Mike Collins talks about “Scaling Your ColdFusion Applications (Clusters, Containers and Load Tips)” in this episode of the CF Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

In this session, we will answer common questions around deploying applications across multiple JVM instances, servers or containers.  How many instances, servers or containers do you really need? What happens when an instance goes down? What is the best way to manage sessions? We will look at key performance metrics and session management strategies to increase your uptime and improve your end-users overall experience. Session topics will include: Using Local and Remote Web Servers, Load Balancing (Hardware and Software based), Tomcat Connector Features, Understanding ColdFusion Clustering, Using Docker Containers and Orchestration, Using Session Management Strategies, API Based Applications, Load Testing Applications and Security and Monitoring.  We will have several demonstrations along the way.

Show notes

Why CF scaling matters

Faster site

Reliable - no single point of failure

Seamless sessions between servers in a cluster - esp ecom

What are common scaling issues

How much JVM memory to allocate

Garbage collection settings

Connector best practices, connector admin manager → key metric

Plan for alerts and snapshots

Deploying applications across multiple JVM instances, servers or containers.  

How many instances, servers or containers do you really need?  

What happens when an instance goes down?  

What is the best way to manage sessions?

Key performance metrics and session management strategies to increase your uptime and improve your end-users overall experience.

Server Sizing

CPU

Memory

Using Local and Remote Web Servers

Load Balancing (Hardware and Software based)

Tomcat Connector Features

Understanding ColdFusion Clustering

Using Docker Containers and Orchestration

Using Session Management Strategies

API Based Applications

Microservices

Load Testing Applications and Security and Monitoring.  

Why are you proud to use CF?

WWIT for you to make CF more alive this year?

What are you looking forward to at CF Summit East?

Mentioned in this episode

EHcache

Redis

CF Server monitor

FusionReactor

Sticky Sessions

Round Robin

F5 load balancer

Kubernetes (container orchestration)

JMeter load testing

CF Summit East

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Mike Collins

Senior ColdFusion consultant at SupportObjective providing development, services including applications, migration projects, and annual ColdFusion support. Mike started using ColdFusion during his time with Allaire, Macromedia, and Adobe.  Over the years Mike has given several ColdFusion conference sessions concerning developing and architecting ColdFusion applications.

Links

Support Objective

Interview transcript

Michaela:         Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Mike Collins and we're going to be talking about scaling your ColdFusion Applications. And we'll look at some of the JBM things you can do that and some of the key performance metrics and session management strategies you might use. And we'll look at both using local servers and using clever things like Docker to do it more remotely. So, we'll also briefly look at load testing security and monitoring if you will scaling your application. So welcome Mike.

Mike:               Welcome, thank you.

Michaela:         And in case you don't know Mike, he's been with ColdFusion since it was born back in the earlier days. He used to work at he's been at Macromedia and Adobe. And now he's got his own business school Support Objectives that provides annual ColdFusion support and consulting. So, he's a really smart guy I am so happy you got him here on the show today.

So yes. So, tell us you know why is scaling important in the ColdFusion world, because maybe people haven't really thought about this topic?...

Samuel Knowlton talks about “The Great ColdFusion Entrepreneurial Adventure (from side jobs to freelancing to your own biz)” in this episode of the CF Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

Show notes

His journey from side jobs to freelancing to his own biz

Moved to NYC to become an actor - did CF side jobs to pay the rent

Side job risks

Missed taxes and compliance

Liability

What to expect

Accounting

Separate biz bank a/c and credit card

Incorporation options

LLC, LLP, S-corp, C corp

Delaware

Wyoming

Government compliance

The unincorporated biz tax in NYC

Liability concerns

Biz insurance

Workers Comp

General liability insurance

Errors and omissions

Umbrella

Your own biz

Employees vs Subcontractors

Payroll and employment taxes

Use a payroll service!

Quickbooks

Xero

Perks

Healthcare

401k

Write-offs

Home office deduction

Infrastructure

Support of your clients

Good will

Legitimacy with clients

Support system eg Jira

Toolsets - hardware and software common to all staff

Ramp Up time

Why are you proud to use CF?

WWIT for you to make CF more alive this year?

Docker and containers

What are you looking forward to at Into The Box?

Building and managing your own enterprise: Infrastructure, Support, Payroll, Taxes and Toolsets. An introduction to your own business from the founder of inLeague (15+ years in the market) with an emphasis on how ordinary developers can manage a shop, grow a team, and still write code. Topics will not include Getting Rich Quick or Venture Capital.

Into the Box - Samuel Knowlton

Mentioned in this episode

Different business types

Types of business insurance 

Types of payroll taxes 

Common business deductions

Xero

CFML slack channel

Jira

Forgebox

Into The Box

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Samuel Knowlton

Founder and president of inLeague, boutique ColdFusion software development house.

Interview Transcript

Michaela:        Welcome back to the show. And today, we’re going to be looking at the great entrepreneurial adventure using ColdFusion. How Samuel Knowlton went from side jobs to freelancing to his own business. And we'll look at some of the risks involved in doing side jobs you might not be aware of in particular is this really wacky taxi came across that didn't even make sense to be honest to me. And we’ll also look at some of the liability concerns you may have in working for other people; freelancing or in your own business. And some of the perks you can make some money by incorporating as well so. We'll also look at infrastructure you might want to set up, and how you support your clients if you start a business, and the tool sets you use for your ColdFusion business. So welcome Samuel.

Samuel:           Thank you very much Michaela.

Michaela:        Yes and if you don't know Samuel is the founder and president of in league which is a beauty ColdFusion software development house. Been around for about 16 years now. Congratulations! I think in dog years that's probably about four lifetimes right.

Samuel:           Well that said still what half your company so you have something to look forward to.

Read more

 

And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job,

Peter Ivanov talks about “Virtual Power Teams for ColdFusion Development (3 mistakes to avoid)” in this episode of the CF Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

Show notes

Why virtual ColdFusion software teams?

Experts are hard to find and may not want to relocate

Offshoring and labor arbitrage 

Easier scaling of projects

Fast delivery

81% of teams are virtual - Forrester Research

Common problems and mistakes with virtual teams

Neglecting the team’s personal life and personality

Meet each team member and lifeline successes and struggles

In person

Zoom video call

What makes their heart sing

Only have meetings for problems or if manager has need

Regular meetings, not manager dominated, all people get a chance to speak

personal update from each person (< 2 min max)

Team decides the frequency of meetings

Bottom-up agenda and goals → roadmap and milestones

Formal project meetings and milestones → peer pressure to deliver

Empower and regular reporting of progress

Managers take performance for granted

Expect good/great performance without recognition or rewards

Praise results and behavior. Not critic online - do one on one. Timely

Time zones

Some people will need to comprise - but rotate to make it fair

Split to two meetings with different times if big global teams

Culture

Culture Map

Democratic vs Autocratic styles

Questioning directly or not

Saving face

Conflict style

Decision-making style - top down or bottom up

Creating a successful virtual team

10 big rocks

Personality and focus

Member Strengths (public)

Interdependent goals

Knowledge management - and issue champions

Regular Scheduled feedback (1-on-1)

Recognition

Diversity

Winning spirit

Next generation leaders

Virtual pizza

Reward trip

Virtual communication

Zoom, email, basecamp/other PM tools, slack

What purpose for each tool

Email - good for updates

Team charter - response time eg 24 hours

Chat - Urgent message

Team charter - response time eg 1-2 hours

Slack - good for multiple projects and teams

Trello - dynamic communication and sharing

Or closed FB group

Or MS-Office 365 Teams

Baseline plan plus version control

Zoom - more emotional or upset topics

Images can help

Recording videos to share with team

Future - Virtual Reality teams and AI

How to hiring to your virtual team

Balanced team - Meredith Belbin 9 roles in a team

Can work on own, self-motivating

Can meet social needs another way than work

Don’t hire all the

Onboarding new virtual team member

WWIT for you to make CF more alive this year?

Mentioned in this episode

His book Virtual Power Teams: How to Deliver Projects Faster, Reduce Cost and Develop your Organization for the Future

Power Teams Beyond Borders

Episode with Peter on using your intuition in virtual teams 

Book Erin Mayer The Culture Map

Meredith Belbin 9 roles in a team 

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Peter Ivanov

Peter Ivanov is Manager, Entrepreneur and Virtual teams Expert with over 20 years of international experience.

Born in Bulgaria he graduated Mathematics and joined a multinational company as Data Analyst. He quickly became IT Manager for Bulgaria and gradually worked his way up to IT Services Manager for Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa. Peter recognized the growing importance of the teams in multiple locations and developed an innovative method for leading Virtual teams.

In 2007 the Team led by Peter won the “Best of the Best” award for outstanding Project management in establishing global Shared services.

In 2012 his Team won the “Global IT Connect Award” for excellent Engagement in a global cross-functional environment.

In 2013 Peter founded “Virtual Power Teams” and started new career as Keynote speaker and Executive coach on New Leadership...

Nolan Erck talks about “Migrating legacy CFML to MVC (Model View Controller)” in this episode of the CF Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.   Episode highlights What exactly is legacy ColdFusion? A broad term Non-framework code Might use CFIncludes or some CFCs to be modular Even giant 10k lines of code Self-posting forms What the MVC […]

Nolan Erck talks about “Migrating legacy CFML to MVC (Model View Controller)” in this episode of the CF Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

Show notes

What exactly is legacy ColdFusion?

A broad term

Non-framework code

Might use CFIncludes or some CFCs to be modular

Even giant 10k lines of code

Self-posting forms

What the MVC design pattern is and what problems it solves

MVC = Model View Controller

Model = biz logic and SQL

View = front end UI - HTML, CSS, JS

Controller = the glue that holds the Model and View together and says which part calls which

Customer in a restaurant ordering from a Menu (View) from a Waiter (Controller) to make the food in the kitchen (Model)

Maintenance easier

Whack a mole bugs

Biz logic, HTML, JS and SQL all mixed up together

Bit rot/Technical debt

Hard for designers to edit the code as the HTML is mixed up

Merge conflicts

Hard to fully test

Manually testing

Duplicate code, unused code (deadwood)

Specialization of labor

UI experts

CF developer

SQL database engineer

How the FW/1 and ColdBox frameworks use a convention-based approach to bring consistent structure to an application

Both are modern MVC

Use folder to separate the three parts, file naming conventions

FW/1 is minimalist, one file, easy to get started

MuraCMS uses it

ColdBox is heavyweight with more features and add-on packs in the Box ecosphere

Testing

Caching

Etc

Ortus supports

Other MVC frameworks that are not as maintained

CFWheels - These are convention based frameworks

Fusebox - XML config file framework

Mode Glue - XML config file framework

Mach-ii - These are convention based frameworks

What Dependency Injection (DI) is, how it simplifies the “model” portion of applications, and how they are used in FW/1 and ColdBox

Keeps your objects organized

Tools

DI/1

Wirebox

We did a whole interview on this topic in another episode of CF Alive

DRY = Don’t Repeat Yourself

DI and MVC are independent

How to refactor real-world procedural code into MVC-style code

What code belongs in the model, the view, and how the controller ties the two together.

Cut parts out of giant file to include files

Move out the SQL and CF logic

Dedup similar code

Move out the front end code to View include files

Start running with the remaining code in the View

Strategies for migrating large applications in phases.

ColdBox legacy tool feature

Version code such as Git

2 branches

Legacy

MVC

Maintain both

AB test each branch

All URLs will change

Using CommandBox and Git to spin up on-demand instances of ColdFusion and manage our code.

CommandBox

command line CF

Instant server setup or config

Any version, Adobe ColdFusion, Railo, Lucee CFML

Tool costs

FW/1 free

ColdBox free, pay or training and support

CommandBox - free

Git free to paid

Source Tree - free

Sublime Text - free to shareware paid $35

CF Builder free 30-day trial, $300

Why are you proud to use CF?

WWIT for you to make CF more alive this year?

What did you enjoy at CF Summit?

Nolan’s CF Summit workshop description

Do you maintain legacy ColdFusion applications, perhaps written with old procedural-style code? Have you been told you should be using a Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework but don't really understand how that works? Does the idea of rewriting the entire application seem like an impossible task? What if you could instead revamp your code in phases, without having to do it all at once?

Come to this workshop and learn:

What the MVC design pattern is and what problems it solves

How the FW/1 and ColdBox frameworks use a convention-based approach to bring consistent structure to an application

Kishore Balakrishnan talks about “All about the Adobe CF Summit East 2018 ColdFusion” in this episode of the CF Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

Show notes

What exactly is CF Summit East?

Started in second year of CF Summit in Las Vegas

For people who can’t travel to West coast

Expecting 200 people, 160 registrations already two month out

How many years has CF Summit been running?

3rd year

Why is it so important to the CF Community?

Networking with other CF developers, CF speakers and Adobe CF senior staff

Why all CFer should go?

To learn about Adobe’s commitment to CF

New features in CF

Direction of CF

Roadmap through 2025

Revealing the Speakers and topics that you are excited about

10 speakers

Rakshith Naresh - new features of CF 2018 (second half of 2018 release date)

Elishia Dvorak - CF API manager

Tridib Roy Chowdhury - Keynote State of CF with customers, Adobe’s plans, customer experiences with CF

Charlie Arehart - new in CF 10, 11, 2016 that you may have missed

Pete Freitag - Securing mature CFML codebases

Masha Edelen - Power of Simplicity in FW/1 Framework

Eric Cobb - Building Better SQL Server Databases

Kevin Schmidt - PDF

Trip Ward - Angular.js and CF

Mike Collins - Distributed caching

Dave Watts and Theonic Way - Upgrading legacy CF servers

Date

Wednesday April 25th 2018, 8am - 5pm

Includes breakfast, lunch and breaks

Cost

Free

Location

Renaissance Washington, DC Downtown Hotel

999 Ninth Street NW

Washington, DC 20001

Close to last’s year’s location at Marriott

Near to the metro

Other things you can do in DC?

National Mall

Museums

White House

What is new this year?

Last year 110 attendees - CF govt focused

Recording session is planned

CF growing over last year

Dollar sales

Number customer

Why are you proud to use CF?

Started as Java dev → QA → CF dev → marketing manager

WWIT for you to make CF more alive this year?

CF community paritation

Spread the CF Alive message

For every 1 public site there are 4 private/intranets

30% of CF installed base is government

What are you looking forward to at CF Summit East?

Mentioned in this episode

Conference event

Roadmap episode

Educational free

Community Portal blog about CF Summit

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Kishore Balakrishnan

Kishore Balakrishnan is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Adobe Systems with a Master Degree in Computer Applications. At Adobe he has held roles of a Quality Manager, Program Manager before becoming the Product Marketing Manager. He enjoys being the 'voice of the customer' within the organization, liaise with sales team to facilitate the selling process and clearly communicate the why, what and when to the marketplace for CF. He lives in Bangalore with his wife and kid. Kishore loves his long runs and cooking.

Interview transcript

Michaela:          Welcome back to the show. Today, we're looking to talk about the Adobe C.F. Summit East. And I'm here with Kishore Balakrishnan. And we're gonna learn all about this band it's in its fourth year as a lot of exciting changes. So if you haven't heard of the CF Summit East, we're gonna learn what that is, and why all ColdFusion developers on the East Coast see if they can get there. And we also will reveal who the speakers and topics are this year, and the location, and also what is new with the event. And we'll also talk about Kishore’s background. You may not know this; he's the senior marketing manager for ColdFusion Adobe. But he also programs in ColdFusion. So we'll talk about his background later in the show. So welcome Kishore.

Kishore:           Thanks Michael for having me on the show, have a lot of good things.

Michael:          So… oh great! Yeah I mean we did over 50 episodes last year, and planning to do a similar number this year.

Miles Rausch talks about “Progressive Web Apps Building - Amazing Lucee CFML and ColdBox Tricks” in this episode of the CF Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

Show notes

What a Progressive Web App? (PWA)

Eg google docs

A web app that gives you a native app experience (including offline use)

Content cache

Background working so UI stays as single page

Install icon to your homepage

Why the heck should make your web apps Progressive?

Better user engagement

More responsive UI and better user experience

Why should your trust your users’ network connectivity 100% of the time?

Emerging markets in China, India and Africa

What support is there for Progressive Web Apps?

Who is leading the charge and

Google

Creators of Chrome browser

Creators of many Progressive web apps

Android browser support

Firefox browser

Microsoft

Windows 10 support

IE

Standards groups for Progressive APIs

Lucee

Adobe

Who is left behind

Apple Safari browser

How the the Offline First movement related to this

What if the client device crashes while they are editing offline?

How to easily implement Progressive Web apps using ColdBox and Lucee (and a bit of CommandBox too!)

Demo where he pulls his network connection live

Your move to Lucee CFML

Why are you proud to use CFML?

WWIT for you to make CF more alive this year?

What are you looking forward to at CFObjective?

Progressive Web Apps are more than just a UI fad, like parallax or scroll-triggered animations. PWAs are quickly becoming the best practice for creating reliable, fast and engaging user experiences. Like progressive enhancement, which treated JavaScript as an optional enhancement for a website, progressive web apps treat the network itself as an optional enhancement. By treating the network as untrustworthy, developers are forced to create better web apps that capitalize on modern browser features when they exist and fallback to traditional client-server communication when they don't.

This talk builds the most cutting-edge client technologies upon the solid foundations of ColdBox, giving CFML developers a helpful path into the future. Google has been a strong supporter and proponent of PWAs and the Offline First movement, but their examples and toolkits make too many or too few assumptions about the reader's server technology. This talk will use ColdBox and Lucee (through CommandBox) as the server language, allowing CFML developers to wrap their heads about this new movement and hopefully incorporate its philosophy and techniques into their existing and upcoming projects.

Mentioned in this episode

Progressive Web Apps

Offline First

Forbes case study of a Progressive App

Twitter light - mobile progressive web app

Google Progressive case studies site

The “Progressive” in Progressive Web Apps (Chrome Dev Summit 2016)  

Patrick Kettner, Product Manager for Microsoft Edge, talks about the "progressive" in PWAs, service workers, AppCache, and more!

Service worker

Index.db

Slides.com

CommandBox open source command line CFML and package manager

Similar in idea npm and Yarn for Node.js

Progressive Web App Dev Summit

Google I/O event

annual developer festival

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Miles Rausch

Miles Rausch is a web developer from Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

He is a writer for people, and a writer for computers. He believes that he is destined to spend his time at a keyboard.

During his work time, he develops for both server (in CFML using the Lucee engine) and client (where he tries to be unobtrusive, semantic and responsibly future-facing). At the same time, Miles have been having a flirty affair with Node.js and React.

In his personal time, he writes short stories and novels. Fiction is as strong a passion for Miles as programming, and he has published in some online publications ...

David Tattersall talks about "Into the CLOUD with FusionReactor (ColdFusion Application Performance Monitor)"  in this episode of ColdFusion Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

Show notes

What is FusionReactor CLOUD?

CLOUD version of FusionReactor with extra features over the on-premises version

What is FusionReactor

FR is on premise tool

Server Monitor and alert

Crash protection

Low overhead CF and Java application performance monitor

Less than 1% overhead compared to 2-5% on other monitors

Low overhead includes lots of tools such as debugging, JDBC, Database

It can measure 100’s of different metrics + alert you to potential issues

Agents

CF

Java

Node.js

Why go to the CLOUD?

Keep more data

More AI in the app

More analysis of the data

See patterns in billions of transactions

Is this secure?

Yes, your data is kept separate from others

Can obfuscate some data such as credit cards

Can use Fusion Analytics if you prefer not to use the CLOUD

When was FR CLOUD launched?

August  2017

Daily deployment and improvements (no version numbers) - it is a SaaS!

FR CLOUD demo

CLOUD license

It includes a copy of FR regular

CLOUD $99/mo/server Ent, $149/mo/server Ultimate

Upto 5 instances per server

Docker containers on demand licenses vs reservations for permanent servers

On demand is 10% more cost but is only billed by the minute of use

FR CLOUD works with Java too

Data retention (not just memory) from a week to 30-90 days (depending on the CLOUD version Ent or Ultra)

Capturing only interesting transactions (ITs) - not all of them

Powerful alerting engine on any of the metrics in FusionReactor CLOUD, with integration to many common Alerting Channels - such as

Hipchat

Slack

PageDuty

Email

HTTP hooks

Why did you add FR to the CLOUD?

Save server monitoring data to the CLOUD so it doesn’t clog up your server

Combining metrics from multiple servers (instances), say across a cluster, to provide a combined application view

FusionAnalytics for on premise, in-depth analysis

Two way link from FR CLOUD to the local FR so can run a stack trace or GC from the CLOUD

Webinar on this at https://www.fusion-reactor.com/webinar/fusionreactor-CLOUD/

They use use FR to monitor FR CLOUD

What versions of ACF and Lucee does FR work with?

ACF 6.1, 7 MX (FusionReactor 4.5)

ACF 8,9,10, 11, 2016 (latest version of FR)

Railo 3.x, 4.x

Lucee 4.5, 5.x

Also supports Java containers e.g. Tomcat, JBoss, GLassfish, Websphere + many Java frameworks e.g. Spring and Struts

How was CFCAMP this year?

Next conference

DevNexus Feb 23-25 2018

Why are you proud to support CF?

WWIT for CF to be more alive this year?

Mentioned in this episode

Jetty - Eclipse Jetty provides a Web server and javax.servlet container, plus support for HTTP/2, WebSocket, OSGi, JMX, JNDI, JAAS and many other integrations.

Using FR with Docker Swarm Brad Wood video

ColdFusion on Docker

Listen to the Audio

Bio

David Tattersall

David Tattersall has been in working in IT for over 30 years. Since co-founding Intergral in 1998, he focused on company management, business development and sales & marketing. Intergral has become a leader in server monitoring and application performance monitoring (APM) solutions in the ColdFusion / Java segment. His flagship product - FusionReactor - www.fusion-reactor.com is used on over 25,000 production servers and has been purchased by over 5,000 customers.

Links

www.fusion-reactor.com

Interview Transcript

Michaela 0:00

So welcome back to the show. I'm here with David Hansel and he's the CEO of integral in Germany and from their worldwide headquarters, he's gonna be demoing to us my home office home office,

he's gonna be telling us all about fusion reactor cloud, which is their new version.

I am talking with Matthew Clemente about "send.Better() - Giving ColdFusion Email a REST" in this episode of CF Alive Podcast. 

Your application sends emails; they might be alerts, confirmations, reports, surveys, newsletters, support-related, or invoices. The process of setting up, maintaining, and troubleshooting these emails generally alternates between boring and frustrating; developers are happy to move on to richer, more modern portions of their applications.

It really doesn't have to be like this. AWS SES might be the best known of the transactional email services, but that doesn't mean it's the best. Mailgun, Sendgrid, Postmark, and Sparkpost all provide compelling email-as-a-service offerings, built around developer-focused REST APIs.

The offerings and features varying slightly from one provider to the next; which is the best for you? As usual, the answer is that it depends, but I'll help you find out. We're going to cover:

The benefits provided by using a transactional email service

A pragmatic, use-driven comparison of the major players in the space

Pitfalls, considerations, and tips when configuring your DNS records and integrating a transactional email service with your application

Interacting with the actual APIs, and showing how easy they are to use with ColdFusion

So let's dive in and see easy it is to send better emails, get detailed reporting, access logging that doesn't make you want to pull your hair out, and take advantage of advanced features, such as webhooks, transactional templates, and inbound email rules.

Show notes

But isn’t email dead?

Open, accessible, resilient

Slack, messaging

Email as in interface for your application (it’s neglected)

Transactional emails

Use cases

Purchase confirm

Mini surveys with links for options

Account creation

Email verification

Password reset

Receipts

Requested updates

Comment notifications

Weekly digests or report

Where Speed and deliverability matter

CFMAIL + SMTP settings

TLS on encrypted send

Set in your Application.cfc rather than hardcoding in each CFMAIL tag

Dev → stage → live

Mailtrap.io ← fake smtp server for mocking

Why emails on Dev servers matter and how to do them right

Send Plain text and HTML emails

Why transactional email services?

Separate from your marketing and other emails → better deliverability and speed

Lots more data on your emails is available

Which email services do you like?

Which is best (trick question, they all have specific use cases that make sense)

AWS SES - low cost, less features, harder to set up $5/50k emails

Postmark - pure transactional emails, highest deliverability, speed, great features, more expensive $50/50k emails

Spartpost - developer friendly, free tier to 10k/mo, more marketing focused $9/50k emails

Sendgrid - does both transactional and marketing emails $20/50k emails

mailGun - developer friendly, free tier to 15k/mo, detailed developer features and logging, good inbound email handling, $20/50k emails

Who NOT to use and why?

MailChimp

GetResponse

ConstantContact

Deliverability

SPF

DKIM

DMARC

Dmarc.postmarkapp.com - friendly reporting

How to test your deliverability (Mail-tester.com)

How to set a transactional email service

Use a subdomain for config but can send from your main domain

REST API or SMTP

Start with SMTP

If you need more features move to REST

Also faster

CFML wrappers exist for these

Using Web hooks in email processing

Inbound

Bounce processing

Link processing and verification

Email open processing

Zapier integration

The future of ColdFusion email

Why are you proud to use CF?

Easy to create

Community that helps out esp slack channel

WWIT for you to make CF more alive this year?

CF slack channel

CF Alive podcast

Help with Github projects

Brian Sappey talks about "How to implement Adobe's API Manager with Swagger, ColdFusion, and API's" in this episode of ColdFusion Alive Podcast.

In this session, you will be provided a look, with examples, about a successful implementation of the Adobe API Manager into a large scale Enterprise environment. You will learn how to configure the API Manager, migrate your existing API's, and create new ones utilizing Swagger. As an added bonus you will learn how to accelerate your SDLC by utilizing API's to automate the API creation process along with the on-boarding of subscribers. Lastly, you will see first hand how to wrap the entire API Manager into a developer portal using, you got it, API's!

Show notes

What is the Adobe API Manager?

Built using Java and Angular

Comes with CF Entreprise

SOAP to REST WSDL

Analytics

End point level and resource level

Realtime

Debugging APIs

Drill down to problems and solve

Replay

Sandbox and failover server

Versioning

Security

Metering and Throttling, SLA

Clustering

API key management

Why should CFers be using it?

Productivity and Debugging API

Simplify API creation and consumption

More control over your API, who uses them and how much they can call them

What is Swagger?

How did you migrate to it from Layer 7?

Cost saving $400k

Automation and SDLC

Microservices

Auto documentation

Programmatic building of APIs

Why are you proud to use CF?

Performance

Improvements at Adobe with conference, roadmap

30 CF developers at MarketAmerica

WWIT for you to make CF more alive this year?

Stronger CF community

Modern CFML use and use of REST

Forrester whitepaper

Be ok asking and talking with Adobe

What are you looking forward to at CF Summit?

Mentioned in this episode

Adobe API Manager 

CA API manager (formerly Layer 7)

Rakshith Naresh, Adobe Product Manager for ColdFusion

Swagger- the world’s largest framework of API developer tools for the OpenAPI Specification(OAS)

REST

SOAP

WSDL = Web Services Description Language

Elastic search

PCI security

API endpoint

SLA = Service Level Agreement

API Contract

API keys

microservices

Listen to the Audio

 

Bio

Brian Sappey

Brian Sappey is an Applications Architect and Manager of Engineering. His most recent focus has been redesigning the E-commerce infrastructure at Market America/SHOP.com. He is an avid supporter and user of the Adobe API Manager.

Links

CF Summit Adobe Events

 

Interview transcript

Michael:          Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Brian Sappey. I hope I’m saying your name that right there Brian. It looks kind of vaguely foreign even though I know you're American.

Brian:              yes Sappey

Michael:          Sappey, all right. And we're gonna be talking about how he's implemented Adobe's A.P.I. manager with swagger ColdFusion A.P.I. And we'll look at what the A.P.I. manager is and why you should be using it. And what swagger is and how you might use that. And how they migrated from using Layer seven for all these stuff, and some of the big cost savings they had and a whole bunch of automation they're doing in that ColdFusion development using this. So welcome Brian.

Brian:              Thank you, appreciate it. Thank you giving me the time.

Michael:          Oh! You're so welcome. Thanks for staying up late to do this. I know it's after hours for you. And I know you're off to CF Summit in a few days. So glad you were able to fit this interview in. So tell us what is the… not everyone's use the A.P.I. manager in ColdFusion. Tell us what that is and why we should be using it.

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Michaela Light is the host of the CF Alive Podcast and has interviewed more than 100 ColdFusion experts. In each interview,