Code

Agentic agent dev tools

Less typing of code

 Autocomplete on steroids

SDLC and PRs

Create or update skill from what it learned

Ask AI agent - how can I utilize you better? Can you improve

AI coding as a super compiler

Higher level view

Beyond frameworks

Does the target language matter any more?

Adobe CF MCP docs server

What have you been doing lately?

Customer education

AI for marketing his blog ideas

Mentioned in this episode

Eleventy

Astro

Webawesome

Adobe CF MCP docs 

Blog

The MCP

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Raymond Camden

Raymond Camden is a developer advocate, focused on Generative AI, the web platform, development and cats. He has 8 kids, 5 dogs and 2 cats.

Links

raymondcamden.com 

His Amazon wishlist

Threads

LinkedIn

Interview transcript

Michaela Light

Welcome back to the show I'm here with Ray Camden famous cold fusion uh developer ai expert and general all-around great guy along with being a star wars fan and cat afectionado uh ray lives in louisiana one of the only state of the union that has a different law system I think and it does have great food and a bit of French influence. And he's a developer advocate, has been for many years. I think many, many years ago, a developer advocate or had some other title for Adobe, but you've now moved forward. And he has eight kids as well.

Raymond Camden

So eight kids, five cats, one dog.

Raymond Camden

No fish.

Michaela Light

Well, the cats might eat the fish. So welcome, Ray.

Raymond Camden

Hey, thank you for having me.

Michaela Light

And we're going to be talking about using AI with ColdFusion and development in general. Some of we're going to talk about are how some developers are kind of terrified about letting AI write code, having confidence in the code that's generated. How it can help if you have to move between languages. And we'll slip in some rag and AI sanity checking. And we'll ask Ray what he's been doing lately because that's always of interest. So tell us about how developers you talk to are frightened about using AI to write code. What do you think is going on?

Raymond Camden

I wouldn't say they're frightened. I think there's hesitation, maybe, because at least year or so ago, we saw so many vibe-coded things and heard vibe-coded horror stories. And I think, and from my personal experience, it wasn't necessarily fear, but I can remember about two years ago at a Microsoft conference. Using, I believe, Copilot. And my test was, hey, you know what? Create me a web component, but don't use a build step.

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.

 

Join the CF Alive revolution

Discover how we can all make CF more alive, modern and secure this year. Join other ColdFusion developers and managers in the CF Alive Inner Circle today.

Get early access to the CF Alive book and videos

Be part of a new movement for improving CF's perception in the world.

Contribute to the CF Alive revolution

Connect with other CF developers and managers

There is no cost to membership.

Monte Chan talks about “Semantic CF code search with JARVIS (No Arc Reactor Budget required)” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive Podcast with host Michaela Light.

“...With this tool, kind of like an AI bot, if you will, that will give a jump start on the onboarding process… the new employees can just use this bot to get a familiarity with the code base…” 

https://youtu.be/w2LeYZB8LA8

Show notes

What if you could ask questions about your codebase and get answers instantly?

Motivated by CodeQL by GitHub (Paid tool)

“What if a new developer (or a CTO) could just ask the codebase ‘where is the session timeout set?’ and get a real answer instead of grepping for three hours?”

“You called this a poor man’s J.A.R.V.I.S. Ben Nadel said ‘with great power comes… great self-indulgence.’ Are we about to be very self-indulgent today?

What is J.A.R.V.I.S.?

J.A.R.V.I.S. is the fictional artificial intelligence assistant created by Tony Stark in Marvel's Iron Man and Avengers comics and films.

J.A.R.V.I.S stands for "Just A Rather Very Intelligent System".

Codebase ingestion using vector databases

Walk the repo, split files into chunks (functions, classes, docs), turn each chunk into an embedding (a numeric vector that captures meaning), and store those vectors with metadata (path, line range, language). That index is what makes “where is session timeout set?” searchable by meaning, not just IDE search.

A vector database is a store optimized for “find the N most similar vectors.” Examples: Pinecone, Qdrant, Milvus, Chroma, LanceDB, plus CF’s built-in / in-memory store for demos. Code search is usually hybrid: vectors for meaning + keyword/BM25 for exact symbols.

How you chunk CFM/CFC/JS/SQL differently

Why you store a summary + metadata and embed that

The current gap: CF’s built-in document ingestion doesn’t yet understand CFC/CFML structure, so custom scripts are required

PDFs can be ingessed directly

Updating the vector store when your codebase changes 

Prompt-driven code exploration

Prompt-driven code exploration: You ask in English. The system retrieves the relevant chunks, stuffs them into the prompt, and the model answers from that context. That pattern is RAG (retrieval-augmented generation): retrieve first, then generate, so the model is grounded in your code instead of guessing

 

What you need” slide with practical commentary:

Piece

Why it matters

CIO translation

CF 2025 Update 8

Native AI, vector stores, agents, MCP

No new language or Python sidecar tax

Vector store (Qdrant / Milvus / Pinecone / Chroma)

In-memory is too small for real apps

Persistent, scalable “memory” for the AI

LLM (Anthropic, OpenAI, or Ollama local)

The brain

Cloud vs on-prem / air-gapped choice

Ingestion script

CF can ingest docs today; CFC/CFML still need custom work

One-time + ongoing cost of keeping the index fresh

MCP (optional but powerful)

File-system or other tools the agent can call

Controlled agency—AI can look without unrestricted access

Key terms

Vector store / embeddings -  numbers that capture the meaning of code so similarity search works

Chunking by logical entity (whole function, not random 500-token slices) -  this is the quality differentiator

Summary-first embeddings -  embed a rich description (purpose, path, callers, callees) rather than raw code only

MCP (Model Context Protocol) -  open standard so the agent can safely call tools (filesystem, DB, etc.)

Ongoing ingestion -  full re-index vs git-diff / pipeline-after-merge

Adobe folded LLM, embedding, vector-store, RAG, agent, and MCP APIs into the CF engine (commonly described as CF 2025 Update 8 / the “CF 2026” AI wave). You call models from CFML (ChatModel(), agent(), simpleRAG(), VectorStore(), etc.) instead of wiring every provider by hand.

MCP (Model Context Protocol)

An open standard so tools/resources are exposed the same way to Claude, Cursor, VS Code, ChatGPT, etc. CF can host MCP servers or call MCP tools. Community projects like MCPCFC wrap existing CF functions as MCP tools.

Similar commercial tools

Sourcegraph Cody, Continue.dev, custom LanceDB/Qdrant indexers

A fascinating look at how AI can help developers understand and navigate complex applications. 

CIO / risk / value questions

Time-to-answer for audits, compliance questions, or new-hire onboarding

Reducing “bus factor” / key-person risk

Security posture:

Local Ollama option (data never leaves the building)

Guardrails and “excessive agency” concerns (echo Pete Freitag’s CF Summit security talk)

Prompt injection surface when the AI can call tools

Cost model: vector DB + LLM tokens + ongoing ingestion vs. developer hours spent hunting code

Build vs buy: this is a capability you can own inside the CF platform rather than another SaaS

Practical next steps & gotchas (5- 6 min)

Minimum viable version a team could stand up in a sprint

Biggest surprise or pain point he hit while building it

What CF 2026 still needs (better CFC/CFML-aware ingestion is the obvious one)

Where the slides and sample code live: github.com/knittingguy (JARVIS repo + the earlier mongoDB-langchain / aiagent_cf work)

Close & resources

One sentence each for the CF developer and the CIO listening

Ben Nadel quote callback

Point people to the GitHub, MCP servers list (mcpservers.org), and Monte’s Facebook/Geek Talk channel

Invite questions from the live or later audience

Why are you proud to use CF?

WWIT to make CF more alive this year?

What are you looking forward to at the Adobe CF Summit East?

Mentioned in this episode

133 GitHub Copilot & AI-Assisted Coding (Unlocking ColdFusion’s AI Potential) with Monte Chan

Qdrant vector database

CF 2026 features (TT blog)

MCP servers

CF Summit East

Monte's GitHub

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Monte Chan

Monte Chan is currently a Senior Web Programmer at Shoes For Crews. He has been programming in ColdFusion since version 4.5 back in 1999. He was a co-manager of the Alamo Area ColdFusion User Group from 2008 to 2010. In his free time, he enjoys learning any web development related technologies or just programming languages he can put his hands on. He also enjoys running marathons; he does not run fast; he just runs🙂. He currently resides in San Antonio, TX with his beautiful wife and three rescue dogs (two chiweenies and one pure-bred chihuahua).

Links

Facebook 

You can email me at monte (at) monteandjanicechan.com but you may get a quicker response if you send me a message in Facebook Messenger.

LinkedIn

YouTube channel, Geek Talk.

GitHub

Interview transcript

Michaela Light

So welcome back to the show. I'm here with Monte Chan and we're going to be talking about semantic ColdFusion code search with Jarvis. And you don't need an Arc Reactor budget to do this because it's all written in ColdFusion. So welcome, Monte.

Monte Chan

Oh, thank you.

Michaela Light

And it's been a few years since you've been on the show when you were talking about your AI coding experience. And I'll put that episode in the show notes at TeraTech.com. But let me introduce you to folks who haven't met you before. You're currently a senior web programmer at Shoes for Crews, and you've been programming ColdFusion since version 4.5 back in the late '90s. You used to be the co-manager of the Alamo Area ColdFusion User Group.

And in your free time, I don't know how you have free time because I've seen you presenting at CF Summit and I know you work hard. You enjoy learning any web development-related technologies or just programming languages that you can get your hands on. And also, you enjoy running marathons, though you don't have any world-record times there. You just enjoy it, do it for fun.

Currently, you're in San Antonio, Texas, and you have a beautiful wife and three rescue dogs. Two chiweenies and one purebred Chihuahua. What is a chiweenie? I've never heard of that. Chihuahua is the little dog, right?

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.

 

Join the CF Alive revolution

Discover how we can all make CF more alive, modern and secure this year. Join other ColdFusion developers and managers in the CF Alive Inner Circle today.

Get early access to the CF Alive book and videos

Be part of a new movement for improving CF's perception in the world.

Contribute to the CF Alive revolution

Connect with other CF developers and managers

There is no cost to membership.

Charlie Arehart talks about “Moving to ColdFusion 2025 Cheers and Challenges” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive Podcast with host Michaela Light.

"…There was so much in that Update 8. It is like a new release, and the AI stuff is by far the biggest. And there’s so much more than the AI stuff… if you think Update 8 was all about AI, it’s not.."

https://youtu.be/FX4FHKCxCK8

Show notes

Charlie, you always open Hidden Gems by saying there's more new stuff in a release than people ever realize. Looking back at CF2025, what's the one gem that surprised even you?

Does this include hidden gems in CF 2026 (aka CF 2025 update 8)?

ACF 2026 introduces native artificial intelligence (AI) and large language model (LLM) integration, Model Context Protocol (MCP) support, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), vector databases, new ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) features, security enhancements, developer tooling, monitoring capabilities, and performance improvements.

The installer now lets you set an allowed IP for the admin on any profile, and it reminds people about wsconfig. You pushed for both of these. Thanks! For shops that only touch a CF installer once every few years, how much does a small usability win like this actually move the needle?

Enabling HTTPS for the built-in CF Admin is basically trivial now, and you can force HTTPS only. On port 8500. Here's the thing that should scare people. In your consulting work, how many admins were you finding like that before CF2025? What's the worst thing you've seen happen because of it?

Since ACF 2016 admin not visible publicly by default

Containers got a real upgrade. 60 to 70 percent faster startup, secrets support, CCS inside containers, better docs. 

CF has had container support since ACF 2018!

For teams already on Docker or moving toward Kubernetes, what's the day one win they should expect?

Subscription licensing

With pure subscription licensing now the only path, how are procurement and finance teams reacting compared to the old perpetual model? What should a mid-sized shop be building into their multi-year budget forecast, and where's the true up risk hiding?

Subscription budget is same as upgrading every 2 years

Dev license 2 concurrent requests limit

CF2025 is subscription only now. You've got the public pricing numbers and you point out a lot of people were already on subscription through cloud AMIs or ETLAs. This is the number every budget owner actually wants before they'll sign off on anything. Purely on total cost of ownership, how does this compare to the old perpetual plus upgrade discount model for a mid-sized shop, over say a five year run?

API Manager doesn't need a CF license key anymore. That feels like a quiet one but it's huge. Who should be looking at this now that it's free, and what are people actually using it for?

Came out with ACF 2016

Useful for API monitoring, throttling, versioning and security

The new null coalescing operator, multi-exception catch, trailing commas, createObject loadPaths, these all feel overdue. 

Which of these do you think will actually change how people write CFML day to day, versus just being nice to have?

CSP and nonce support are built in now. For teams that have been fighting with Content-Security-Policy headers, how much of that pain does CF2025 actually solve, and what still has to be handled outside CF?

For better app security

Beware CFDump needs fixing if you use CSP - alt CSP header for this

Click Dump to expand or contract sections

The removals list is longer than any release I can remember! 

Prior depreciented functions were now removed.

YUI based UI tags, cfencode, Axis1, COM, parameterExists, tags as CFCs, ThreadTerminate. 

HTMLEditFormat() → EncodeforHTML()

This is the part where every CIO I talk to gets nervous, because somewhere in their app is one ancient tag holding the whole thing together, and nobody left on staff remembers why, kind of like nobody remembers who actually planted the tree that's now blocking the road. Of everything you've helped migrate so far, which removal is causing the most real pain?

Key terms defined

Deprecated = still works, but developers are warned not to use it. Replacement is normally available.

Removed/obsolete = no longer supported; code using it may fail to compile, load, or execute.

Unsupported but present = an intermediate state used by some vendors: it may still work, but bugs may not be fixed.

Behavioral breaking change = feature remains, but its semantics change enough that old code may behave differently.

Adobe explicitly distinguishes deprecated, deprecated and unsupported, and removed. Deprecated ColdFusion functionality remains eligible for bug/security fixes; deprecated-and-unsupported functionality generally receives only security fixes; removed functionality is unavailable.

Adobe updated the Compatibility Code Analyzer and Pete Freitag built a dedicated compatibility scanner into Fixinator. How good are these tools actually at catching the gotchas before they hit production, so people aren't finding out the hard way in front of customers?

You spend time on the breaking changes carried over from the March and June 2024 updates, searchimplicitscopes and the encryption algorithm change, plus the old dateformat capital D change from CF2021. This is exactly the kind of thing that makes a CTO put off an upgrade for three more years, one small silent change breaking something nobody tested. For someone jumping straight from CF2018 or CF2021 to CF2025, what's the realistic order of operations, because nobody wants to be Frodo walking into Mordor without Sam and a map?

Java 21 and Tomcat 10.1 landed together. Beyond just being current, what real benefits, or new gotchas, are you seeing CF developers run into?

Quarterly Java updates

Future Java 25 support?

Deploy CF as a WAR requires CF Ent

Looking at the full support matrix, Windows 2025 server is added. Sybase is gone, Solaris is gone, WebLogic and WebSphere are gone. 

Few orgs use these so it was an ROI decision to remove.

For organizations still stuck on those platforms, it's a bit of a fellowship breaking up, everyone has to pick a path forward. What migration paths are you actually recommending?

ZIP install alternative

Past this one release, what should a CIO actually watch for as a signal that Adobe is staying committed to the platform, versus the risk of another long quiet stretch? Nobody wants to migrate now and then find themselves waiting at the gates of Moria for the next real update.

What are you excited about for CF Summit East?

Reston VA near IAD airport

Mentioned in this episode

Hidden Gems in CF 2025 CFmeetup youtube 

ACF 2026 features 

ACF 2026 features (cf2025 update 8)

https://guides.adobe.com/coldfusion/en/docs/introduction-to-coldfusion/whats-new.html

ACF 2025 features

Adobe ACF 2025 features

https://guides.adobe.com/coldfusion/en/docs/introduction-to-coldfusion/whats-new-cf-2025.html

Adobe CF issue tracker

CFMeetup talk on CF 2025 migration

Adobe CF Summit East (TT blog)

https://teratech.com/adobe-coldfusion-2024-new-features/

Adobe CF Summit East

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Charlie Arehart

A veteran server troubleshooter who’s worked in enterprise IT for more than three decades, Charlie Arehart (@carehart) is a longtime community contributor who as an independent consultant provides remote, short-term, and even on-demand troubleshooting/tuning assistance for organizations of all sizes and experience levels (carehart.org/consulting).

Links

X

Facebook

LinkedIn

Web

Interview transcript

Michaela Light

Welcome back to the show. I'm here with famous Charlie Earhart. Saw him recently in Las Vegas at CF Summit, invited him back on the podcast. And we're going to be talking about moving to Cold Fusion 2025. Cheers and challenges. So, if you are one of the very few people on the planet who does Cold Fusion, has not heard of Charlie, he is a veteran. Server troubleshooter. He's worked with enterprise IT for more than three decades, probably four decades at this point, to be honest. And he's also been contributing to the community. He's a great helper in the different ColdFusion communities. He's contributed to multiple ColdFusion books. And he provides remote, short-term, and on-demand troubleshooting, tuning assistance for organizations of all sizes. And experience level. And you can find him at cairheart.org/slash consulting. I'll put that in the show notes at terror tech.com for those of you who want to find it. Welcome, Charlie.

Charlie Arehart

Hey, well, glad to be back. It's been a little while.

Charlie Arehart

Yes. Well, I took a little break, but I'm back from the break now.

Charlie Arehart

Well deserved, I'm sure.

Michaela Light

Yes. So we're going to be talking about. Both ColdFusion 2025 and what I call ColdFusion 2026. Other people call it ColdFusion 2025 update eight. So, and we'll look at the cool things that Adobe released in there. But in particular, we're going to look at some of the hidden things that people may not have noticed. And so what are you excited about in the latest release that came out over the summer?

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

Get the inside scoop on the Into The Box 2025 ColdFusion Conference from Daniel Garcia and Michaela Light. This episode covers the event’s schedule, top speakers, trending ColdFusion and BoxLang topics, exclusive workshops, travel and pricing tips, plus special offers for developers and teams.

Daniel Garcia talks about “Into The Box 2025 ColdFusion conference (all the details)” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive Podcast with host Michaela Light.

“…BoxLang, we first officially announced it last year into the box the first beta of it. It's a modern, dynamically and loosely typed scripting language for multiple runtimes”.

https://youtu.be/RDYMKtq03iQ

Show notes

What is Into The Box conference?

CommandBox, ColdBox, BoxLang, all the Box products by Ortus 

ColdFusion topics too

Smaller conf, very easy to talk to speakers and other attendees

Speakers and Topics

Speaker

Brad Wood

Brian Klass

Curt Gratz

Dan Card

Daniel Garcia

Eric Peterson

Esme Acevedo

Gavin Pickin

George Murphy

Giancarlo Gomez

Grant Copley

Jacob Beers

Javier Quintero

Jon Clausen

Kevin Wright

Luis Majano

Michael Rigsby

Scott Steinbeck

Topics highlights

Integrating OpenAI API in ColdFusion Applications

Reactive Front-Ends with CFML, CBWIRE, and AlpineJS

IoT Hardware Integration with BoxLang and MQTT

Introduction to CBWIRE 4

Open call for speakers

Preconference Workshops

Development and Hosting using Docker, CI, CD, and AWS ECS

Getting Started with Boxlang with Brad Wood, John Clausen, and Luis Majano

Just Enough Workshop

Building Modern Apps with CBWire and AlpineJS with Grant Coplin and Esme Acevedo

When is it?

Wed April 30th - Friday May 2nd, 2025

Where is it this year?

Washington, DC

Why not send devs to conferences?

Dev team too big to send all → send none

Solution: Rotate devs each year. Eg send 3 this year, another 3 next year etc

No training mentality

Solutions

Free video training

CFCasts

Daniel offer for unemployed CFers and students

9-5 Devs "comfortable" who don't want to grow in tech skills

Solutions

Modernize or Die

Be competitive 

Hiring 

Attitude and Aptitude

Open source

Travel

3 airports in Washington DC metro area. Plus Amtrack. 

Metro in the area

Cost

Conf only early bird $349.50, 449.50

$499, 699

25% off promo code CFAlive_2025

Deals and early bird pricing 3/31/25

BoxLang+ 1-year license included! 

Special support for BoxLang

Code scanner

Extra bonus feature

Team Plans are available for businesses - Reach out at Intothebox (at) ortussolutions.com

    **Get 50% off** your second Into the Box on-site ticket.

    **Buy 2, Get 1 Free** – Purchase two on-site tickets, and the third one is on us.

What are you looking forward to at ITB this year?

 

Mentioned in this episode

Into The Box 2025 conf site https://www.intothebox.org/ 

Comprehensive TeraTech blog about ITB https://teratech.com/into-the-box-conference-is-coldfusion-modern-or-dead/ 

140 BoxLang modern JVM language that runs CFML code (new CFML engine and much more) with Luis Majano and Brad Wood

121 How to Get Your Next Ideal CF Job (using LinkedIn, Resume, GitHub), with Doug McCaughan

CFCasts

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Daniel Garcia

Senior Developer at Ortus Solutions 

Daniel Garcia lives in Plainfield, IL, has been working with web technologies since 1997, and is passionate about what he does. He is a husband, father, "Dad"-ager for his aspiring musician son, cinephile, regaler of useless knowledge, smoker of meats, aspiring podcaster, part-time radio DJ, and has an irreverent sense of humor. His mantras are "Work smarter, not harder" and "KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid).

Links

Daniel Garcia | LinkedIn

Ortus Solutions

GitHub Garciadev

https://www.ortussolutions.com/about-us/daniel-garcia

CFML and Box Slack Daniel Garcia

Interview transcript

Michaela Light 0:00

Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Daniel Garcia, and he and I are going to talk about an amazing cold fusion conference coming up real soon. Now called into the box. You may think it only covers box things, but actually covers all kinds of cold fusion things as well. And if you don't know Daniel, he's been doing cold fusion for decades now, probably started bringing in web tech. Yes, decades started in 1997 with web tech, and he loves doing it. He's also a dad got an 11 year old son who's a musician, and he's the manager, or he likes calling him himself, the dad, manager of his son. And he's also a podcaster. DJ has a wicked sense of humor. So welcome Daniel.

Daniel Garcia 0:59

Thank you for having me. Michaela, it's been years since, yes, since

Michaela Light 1:03

we lost on the show. So what is this? Into the box conference? For people, I know what it is, but maybe some people listening don't well into

Daniel Garcia 1:13

the box. So first of all, my name is Daniel gersim With orti solutions. We're one of the premier code fusion consulting companies out there. You've probably heard of us. We're the Box Company, cold box, command box, test box, content box, all that, and into the box. Get it into the box. It's a box theme is our annual developer conference, and so we put it on every year. Last year was the first time you moved to DC with it. Again. This year we're gonna be DC again, but it's our conference to bring together developers, engineers, enthusiasts, basically anyone who works with CO fusion box, laying any related technologies, kind of learn the best practices, networking, discuss trends, things like that,

Michaela Light 1:57

all right. And so will be a lot of things about cold box and command box, and how many box things are these days? Every time I turn around, it seems there's another box, cold fusion library or tool released. Well,

Daniel Garcia 2:10

the quick answer is, I don't know, and I'm gonna get made fun of for that leader by my team, in a good way, but there's a lot of boxes there are. And because not just the main core products, we also have a lot of modules and all sorts of things to get with it, I should have been more prepared. Michaela, I'm sorry

Michaela Light 2:30

if you want that's okay, but there's more than 20, I

Daniel Garcia 2:36

think, right there are a lot the main ones that people know are going to be cold box, command box. Love command box. We love cold box. Dude, content box, test box, stash box, all these, well, they could just go to the website and look at them, but that's less than just no

Rakshith Naresh talks about “ColdFusion 2021 Revealing Details on How it was Created” in this episode of the CF Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

Show notes

Today we talk about some of the challenges the Adobe CF team overcomed with corona virus lockdowns In India and the complexities of implementing multi-cloud and containers which are totally new features for ColdFusion. 

CF 2021 new features

Game-changing release for the next decade

Cloud

Easy cloud coding - even less lines of code than Node.js cloud

Multi-cloud support

Microservices

Why?

More efficient scaling apps

Easier REST

CF Image size and load 80%+ better

Huge engineering task achieved 

New master runtime to do this

Command-line installer (GUI optional)

Custom runtimes

New Language features

IIFE (Immediately Invokable Function Expressions)

Lambda

Rest and spread operators

Parallelism

Destructing assignment

Identity operator

Dynamic switchcase

Iterator support

Java integration

Performance

Way faster than CF 11 or CF 2016

End of Life:  CF11 already in 2019, CF 2016 in April 2021

Security

Separate security team inside Adobe

3rd party vendor security certification

All team devs certified in security coding best practices

SSO SAML 

Backward compatible 

Old CFML code runs fine

CF still works great on dedicated servers (not just cloud)

CF admin

All settings are scriptable

Why the change from CF 2020 to CF 2021 name

Because released at end of year

Next release code name announced

Testing it out

Free development version 

CommandBox is the fastest way to download and install 

When will the first hot fixes come out?

This was release last week

Questions from CFers

From thread https://www.facebook.com/groups/CFprogrammers/permalink/10157911453630036/ 

IDE support

- had used it for many years and migrated to other languages and frameworks due to IDE support (one of the major factors.)

I believe that a new version of CF Builder was announced at CF Summit last week - due to release in the first half of 2021. I will clarify in the interview. Thanks for the question!

PS have you checked out the free VSCode - it has EXCELLENT CFML support extensions.

New version of CF Builder built on VSCode

Front End tools

What are improvements is Adobe doing in competition with Angular, React and Vue.js?

how does CF 2021 work better with these front end technologies than CF 2018 did?

These are front-end frameworks and CF is server side. Both are independent of each other and can not be each other's competition. You can easily connect any front end framework with server side CF with rest calls which CF already supports.

JavaScript better data type preservation

Easier REST coding

Possible future auto generation of REST services

Licensing

SaaS

I'm good with the license price but for 2020 they attempted to collect a license for EACH site (application) we hosted on a single server and we moved to Lucee. We would love to use ACF (as we had since v 3.5) but their license change nearly bankrupted us.

Pay for EACH SITE??? where does it say that in the licensing?

See detailed response and discussion at https://community.adobe.com/t5/coldfusion/adobe-coldfusion-license-bait-and-switch-for-saas-companies/td-p/10614494?page=1 

“Yesterday we had a call with the Coldfusion Technical Marketing Manager who sincerely apologized for the experience we have had the past several months.  By the end of the conversation, our position that we are not a service bureau and should not be subject to a custom agreement was accepted by Adobe, and we are able to continue to use the perpetual licenses we currently have.  If others experience something similar to what we did, you may contact adobecoldfusion@adobe.

Luis Majano and Brad Wood talk about “BoxLang modern JVM language that runs CFML code (new CFML engine and much more)” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive Podcast with host Michaela Light.

“…BX is the acronym we use a lot like our file extensions are analogous to the cold fusion file extensions. So a CFM file, we call that bxm For box Lang markup, CMS, which Lucy six had his support for, which is cold fusion script”.

https://youtu.be/T59ElgfjuY8

Show notes

What is BoxLang?

A new language for the JVM that includes CFML

Inspired by cool CF, Groovy, Rust, Go, PHP etc

Compiles into Java byte code, just like CF

A new language for 2024 and beyond

Not just targeting web server - see below for all runtime targets

7 MB core

Tidy and lightweight core

Super fast start up time in 100-200ms

ACF core 120 to 300 MB 

Lucee core 20 to 120 - 300 MB

Node 80 MB

Add on modules for different target runtimes

Similar in ideas to ACF and Lucee packages

Target runtimes

Web Server

Miniserver

Serverless

Jakarta

Android

Web assembly 

Command line use

Modules are designed from the start vs separated out as in ACF or Lucee

Using tight Java libraries that are different from ACF or Lucee libraries

Drastic architecture differences

No OSGi copies

See below for what OSGi is

MVP for this language

Created to be extensive in the core from the start

Not a monolith

Super strict on 3rd party JARs added to the core due to features in the modern JDK

Oracle improvements in Java language and JVM

Java 21 or higher only

Other JVM that are based on Oracle JVM 21 or higher

Fixes old syntax and function naming inconsistencies from CFML backwards compatible

Has two parsers

Antler parser library for BoxLang code

100% legacy CFML code via transpiler

AST = Abstract Syntax Tree

This is what compiles to Java byte code

Linting and code quality metric tool and VS-code extension IntelliSense and semantics of the language.

Open source AST so easy to extend and hook into it.

In-line debugger is built in with scope introspection

Can innovate in BoxLang language without breaking legacy CFML

Transpiling

Dynamic and can continue to edit legacy CFML code

Or one-time translate to BoxLang language (BX)

Can you translate back from BoxLang to CMFL?

Not currently and technically it can be done - it is open source

The syntax is very close to CFML script and tags

Why bx vs cf script

Not tag first language - it is script first then adds components / class (aka tag)

What is it really?

JVM 

100% interoperable with Java

No bridge like ACF or Lucee

Extend from Java classes

Import Java classes

Framework capabilities built into BoxLang

Event-driven programming

Event listeners and extension is built-in

Cache engine built-in

vs added on

Can talk to Redis and Couchbase

Async and parallel programming 

Built into the core from Java

vs adding in Quartz Java library to do this

Easy unit testing of tasks

Keep the CFML productivities of RAD coding

BoxLang templating language

Like Groovy GSP

Most modern JVM language 

More modern than ACF, Lucee OR all other JVM languages such as Groovy, Clojure, Kotlin, Rust etc

Super dynamic language with built-in dynamic concepts from the modern Java engine vs a 3rd party library

Comparison chart to other languages?

Coming in future

Why are most modern languages similar in appearance?

Common programming metaphors over time are used with similar syntax.

But under the hood, they are different engines

Tooling

IDE

Community

Is ACF or Lucee embedded in BoxLang?

No

ACF is closed source

Lucee - separate development. Chinese wall separation of BoxLang development.

Can see the full source code edit history in GitHub which shows it is not a fork from Lucee

What about QA on the language?

6000 automated tests in GitHub

Why did you create it?

A lot of work to make a new compiler etc

Alternatives not taken

Suggest features to ACF

Tried. Too radical a change

Have done for years. They have their own limitations.

Tickets exist for these feature requests

Pull requests to Lucee for a fork

Looked at this for several months 

Lack of docs from the lead of the Lucee open-source project

Major architecture differences with a fresh start

Tickets exist for these features for years

New JVM language without the emotional baggage of taggy CF

Fast release cycles

Weekly release cycles

Lucee monthly releases

ACF annual release plus as needed hotfixes 

CI process to immediate deployment

CommandBox can run different versions of BoxLang, just like it does for ACF and Lucee

What are you looking forward to at CF Summit?

Seeing other CFer

Teaching REST class

Ok to ask questions on the side and let’s respect Adobe CF conference is focused on ACF. 

Addendum - What is OSGi

OSGi, or Open Service Gateway Initiative, is a Java framework that allows developers to create and deploy modular software programs and libraries. It's based on a set of specifications that define a component system for Java, and includes a standard for building modular components called bundles. 

Here are some benefits of OSGi: 

Loose coupling

OSGi focuses on loose coupling of functions, which allows for modular functionalities that can be easily moved between source codes.

Dynamic component model

OSGi implements a dynamic component model that allows applications to be remotely installed, started, stopped, updated, and uninstalled without requiring a restart. 

Microkernel architecture

OSGi utilizes the concepts of a microkernel architecture, also known as a plug-in architecture. 

Reusable components

OSGi allows developers to create applications from smaller, reusable, and collaborative components. 

The OSGi Alliance was originally responsible for managing the OSGi framework, but in early 2021 the Eclipse Foundation took over the OSGi specification. 

 

Mentioned in this episode

TeraTech’s BoxLang overview article 

BoxLang Download - free download and paid options, plus lots of language info

BoxLang Full source code repo on GitHub plus docs and 1000s of test cases

Try BoxLang - similar to TryCF site to try out BoxLang code without having to install it first

BoxLang book - full docs and examples to get you going fast. 

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Luis Majano

Luis Majano is a Computer Engineer who has been developing and designing software systems since 2000. During economic instability and civil war, he was born in San Salvador, El Salvador, in the late 70s. He lived in El Salvador until 1995 and then moved to Miami, Florida, where he completed his Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering at Florida International University.

He is the CEO of Ortus Solutions, a consulting firm specializing in web development, BoxLang, Java development, and open-source professional services. He is the creator of ColdBox, ContentBox, CommandBox, WireBox, TestBox, LogBox, and anything "Box," and he contributes to over 250 open-source projects. He has a passion for learning and mentoring developers so they can succeed with sustainable software practices and the usage and development of open-source software. You can read his blog at www.luismajano.com

Luis is passionate about Jesus, tennis, golf, volleyball, and anything electronic. Random Author Facts:

He played volleyball in the Salvadorean National Team at the tender age of 17

His favorite books are The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit (Geek!)

His first computer was a Texas Instruments TI-99 that his parents gave him in 1986. After some time digesting his very first BASIC book, he had written his own tic-tac-toe game at the age of 9. (Extra geek!)

He has a geek love for circuits, microcontrollers, and overall embedded systems.

He has, as of late, become a fan of organic gardening.

Links

Luis Majano | LinkedIn

Twitter 

Ortus Solutions

 

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 is a software engineer at Ortus Solutions, lead developer of CommandBox CLI, and open source contributor.

Links

CFML Slack Box Channel

Box Team Slack Channel

Brad's Website

Brad Wood | LinkedIn

Twitter

Ortus Community Forum

Techempower Nightly Builds

Interview transcript

Michaela Light 01:10

Hey, welcome back to the show. We're here on sea of life with two mega geniuses of cold fusion, Luis majano and Brad wood at water solutions. They're joining us actively Spain and from Kansas, so and I'm right now in Austin, Texas, so we're quite spread out here, but we're here today to talk about box Lang, the new cold fusion engine that is joins the stable of cold fusion engines, of Adobe cold fusion and Lucy, and it's now an alternative to that, which I think, and I'll tell you why I think it's really great thing to have for the Cold Fusion community later. But I'm going to let Luis and Brad talk about that. But before I do if you don't know who Luis is, he is the founder of all his solutions. He's behind a lot of those box products, cold box, you know, wire box, you name it. Box. It's got a box in it. He's probably had his hands in it, except for command box, which Brad....

Mark Takata talks about “All About Adobe ColdFusion 2023 (Part 2: PDF, CCS, SSO, perf, security)” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive Podcast with host Michaela Light.

“…So we decided to build this thing called CCS central configuration server. And it runs at the command line, basically, and allows you to control your servers from a central location.”.

https://youtu.be/n_PNO4jYOuE

Show notes

Enhanced HTML-to-PDF Conversion

New HTML-to-PDF conversion engine

Supports new CSS features for pixel perfect PDFs

Imbed audio, video and SVG

Old tags features for manipulation of PDFs and forms etc still work

Increased file size limit by x100

Optional future features eg DBX merge / header engine

New PDF Engine and Library Updates

Updates several libraries, including Java, Solr, and Hibernate

More secure

Runs faster

Central Configuration Server (CCS)

Simpler management of multiple ColdFusion instances

Undo changes

“Young” feature, UX a bit hard to set up, easy to use once set up.

SSO CF Admin Integration (SAML/LDAP)

Users can log in using their corporate credentials with SSO (Single Sign On)

Pin point access to parts of CF Admin

Groups support

Performance optimizations to the ColdFusion engine.

ACF 2023 came with Java 17 update which broke some security issues

Cause initial slower in first release

Was speed up with hotfixes. 

Future improvements in ACF 2024

Enhanced security features and protocols.

SSO

Java 17

Protect logs

Integration with new technologies and frameworks.

Updated libraries used by CF

Improved support for cloud platforms and services.

Developer tools and IDE enhancements.

Accessibility improvements.

Security, Stability, RAD and performance

Bug fixes and stability enhancements.

200+ bug fixes

500+ for ACF 2024

Christmas holidays bug bash in JIRA

https://tracker.adobe.com/  for public bug reporting

Annual release cycle and ACF 2024 beta

Features fully defined and beta for show at CF Summit West (Las Vegas) in October 2024

Better keep up with changing tech eg AI

Why are you proud to use CF?

He built his entire career on CF

Has professional used 13 other languages too and always comes back to CF

Can explain why CF compared to other programming languages

RAD - fast prototyping

CF is growing

More CF jobs

Hack and code in CFML 40 lessons

Junior devs now asking about CF

Easier to learn esp for anyone knows JavaScript

Modern ecosystem

WWIT to make CF more alive this year?

TryCF

Mark’s learning resources - ask him

CF Community

Talk about CF a local dev meetup

Education

CF Summit East announcements coming up

What are you looking forward to at CF Summit East?

https://www.carahsoft.com/learn/event/50994-adobe-coldfusion-summit-east-2024 

April 24th, 2024

Reston VA, on the metro, near Dulles airport

CF product manager Charvi Dhoot will be ther

Free and free breakfast and lunch

CF certification training April 23rd

$99

Mark’s CF Summit talk on PDF all features

CF Summit Online too https://adobe-coldfusion-online-summit-2024.attendease.com/

Happing now

Smaller and more intimate event where you can talk with more other CFers and Adobe dev team. 

Dedicated conference space.

Mentioned in this episode

063 Scaling Your ColdFusion Applications (Clusters, Containers and Load Tips) with Mike Collins

110 CommandBox Workflow Magic (modules to speed up CF development), with Brad Wood

044 Let’s get GraphQL! (Smart API access from CFML), with Mark Drew

120 How is CFML Speed vs Other Languages? (Hint: really fast!), with Brad Wood

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Mark Takata

Senior ColdFusion Technical Evangelist

Mark Takata is Adobe’s Senior Technical Evangelist for ColdFusion. With more than 25 years of experience in the tech industry, Mark brings a deep knowledge of programming, design, and his love for mentorship to this role, where he is the main touchpoint for the CF community.

Links

Mark Takata | LinkedIn

CFML slack channel

[email protected] 

Interview transcript

Michaela Light 1:34

So I think we should move on to PDFs because a lot of enterprises you know, need to produce PDFs, either reports or, you know, other cute PDF stuff. And there's two major enhancements here. First of all, how you can create pixel perfect PDFs, which sound very sexy, particularly if you're producing things like tax forms or other forms that must be absolutely perfect. And then I think you did some under the hood stuff too. So tell us about what the you know, you've got this HTML to PDF version feature

Mark Takata 2:08

All right. So in fact, all of those things are all coming from the same location, which is the new engine that we put in, the old engine that we had in there was really not brought up to date very much, or very often over the years, it had gotten a little bit long in the tooth, it still worked fine for the things that it did. But things like HTML, CSS, they kind of moved on without it. And so it didn't support things like, you know, CSS Grid, or Flexbox, or all of these new features that allow you to really position things exactly the way that you want them. So to make these pixel perfect pages, say that sometimes fast, you needed to do all sorts of stupid web tricks, right? And it was frustrating and annoying. And I was one of those people I made so many reports, I lost track years and years ago. And you know, you had to do these silly little things like add a pixel here. And then why didn't the pixel to make it so that this line lined up? Right? It was just annoying. And to be fair, every reporting system on the planet that I've ever used had this problem. So this was not necessarily anything new. But you know, we felt that we could do better. So this new engine improves all of those things. So now when you output something, it looks the same in the PDF as it looks on your screen in the browser. Pixel Perfect. Oh, I don't hear you.

Michaela Light 3:35

I muted myself, I was shocked, I was so shocked, I had to meet myself. No, but that's great that it can look the same in the browser as as in the PDF, and that makes doing creating PDFs so much easier. Because, yeah, and all your tricks and all your designers to to make it look great. On the webpage,

Mark Takata 3:58

I actually had a really, there was a really neat use case that I saw that I had never thought of and you mentioned tax forms, and government forms and things like that, which are super important. I know, you know, most of the government uses ColdFusion Sure, everyone knows that, you know, Social Security Administration, and NSA, all those guys use it. But this one company was so excited about this feature, because the thing that they do is they actually will get invoices. So you know, people buy stuff from them, they'll get an invoice and the invoice is something went wrong, right? Somebody ordered 20 reams of paper, but the invoice said 21 or whatever. And they had to regenerate the invoice but because it was they did work with the government, they had to alter the the invoice that was coming if or something along those lines, it needed to be exactly the same as the invoice because they had it recorded. And then they were going to add this as a new version. And it had to like match up. So they were able to use this engine to generate an identical pixel perfect copy of the old version with just the change that they needed, the number of the invoices, the price or whatever. And it worked seamlessly out of the box first time, and they were just blown away. I mean, like that was they had been waiting for this forever. They tried like other external PDF generators, and no one else was quite able to do it this way. But here, it's a tag, it's it's enough PDF, you create your HTML, the way you want it to look, boom, it outputs to, to what you need. So yeah, that's, that's a really big deal. It also added a bunch of support for things like you can embed audio and video that's new, and really cool. It doesn't work. If you print it, though, just know. I tried really hard to get him to do that. But, um, and it also supports SVG. Which, as you might know, SVG is scalable, scalable vector graphics. And that, that allows you to have like things like logos, or photographs, or pictures or architectural diagrams, or whatever. And you can scale them to nearly any size. And they're used by a lot of people in a lot of different industries, and we just have not had any kind of support for them at all. Now we do. And again, it's it's about pixel perfection, right? Like, because those are, you know, if you're familiar with vector graphics, they don't have pixels, they describe the size of the lines, the width of the lines, the alignment of the lines to each other, all of that. So you can scale it to the size of a building or, you know, the size of something you'd print on a pen. Yeah, and it should still work across both of them.

Michaela Light 6:44

So those and you still have all the the old tanks for you know, manipulating PDFs merging different files into one PDF or PDF forms or, yeah,

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.

 

Join the CF Alive revolution

Discover how we can all make CF more alive, modern and secure this year....

Mark Takata talks about “All About Adobe ColdFusion 2023 (Part 1: containers, GCP, GraphQL, JWT)” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive Podcast with host Michaela Light.

“…So we support Google's version of Pub Sub. And it's fairly simple. You know, you've got a you've got someone creating a message. You've got a subscriber that you can create to listen to that message, messages of contact message that I gaze at It just have, you know, timestamps and things like that”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1XLGUoRTX0

Show notes

In this episode, we look at all the Adobe ColdFusion 2023 new features with the Adobe CF evangelist, Mark Takata. 

Modular, Secure, and Containerized Approach

Adobe ColdFusion 2023 offers a modular and containerized way to build applications

run across multiple cloud providers or on-premises without the need to rewrite your application. 

Future proofing your apps to future cloud tech changes.

CF compiles to Java

Even can run CF on Steam Deck (Linux game box)

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Services Integration

The new version enhances project efficiency through seamless integration with GCP services like 

Cloud Storage buckets (all levels)

Doc versioning, aging / retention

PubSub. - MQ - app messaging

Firestore

A NoSQL database

Like AWS Dynamo but easier to use

Access rights definable in CF admin or via code.

Great docs

Can use any other GCP features as APIs using CFHTTP

Authentication is easy

Including Google AI models such as Bard and Gemini 

Databases: MS-SQL, MySQL

BigQuery

VS Code extensions to help write this code

Cool for more scaleable and modern CF apps!

(Multi-Cloud support was added in ACF 2018

ACF 2021 already covers Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS cloud features.

For doc storage and MQ features one tag

Authentication is handled the same

For NoSQL separate tags as features so different syntax

GraphQL Support

What is GraphQL? 

GraphQL is a query language for APIs and a runtime for fulfilling those queries with your existing data. GraphQL provides a complete and understandable description of the data in your API, gives clients the power to ask for exactly what they need and nothing more, makes it easier to evolve APIs over time, and enables powerful developer tools.

It is Open source (The GraphQL Foundation)

Ahead of the curve

More efficient data retrieval and manipulation. 

Make complex data queries and updates with fewer requests

Improved the performance and code flexibility.

ACF 2023 provides native GraphQL Query Support

Direct consuming of GraphQL endpoints

Future - serving GraphQL too

JSON Web Tokens (JWT)

JSON is Structured Text data - more compact than XML.

JWP secures your JSON that you are passing around or saving to prevent man in the middle or injection hacker attacks. 

ACF 2023 has built-in support for JWTs

enhanced the security of your CF app

 

Mentioned in this episode

063 Scaling Your ColdFusion Applications (Clusters, Containers and Load Tips) with Mike Collins

110 CommandBox Workflow Magic (modules to speed up CF development), with Brad Wood

044 Let’s get GraphQL! (Smart API access from CFML), with Mark Drew

120 How is CFML Speed vs Other Languages? (Hint: really fast!), with Brad Wood

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Mark Takata

Senior ColdFusion Technical Evangelist

Mark Takata is Adobe’s Senior Technical Evangelist for ColdFusion. With more than 25 years of experience in the tech industry, Mark brings a deep knowledge of programming, design, and his love for mentorship to this role, where he is the main touchpoint for the CF community.

Links

Mark Takata | LinkedIn

CFML slack channel

[email protected] 

Interview transcript

Michaela Light 0:01

Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Mark Tatar Cocker, would I make a mince meter? You're nearly close. How do you say Mr. Takata? The cutter sounds very precise when you say He is the senior ColdFusion evangelist for Adobe. And he knows a lot about ColdFusion 2023, which is good because that's the subject of today's episode, we're going to look at all the cool features that got added in to 2023 that you may not be aware of at home. So we'll be talking about containerization and the Google Cloud platform integration graph, QL, JSON Web Tokens, cool PDF enhancements, the centralized server admin, stuff, ss, O single sign on, and also the whole revamp of the PDF engine that happened so and a whole bunch of other things. I haven't got time to fit into 30 seconds promo there. So welcome, Mark.

Mark Takata 1:06

Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having me on. Always a pleasure to see you and be on be on your podcast. It's good to see amps.

Michaela Light 1:14

Absolutely. It's great to see you. So I got your title on you're actually senior technical evangelist.

Mark Takata 1:21

I am I am that was a new I got I got an upgrade. Yeah,

Michaela Light 1:26

Basically means you go around to customers cold fusion and meet them online, meet him at conferences new. Tell them about what wonderful in confusion. And I think you also kind of do a little bit the other way you listen to people and pass stuff back to correct

Mark Takata 1:42

It. And that I'm that herb and that connector between the community and the internal folks. You know, I say the things in meetings internally that maybe we don't want to hear or we don't hear very often. So I'm, I'm that voice from the community to try it out. I mean, you know, it's, that's my job, it's my job to be that voice, whether it's positive or negative, we need to hear what's coming from the community. And then the other way back is, you know, I communicate stuff from the internal folks back out to the community about changes, things that are coming up, talking about, you know, support issues, things like that. So I cover the gamut. I work with engineering, product support, sales, everybody is sort of math, I guess.

Michaela Light 2:27

And you're also a ColdFusion. Developer. I used to do cold fusion development University California at Davis. I think I remember right?

Mark Takata 2:35

Yeah. A lot. Yeah. I've worked in cold fusion for over 25 years, and worked at UC Davis, UC ANR. Did CF, both of those did CF at a company called line tech, plus another like 13 Other languages across a multitude of different companies.

Michaela Light 2:54

You have a perfect, perfect person to be the evangelist for cold fusion? I think so.

Mark Takata 2:59

I think I think so. But hopefully others do too.

Michaela Light 3:03

Yes. So let's start talking about containerization. Yeah, that's something a lot of people are interested in and have been doing for a while. But what does Adobe ColdFusion add to that? was added new on earlier versions.

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.

 

Join the CF Alive revolution

Discover how we can all make CF more alive, modern and secure this year. Join other ColdFusion developers and managers in the CF Alive Inner Circle today.

Get early access to the CF Alive book and videos

Be part of a new movement for improving CF's perception in the world.

Contribute to the CF Alive revolution

Connect with other CF developers and managers

There is no cost to membership.

Scott Stroz talks about “ColdFusion Oracle Cloud Migration with MySQL (from VPS)” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive Podcast with host Michaela Light.

“…And the difference between Oracle clouds version of the manage the managed MySQL database is that in Oracle Cloud, it's Enterprise Edition. So if you are using MySQL heatwave in Oracle Cloud, you're actually using Enterprise Edition”.

https://youtu.be/g9fce9kEeq8

Show notes

What is Oracle Cloud?

Oracle cloud services like AWS, GCP, Azure etc

Servers, Storage, MySQL, AI etc

OCI = Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

How does it differ from AWS, GCP, Azure etc?

Robust always free tier, not CC required

Startups, open source or personal projects

Oracle is the steward behind MySQL community edition 

MySQL Heatwave is cloud version of MySQL

Compare AzureSQL etc

Managed db

Enterprise edition performance boosts and more security

The latest

MySQL

New features - Ben Nadel posts

Open Source version and closed source versions

Caught up with MS-SQL Server

MariaDB fork

Original MySQL dev lead developer/CTO is Michael "Monty" Widenius

SQL Server is a 'fork' of Sybase

Docker images

Auto Tuning and DBA

AI and ML

Oracle The Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor (ADDM) provides a holistic tuning solution.

Why cloud hosting?

Ease - no server management, no hardware management

Fast upscale of memory, disk, CPU

Fast scaling of extra servers and spin down too

Ditto failover

CapEx vs OpEx

Small and Enterprise good, Medium less

37 signals posts on cloud vs inhouse

Regions - data centers 

Patching and security 

Very hard to hack MySQL cloud

Point in time recovery

Easier Disaster Recovery

Pre-problem detection

Why use Oracle Cloud?

Always free tier - 4 VMs, ARM CPU

Lucee issue on ARM? Fixed with CommandBox

https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/ 

Two Oracle Autonomous Databases with powerful tools like Oracle APEX and Oracle SQL Developer

Two AMD Compute VMs

Up to 4 instances of ARM Ampere A1 Compute with 3,000 OCPU hours and 18,000 GB hours per month

Block, Object, and Archive Storage; Load Balancer and data egress; Monitoring and Notifications

Moved from VPS at HostMedia in Europe

Lucee on MySQL

Issues with migration that you solved

Set up MySQL instance (VM)

Now would just use HeatWave MySQL

Update Datasource in CF Admin

Use CommandBox to launch Lucee

Paramedic experience and development skills

Transferring skills from other careers to developing

Deal with high stress - stay calm, calm others in chaos

Troubleshooting skills - differential diagnosis - keep checking for evidence is true

Intuition on what to do or not to do

Layers of bugs

New keynote

Learning from your mistakes or other people’s mistake

Code reviews

Opportunity to learn

Rotate reviewers 

Think bigger picture 

Code reuse

Open source

Time to go, time to stay

Why are you proud to use CF?

Ortus tools and packages

Node packages

CF community 

WWIT to make CF more alive this year?

 

Mentioned in this episode

Oracle Cloud

Inside MySQL: Sakila Speaks  - new podcast, link coming soon

CF Hour

Dave Ferguson, Scott Stroz and Matt Gifford

CF Suicide, Depression, and Recovery with Jorge Reyes

From near death to better biz leader with Brie Moreau

Forgebox

ITB article 

CF Summit article

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Scott Stroz

Developer Advocate for MySQL

20+ Years as Software Developer/Architect

2 Years as Assistant Network Administrator

2 Years as Operations Manager for large Mobile Health System

14 years as a Paramedic.

Specialties:

Web application development with Groovy/Grails, Angular, Vue.js, Micronaut.

Links

Scott Stroz | LinkedIn

[email protected] 

http://www.oracle.com

Interview transcript

Michaela Light 0:01

Welcome back to the show. Today we're going to be talking about moving your ColdFusion dye into the cloud with Oracle Cloud Migration with Scotts froze, and got it joining us from exotic West Virginia, in the United States of America. And you may not know, Scott, he's been doing cold fusion stuff for years. And he's got some he used to run the CFR podcast with with it, Dave, or who are you running that with? Dave Ferguson? Dave Ferguson? Yeah. And he's the developer advocate for my sequel, which many of the listeners will be using for their database? If they're not still on the dark side with SQL Server? So that was a joke. You said that not me. Yes.

We have complete freedom in this podcast, though.

So and he also has been doing software development for you said 20 plus years. I'm sure you in your bio, I'm sure you've been doing for 25 years.

Scott Stroz 1:00

Not quite, not quite. Also done network administration being an operations manager. And he is also a paramedic. So November's eto, former paramedic, oh, former. I stopped being a paramedic a long time ago. You did. Oh, that's certified anymore.

Michaela Light 1:20

Okay. And as well as cold fusion. You also do things with Groovy and Grails Angular view. Micronauts. I think you'd mentioned Python and all kinds of other Sonos. Yeah, node. So yeah, lots of cool stuff. Lots of experience. This man has. Welcome to the show. Thanks. It's great to be here. So I think we should start with the So speak elephant in the room. What is this Oracle cloud thing? Because I've never heard of it until you mentioned it to me.

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.

 

Join the CF Alive revolution

Discover how we can all make CF more alive, modern and secure this year. Join other ColdFusion developers and managers in the CF Alive Inner Circle today.

Get early access to the CF Alive book and videos

Be part of a new movement for improving CF's perception in the world.

Contribute to the CF Alive revolution

Connect with other CF developers and managers

There is no cost to membership.

Bilbo's Bonus Pass: Get a 10% discount because you’re a part of our CF Fellowship community: ITBTERA24

Jorge Reyes talks about “Into The Box 2024 (all the details and speakers)” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive Podcast with host Michaela Light.

“...But it's just those aha moments where, Hey, I didn't know you could do that. So you can actually, when you go back home and do your job, then you can actually worry about looking more into it and implementing it. So that's kind of the idea behind all the sessions, actually”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSSxZmWkI_A

Show notes

What is Into The Box conference?

Is it only for Box products topics? No - lots of CF topics, not just Box products

Do not have to use ColdBox framework to use other Box products

Website  https://www.intothebox.org/  

TeraTech is Silver sponsor

Speakers and Topics

1 day pre-conf workshops

The pre-conference day is dedicated to hands-on workshops designed to enhance your skills and knowledge in modern web development. These workshops include:

Reactive Front-Ends with CFML, CBWIRE, and AlpineJS: Led by Grant Copley, this workshop will guide participants through building a modern web application using CFML and the ColdBox module CBWIRE.

Bare Metal to the Cloud: Migrating Legacy Applications to Amazon Web Services: Daniel Garcia and Jon Clausen will provide live, hands-on examples of migrating traditional CFML applications to AWS, covering both "lift and shift" and distributed approaches.

ColdBox 7 Unleashed: Luis Majano invites attendees to explore the advanced features of ColdBox 7, focusing on building a dynamic Headless CMS.

Day 1 - May 16th

Principles and Techniques to Write More Durable Code by Jacob Beers

Build a Complex Web Form with RuleBox and TestBox by Annette Liskey

User Rights Management Dashboard using cbSecurity by Irvin Wilson

Reactive CFML with cbWIRE v4 by Grant Copley

Taming the Data Sprawl: Strategies for Managing and Controlling Data Proliferation by Curt Gratz

Demonstrating Monitoring Solutions for CF and Lucee by Charlie Arehart

cbq — Jobs and Tasks in the Background by Eric Peterson

VS Code powered up for modern CFML Development

Day 2 - May 17th

Schrödinger’s Backup: Is Your Backup Really a Backup? by Shawn Oden

How to debug ColdFusion applications using "ColdFusion Builder extension for VS Code / CF Builder" by Vinay Jindal

Design System: The basis for a consistent design by Jona Lainez and Esme Acevedo

Web Hosting with CommandBox / PRO by Daniel Garcia

CommandBox/Pro https://www.ortussolutions.com/products/commandbox-pro 

Migrate your Infrastructure to the AWS Cloud by George Murphy

Headless Content For The Win! by Luis Majano and Esme Acevedo

Passkeys and cbSecurity by Eric Peterson

Web accessibility for all by Felicia Sephodi

ITB/Latam https://latam.intothebox.org/ 

When?

Wed May 15th to Fri May 17th 2024

Where is it this year?

New location 

Washington DC

Optica conference center, 2010 Massachusetts Ave NW, near Dupont Circle metro

Travel 

3 airports. Best two are WAS and DUL, both metro access to downtown DC

Registration

Register here

Bilbo's Bonus Pass: Get a 10% discount because you’re a part of our CF Fellowship community: ITBTERA24

Cost

Early bird $349 conf only, $449 workshop + conf 

Early bird ends March 30th

Party Box evening event

What are you looking forward to at ITB this year?

 

Mentioned in this episode

CF Suicide, Depression, and Recovery with Jorge Reyes

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Jorge Reyes

COO

Jorge is an Industrial and Systems Engineer born and raised in El Salvador. In 2004 he moved to Mexico to complete his Bachelor's at the Insitute of Technology in Monterrey. In 2009 he returned to El Salvador where he worked as Operations Manager for SIHAM, Industrias Bendek. In 2013 he moved to Switzerland with his beautiful wife Marta and joined Ortus Solutions: a professional open source company focused in web development where he currently serves as the Business Manager. He is passionate about delivering value to customers through the use of Ortus Open Source software solutions. He has been blessed with 3 children: Sofia, Isabella, and Jorgito, and he loves spending time with his family. He enjoys an excellent kickboxing workout session and is a mountain bike weekend warrior.

On Sundays, he serves as a Worship Pastor at Iglesia Cristina Hispano-Suiza in Pratteln.

Links

Jorge Reyes Bendeck | LinkedIn

Into the Box

www.ortussolutions.com

Interview transcript

Michaela Light 0:01

Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Jorge Reyes, from Ortus Solutions, and we're going to be talking about everything into the box. You may be wondering why that would even interest someone who does cold fusion, we're going to explain why everyone who does cold fusion should be checking out this event. And there are options for going in person, and also for being able to see the sessions recorded afterwards. So we'll talk all about that. If you don't know, Jorge, he has been doing cold fusion for years. He's originally from El Salvador, where he learned systems engineering, and the bachelors Institute of Technology in Monterrey. Wow, I never knew that. Just check this out. But he works for autists you're kind of basically their operations, project management. Kind of keep it up there. Lot of hats and l intuiting. The hat that you're the brother of the famous Luis Mahana.

Jorge Reyes 0:59

We're somewhat related. We're not really family, but he's is like my brother. Yes.

Michaela Light 1:04

He's like your brother. Yeah, he's your brother in Christ or something that 100% Or your brother in box? I'm not sure both maybe. So. And he's currently Oh, he lives in Switzerland. So thanks for coming to Switzerland, a great location for connecting with all the Lucy folks in Europe. So if you go to CF camp, I know we're talking about into the box here. But if you go to CF camp in Germany, you're highly likely to see him there. So in his copious spare time, he's a worship pastor at a church in Switzerland, a Spanish speaking church, I believe. That's

Jorge Reyes 1:42

Correct.

Michaela Light 1:44

So welcome away.

Jorge Reyes 1:47

Thanks for having me. Miko. All right. So I believe you are a sponsor as well.

Michaela Light 1:52

We are a silver I was keeping on the down low about that. But I will let it get out of the bag and say, Yeah, Tara tickets a silver proudly is a silver sponsor of into the box. And, you know, we're so so awesome, because I just think you guys do great things with all the box products and putting this conference together. As you know, I ran a conference called cfunited for like 11 years in the DC area, it was an enormous amount of work. And I could get total hats off respect to orders for running a conference, I just, I know how much work it is to find speakers and get the speakers to give their information in a timely way and get the audio visual work. Good. And the food is good and all and then you have last minute problems that come up, you know that you try and hide from the attendees and just you know, resolve the problems, but it's having an in person event is a lot of work. So respect you for doing this.

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.

 

Join the CF Alive revolution

Discover how we can all make CF more alive, modern and secure this year. Join other ColdFusion developers and managers in the CF Alive Inner Circle today.

Get early access to the CF Alive book and videos

Be part of a new movement for improving CF's perception in the world.

Contribute to the CF Alive revolution

Connect with other CF developers and managers

There is no cost to membership.