ColdFusion Alive

David Tattersall talks about “What is new in Fusion Reactor 7 (20 new features)” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light.

Show notes

What is Fusion Reactor

Monitor and Alert for server problems

Highlights of Fusion Reactor

Crash Protection

Memory, CPU

Multiple JVMs supported

Debugger

Code profiler

Less than 1% of CPU used

What is new in Fusion Reactor 7

20 new major features

100 minor improvements and bug fixes

Memory profiler

Soft released August 2nd 2017

Currently on version 7.04

MBean requests and 100s of attributes

Full SQL statements in each request (from Request History)

Pricing $39/mo/server $79 for Ultimate

Do you have a developer edition? $199/year

Why are you proud to use CF?

WWIT for you to make CF more alive this year?

What are you looking forward to at CFCAMP?

Mentioned in this episode

APM = Application Performance Monitor

JVM = Java Virtual Machine

JDBC = database requests

MBean

AWS Cloudwatch

Listen to the Audio

Bio

David Tattersall

David Tattersall has been in working in IT for over 30 years. Since co-founding Integral in 1998, he focused on company management, business development, and sales & marketing. Integral 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

Release notes 

New features  

YouTube channel FusionReactor Monitor 

Interview Transcript

Michaela  0:00

Welcome back to the show I'm here with David has or co founder of integral and make us a fusion reactor and today we're talking about what's new in the freshly released fusion reactor seven with over 20 new features in it. And we're going to be doing a demo later in this which I'll will be talking through. So those of you are listening by audio will be able to get all the exciting stuff and welcome David. Thank you, Michael. Thanks for having me. So just for the people who haven't heard of it, what exactly is fusion reactor?

David Tattersall  0:32

So fusion reactor is a lightweight application performance monitor, it supports all the major Java containers, Tomcat jetty web sphere, J boss, of course, while fly also cold fusion. So fusion reactors been around since 2005 now. And we are the number one monitoring. So solution for cold fusion.

Michaela  1:03

So basically, if you have a cold fusion server that slow or crashing you, you want to have fusion reactor to help figure out what's going on

David Tattersall  1:11

and prevented Absolutely, yeah, so there's two main areas that we focus on those performance related issues, or those some defects and the code bug in the code that you're trying to find out. And, as you rightly say, so the job of the monitor generally monitors do two things a measure, and they alert so measure is in terms of metrics. So things like web requests, JB bc activity, memory and CPU, all the metrics in and around there.

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, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Geoff Bowers talks about “Secrets from the folks who make the official Lucee CFML Docker images” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light.

Show notes

Secrets from the folks who make the official Lucee Docker images

Treat your servers like cattle and not pets - throw old server away and instantiate a new clean one

Much faster server spin up (seconds)

Much easier server setup and programmable install

Continuous delivery ⇒ more confidence at rolling out code changes

Dev → stage → production

CF DevOps Tips

Version control of server instances

No more running server upgrades or patches for CF, the JVM, the OS, the DB - pull a new Docker image and create a fresh server

Programmatically server config

Orchestration of server clusters

High availability by having 2+ containers in different data centers (on AWS)

Checkbox for MySQL replication (and read replicas)

“Infrastructure on demand”

Paying by the minute (auto shut down staging server at night and weekends to save 50% on your AWS costs

Security scanning of docker images

Converting to Docker

No writing files locally → CDN or other shared location

5 day convert to Docker Daemon consulting

Why Serverless is cool.

Spaghetti server architecture

Lasagna layers

Ravioli micro services

What new apps are you building in Lucee CFML

University private video hosting

AWS transcoding service

Queue + auto scaling of servers

16 TB of data

High availability infrastructure

Tricks to migrating legacy ACF to Lucee CFML

The app that would never die

How he started WebDU and why they consciously chose to close it after a 10 year run.

What did you enjoy at CFObjective?

How did you come up with the name Daemon and @modius?

Daemon (is pronounced Demon in the US) like Encyclopaedia / Haemoglobin

Why are you proud to use CFML?

WWIT to make CF more alive this year?

Mentioned in this episode

Lucee CFML

Tomcat

Docker

Containers

Chef

Ansible

Vagrant

Debian Linux

OpenJDK

Alpine Linux - very lean (5MB)

Microsoft Windows Docker containers

Farcry CF CMS

Patrick Quinn episode

AWS

Park My Cloud 

DockerHub

Brian Klass AWS episode

AWS transcoding service

Amazon S3

Amazon EC2

Azure

Digital Ocean

Brad Wood

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Geoff Bowers

Geoff Bowers is a CEO of Daemon in Sydney Australia for 22 years so far and a President of Lucee Association (LAS). He has ran WebDU conference for 10 years.

Links

Website

Twitter

Interview transcript

Michael:          I'm here with Geoff Bower from Demon. [If I'm saying that right. He gave me extensive lessons on how to pronounce it.] And we're going to be talking about secrets from the folks who make the official Lucee CFML Docker images. So as well as that, we’ll look at some ColdFusion dev ups tips. Why is he thinks Servulous is so cool these days, and some of the neat apps he's building with Lucee CFML with his team there down in Australia. And also look at tricks they use on migrating legacy Adobe ColdFusion to Lucee. And we’ll also do a little bit of chat about web [inaudible] [00:40], and a few other interesting things. So welcome Geoff.

Geoff:                         hi there

Michael:          And just in case you don't know, he’s C.E.O. of Demon, has been around for like 22 years, been doing ColdFusion forever, or at least since version one.

Geoff:             Seems like forever. Now probably since version… I think might be version was is three and a half I can’t remember.

Michael:          In 97, was three and a half?

Geoff:                         Nearly three and a half. 97 is sort of the time frame.

Michael:          Yeah, and he's also president of LAS; the Lucy Association Switzerland. So he's the …that's where the buck stops as they say in America.

Geoff:                         It’s where the buck stops, yeah.

Michael:          Yeah, so you guys there make all the official Lucee Docker images. Tell us about that, and why that matters to people listening.

Geoff:             Well, I think the first thing to say is in ter

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, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Luis Majano talks about “CommandBox + ForgeBox: ColdFusion Code, Package, Share, Go!” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light.

Show notes

Why he created CommandBox three years ago

Then there were better tools with other languages and other CFers were moving

He took the lead in creating better CF tooling

Tired of CF language shaming

Created at an Ortus company retreat

What the heck is CommandBox is now

A very thin java layer than wraps Lucee that creates a headless server

A class loader

All coded in CFML

Open source - any CFer can modify and contribute

A package manager

Like Mavin, MPM, Yarn

A CLI and REPL

What the heck a CLI

And what is a REPL?

Can run, evaluation and print code (in a loop)

Scripts and batch files with full OS and piping between scripts

JVM containers

Future plans

Orchestration of cloud servers

Docker

Any WAR file

How containers can save you time and headaches

Containers vs VMs

Total change in doing DevOps

Docker Swarms for scaling

Fast to spin up - light up

CFML is ahead of other languages

CFML portability

Digital Ocean, AWS

Portainer

No need for Node

Using CF tools

See Brad’s article on this below

Package management

What the heck is a package and why would you want to manage it?

Reusability of code

Gives the Dependencies

Continuous Integration

Similar flow and process to what you get in Node

Only need a descriptor Box.json in the folder for it to be treated as a package

Installation

Versioning

Package scripts

Artifacts

Git integration

JAR endpoints

Future - Mavin and Grable support

Why every CFer should create a ForgeBox account

Help promote the CF community

Encourage sharing of code and knowledge by making it easy

MVP did this for Java

Great for your resume

What is ForgeBox

Cloud Repository for packages

Supports multiple versions of your code in one package

Can lock specify dependencies and versions

400+ contribution already there

Gamification of contributors

Free open ForgeBox vs Paid Private ForgeBox

SaaS

Private version for government users and commercial code (vs open source)

ForgeBox Entreprise can run in a container on your private server

Try CommandBox in 10 mins

Download it

Install it

Start a new server

Why are you proud to use CF?

Proud to be a modern CFML developer

The tools and apps (the ecosystem) around the language make you more productive

WWIT for you to make CF more alive this year?

Use cool tools for CFML

Write cool apps in CFML

Share about them online and at conferences

What did you enjoy at CFObjective?

What are you looking forward to at NAGW, CFCAMP and CF Summit?

Mentioned in this episode

Denny Valient of Railo

Lucee CFML

Docker containers

REPL

WAR file

Portainer 

No need for Node blog articles by Brad Wood 

Grunt

Gulp

Upcoming book Modern CFML in 100 minutes book 

This book is inspired by the original Ruby in 100 minutes and Mike Henke's work on CFML in 100 minutes. The purpose of this book is to jumpstart developers into the ColdFusion (CFML) programming language from a modern perspective and a focus on best practices and object orientation.

Ortus Solutions

NAGW

CFCAMP

CF Summit

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Luis Majano

Luis Majano is a Computer Engineer born in El Salvador and is the president of Ortus Solutions, a consulting firm specializing in web development, architecture and professional open source support and services. His background includes over 17 years of software development experience, architecture, and system design.

He is the creator of the ColdBox MVC Platform, ContentBox Modular CMS, CommandBox CLI and many more open source projects. He lives in Texas with his beautiful wife Veronica, baby girl Alexia and baby boy Lucas! You can read his blog and technology musings at https://www.luismajano.com.

Links

cfObjective

Twitter

Interview transcript

Michael:           Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Louis Majano otherwise known as Superman of the ColdFusion world because if you were into the box you actually saw him next to a Superman cutout where you could take his photo. But also, because he's just produced so much open source software, and really helped out the ColdFusion community. We’re going to be looking in depth in today's episode two things that he's been heavily involved in.

One is CommandBox which he created three years ago, and the other is ForgeBox. And why everyone listening needs to know about these things, and I strongly recommend, check them out. And we'll look at what the heck is CommandBox for those people who don't know what it is. And what the heck is a CLI and a REPL. Also look at how containers could be saving you time, and headaches in your ColdFusion development. Why there is no longer any need for node in your development, package management and also, we’ll look at why everyone listening should have a ForgeBox account. And there's a new kind of ForgeBox account of some of you listening may have been waiting for with bated breath if you knew it existed. So welcome, Luis.

Luis:                 Gracias, welcome very much Michael.

Michael:           And he's also the founder of or to [inaudible] [01:16] solutions who do a lot of great stuff. It's not just him there's a whole bunch of guys; Brad, Gavin, all the people who I'm forgetting the names of in the second. But I will remember later.

Luis:                 yes

Michael:           So, suddenly three years ago you decided to create CommandBox, why?

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, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Mark Drew talks about “Let’s get GraphQL! (Smart API access from CFML) ” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light.

Show notes

History of API use: SOAP, REST, GraphQL, oh my!

Why GraphQL?

Why Facebook invented it 2012

Open source version released in 2015 + spec released

What exactly is GraphQL

A query language for APIs

For example, if you look at a single tweet, obtained from Twitter's API, you will so a stack of information that you don't need! If only there was a way to query this data to get just what you need.

GraphQL - A language specification that solves the same problem that SQL did for Relational Databases.

Fundamentals of GraphQL

Hierarchical

Parse the graph of data - parents → children → grandchildren

Product-centric

Strong-typing

Client-specified Queries

Introspective

The API is self-documented

Language Concepts

Fields and subfields

types and fields, not endpoints. Access the full capabilities of your data from a single endpoint. GraphQL uses types to ensure Apps only ask for what’s possible and provide clear and helpful errors

Edges

Nodes

Filters

Arguments

Fragments

Variables

Mutations

CRUD operations

Versioning

Add new fields and types to your GraphQL API without impacting existing queries. Aging fields can be deprecated and hidden from tools. By using a single evolving version, GraphQL APIs give apps continuous access to new features and encourage cleaner, more maintainable server code.

How about in CFML?

Client libs

Java Server Libs

IDL based on the GraphQL apec

Must strip extra whitespace from the query you submit

Who are actually using it and why?

Github

Facebook

Intuit

Pinterest

Coursera

Shopify

Sky TV

Faster to run

Good for mobile apps

Apollo tools and server

How was cf.Objective for you?

What are you looking forward to at CFCAMP and NCDevCon?

Mentioned in this episode

Adam Tuttle

SOAP

REST

REST endpoint

REST get

REST post

REST delete

JSON

Swagger auto documentation creation

GraphQL

History of Facebook inventing GraphQL

The star warsAPI test playground

The GraphicQL swapi  demo

GraphQL edge

GraphQL node

GraphQL filter

GraphQL Fragment

GraphQL Mutations

CRUD = Create Read Update Delete

Matt Gifford

Paw REST software

SAML

Apollo GraphQL tools and clients

Graph.cool

Preside CFML CMS

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Mark Drew

Mark Drew has been programming CFML since 1996, and even though he has had forays into Perl, ASP and PHP he is still loving every line of code he has crafted with CFML. His career has concentrated on eCommerce, Content Management and Application Scalability for various well-known brands in the UK market such as Jaeger, Hackett, Hobbs, Dyson, B&W, Diesel amongst others. He founded CMD, a London based web development consultancy.

Links

Twitter

LinkedIn

CFML Slack

Mark (at) CMDHQ.com

Interview transcript

Michael:          Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Mark Drew from Command MD, a web development consultancy in London, he's the founder. That's a bit like George Washington founded United States except it's a little bit smaller.

Mark:               Just a tad, just a tad, we'll soon be quite as … you know give me 400 years and …

Michael:          There we go yeah.

Mark:               And I'm sure we'll be quite as big as the United State.

Michael:          Exactly, so we're going to be looking at getting graphical with GQraphQL. We’ll look at the history of A.P.I. use, and where GraphQL fits into that. Why you should use it, who's using it, what exactly is the fundamentals of it, some of the subtle language concepts, and mutations that we can look at in there. And also, how you'd use it from ColdFusion, and how to get started on that. We'll have a quick demo in the middle of the episode, so you can see that.

Mark:               And we [inaudible] [00:58] demo gods that everything goes well.

Michael:          Always praise the demo gods. And we'll also check in on how C.F. objective was, and what's coming up at the C.F. camp for Mark. So, welcome Mark.

Mark:               Well, thank you nice to see you again I should say. Are these in order?

Michael:          Yes, they probably are moderately in order. We do shuffle randomly sometimes, but you know you're not alone because otherwise you're going to be like but we have not seen him before yes. So, thank you, thank you for having me on.

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, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Rakshith Naresh talks about “Revealing the ColdFusion 2018 Roadmap details ” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light.

Show notes

How has CF changed over the last few versions

 

API management platform

Docker container - official images will be available by end of Q3 2017

+ Redhat openshift platform

What features are you focusing on CF 2018

Performance

New Performance Management Suite

Runtime faster

Distributed caching (on separate server in your cluster)

ASync programming

Security

Automated lockdown

CF has the least number of issues of any App dev platform

No Zero Day issues over the last 4 years (other languages have had them!)

Language

OO better inheritance including interface inheritance

Pre-alpha release will be announced on blogs.coldfusion.com

PDF better conversion

How do you decide what features to add?

What is the long term commitment of Adobe to ColdFusion?

How are ColdFusion sales going for Adobe?

Sales are growing 12% per year

The biggest revenue for CF sales was this year

Hence Adobe continues to invest in CF

5 years of support plus 2 years extended support

CF 2016 will have full support through 2021. Extended support through 2023

CF 2018 will have full support through 2023. Extended support through 2025

Security hotfixes are provided in full support period

Why are you proud to use CF?

He has been on the CF team for 11 years (during CF 8 build as engineer)

CF is critical to 76% of our customers in their tech

70% of Fortune 100 companies use CF

50% of Fortune 500 companies use CF

WWIT for you to make CF more alive this year?

New features in CF 2018

CF Summit support

Large customer and analyst (Gartner and Forrester) conversations

Changing the perception of CF as being a modern and alive technology

What are you looking forward to at CF Summit?

500+ attendees - was sold out last year

Mentioned in this episode

Adobe ColdFusion 2018 roadmap

Adobe ColdFusion open buglist

Elishia CF Summit episode 

Redhat openshift container platform - a container application platform that brings docker and Kubernetes to the enterprise

CF Summit

API management platform

Docker containers

Adobe ColdFusion (2018 Release) Public Beta

Related

Docker containerization official version

Docker containerization metered licensing cost

The only form on cloud pricing that is available currently on AWS where you can pay by the hour - They will soon have CF 2018 on AWS too.

Why You Should Attend CF Summit 2018

Listen to the Audio

 

Bio

Rakshith Naresh

Rakshith Naresh senior product manager for ColdFusion at Adobe. He decides the future direction of CF there.

Links

Twitter

 LinkedIn

Adobe

Interview Transcript

Michael:          Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Rakshith Naresh. I hope I'm saying your name right there. I had to practice it several times.

Rakshith:         [Crosstalk] [00:09]

Michael:          Excellent. He's the Senior Product Manager for ColdFusion Adobe, and he's the guy who decides the future direction of ColdFusion there. And in today's episode, we're going to be looking at the ColdFusion 2018 roadmap that they're working on, and be released in a few weeks’ time on the Adobe site. So, we're going to start off by looking at how ColdFusion has changed in the last few versions, and what particular features they're focusing on for ColdFusion 2018 that's going to be released next year. And also, we’re going to look at how they decide what features to add, and the long term commitment of Adobe to ColdFusion. And if I can squeeze Sir Rakshith’s binds back we'll find out how to ColdFusion sales are going. So, welcome Rakshith.

Rakshith:         Thanks a lot Michael, it's great chance to be on this podcast.

Michael:          So, how has ColdFusion changed over the last few versions? I think you have a slide you want to share with us, show some detail on that.

Rakshith:         Absolutely, so in fact, we've had a transformation over the last few releases. [Inaudible] want to go for us Michael has been to make sure that ColdFusion is the most stable, and productive back in out there for any kind of business logic that you can host, is still across the host of bind sight technologies.

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, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Thomas Grobicki talks about “The true ROI of ColdFusion (how to sell CF to your boss or client) ” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light. We re discussing the ROI of using Coldfusion. I strongly believe that the case to use CF has to be made for business reasons. All

"I strongly believe that the case to use CF has to be made for business reasons. All to often the discussion is about the technical merits and completely ignores why a business might want to use CF, particularly CF enterprise." - Thomas Grobicki

Show notes

Why the ROI of using ColdFusion is much higher than you think

Saved time developing apps

Easy built in features

Web services

Easy db query

Easy migration between db platforms

Charting

Threading

And many more

Google maps

Few lines of code to write or read later in maintenance

50% more efficient to code in than .Net, PHP, Java, C++

Savings of $10-100k+ depending on team size, developers and project size.

Better reliability

Cost of outages

SLA refunds

Reputation and trust with customers

Auto bug reporting

Self healing databases

99.8% app uptime

And most of the downtime is Windows patching scheduled downtime

Savings of $10-100k depending on your SLA and customer base

Lost opportunity cost of delayed features to market

Lost customers due to slow feature delivery

Savings of $10k-1M+ depending on your customer base size and product pricing

Value of RAD of new features for new customer demos for their strongest pain point that was missing from your app (and all your competition)

50% of sales have been closed due to this

Backwards compatibility of CFML among versions

Not having to extensively rewrite when a new version of CF comes out

Not having to use 3rd party libraries to get stuff done

When you upgrade the non-CF language you have to retest/recode to allow for this.

Sometimes the library is even discontinued  and you have to replace and recode to replace it

ColdFusion deals with this for you because the features are built in

Saving $10-100k

Total savings from using CF  $40k-$1.3M ← How to make the business case for using CF

Why CF Enterprise vs Standard

If an Enterprise feature saves you even ½ a month of developer time it is worth it

Overcoming concern of availability of developers in CF

There is an active CF consulting marketplace

But easy to train good web-db developers from languages to CFML

They already know HTML, CSS, JS, SQL

They already know how to write good scripting language code

Easy to learn CFML

Be ok investing in your staff

The developers programming skills and attitude are more important than the language they first

Overcoming fear about Adobe exiting the CF market

10 year road map for CF

50+ developers on the Adobe CF development team

Adobe support the annual CF Summit

Adobe CF developer week

6 CF conference this year

Adobe is selling thousands of new CF licenses every quarter

Plus upgrades

Plan B: Lucee CFML open source

200k+ public CF sites and many more intranets and cloaked sites

Dealing with End of Life cycle CFML features

CF report builder

Crystal Reports is not an option

CF Chart

Provide replacement 3rd party tools if a feature is deprecated

Provide a migration tool if changing how features work

The horrors of migrating from CF 10 to CF 11

Why are you proud to use CF?

WWIT for you to make CF more alive this year?

(* WWIT = What Would It Take)

Mentioned in this episode

ROI = Return on Investment

SLA = Service Level Agreement

RAD = Rapid Application Development

Legacy apps in any language are harder to maintain whatever the language

Idea: CFML for PHPers guide

Adobe CF Summit 

Adobe CF developer week 

CRF files = ColdFusion Report writer files

Hackathon contest: CF vs PHP (no libraries allowed)

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Thomas Grobicki

CEO of Avilar Technologies, Inc. talent management apps -  learning and competency management system in hospital healthcare, insurance, finance, and DOD.

Links

Website

LinkedIn 

Interview transcript

Michael:          Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Thomas Grobicki. If I'm saying his name right. That looks really Polish there Thomas.

Thomas:           [inaudible] [00:09] Polish. So, you know a lot of different channels, but absolutely.

Michael:          So, today we're going to be looking at the true ROI of using ColdFusion, and why that ROI may be much higher. And ROI just in case you didn’t know is “Return on Investment”. So, it's how much value you get out of using ColdFusion versus other languages. And how you can make the business case for using ColdFusion. Overcoming fears you might have about Adobe Eckstein the ColdFusion markets. Dealing with end of life cycle issues with features go away, [and we have a couple of features we're going to talk about going away, and how Thomas dealt with that]. And some horror stories he had migrated from C.F. 10 to 11 a few years back. So, welcome Thomas.

Thomas:           Thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity, and looking forward to sharing my enthusiasm for ColdFusion.

Michael:          Me too, we’re here to help ColdFusion be more alive. So, I think knowing that ColdFusion has a good ROI is important because oftentimes even if developers, or CIO’s want to use a technology sometimes, they have to show that it has a good ROI.

Thomas:           Right, right yeah, so again I grew up, I’ve been doing software development for a long time. But Avila has been doing ColdFusion for the last twenty years. So, our products are built on a ColdFusion basis. And a lot of times, people… I'm certainly evangelical about ColdFusion features, and things like that. But the bottom line is as a business owner, you have to make the case for why using ColdFusion is better than other alternative environments. And certainly, when you look at ROI factors like people frequently bring up the cost of ColdFusion and then something is free, and ColdFusion costs money. But I don't really ever judge things from that perspective. Yeah, it costs some money. But programming time and server outages, and other things that cost you customers are a lot more expensive than the relatively low cost of a ColdFusion environment.

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, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Elliotte Bowerman talks about "The Opportunities of Being a Woman in Tech Today" in this episode of the CF Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

"I have actually spent the last dozen years in the tech industry. And it has been so incredibly fulfilling to be a part of technologies that are really changing the world. And I think that anyone who's called to this industry is, in fact, a unicorn. We want to make something bigger than ourselves, we see the magic in the ones and zeroes, and in the opportunities that technology opens up for the world." - Elliotte Bowerman

Show notes

The opportunities of being a women in tech today

Focus on opportunities rather than challenges

Power, Pay, Play gaps

Women do better at crowd funding

Why you need to break The Rules in tech

You don’t have to fit into the culture

Still connect

Be more of you

Don’t be afraid of conflict

Need to 100% ready to leap up

Vs 60% for men

I can learn fast on the job

I can delegate

Salary negotiation

You are interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you

Don’t accept the first offer

20% more or transparency

Be up front about your needs - hiring is a 2-way street

Being shy about your needs is not cute

Lean in vs Leap out

Lean in - taking a seat at the power table

Focus on ourselves

Overcoming the negative voices in my head

Growing up Awkward, chubby, ashamed of being smart

Get comfortable with discomfort ← reframe

Fear → I am excited

Power pose legs taking up space

Changing the bully dynamic of the tech industry

Meeting her high school bully on FB

Glitter is a Shame repellent

Glitter eye shadow - how do you want to be seen?

Sparkle back harder

Mind-set - what is YOUR glitter?

Hiding your special magic vs sharing it

Google #Iamremarkable

Are you wearing your Power bling today?

Overcomes not being noticed at meetings

Ready for battle

Avoid the zombie unicorn women in tech

Scarcity mentality

Why security is a lie, and the search for safety is dangerous and limiting for your career

Confidence in our skills

A community of support

“If you are not growing then you are going”

Save some money

Mentioned in this episode:

Book Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg

Lean in women of the 415 group

Google #Iamremarkable

Salesforce salary audit

Book Superbetter by Jane McGonigal

Yes x Yes Yes conference

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Elliotte Bowerman

Elliotte Bowerman, is the Unicorn Muse and cofounder of the Unicorn Scouts.

Elliotte Bowerman, the Unicorn Muse, helps professional unicorns - women in tech - "get in their glitter" to get more pay, more power and more play in their careers and their lives. An award-winning journalist, tech PR executive and former VP of Marketing, Elliotte has worked with 20+ startups over the past dozen years. She's been the most senior woman at multiple tech companies, built and managed teams in difficult work environments, and learned how to bend and break "the rules" to turn her job into a lifestyle delivery system.

Elliotte is a single mother, soul marketer, entrepreneur, professional play-grounding guide, conscious life crafter, speaker, writer, workshop leader, artist, and magic maker. In addition to working with adults, Elliotte is also dedicated to helping "unicorn kids" - the magical ones that don't quite fit in with the herd - be seen, supported and encouraged to shine. In 2017, Elliotte co-founded the Unicorn Scouts with her 7-year-old daughter. She Kickstarted more than $10,000 to create a global community - a Glitter Guild - that brings artful, in-powering, magical odysseys to alternative folks of all ages. These adventures teach life skills - including shame resilience, creative self-expression, boundary setting, gratitude, mindfulness, and community - through interactive stories and playful missions delivered via physical mail + digital channels. A portion of all Unicorn Scouts and Glitter Guild proceeds go to support free outreach activities and sponsored memberships for at-risk youth.

Links

Website

Facebook 

Instagram

Twitter

Medium

Interview Transcript

Michael:          Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Elliotte Bowerman, and we're going to be looking at the opportunity of being a woman in technology today. And we're going to also look at leaning in versus leaping out. Why you need to break the rules in tech, changing the bully dynamic of the tech industry. And glitter as a shame repellant. So, welcome Elliotte.

Elliotte:           Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited.

Michael:          Me too; and in case you don't know Elliotte, she is the unicorn muse and co-founder of the Unicorn Scouts. And we will talk more about that towards the end of the episode. But right now, let's look at what the opportunities of being a woman in tech today are.

Elliotte:           Yes, well, I have actually spent the last dozen years in the tech industry. And it has been so incredibly fulfilling to be a part of technologies that are really changing the world. And I think that anyone who's called to this industry is in fact a unicorn. We want to make something bigger than ourselves, we see the magic in the ones and zeroes, and in the opportunities that technology opens up for the world, right. Look at the incredible access that people have to money through technologies like PayPal and crowd funding. Kick starter has enabled myself to start a business and so many other people to turn their passion into actual products and into companies.

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, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Patrick Quinn talks about “CFML Secrets (AWS, Lucee and SeeFusion” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light. He is the CoFounder, CEO and CTO of Webapper and  Global Product manager at LAS.

"We think doing more of what we’ve been doing would be the best way to make CFML a more “alive” community. For Webapper’s part, we’ve updated our offerings to include Amazon cloud hosting, released 3 new versions of our SeeFusion product in the past year (including with AWS integrations), and, most importantly, we’ve put our financial and technical backing behind Lucee, the F/OSS CFML platform. In our opinion, Lucee is the most exciting and energetic force in the CFML world. We think it’s the future of CFML, and we’re excited to watch it grow, and to be a part of that growth with our Lucee-centered products and services." Patrick Quinn

Show notes

The Challenges of AWS managed Lucee hosting

What is new at Webapper

AWS

“Infrastructure as code”

The move from Adobe ColdFusion to Lucee CFML

ACF cloud pricing model and Adobe EULA - pay per server virtual instance

Joined LAS

On the Board of Directors

Global Product Manager of LAS

Monthly release cycle / sprint

More transparency

Build automation

Test driven development

What is exciting about Lucee in the coming year

Same day/hour Security hotfixes

More releases and smoother regressions/fewer bugs

Test coverage checking

The Lucee Roadmap for Lucee 5.3 and 6.0

Approx 12-18 months away (not official date)

Feature voting in Lucee JIRA ticketing system

Sponsored fixes

Backwards compatibility of X.0 releases

Commercial software vs open source software

Supporting the last two prior major releases. 5-10 year support window

Lightweight install and small footprint

Faster start up

Official Lucee AWS server gold image in the cloud (AWS marketplace) AMI (Amazon Machine Image)

Pre-installed, pre-optimized

Contributor paid cloud version

SeeFusion Secrets for CF high performance

CF Cloud monitoring support

Amazon cloudwatch integration

Been available for 13 years

SeeFusion 5.2 due in August

Cloud licensing by server per hour

Why are you proud to use CFML?

We’ve always loved CFML as a core tool of ours because of its combined simplicity and power. It has also acted as a great technical “glue” for us over the years, connecting systems, marshaling different technologies together into one stack, etc. Beyond its usefulness, we’re also proud of its history, in particular of its status as the first application server to market in 1995. Since most of us at Webapper worked at Allaire Corporation, we’ve always been proud of being part of that technical and corporate history.

Best of breed tool

WWIT for you to make CF more alive this year?

We think doing more of what we’ve been doing would be the best way to make CFML a more “alive” community. For Webapper’s part, we’ve updated our offerings to include Amazon cloud hosting, released 3 new versions of our SeeFusion product in the past year (including with AWS integrations), and, most importantly, we’ve put our financial and technical backing behind Lucee, the F/OSS CFML platform. In our opinion, Lucee is the most exciting and energetic force in the CFML world. We think it’s the future of CFML, and we’re excited to watch it grow, and to be a part of that growth with our Lucee-centered products and services.

Adobe CF 10 year roadmap, CF Summit support

What are you looking forward to / did you enjoy at CFObjective?

Looking forward to more of the defining characteristic of cf.Objective()--namely, that it’s the most advanced CFML conference in existence. In-depth sessions about the latest topics, trends and tooling in web software development. It’s also a great time for the worldwide Lucee team to spend some in-person time together

Mentioned in this episode

Mike Brunt

Daryl Banttari

Allaire

Amazon AWS partner program

Cloud design pattern applications vs monolith apps

Docker containers

AWS Autoscaling

Clone server to a new big virtual server

Amazon cloudfront a global content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to your viewers with low latency and high transfer speeds.

AWS Geo-distributed systems

AWS Availability zones

Replicated database servers

Lucee

Jeff Bower

Build automation

Test-driven development

Test coverage

Pete Freitag

HackMyCF

Ant

Maven

ORM

Flex

Angular

Lucee JIRA ticket system

Lucee TAG (Technical Advisory Group)

AWS marketplace

Ortus Solutions

CommandBox

AWS CloudWatch

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Patrick Quinn

CoFounder, CEO and CTO of Webapper. Global Product manager at LAS.

I'm the Co-Founder and CEO/CTO of Webapper Services. Since 2001, we've been providing a true one-stop-shop consulting experience for customers with CFML-based web applications (ColdFusion or Lucee). We've worked on many of the largest, highest-traffic systems in this space. In recent years, with the advent of cloud technology, we've been able to transform into a new kind of hosting company, where we combine AWS's leading cloud technology with our extensive web application engineering expertise. The result is an even better experience for our customers, who benefit not only from a 21st-century "true cloud" hosting infrastructure, but also from dramatically improved tech support that's delivered by engineers who are not only well-versed (and certified) in AWS technology, but who are also experienced application engineers.

My strongest professional interest at this juncture of my career lies at the locus of culture, process, and code. In short, I thrive on the alchemy of combining these 3 key ingredients for creating high-performing technology organizations. Pragmatically speaking, if you’re achieving sub-optimal results, and aren’t sure if your code, process or culture are the problem, I can help. Or, if you are tackling a particularly challenging IT project, and have concerns about strategy, or execution, or both, I can help. Or, if you have an organizational/technical mess on your hands, I’m especially good at cleaning up.

I have personally delivered over 500 successful engagements, to hundreds of customers all over the world.

I was born and raised in Chicago, received my bachelor’s and master’s degrees at The University of Chicago in the 1990s, and have been solving technology problems ever since.

Links

WebApper

See Fusion

LinkedIn

Interview transcript

Michael:          Welcome back to the show. I am here with Patrick Quinn from WebApper and the Lucee Association of Switzerland and we're going to be looking at the challenges AWS managed Lucee C.F.M.L. hosting doing things in the cloud that you used to do on a server and all the clever stuff he's been doing a web app with that. Also, how they have moved their focus from Adobe ColdFusion to Lucee C.F.M.L. and why they did that.

And as he's the product manager global product manager. I'm sorry Patrick. I'm going to get your title right there because I know it's far more important being a global project manager for Lucee.

Patrick:            of course

Michael:          What's exciting about Lucee coming up in the coming year? And we'll also briefly mention some C. Fusion secrets you can use for high performance on the cloud. Because ColdFusion has been upgraded now, works on the cloud versions of ColdFusion so, we'll mention that as well. So, welcome Patrick.

Patrick:            Thank you Michael great to be with you as always.

Michael:          Yes good seeing you so, you've moved to doing AWS managed Lucee hosting. What are the challenges you had to deal with in doing that because it could be quite complicated to get it right?

Patrick:            Right so, the first challenge was just picking that meaning I managed hosting in the Amazon cloud, or we also offer consulting and support services to customers who are already in the Amazon cloud. But we've been doing ColdFusion consulting since the very beginning. Our co-founder Mike [inaudible] 01:34 has support emails from 01:37 on our hard drive somewhere. He was with the platform before is was even called C.F.M.L. back when it was called D.B.M.L. – Data Base Markup Language.

And then of course you know all of us here at WebApper we all work to deliver together that's where you met myself, our co-founder Mike, Darryl, the chief executive C. Fusion [inaudible] and lots of other people who [inaudible] over the years. So, we did that consulting work for a lair that was really the first ColdFusion consulting in the world continued under Macromedia and then we started WebApper after the Macromedia days and it's been since 2001 we've been doing this. So, we were just doing hundreds and hundreds of ColdFusion consulting support and development agency and that was great. And then, around about the time that I personally had completed my five hundred ColdFusion product projects under the WebApper Bella 02:28, I started thinking more seriously about that C.E.O. title I have instead of just being the developer who happens to sign paychecks.

And so, we started thinking about what's next, what would be the next generation move [inaudible] 2:41 move for our company. And so, we've been partnered with a lot of traditional hosting companies over the years. We brought in professional services for a lot of the ColdFusion hosting companies. And we started looking more and more at the Amazon cloud first for a machinery and then, just maybe provide this as an offering. And then, that's when the label went off and realized wow, we can actually be able to manage those the provider, we can control the entire system; no middleman at all.

Read more

...

Sami Gardner talks about "Smart Developer Career Strategies and How Women Can Get Ahead in Tech" in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light.

"It is a bare minimum to be hardworking, competent, and skilled, and have a degree. That's like saying a car has wheels. Nobody's going to buy a car just because it has wheels. Nowadays, you have to really position yourself. So, when you're thinking about the type of job that you want, how you're going to get there. You have to be strategic especially when you are in something like tech where people want to get into tech." - Sami Gardner

Show notes

Smart Career strategy - how to get to your ideal job

Reverse engineer your dream job skill set from LinkedIn searches

Be ok learning on the job

Specialized vs full stack

Getting over the full stack mentality

Lack of on the job training → turnover

The consequences of poaching staff

Lack of job loyalty and faster raises

2 year average stay

Job ad buzzword overload

What are issues you have experienced with being a woman in tech

Gender Confidence differences when applying for jobs and tasks

Women need to feel 150% confident that they can do a job or to even attempt anything

Men are ok to feel 60% confident that they can do a job + think they can learn the rest at the weekend

Job title rolette

Different titles in different companies for the same job

Getting your own job title vs programmer 1-4

Detail work

Lunch and learn - the why vs the how

Desire for job stability vs risk

Freelance rates vs permanent jobs salary

How to deal with not being listened to in meetings

Use the “man microphone” to repeat what you say so that people pay attention

Being discouraged from going into tech when in school

Being redirected into nurturing careers by school officials

Wanted to join the electronics club but was told she couldn’t

Don’t worry about about math, because you are a girl

Persistence and working around obstacles

Hiring pool male bias

University bias

Networking to get junior devs - ask existing staff “do you know someone?”

Why are you proud to be a woman in tech?

Mentioned in this episode

LinkedIn Advanced Search

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Sami Gardner

Sami Gardner is a Career Stagnation Stopper, Librarian, and World Traveler. She inspires technical, artistic, socially conscious types to craft their career on their terms. With experience in peer counseling, higher education, and facilitating career services at international tech bootcamps, she guides clients in evolving their careers.  

Links

Sami Gardner 

Facebook

LinkedIn

Interview Transcript

Michael:          Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Sami Gardener, and we're going to be talking about smart developer career strategies, and also how women can get ahead in tech. And we're going to look at how you can create, having your ideal job over a few years with a strategy which many people don't even think about. So, some new stuff in there. And also, we're going to have a look at some of the consequences of how tech careers are currently set up and or how they're not set up.

We'll also look at some of the gender confidence differences between men and women when applying for jobs, and doing projects. How to deal with not being listened to in meetings, Job Title Roulettes and how she deals with the desire for job stability versus risk. Also, we'll look at how to deal with being discouraged from going into tech when you're in school. So, welcome Sami.

Sami:               Hi, thank you Michael. I'm glad to be on.

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, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Brian Klaas talks about “Level Up Your ColdFusion Web Apps With Amazon Web Services” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is well known to developers for providing a vast army of on-demand servers on which you can run anything, including CFML or Node.js. AWS offers a whole lot more than servers in the cloud, though. AWS is comprised of over 40 services which enable powerful Web/mobile application functionality, and you can tap into nearly all of them using your favorite programming language. With only a few lines of code, you get powerful, hugely scalable functionality that would otherwise be near-impossible to build yourself. This talk will show you how to tap in to the power of multiple AWS services from your CFML code, and mix in some Node.js goodness along the way.

Show notes

Get super fast, infinitely scalable file storage with Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)

Invoke on-demand Node.js microservices through AWS Lambda

Tap into AI to manage and search images with Reflektor

Utilize a high-throughput NoSQL datastore with DynamoDB

Plan for common problems when dealing with cloud service providers

What are Amazon Web Services and why should CFers care?

It is far more than just EC2

AWS is comprised of over 40 services which enable powerful Web/mobile application functionality

What exactly is S3 storage?

Get super fast, cheap, infinitely scalable file storage

Replicated over multiple data centers around the world

ACF and Lucee both support S3 storage

Storing log files, images, videos, user docs

Athena for text file search

Life cycle policies - if files not used in over N months move to slow storage (Amazon Glacier).

How to tap into AI to manage and search images with Reflektor

Amazon Rekognition - image recognition for faces, auto tagging, matching confidence score

Poly text to speech

Lex natural language process

The great S3 outage of 2017

loss/downtime risk vs cost of home building or duplication at other cloud services

Amazon eats their own dog food (AWS including S3) ⇒ they are highly motivated to have super high up time.

How you can Invoke on-demand Node.js micro services from ColdFusion through AWS Lambda

Lambda Run in Docker containers but without you have to provision them or the servers underneath them

AWS Lambda automatically scales your application by running code in response to each trigger. Your code runs in parallel and processes each trigger individually, scaling precisely with the size of the workload.

With AWS Lambda, you are charged for every 100ms your code executes and the number of times your code is triggered. You don't pay anything when your code isn't running.

Utilize a high-throughput NoSQL datastore with DynamoDB

Amazon DynamoDB is a fast and flexible NoSQL database service for all applications that need consistent, single-digit millisecond latency at any scale. It is a fully managed cloud database and supports both document and key-value store models.

Geo distributed data for speed and increased reliability

Avoiding common problems when dealing with cloud service providers

Vendor lock in

Fall back code when your provider fails

Friendly service degrading - only certain functionality stops works

Cached data

Getting started

It is easier than you might think

SDK are easy (even though originally written for Java)

CFDUMP is your friend

AWS blog and stack over examples

Why are you proud to use CF?

Productive fast

Easy to combine with other languages and SDKs

Be a polyglot programmer!

WWIT for you to make CF more alive this year?

More people highlighting the cool projects they have created in CFML

What is possible with modern CF

Better official tooling support

Fast CF server spin up

What are you looking forward to at CFObjective?

Learn a bunch from smarter developer

CFML + a bunch of other exciting stuff

Mentioned in this episode

Amazon Web Services

Re:invent conference with 1000+ sessions on AWS and 40,000 attendees 

S3 storage

Amazon Glacier  

Amazon Rekognition 

Amazon Photos

AWS Java SDK

Boto library for Python

The great S3 outage of 2017 

Elastic 

AWS Lambda - lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. You pay only for the compute time you consume - there is no charge when your code is not running

Elastic video/audio transcoder 

Amazon DynamoDB document datastore

MongoDB 

Amazon Athena 

Pay per query

AWS availability zones (free) and regions (costs more)

IBM openwisk

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Brian Klaas

Brian Klaas is the Senior Technology Officer at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Teaching and Learning. As the architect for eLearning technology at the School, he leads a team that designs and delivers custom online courseware to students and members of the public health workforce around the globe. In addition to designing software and delivering courses, Brian is the manager of the Johns Hopkins Web Technology Forum, teaches “Introduction to Online Learning,” and leads faculty training and development courses. Brian has presented on software development and eLearning at conferences throughout the country, including jQuery US, cf.Objective(), CF Summit, Into the Box, NCDevCon, Adobe MAX, UBTech, and CUE.

Links

Website

Twitter

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Interview transcript

Michael:          Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Brian Klass, and he is speaking at C.F objective in a few days' time about how you can level up your web apps with Amazon Web Services. And before you yawn, there’s so many things in Amazon Web Services you probably didn't even know are there. And we will talk a bit about that and all the amazing things you can do with S-3 storage. And he is going to be demoing at C.F. objective how you can use ColdFusion and 00:28 [Node J S micro-services to invoke on demand way so, you can use a WS lambda, and we'll talk about what that is.

And also, we've got some artificial intelligence stuff you can call from your app as well which is processing images using a thing called ‘reflector’. And we'll also look at some notes sequel data store using dynamo D.B. And he's going to be talking about common problems you can avoid when you're dealing with cloud service providers. So, I hope on interesting stuff the modern web app development. Welcome Brian.

Brian:              Thank you, thank you Michael very much.

Michael:          So, let's just start off. People think they probably know what Amazon Web Services is, there's actually more to it than you might think, right. Tell us what it is and why we should be paying attention to it.

Brian:              Absolutely, so I think for most developers their introduction to Amazon Web Services was or is a service known as EC-2 which is elastic Compute Cloud. That's their vast array of virtualize servers that come in all sorts of shapes, sizes and memory and speed, and all that stuff. And a lot of people say oh we're going to move stuff out of our data center on the AWS, right. And by that, I mean they're going to run their on demand applications, their custom apps, their licensed apps, inside of the AWS’s computing center, server centers so that they don't have to run their own datacenter because nobody wants to run servers; it's incredibly boring. Well, that is actually the most boring part of AWS.

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