ColdFusion Alive

Scott Coldwell talks about “Managing an international team, Git, CFML, Node, Joomla, Headaches and Heartaches” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light.

Scott is one of the speakers of the upcoming Into The Box ColdFusion Conference, where he will talk about Managing an international team, Git, CFML, Node, Joomla, headaches and heartaches.

In his ITB talk, Scott shares how source control is the cornerstone of any substantial codebase, but managing incoming changes and getting them out the door can be complicated, time-consuming, and frustrating.

"You know developers are so anxious to get started on things and they just jump right in and sometimes Source Control is seen as a second-rate thing and, but I gotta tell you it's just crazy not to use it. It is absolutely critical. Even for a one-man show to have things in source control, to have a good history of what you've done, and to have those backups and the possibility to deploy in an automated way. I just can't imagine not having source control on every single project that I work on." - Scott Coldwell

Episode highlights

Why is source control critical for all ColdFusion developers

How to best manage lots of incoming changes via Git and keep aligned with your business process and release cycle

Lessons from the trenches on working with multiple teams, in multiple time zones, multiple countries and multiple programming languages (CFML, PHP and Node)

Avoiding Deployment Day Disasters

Project management war stories

Why are you proud to use CF?

WWIT (What Would It Take) to make CF more alive this year?

Conferences, podcast

The Modern Face of CFML

What are you looking forward to at Into The Box?

Source control is the cornerstone of any substantial codebase, but managing incoming changes and getting them out the door can be complicated, time-consuming, and frustrating. In git, where branching is a first-class operation, we'll look at tried-and-true strategies to manage code changes, and see how those strategies align with business processes and release cycles.

Working with one team is tough enough, but with multiple teams, in multiple time zones, countries, different programming languages, cfml, php and node things get even more complex. I have worked in this environment, working through some tough lessons, and learning a lot on the way.

Join me as I tell you a few stories, and give you some strategies for dealing with your project, no matter how small, or big and complex it is.

Mentioned in this episode

Git stashing - a local commit off to the side and come back to it later

Git commit without push

Git branching and merging

Project release cycle/ Sprint

3 weeks total

2 weeks development + 1 QA/bug fix/plan next release

Plus release notes

The good cadence of the cycle

Agile methodology

Daily scrum meetings

Scrum master helps with good communication within team and developers staying focused on tasks

Challenge of defining tickets before start coding

His project tools

Notification only during certain times

Seamless between computer, web and phone

Helps keep things moving

Channels to organize communication

Mute channels not interested in but @ mentions still

Better team orientation than Skype. Better feature than HipChat

Slack

Jira bug tracking

Confluence wiki

Sourcetree and bitbucket

Beyond compare - side by side comparison - can hide what you define as “less important” changes, can find

Sublime code editor - multiline edit, quick selections, nice themes

Core meeting time for all teams

Deployment process

The enemy of reliability is complexity

“I didn't have time to write a short program, so I wrote a long one instead.” with hat tip to original quote about writing letters by Mark Twain

Ticketing system - track bugs, hotfixes and change requests

Gitflow

Branch per feature

Common Deployment language and terms

“Run the merge scripts”

Beginning with the end in mind - from 7 Habits by Stephen Covey

Speaker details

Scott is a developer and sysadmin at Computer Know How and has been building the web since 2006. He loves elegant, simple solutions and helping others achieve the same.

Links

Twitter

Blog

LinkedIn

Interview transcript

Michael:               Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Scott Caldwell from Computer Know How and he is going to be talking about managing an international team using Git, ColdFusion, Node, Joomla, and all the headaches and heartaches he went through on a big project. So we're gonna look at how he used source control. In particular, Git and why that's critical for all ColdFusion developers.

How to best manage lots of incoming changes by Git, and keeping aligned with your business process and release cycle at the same time. Lessons from the trenches on working with multiple teams, in multiple time zones, in multiple countries and multiple programming languages. I can see where the headache and heartache part came in in this talk. And avoiding deployment day disasters and project management war stories. So, welcome Scott.

Scott:                    Thank you so much for having me, it's an honor to be here.

Michael:               Yeah, great to have you on. So I know in our recent state of the union ColdFusion survey, not everyone uses source control. Maybe about 20% of people who took the survey don't use it, and of course we all know that only the most engaged developers take online surveys 'cause they see them in forums or what have you, so I've [crosstalk 00:01:14] gotta guess that it easily could be that 50% of program developers out in the wild don't use source control. So why in your opinion is that critical that they use it.

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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.

Seth Engen talks about “Adventures with ColdFusion and ContentBox in the Wild” in this episode of the ColdFusion Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

Seth is one of the speakers of the upcoming Into The Box ColdFusion Conference, where he will talk about ContentBox In The Wild.

In his ITB talk, Seth will mention a variety of specific real-world scenarios where ContentBox has answered business needs. 

"We're dealing with in theming essentially HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This is the one area where it's probably most like other content management systems but with ContentBox I think there's a real power." - Seth Engen

Episode highlights

What the heck is ContentBox?

How is it different from other open source ColdFusion CMSs?

Built On top of ColdBox framework

Security good

Scalable

Great support from Ortus

Why use ContentBox Themes and what are the amazing things that you can you do with them?

How ContentBox widgets make it easy to program common business needs

A CFC with a UI that you can drag and drop in the content page

Some data and properties are exposed in the UI so that user admins can edit directly

How creating ContentBox modules helps with integration to other software

Integrate with 3rd party software such as Stripe to charge credit cards

Integrate Full Calendar and Google Calendar API into one module

Called from a widget

Why are you proud to use CF?

WWIT to make CF more alive this year?

Community

Education such as conferences

Education to folks who have old info about CFML

What are you looking forward to at Into The Box?

Learning

Networking

ContentBox In The Wild

ContentBox is an open source CMS ready and waiting for use in your next project. See a variety of specific real world scenarios where ContentBox has answered business needs. This demonstration will outline business needs and their associated solution using a ContentBox theme, widget, or module.

Objectives:

Customizing Themes w/ Customized Menu Solutions

Creating Widgets for Common Business Needs

Developing Modules for Robust ContentBox Integration

Mentioned in this episode

ContentBox

ColdBox

BootSwatch theme toggler

ForgeBox download themes, widgets and modules

CKTemplates - WYSIWYG editor integration

FontAwesome icons and themes 

Code from the talk is available on ForgeBox and GitHub

Ortus Developer week

Speaker details

Seth Engen is a co-owner of Computer Know How, a Wisconsin-based technology firm that he started with Curt Gratz in 1997. At the companies start he was introduced to CFML (version 4) and has been programming in the language ever since. Seth really enjoys creating web applications with great user interface experiences.

Links

Twitter

Computer Know How

(* WWIT = What Would It Take)

Interview transcript

Michaela Light:               Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Seth Engen from Computer Know How. In fact, he was the co-owner of that. Founded it quite awhile ago back when ColdFusion 4 was out. We're going to be talking about adventures with ColdFusion and ContentBox in the wild. Not just theoretical but practical. We'll check in what ContentBox is, how it's different from other open source ColdFusion CMS's, why you should be using ContentBox themes, and some of the amazing stuff you can do with them. How ContentBox widgets make it easy to program common business needs, how creating modules help with integrating ContentBox out of software. Welcome, Seth.

Seth Engen:                     Thanks for having me.

Michaela Light:               Let's just start off for folks who don't know, what the heck is ContentBox?

Seth Engen:                     Well, ContentBox as the website and some of the documentation indicates is just an open source CMS, Content Management System. It's very similar to a WordPress, something like that. But for us, those familiar with ColdFusion and have written and programmed in ColdFusion over the years, ContentBox is written in ColdFusion and built on top of ColdBox. Some of the Ortus solutions suite of products, stuff we've interacted with for about as long as we've interacted with ColdFusion overall but just a really solid content management system for your use in your business and with things that you do on the web and those things that you need custom programmed. A great content management system for your use.

Michaela Light:               Cool. You know, there's a lot of open source ColdFusion CMS's out there. Mura, FarCry, Preside, if I'm getting the name right. How is ContentBox different from those other than it's built on top of ColdBox?

Seth Engen:                     Actually that is probably the biggest difference I think. I haven't had a lot of experience with those. I think the difference, and even with other non-ColdFusion based CMS's but they've really built ContentBox with security in mind initially. Very much a modular architecture. Designed it, and we've seen this with some of our business customers and their successes, designed it to scale.

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.

Esmeralda Acevedo talks about “Better ContentBox Themes and easily creating an Amazing UI” in this episode of the ColdFusion Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

"I could become more active in the community. But I'm already part of the Box team on Slack and that's how people can reach me. I'm new to this if I can help anybody there, as it is I've had a lot of people helping me when I was building my project." - Esmeralda Acevedo

Esmeralda is one of the speakers of the upcoming Into The Box ColdFusion Conference, where she will talk about Developing ContentBox Themes.

In her ITB talk, she wants to share what's new in ContentBox 3, and the big updates from Layouts in earlier versions.

Show notes

Amazing Theme UI

From Layouts to Themes

Creative Themes

Headerview, Footerview, styles

How to change out your Theme

Better Theme Setting and how they affect the users

ContentBox Theme Modules and Events

How climbing mountains helps her code better

Why are you proud to use CF?

WWIT to make CF more alive this year?

What are you looking forward to at Into The Box?

Esme will be presenting with Gavin Pickin the ContentBox evangelist

Developing ContentBox Themes

Themes are new in ContentBox 3, getting big updates from Layouts in earlier versions.

Components of a Theme - Learn about the different components of a Theme, and how to customize and use them. Layouts, Views, Templates, Widgets & Modules.

Themes, not Layouts - Themes is our new mantra. We have transitioned layouts to what we now call ContentBox Themes. They have been revamped to support ColdBox 4.

New Theme.cfc - The theme descriptor CFC is now named Theme.cfc. Backward compatibility still remains, but now the new descriptor will provide a nice way for editors and tools to target.

Theme Setting Groups + Help - You can now create theme setting groups in the theme descriptor Theme.cfc and the new admin UI will present them in a categorized and ordered format. This is a great way to visualize theme settings. You now have the ability to add notes and help in the form of modals, all built from the Theme.cfc

Theme Modules - Themes can now include ContentBox modules in a new folder convention called modules. This allows you to ship your theme with 1 or a billion modules.

New Theme Events - The theme life-cycle now presents several new events: cbadmin_preThemeSettingsSave, cbadmin_postThemeSettingsSave, cbadmin_onThemeSettings, cbadmin_onThemeInfo

 

Mentioned in this episode

ContentStore custom fields

Sass compiles CSS - CSS with superpowers

ForgeBox

Vue.js

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Esmeralda Acevedo

Esmeralda Acevedo is a Software Consultant for Ortus Solutions, Corp. Her professional journey began about 17 years ago as a graphic/web designer, in the time of tables and frames. After graduating from California State University with a major in Art and a minor in Computer Science, she was hired to work along CFML developers. Although Esmeralda was mainly involved in the design aspect of the projects, she gradually became more involved in assisting the programming team.

Eventually, Esmeralda returned to school to complete a technical degree, with an emphasis on software development. Now, in addition to her experience with graphic design tools, such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, Indesign, etc., she has added application development tools, which include CFML, MySQL, Javascript, CSS, Bootstrap, Coldfusion, Coldbox, ContentBox to the list.

Away from the computer, she has a love for the outdoors. As John Muir said, “ Keep close to Nature’s heart... and break clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.” Besides washing the spirit clean, nature clears her mind to solve programming issues or inspires me to create designs.

(* WWIT = What Would It Take)

Interview transcript

Michaela Light:               Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Esme, also known as Esmeralda Acevedo if ... I made a meal out of your name there.

Esmeralda A.:                 That's okay. Acevedo.

Michaela Light:               Acevedo. And she is going to be talking about Content Box themes and she is not only an amazing graphic designer, she's also a Cold Fusion developer and she learned about Sequel and Cold Fusion and Cold Box and Java Script and goodness what else so she could create amazing themes for Content Box. And some of the ones that come bundled with Content Box, she created. We're going to be talking about how she did that and the important thing in Theme UI and how you can create an amazing UI and what difference that makes. We'll look at some of the creative things she's done with themes, not just your regular theme but things that are, a different way of presenting information.

                                            And how you present the settings to the users makes an effect on the usability. Welcome, Esme.

Esmeralda A.:                 Thank you for having me.

Michaela Light:               You started out being a graphic designer and then you started working with all this Content Box and other things at Ortiz and now you've learned a whole bunch of Cold Fusion as well.

Esmeralda A.:                 Yes, yes. Actually, my first experience with Cold Box and Content Box, it was my senior project for school and I had to crash course it because I didn't really know anything much about it and that's how I became introduced with it. I read so much documentation thank goodness Luis had posted up there and from that I developed my senior project and within a week I had it going. And this is somebody that didn't know anything about it. So yeah, that's great and I think that little I had of Cold Fusion knowledge, it helped me understand what was going 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.

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

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

Kevin Jones talks about "NGINX: a smart middle man between your app and your users" in this episode of ColdFusion Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

Kevin is one of the speakers for the upcoming Into The Box  ColdFusion Conference, where he will talk about Using NGINX as an Effective and Highly Available Content Cache.

In his ITB talk, he wants people to understand what NGINX means and the powerful features contained in the platform that can be used in building an HTTP caching layer, and why NGINX is often used as a framework to build powerful, scalable and highly available content delivery networks.

"Right now there's about 350 million known websites on the internet today that use NGINX, so it has a really, really large footprint. It's widely adopted in the community, and now NGINX is a company. So, we've built NGINX Plus, which is a commercial version on top of that open source version, so we kind of handle both sides of the matrix." - Kevin Jones

Show notes

What is NGINX?

A smart middleman between your app and your users

Good for DevOps

But it is not a network firewall, but be used to build a web application firewall

When you should be using it

A 10-year history and the hockey stick growth in features happening right

How it works with Docker containerization and microservices

Application Delivery Controller (ADC) - virtualized load balancer

Round Robin

Least Response Time

Least Connections

Requeuing of request

How it can implement smart Layer 7 Security fast

API gateways in your DMZ

Blocking by IP, subnets, ports

Authentication

Protections for Denial Of Service attacks

Metered access

Country blocking

The value of virtual proxy software

The power of NGINscript (JavaScript-like language)

What are you looking forward to at Into The Box?

Mentioned in this episode

NGINX 

Virtual web server

Open source and commercial versions

Igor Sysoev CTO, based in Russia

TPC

UDP

SSL optimization

Asynchronous non-blocking architecture

Shared memory zones for all the workers

Load balancing

GUIP

Proxy

HTTP via proxy

HTTP caching

Streaming media

Layer 7 Security

Listen to the Audio

 

Bio

Kevin Jones

Kevin Jones is a Technical Solutions Architect at NGINX, where he specializes in the integration and implementation of NGINX for various companies around the world. He has a strong background in infrastructure management, application monitoring, and troubleshooting.

Links

Blog

Twitter

Interview transcript

Michaela Light:                 Welcome back to the podcast. I'm here with Kevin Jones, from NGINX, and he's going to be talking about the past, present, and future of the modern web using NGINX, which, as I understand it, is kind of like a virtual middle man between your app and the users of your app, and it has lots of applications. So, we're going to be looking at what it is, when you should be using it, looking at the 10-year history of it, and the hockey stick growth in feet just that's happening right now with it, how it works with docker containerization and microservices, application delivery controller, virtualized load balances, how it can implement smart layer seven security fast, the value of having a virtual proxy software with the power of engine stripped to let you customize it.

And welcome, Kevin.

Kevin Jones:                      Thank you. Nice to talk to you.

Michaela Light:                 Yeah. So, what exactly is NGINX?

Kevin Jones:                      Yeah, so NGINX has been around for a while. It's been around since 2007. It's actually originally an open source project, and still is an open source project, and essentially it's a lot of things. Essentially it's a web server, it's a reverse proxy, it can do HTTP caching, and it can also do load balancing of traffic, and it can also do TCP and UDP traffic as well, proxying. So, it's commonly used to do security control of web applications, being able to control access to those web applications. It can also do live video streaming, media streaming, and then, as I mentioned before, it can be used to serve static files as well.

So, it's commonly used. Right now there's about 350 million known websites on the internet today that use NGINX, so it has a really, really large footprint. It's widely adopted in the community, and now NGINX is a company. So, we've built NGINX Plus, which is a commercial version on top of that open source version, so we kind of handle both sides of the matrix.

Michaela Light:                 So, it's a startup company. How many people work there?

Kevin Jones:                      Yeah, so we're rather small right now. A lot of people hear NGINX and they hear the 350 million websites and they think, "Oh, it must be this huge company." But we actually only have about 150 employees right, so we're just really hitting the ground running and growing. We've grown a lot. I think when I got hired I was number 50, so in the past two years we've hired about 100 employees. Yeah.

Michaela Light:                 Well, something must be going right.

Kevin Jones:                      Yeah, definitely, definitely.

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.

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

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

Charlie Arehart talks about “Are spiders eating your servers? The impact of their unexpected load and how to counter it” in this episode of the ColdFusion Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

These days a lot of people are concerned about site security and they'll … Either they or someone in the organization will run some sort of a scam against their server, but when they run that scan, again what are they doing? They're trying to call lots of requests with different forms of potentially bad break-in type code. And those tools, sometimes they're not as careful and they might make a request every second." - Charlie Arehart

Show notes

Why your ColdFusion app being slow might not be your SQL, JVM, or even your CF code

What exactly is unexpected load

What kind of unexpected traffic have you seen

Is it a lot of traffic?

Is it common to find on CF servers?

What can be the crazy problems with unexpected traffic?

But, but, what about intranet-only sites - aren’t they safe from unexpected traffic?

How you can mitigate these problems fast

What about robots.txt? Doesn’t that block bots?

Ok, but aren’t spiders and bots getting smarter, so harder to handle?

Why are you proud to use CF?

WWIT to make CF more alive this year?

What are you looking forward to at Into The Box?

The move to the countryside

Charlie says:

For years I've watched people try to tame "server problems" with a focus on their code, their SQL, the jvm, and so on. Yet often it turns out that the root cause is actually unexpected load. And that load may be from things you never expected (automated), at volumes you never expected.   I've found folks with as much as 80% of their web traffic to be such unexpected automated traffic! Worse, there are characteristics of such automated visits that may actually have MORE IMPACT than "real users": for instance, did you know they create a new session/client variables, and run session startup code, for each page they visit?!

The good news is there are solutions to better manage (or simply block) such automated requests which may already exist in your environment, and tools you may consider (some free, some commercial) which can be easily implemented. There are even SAAS solutions that could help alleviate such problems with just a single tiny change in your environment!  You may also want to consider some admin configuration options related to sessions and/or client variables, as well as reconsider some coding choices in your session startup code.

In this session, veteran ColdFusion server troubleshooter Charlie Arehart will guide a more detailed review of the issues above, including how to identify such traffic, more on these specific impacts, and most important identifying the solutions along with their pros and cons. He has helped shops achieve dramatic reductions in impact from such automated requests, resulting in greater server stability and performance.

Mentioned in this episode

Web spiders

Yandex

Bidu

Yahoo slurp

User agent

robots.txt

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Charlie Arehart

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

Links

Website

Twitter

Facebook

LinkedIn

(* WWIT = What Would It Take)

Interview transcript

Michaela Light:               I'm here with Charlie Arehart, veteran ColdFusion server troubleshooter. Hey Charlie. We're going to be looking at some very strange stuff, which is why your ColdFusion might be slow, but it's nothing to do with your SQL JVM or even your CF code. And what we're going to be talking about is an unexpected load.

                                            So, we'll look at that and we'll look at what different kinds of unexpected traffic you may have on your server and how much traffic that could be and how common it is to find. I'll let you into a secret here, it's pretty darn common. And what kind of crazy problems you could have on your server when you have an unexpected load.

                                            You might be thinking, "Well, I have an intranet site, aren't they safe from the unexpected load?" Charlie is going to let out, reveal the secret on that. No, he's shaking his head. So, you better listen to this even if you have intranets. And we're going to look at how you can mitigate these problems fast a lot of the time, other times it might take longer. We'll look at the different kinds.

                                            And you may be thinking, "But what about robots.txt, doesn't that block all these things?" And unfortunately, I think the answer is no again. And also what about all these spiders bots that scan your site, aren't they getting hard as a block and they getting small, so how do you handle a smart spider? It sounds dangerous. So, it's a very interesting topic that you may not have thought about before. So, welcome Charlie.

Charlie Arehart:             [foreign 00:01:36]  

Michaela Light:               [foreign 00:01:39]

Charlie Arehart:             [foreign 00:01:42]

Michaela Light:               Yeah.

Charlie Arehart:             It's going to be lots of Spanish and mariachi and all kinds of fun stuff.

Michaela Light:               Yeah, si.

Charlie Arehart:             Let's not confuse anybody [crosstalk 00:01:55] It's okay if you just speak english.

Michaela Light:               Okay, we'll stay in English. Yeah, we'll speak English. We're just joking around. So, yeah. Usually when people think about server troubleshooting, they usual go to's are, they're looking at their SQL or their JVM or their ColdFusion code, but what you're saying is that ... Of all those often our problems on servers, [inaudible 00:02:19] will be something else happening.

Charlie Arehart:             Yeah. And it may be that those things have an impact. It may be that those things are being stressed in ways you don't expect. And that's really the bottom line of this talk. I think the title I had was our spiders eating your server and so that's ... What we're getting at is all I do all day, every day is troubleshoot people's servers, whether CF or LUCY or Railo or even some other things.

                                            Most of the time when we're doing things there's some commonality, the configuration issues. Sometimes there's coding issues, it's not as often as people might think I mean. That's another little lessons of this, I would say, is that a lot of people when they have trouble they focus on looking at their code, they focus on looking at their SQL, or if they have gotten past that or ran out of ideas then they start thinking about tuning their JVM. I'm telling you it's really rarely those things.

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.

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

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

Luis Majano talks about "Extreme testing and slaying the dragons of ORM" in this episode of the ColdFusion Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light. Luis is one of the speakers for the upcoming Into The Box ColdFusion Conference, where he will talk about the theory of Behavior Driven Development, Slaying the ORM Dragons with CBORM and The Ortus Keynote.

"And usually with test driven developers, developers really give up. It's really not fun. That's the truth. And it's tedious. And sometimes when you have big object-oriented applications it can really be daunting to create all the mocks, and sometimes you're just testing an ‘if statement' at that point. So it can be really dumb at that point." - Luis Majano

Show notes

Why Behavior Driven Development

How is it different from Test Driven Development

How TestBox makes both easy

Semantics BDD deep dive

Why you shouldn't miss the Ortus Keynote

Box roadmaps

Modern CFML development

Addressing the issues companies adopting ColdFusion: Language shaming, modern tools

Why it is sometimes hard to hire good CF developers

The driving force behind all things Ortus

How Luis came to the brink of moving to Goovy and why he came to ColdFusion

Behavior-Driven Integration Development Exposed

How Behavior-Driven Integration Development is different from Behavior Driven Development

Why you should be doing it

How to implement it fast

Slaying the ORM Dragons with CBORM

Why use an ORM

Why it is sometimes seen as a dangerous dragon

How to tame the ORM dragon

Why are you proud to use CF?

WWIT to make CF more alive this year?

What are you looking forward to at Into The Box?

Mentioned in this episode

All BDD code will be available at this repository: https://github.com/elpete/integrated-workshop

Code Coverage with Testbox + FusionReactor

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Luis Majano

Luis Majano is a Computer Engineer born in El Salvador and is the president of Ortus Solutions (www.ortussolutions.com), a consulting firm specializing in web development, architecture and professional open source support and services. His background includes over 16 years of software development experience, architecture, and system design.  He is the creator of the ColdBox Platform (www.coldbox.org), CommandBox CLI (www.ortussolutions.com/products/commandbox), ContentBox Modular CMS (www.ortussolutions.com/products/contentbox) and is an Adobe Community Professional.

Links

Twitter

Interview transcript

Michaela Light:               Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Luis Majano and he's the CEO of Ortus and all things Box. He created ColdBox and CommandlineBox and TestBox. I don't know. All kinds of things. If it has 'Box' in the name he probably had something to do with it. And we're going to be talking about Behavior Driven Development. Why we should be doing it. Why it's different from Test Driven Development. How TestBox makes both easy. And we're going to look into some of the semantics of that.

                                            And then Ortus is also doing a Keynote of this conference and why you shouldn't miss that. Going to look at some of the roadmap stuff. What modern ColdFusion development is. Addressing the issues that companies adopting ColdFusion have with language shaming, modern tools, and sometimes it being to hire good ColdFusion developers. And the driving force behind all things Ortus.

                                            And I managed to get Luis to tell us a little story about how he came to the brink of moving to Groovy and why he came back to ColdFusion. This was a few years back.

                                            We'll also be looking at Behavior Driven Integration Development, because he's giving a workshop on that, and how it's different from Behavior Driven Development, which got my head scratching for a bit but we're going to make it all clear in this episode. And why you should be doing it and how to implement it first.

                                            And then finally we're going to wrap up by slaying the ORM dragons with CBORM. And why ORM is sometimes seen as a dangerous dragon and how you can tame it.

                                            So welcome Luis!

Luis Majano:                   Thank you. Thank you for having me, Michael.

Michaela Light:               So excited by the Into the Box conference. There's so much cool ColdFusion stuff here and it's not your first ColdFusion stuff, this is all modern stuff.

Luis Majano:                   Yes. Definitely very very excited. Over 28 sessions, it's just really, really exciting.

Michaela Light:               So you're doing a whole day on Behavior Driven Development. So what exactly is Behavior Driven Development?

Luis Majano:                   Yeah so I'm doing a workshop pre-conference. We have a set of workshops and I'll be leading the Behavior Driven Development workshop.

                                            So Behavior Driven Development is an evolution of Test Driven Development, so it's kind of show casing people ...

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.

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

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

Jon Clausen talks about "Portable CFML with Cloud deployments, Microservices and REST" in this episode of the ColdFusion Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light. Jon is one of the speakers for the upcoming Into The Box ColdFusion Conference, where he will talk about Hall PaaS: Cloud CFML deployments with CommandBox and Bringing Legacy Apps Back To Life with Box Microservices.

Show notes

Hall PaaS: Cloud CFML deployments with CommandBox

Small container

What is PaaS and why would you want to use it?

Platform as a Service

How you you save DevOps headache with smart cloud deployment

Will talk about the options for using container-based PaaS solutions such as Heroku, Dokku, Kubernetes, etc for quickly standing up and scaling environments

How to implement on demand or scheduled scaling

Bringing Legacy Apps Back To Life with *Box Microservices

what is a Microserver

Monolithic code vs microservice architecture

maintainable. portable and scalable

How to overcome resource intensive sections of your code using microservice

Easier to rewrite

Why box microservices?

rapid from concept to deployment

easier deployment

Why are you proud to use CF?

most portable

efficient resource use

RAD

WWIT to make CF more alive this year?

talk it up

easy and pain free development

RESTful services 1-day workshop

What is REST?

representational - JSCON or XML from you model

Why Stateless matters?

Portable API pattern

Scalable API pattern

Transfer

HTML

binary internal REST transfer

Logic deduplication

Versioning of API

This workshop is designed for beginning or intermediate ColdBox developers and focuses on the understanding and implementation of RESTful applications, modules, and microservices. At the end of the workshop, the participant will have developed a working RESTful API service which can be used as a baseline template for their own future development needs.  The API service will be scaffolded and implemented using a variety of readily-available tools, such as CommandBox and the ColdBox REST application skeleton.

What are you looking forward to at Into The Box conference?

Mentioned in this episode

Docker swarm

Heroku

Dokku

Kubernetes

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Jon Clausen

Jon Clausen hails from Grand Rapids, Michigan and has been developing CFML applications for over a decade. He was born and raised in South Dakota and attended SDSU and DePaul University. In 2004, after 14 years with a Fortune 100 company, he founded Silo, a full-stack development and technology consulting firm in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Jon has developed and written applications in CFML, Javascript, PHP, and Ruby in addition to dabbling in Java, Python, Bash, Scala and Clojure. He keeps current with both old and new database technologies including SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Couchbase, and - his personal NoSQL favorite - MongoDB.

After hours, Jon enjoys theater, fishing for smallmouth bass on the Great Lakes, and chauffeuring his 12-year-old daughter back and forth to the horse stables.

He is pleased to represent Ortus Solutions as a product evangelist for the Box products and is eternally grateful for tools like ColdBox and CommandBox, which continue to evolve and demonstrate a bright future for CFML development

(* WWIT = What Would It Take)

Links

Ortus Solutions

CommandBox

Interview transcript

Michaela Light:               Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Jon Clausen. I hope I'm pronouncing that right, Jon.

Jon Clausen:                    Clausen but close enough.

Michaela Light:               Clausen, all right. And he's the president of Silo Webworks and a part of the artist team and he's going to be speaking into the box and we're going to talk about portable CFML with cloud deployments, microservices and rest, and he's actually giving two talks, and he's also giving a whole day workshop, so we're going to talk about all that in this episode. We're going to start off by looking at platform as a service, and how you can save devop headaches with SmartCloud deployments and different options there are for container based PAS solutions, and also we'll look at how you can use microservices to take a monolithic legacy app and cut it up into microservices so that it is more maintainable and portable and scalable. And some clever ways that Jon has for overcoming resource intensive sections of the code in an app, so they can scale out separately from the rest of the app.

                                            Then also, we're going to look at REST architecture, and why that works so well and why it has to be stateless. So welcome, Jon.

Jon Clausen:                    Thank you.

Michaela Light:               So let's come back to the beginning of that, you're talking about PAS, which stands for Platform Assess Service, so why would someone want to use that, or what exactly is it?

Jon Clausen:                    Well, Platform as a service is basically implemented in different ways across different providers. So you've got your for pay proprietary providers such as ABS Cloud services, Google Cloud services, Hiroku. You also have open source options open to you as well. So you have for example, Doku, which is basically Hiroku, an open source version of Hiroku. You have Kubernetes which is a google product that is continuing to evolve and a lot of people are really adopting that. You've got front ends also for Kubernetes as well, that will allow you to do bill packs, there's a product calls BASE that works with Kubernetes that way. And you also have Dr. Swarm, which is Dr.'s own native implementation. And what a platform as a service does, is it abstracts the whole details of the container layers, and allows for easy deployments, sometimes scheduling, management and orchestration of containers against one or more servers.

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.

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

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

Gavin Pickin talks about "All things ContentBox (new API, ContentStore, Themes and more)" in this episode of the ColdFusion Alive Podcast,with  the host Michaela Light. Gavin is one of the speakers for the upcoming Into The Box ColdFusion Conference, where he will talk about Bringing Legacy Apps Back To Life with *Box Microservices, Ortus Keynote and Developing ContentBox Themes.

"ContentBox is Ortus's creation. It's basically a content management system for ColdFusion. So over the years we've obviously built plenty of website for ourselves at Ortus. But also for clients along the way as well. We were not really happy with the previous content management systems around and instead of building our little apps every time we- Luis Majano, of course, decided to build ContentBox. So it's been out in the market for several years now and we've made a lot of changes over the last couple of years." - Gavin Pickin

Show notes

What ContentBox is and why would you want to use it?

What does it cost? (hint it is Open Source. One line install with CLI)

Why an API?

The ContentBox API Unleashed

The hidden features of Mobile app front ends and built-in JSON packets

Why using the ContentStore for custom settings is better than a database

Contentbox 3.5 and 4.0 features

native image support with auto thumbnails

custom ContentStore fields

easier overrides

- A story about CFML, which we think you will want to hear, and learn what Ortus and the community is doing for CFML and the future of CFML.

Why you want to use ContentBox Themes and what is new about them?

Theme Modules and Widgets

Expose custom theme settings

Powerful Theme events

Why are you proud to use CF?

WWIT to make CF more alive this year?

What are you looking forward to at Into The Box?

Mentioned in the episode

ContentBox

ColdBox

ContentStore

ContentBox Themes

Ortus University

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Gavin Pickin

The ContentBox Evangelist, Gavin Pickin has been coding in ColdFusion for over 17 years.

Gavin started using ColdFusion in 1999 when working for the university of Auckland in New Zealand before moving to California. He has lead teams, trained new developers and worked the full stack from graphic design, HTML CSS JavaScript through to ColdFusion MySQL and server administration.

Gavin has a passion for learning and cannot understand why the 9-5ers aren't listening to podcasts while changing diapers, watching video tutorials while cleaning baby bottles and folding clothes, or putting the kids to sleep with soothing phone gap mobile application cookbook recipes.

You will find him blogging at gpickin.com and on twitter @gpickin and occasionally being mocked on cfhour's podcast.

Links

Gavin Pickin Blog

Twitter - @gpickin

(* WWIT = What Would It Take)

Interview transcript

Michaela Light:               Hi, welcome back to the show. I'm here with Gavin Pickin, the ContentBox evangelist at Ortus Solutions. And we're gonna be talking about all things ContentBox today. So, we're gonna look at why you wanna use it and what you'd use it for. And we'll look at the new API that's coming out in it and all the cool things you can do with that.

                                            And, there's some of the hidden features in there which let you have a mobile app be the front end or even output JSON packets with just a simple change. Also we'll look at the contents tool as a way of storing custom settings, which is better than using a database. Gavin will explain why that is.

                                            We'll also be looking at themes. Which are out in ContentBox, and what you can do with them. Lots of cool stuff there. And then, Gavin will be revealing some of the new stuff in ContentBox 4.0 that is gonna be unleashed during the conference. So, welcome Gavin.

Gavin Pickin:                    Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Michaela Light:               So, let's come back to that. What exactly is ContentBox? 'Cause not everyone uses it. And why would you wanna use it?

Gavin Pickin:                    ContentBox is Ortus's creation. It's basically a content management system for ColdFusion. So over the years we've obviously built plenty of website for ourselves at Ortus. But also for clients along the way as well. We were not really happy with the previous content management systems around and instead of building our little apps every time we- Luis Majano, of course, decided to build ContentBox. So it's been out in the market for several years now and we've made a lot of changes over the last couple years.

                                            I came on as a content evangelist about two years ago now. So I'm in charge of getting the word out about it. But also one of the team members, I'm actually building it. So Luis and myself are working on ContentBox and, like you say, we use that for all of our order sites now, and a lot of the clients. It's a great content management system.

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.

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

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

Mike Brunt talks about "Tuning & Troubleshooting ColdFusion Using Native Tools" in this episode of the ColdFusion Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

Mike is one of the speakers for the upcoming Into The Box ColdFusion Conference, where he will talk about Tuning & Troubleshooting ColdFusion Using Native Tools.

There are various tools and utilities which ship with ColdFusion and tend to be ignored when tuning is needed, also when trouble strikes. Server Monitor, for instance, is very powerful when used correctly. This practical session will show how to get the best from these powerful, built-in tools.

"There is a server monitoring in ColdFusion, and there has been for some time, but I'll explain in a minute what the best feature of that is, which is better than most others that's out there, the commercial tools. Yeah, absolutely if you're going to put new code out there of any note, you know you need to check what's going on, because again, it's like flogging a dead horse, it's not expensive to do so, apart from time." - Mike Brunt

Show notes

Why monitor your CF server?

18% in the State of the CF survey don't monitor

Why use the built in CF Server Monitor?

What versions of CF is the server monitor in?

The hidden features of CF stat

Why you should be load testing your CF apps?

And how to do it for free.

Why are you proud to use CF?

WWIT to make CF more alive this year?

What are you looking forward to at Into The Box?

Mentioned in this episode

Free server monitor tools

Server monitor snapshot in one file of queries, JVM state when you reach a monitor limit

Runs on Jetty, separate JVM container

JVM monitoring tools

JMeter load testing tool

Blaze Meter

Taffy API

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Mike Brunt

Mike Brunt also known as CF Whisperer.

Links

CF Whisperer

(* WWIT = What Would It Take)

Interview transcript

Michaela Light:               Welcome back to the show, I’m here with Mike Brunt, also known as CF Whisperer, and we’re going to be talking about his upcoming into the box session, Tuning and Troubleshooting Using Cold Fusion Native Tools. We’re going to be looking at, well first of all we’re going to look at why you should be monitoring your server, and I’ll explain why some people don’t even do that, and how and why you use the built-in tools in the CF server monitor, the hidden features of CF Stat, and why you should be low-testing all of your CF apps. Welcome, Mike.

Mike Brunt:                     Hey, good to see you again, good to be here.

Michaela Light:               It’s good to be here, good to be alive on the CF Alive Podcast.

Mike Brunt:                     Right.

Michaela Light:               Before we get into what you’re going to be talking about, the into the box conference on troubleshooting and tuning Cold Fusion using the native tools, let’s back up a bit. Because in the recent state of the CF Union survey, 18% of people didn’t monitor their server at all, and the people who take that survey tend to be the people active on Slack and in forums, and what have you, so you’d hope they’re the cream of the cream of Cold Fusion developers, which makes me wonder of the people who didn’t take the survey, probably even more don’t monitor their servers. Why should someone be monitoring their Cold Fusion server?

Mike Brunt:                     Well because first of all, the logging in Cold Fusion is great, and it’s the best I’ve ever come across in any application server environment. There’s a wealth of information in there, and it’s a great place to start monitoring your server, and I’ll sit back and say everybody should monitor, think of production. It was Nielsen I think that had a survey some years ago which said after eight seconds, anyone on the webpage would go elsewhere if they had an alternative. Eight seconds doesn’t sound like a long time, but you know I wouldn’t still be doing what I’m doing if there wasn’t a lot of issues going on with performance on web servers and application servers, and it’s not just Cold Fusion. I have other clients, I’ve worked on PXP, I’ve worked on .net, and they all have their issues.

Just reiterating something here, espn.net, the logging in those environments, unless you buy a pretty expensive third party tool, it’s just not where it’s at. Now, I can do my work, and I’m presenting on a tool set for Cold Fusion, I can do my work without any external tools, I can do it by just literally looking at the logs. I’ve blogged a lot about that to try and help all this, but at the very least, we should be looking at those logs at least once every week.

Michaela Light:               Either directly at the logs, or using a server monitor to see what’s going 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.

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

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

Nathaniel Francis talks about "The best REST you've ever had: ColdBox REST" in this episode of the ColdFusion Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light. Nathaniel is one of the speakers for the upcoming Into The Box Conference where he will talk about The best REST you've ever had: ColdBox REST.

"ColdBox has allowed CFML to really move forward. One of those ways is with REST APIs. What that provides is instead of these full-bodied, traditional applications, you can make something that anything can touch. You can use any type of front-end technological mobile obviously is universal now, even things all the way down to the watches and the Internet of things to be able to talk to a REST API." - Nathaniel Francis

Show notes

Why REST over regular CF

Separate front end from data

Easy to support multiple platforms such as phone, desktop, and IoT

Versatility

Why the CB REST API

CB, CF Wheels, ACF, Node

Move to CB REST is easy   Converting from CFM to REST

SQL Hibernate ORM -> REST

REST and CouchBase Lightweight Star Wars app

Why are you proud to develop in CF?

WWIT to make CF more alive this year?

What are you looking forward to at Into The Box?

Nathaniel Best SciFi books End Game and Dune, or a Git merge of both!

Mentioned in this episode

REST

IoT Internet of Things

ColdBox

ORM

CouchBase

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Nathaniel Francis

Nathaniel Francis is an employee of Computer Know How, the Wisconsin-based technology firm and ColdBox Alliance Partner. He has been working with ColdBox since he started at CKH in September of 2012. His focus is on ColdBox applications, ContentBox sites, and ColdBox REST apps. He is a husband, father of 8, worship leader, theologian, sci-fi enthusiast, and balding.

Links

Twitter

Website

Interview transcript

Michaela Light: Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Nathan Francis. We're going to be talking about the best REST you ever had. That's not a nap. That's rest as in ColdBox REST. We'll also be looking why you might want to use REST instead of doing regular ColdFusion and why ColdBox is the best REST. Nathan has used a whole slew of different REST APIs. He's got a lot of experience there.

We'll also look at how, if you need to convert between REST APIs, or convert from regular ColdFusion code to REST, how easy it is to do that. Also, we'll look at a cool project he's been working on using REST and Couchbase, which is a really light weight setup he's got. Welcome, Nathan.

Nathaniel F.: Thank you, sir. Glad to be here with you.

Michaela Light: I think we better start with the big question in the room, which is why should anyone use REST instead of regular ColdFusion? A lot of CF developers don't even use REST.

Nathaniel F.: Yeah, that's very true. I think part of that comes from CFML's heritage itself, which CFML excelled. It was one of the main languages that excelled at making just full bodied applications dynamically. Since it thrived in that area, when the tech industry moved to some newer ideas, it had a good sweet spot.

ColdBox has allowed CFML to really move forward. One of those ways is with REST APIs. What that provides is instead of these full-bodied, traditional applications, you can make something that anything can touch. You can use any type of front-end technological mobile obviously is universal now, even things all the way down to the watches and the Internet of things to be able to talk to a REST API.

That really makes your program universal. That bounds to the traditional sweet spot that CFML has traditionally been in. REST APIs are versatile. That means when you write something, you know it can reach a lot farther than just the browser that it used to.

Michaela Light: If you wanted to swap out a different front end, that would be really easy to do?

Nathaniel F.: Yes, absolutely. It'd be very easy to do. What that does is it makes both ends of your application able to go through phases. If you wanted to freshen up your front end, your backend is solid with the REST API setup. You can even your REST API itself to have updates to it, completely independent of the front end.

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