ColdFusion Alive

Joby John talks about “ColdFusion in Biz (the Latest Trends in CF consulting)” in this episode of the CF Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

Show notes

Biz side of CF

Hiring CF developers

Attitude is key

Skills can be learned

Training new people on CF - out of college or from other languages 

Versions used by their customers

Mostly CF 2016, some CF 2018

Some even older versions

Why not the newest version?

Cost of CF

Cost of migration

Why upgrade then?

Way better performance and security in CF 2018

Scaling team

Double team size

Fast to scale down in future too

Knowledge transfer

New trends in frontends on top of CF

jQuery to React or Angular 

Latest trends in tech 

Better UI

CF backend

Fashions in IT

CF growing

From smaller projects to enterprise projects

Migrating away from CF?

No - Too costly to recode in other languages such as Python or Java

CF scales well

Testing

What versions are people migrating to

ACF to Railo or  Lucee 

Only small projects

Bigger customers more focused on the code base investment than server software cost

Cloud licensing issue of ACF vs Lucee

CF 2020 solves this for ACF

Adobe partnership program

Adobe CF certification program

Coming to CF Summit India 2020

Why are you proud to use CF?    

The first customer we worked with was using ColdFusion to develop their web application and from there we worked with many customers who use ColdFusion. We were able to build a strong team of ColdFusion to help our customers from there

WWIT to make CF more alive this year?  

We are planning to hire more college freshmen this year and provide them ColdFusion training. 

Invite more non-Indian partners to the summit

More college classes in CF - support for this. 

What did you enjoy at CF Summit India? 

It was a pleasure to meet a lot of developers and talk to them. It was a pleasure to bring my ColdFusion team and they were so excited to see new trends in Coldfusion and see an active Coldfusion community in India

Mentioned in this episode

LearnCFinAWeek

Why is ColdFusion Better Than Other Programming Languages? 

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Joby John

Joby John is CEO of Techversant Infotech, a 200 person consulting firm specializing in ColdFusion Technology based in Kerala, India and Alberta, Canada.  He is a young and vibrant leader. He is responsible for corporate vision, strategy, business growth and total customer satisfaction.

Links

https://www.techversantinfotech.com/

https://www.facebook.com/jzz44

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jobyjohn/

Email  joby.john (at) techversantinfotech.com

Interview transcript

Michaela Light (00:01):

Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Joby John from tech Versant and we're going to be talking about the business side of cold fusion and new trends in cold fusion. Um, welcome to the show. Joby. Hi Micheala and uh, just in case you don't know him. Um, he is CEO of tech first and Infotech and he, they have 200 people working there. They're a consulting firm that specializes in cold fusion and they're based in Corolla, India and Alberta, Canada. So, um, he's a young vibrant guy. Um, I met him at CF summit, India, um, end of last year and he's got a lot of interesting ideas around cold fusion. So, uh, let's maybe, um, start off by talking about hiring ColdFusion developers cause I know that's a topic of interest to both managers and coffee from developers. You know, what, what have you seen trend wise? Um, you know, hiring ColdFusion developers? Yeah. As you know,

Joby John (01:04):

base is not that great in Confucian even in India. But we, we always run a recruitment program throughout the year, like interviewing more people, always try to find more people because our customers need more cultivation developers. So, and another thing is that we used to have people who are interested to learn confusion, like having them from PHP or not and train them in cognition. Another thing is like we always hire like 10, 15 people, maybe sometimes 20 people from the college and train them in cultivation. So after like one to two years, like in a one year time they will be able to work on cold fusion projects from there. So we started doing it from uh, 2011. We started having people from college and also and now we were able to grow the team from there were very good number of team members in college.

Michaela Light (02:00):

How many ColdFusion developers do you have in the company then?

Joby John (02:04):

Uh, we have like almost 50% age of the team. Science is in cold fusion and the business side of it, like, uh, now we are into some other technologies, but two confusion was the technology that we focused from the start and the first customers was, uh, Wester was in cold fusion. And then from there we use, uh, focus more on the ColdFusion platform. So then we got a lot of customers and we are happy. The customers are still with us and every year we are adding few customers every year in costs.

Michaela Light (02:35):

Read more

 

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

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

 

Join the CF Alive revolution

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

Get early access to the CF Alive book and videos

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

Contribute to the CF Alive revolution

Connect with other CF developers and managers

There is no cost to membership.

Kishore Balakrishnan talks about “CF Summit India 2019 Revealed” in this episode of the CF Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

Show notes

What exactly is CF Summit India?

Started in 2018

For people who can’t travel to the US or Europe from Asia

CF Summit West in Las Vegas 8th year

Expecting 250-300, 200 registrations already one months out

Last year 210 from 173 companies

Also attendees came from Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and other Asian countries

How many years has CF Summit India been running?

2nd year

Also CF Summit West and East in USA, expanding Adobe presence at CF Camp 2020

DevWeek in SF

NAGW (National Association of Government Web developers)

Other conf in the plans too 

Listener suggestions

Why all CFer should go?

Learn CF new features

Future roadmap of CF (through 2028)

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

See the entire Adobe CF engineering and sales team

Revealing the Speakers and topics that you are excited about

Topic Area

- ColdFusion Roadmap and New Features coming in Next Release

- Top ColdFusion Features and Benefits

- API Development and Management

- Performance Tuning and Management

- PDF Manipulation and Advanced Security

10 speakers

0. Ashish keynote

1. Edwin - CF Security Analyzer

2. Suchika - CF Scheduler

3. Piyush - CF performance

4.  TBA -  CF API Manager

5.  Nimit/Dubey - PMT

6.  Ashudeep – Language features (2018 + u5 (Update 5))

7.  Ajay -  CF Document Management with PDF and Excel 

8.  Ketki - CF UI frameworks 

9. Rakshith CF 2020

Date

Saturday December 7, 2019

8:00 am - 4:30 pm

Evening event

Includes breakfast, lunch and breaks

Cost

Main conference Free

CF Certification in 2020

Location

Adobe Tower, Block A, Prestige Platina Tech Park, - Marathahalli-Sarjapur Outer Ring Rd

Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

560087

(Same as last year)

Other things you can do in Bengaluru?

The garden city

What is new this year?

CF 2020

CF 2018 enhancements

Why are you proud to use CF?

WWIT to make CF more alive in 2020?

Talk about what CFers are doing with CF

Banks and Govt especially for security, performance and productivity

What are you looking forward to at CF Summit India 2019?

Mentioned in this episode

Adobe ColdFusion India Summit 2019

DevWeek in SF

NAGW (National Association of Government Web developers) conference

Japan CF Day 

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Kishore Balakrishnan

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

Links

LinkedIn

Twitter 

Facebook

Email kishore (at) adobe.com

Interview transcript

Michaela Light:                  00:01                     Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Kishore Bally Krishna from Adobe and we're going to be talking about CF summit, India 2019 and all the new details on that, some revealing some information that hasn't been out there publicly yet about the speakers and topics and some other cool news about the event. So welcome Kishore.

Kishore :                               00:23                     Thanks for going to, it's always good to be back talking to you about goldfish fishing.

Michaela Light:                  00:27                     Yeah, and we have lots of fans of the podcast in India. There are thousands of developers in cold fusion in India. It's a very big vise. Nicole's Adobe itself has its development headquarters for cold fusion in Bangalore ruin India. We'll talk more about that later, but perhaps four we get going about what's happening in CF. Some India, we should tell people who you are. So your principle product marketing manager for cold fusion, Adobe and you're not just a marketing guy. You actually studied computer science when you were slightly younger than you are now.

Kishore :                               01:05                     Yes, I did. My masters in conveyor does as well.

Michaela Light:                  01:08                     Yeah, and you will live the voice of the ColdFusion customer in Adobe. So when people have things they want to hear about in ColdFusion 20, 20, or 2022, they should, uh, let you know. So when you can pass it on and clearly get the team working on what people want,

Read more

 

Join the CF Alive revolution

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

Get early access to the CF Alive book and videos

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

Contribute to the CF Alive revolution

Connect with other CF developers and managers

There is no cost to membership.

Nolan Erck talks about “CF Alive (Revolution Retrospective) ” in this episode of the CF Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

Show notes

What is the CF Alive revolution

Making ColdFusion Modern, Vibrant and Secure!

MCFGA

ColdFusion is a vibrant and modern language for complex, data-driven enterprise apps. While some companies have abandoned ColdFusion as dying, more visionary dev teams have embraced CF. Learn how they are making it the most modern, secure and state-of-the-art web development ecosystem.

Why was it started?

What aspects of CF are preventing you or your company from embracing CF?

72% CF is seen as dying/legacy.

Annual State of CF Union survey, 2018

Language shame, depression, Burnout → excited and learning again

Make CF Cool again

Hiring issues

More Young CFers

9-5 programmers

Contant “Homeplay” and learning

30 mins per day method

Lunch and learn

When did it start

001 Amazing Adventures with CF WebSockets with Giancarlo Gomez

March 29, 2017

What has changed in ColdFusion since it started

CF Alive podcast

Modernize or Die podcast

CF Alive book released

CommandBox and ForgeBox

Non-ColdBox Box products

Soft Skills and open to mental health issues more openly discussed

Conference inclusivity and diversity including speakers - anonymous topic selection

CF conferences

CF Summit East growing

CF Summit India

Improved CF Camp in Europe

ITB Latin America

Improved code of conduct

Separate Q&A in CF Camp

Office Hours area for 1 on 1 questions

Shy questioners

Showboaters

New speakers

Learned Modern CFML in 100 minutes released

CF Angular book new edition

LearnCFInAWeek revamp

CF Certification released

New CF tools

Framework updates for ColdBox, CFWheels, FW/1

Foundeo new products Fixinator and FuseGuard (on top of HackMyCF)

CFScript.me

FusionReactor new release and cloud version

Adobe PMT Security Auto Lock

Adobe API Manager

Ortus CF box products 4 year roadmaps released

WireBox

TestBox

Adobe at non-CF conferences such as DevWeek and NAGW promoting CF

And Brad Wood at DevNexis 

CF 2018 release

Auto lock down

Mega performance increase

CF containerization revolution

Lucee 5

Modern CF, cfscript

CF 2020 multi cloud and containerization

CF top in web Security

Performance, Productivity and Security

More positive atmosphere in CF Community

CF Slack channel more positive

What are you looking forward to in 2020 for CF Alive?

CF 2020

Lucee 6

Adobe and Ortus roadshows and webinars

CF Rocks book

New CF conferences

WWIT to make CF more alive this year?

Be the change you want to see in the world - Gadhi

StackOverflow public and searchable

Friendly and professional answers

Being visible about using CF

Made with CF logo

Blog

Social share on Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn etc

CF Pride

Mentioned in this episode

CommandBox

ForgeBox 

Jeffrey Kunkel, Oh My GAD  episode

CF Suicide, Depression and Recovery episode with Jorge Reyes

https://teratech.com/podcast/cf-alive-at-chicago-cfug-michaela-light/

https://teratech.com/podcast/cf-camp-2019-everything-cfml-with-kai-koenig-and-mitchi-hnat/

https://www.amazon.com/Learn-ColdFusion-Enterprise-Application-Development-ebook/dp/B07K4X9BF5

Hear Us Roar: A Manifesto for Women and Minorities in Startup, Tech, and Business Communities with Sophia Eng

Getting Real with Women in Tech with April Graves

Smart Developer Career Strategies and How Women Can Get Ahead in Tech with Sami Gardner

The Opportunities of Being a Woman in Tech Today with Elliotte Bowerman

Learn ColdFusion in a Week with Carl Von Stetten, Daniel Fredericks and Dave Ferguson 

Adobe ColdFusion Specialist Certification (new at CF Summit), with Elishia Dvorak 

Adobe CF Summit West 2019 (All that is new) with Kishore Balakrishnan

Into The Box Conference

CF Camp 2019 (Everything CFML) with Kai Koenig and Mitchi Hnat

Foundeo 

FusionReactor 

Adobe PMT 

Adobe Security Auto Lock down

How to Implement Adobe API https://coldfusion.adobe.com/2018/07/server-auto-lockdown/

TT YouTube channel

Listen to the Audio

Bios

Michaela Light

Michaela has been programming in ColdFusion for over 20 years. She founded TeraTech which focuses on ColdFusion development and optimization. She founded the CFUnited conference and ran MDCFUG. She is the current host of the CF Alive podcast and has interviewed over 60 ColdFusion experts about What It Would Take to make CF more alive this year.

 

Nolan Erck

Nolan Erck has been developing software for 21 years. Starting in the video game industry working on titles for Maxis and LucasArts, then advancing to web development in 1999, his list of credits includes Grim Fandango, StarWars Rogue Squadron, SimPark, SimSafari as well as high-traffic websites for a variety of clients.  

Nolan manages the SacInteractive User Group, teaches classes on aspects of software development, and regularly gives presentations at conferences and user groups across the country.

When he's not consulting or talking about himself in the third person, Nolan can usually be found working on one of several music projects.

Links

https://southofshasta.com/

Twitter: @southofshasta

http://sacinteractive.com/

Twitter: @sacinteractive

TeraTech podcast

TeraTech Facebook

TeraTech LinkedIn

CF Alive Inner Circle (ask to join)

TeraTech Twitter

TeraTech Pinterest

TeraTech YouTube

Interview transcript

Michaela Light:                  00:00:03               Welcome back to the show here we have a special episode of the hundredth episode of BC apply podcast. I have a very special guest with us today, Nolan, who is the person who's appeared on the show the most, I think you've appeared like six or seven times because you just have so much to say about cold fusion. So, um, and you're very generous with your time, uh, which I appreciate. So in today's show, we're gonna turn the view a little bit back, um, and look at the CFLI revolution and how things have changed since the cold fusion. A live podcast has been more and a lot of other things happening in ColdFusion land and also have a peek at what's coming in the future for improving ColdFusion. So, welcome Nolan. Thanks for having me. And just in case you don't know who Nolan is, he's the chief architect president and, uh, I don't know. Well, advertise you have at South sash Shasta productions in Sacramento, California. And he is a very frequent speaker. I hope you [inaudible] conferences, user groups, a rabid blogger about Copia writing. That's the right phrase. Rabid. I don't know. He blocked him off, uh, about cold fusion and he writes these excellent post-conference for that. Um, tell you what happened in case you missed the conference. Very good to have you here. So, um, [inaudible] yeah, I think you should be interviewing me. Shouldn't you should just be chatting and having a good time. I'm not sure.

Michaela Light:                  00:01:39               Um, I think we should do, let's ask the audience audience who should interview you?

Nolan Erck:                         00:01:43               Well, it's just chatting on a good time. Oh, who said that?

Michaela Light:                  00:01:47               It was a, yeah, it was the thousands of CFOs listening [inaudible] AI bots episode. So a hundredth episode. Um, and I think, I guess we should start with what is the CFLI for revolution? Cause like we've got this podcast, I wrote a book, you, Louis and the Adobe folks and many other people are doing great things, uh, to improve ColdFusion, but people may not realize that there is a CF alive revolution going on. Um, making cold fusion, more modern, vibrant, insecure, and to quote, misquote someone who will remain nameless to avoid having nasty tweets. And to me, making ColdFusion great again. Um, you know, w w w what do you think with CF alive revolution is no,

Read more

 

Join the CF Alive revolution

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

Get early access to the CF Alive book and videos

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

Contribute to the CF Alive revolution

Connect with other CF developers and managers

There is no cost to membership.

Read the show notes and download the episode here Speaker 1:                           00:01                     Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Kai Koeneke and Michi hat and we're going to talk about everything, CF cam. So it's the amazing CFML conference in Europe coming up in October. And we're going to look at where it is, […]

Kai Koenig and Mitchi Hnat talk about “CF Camp 2019 (Everything CFML)” in this episode of the CF Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

"...So there's an interesting German saying basically that is basically in German it's called like, Ooh, in telecom shown, so literally means efficient later. It means something like you have to look beyond the area of your plate. So you need to look at other things to be, to keep up to date and to get inspiration and to learn supplementary technologies. And you can't just really stick with one technology and one platform nowadays from, from all point of view. And that makes it's common sense, right? Like even if you are like a core web developer using on the back end at some point it's quite likely that you will need to do some javascript coding for example.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ItRkLFUMd0

Show notes

What is CF Camp?

How many years has it be running? 10 years

The Lucee and ACF CF conference in Europe

Lucee is bigger in Europe than US

How does CF Camp compare to Adobe CF Summit?

More Lucee

More ColdFusion eco-system talks as well as CFML ones

Where is it?

Munich Airport Marriott Hotel, Freising

Venue and hotel rooms are at same hotel (different from prior years)

Freising has lots of historical and beer brewing history

Is it only for German CFers? 

No, it’s for all Developers

The main language is English

Most ppl are from across Europe.

Some from India, USA, New Zealand, Australia

When is it?

17-18th of October

15-16th there is the Pre-Conference Programme with PresideCon (1d), Cold-/TestBox Trainings, Logstash/Kibana and Linux Introduction (1/2d)

Preconference classes

€49

Oct, 16th

Get into Linux 

Centralize your logs with the Elastic Stack 

PresideCon 2019 - Preside is an open source app framework and CMS, runs on ColdBox and Lucee

Ortus classes

€849 for two days

ColdBox From Hero to Super Hero: API Edition (Oct, 15-16th)

BDD with TESTBOX (Oct, 15-16th)

What do you get in the ticket?

Ticket price includes access to all sessions, access to the after show party, access to the fair, food, and drinks during both days and a conference goodie bag with several swag and vouchers! 

Yubikey 5 to go passwordless for future applications

Evening show and dinner and beer

Also you get access to the video recordings of the session from 2019 and the recordings of CF Camp 2018

Plus unlimited fresh orange juice

Proper coffee

€330 (about $365)

How many CFers come?

Last year 150 attended

Counted today: 160ppl

Who is speaking

Call for speakers open process

Paper call, anonym process, multiple rounds

Used PaperCon

Diversity support

Topic selection

Charlie Arehart, Eleftheria Batsou, Miguel Beltran, Wil de Bruin, Jen Doherty, Mark Drew, Rob Dudley, Seb Duggan, Nolan Erck, Gert Franz, Uma Ghotikar, Matt Gifford, Majid Hajian, Michael Hnat, Kenigbolo Meya Stephen, Kai König, Francisco Mancardi, Lara Martín, Eric Peterson, Jorge Reyes, Joel Stobart, Maciej Treder, Dom Watson, Brad Wood, Sebastian Zartner

What topics are covered?

Topic areas:

“Core CFML”

Mobile Web / Cross-Platform Mobile Apps

Web Dev best practices

Infrastructure - Deployment and Tooling, Security etc

Full list:

A Comedy of Errors ... in Web App Security

An in-depth introduction to Vue.js

A REST API in under 5 minutes with Preside

Automated Database Migrations with CFMigrations

Building secure applications

But doesn’t everyone on the Internet speak English?

Comparing Monitoring Solutions for CF and Lucee

Continuous Documentation - The best time is now

Deploying and Testing your sites with Bitbucket

Design Patterns: Common Solutions to Common Problems

End to End Testing of Coldfusion Applications using Test Cafe

Flutter for Web: Beautiful Apps and Websites with a Single Codebase

Asynchronous and synchronous code. There and back again.

Hardware connectivity on the progressive web

How To Design With Your User’s Needs & Expectations In Mind

Mouseless Development in vi-mode

Multi-language / multi-OS communication using RabbitMQ.

Practical Lessons Learned from 250+ Legacy CFML Projects

Squeezing performance of a Lucee application using FusionReactor

Testing - How Vital and How Easy to use

Testing My Non-ColdBox Site With TestBox

The trials and tribulations of moving to Linux as a developer

Why the Firefox DevTools are not as bad as you might think (and why Firebug had to die)

Who are the sponsors

Adobe

DistroKid

Lucee

Pixl8

elastic

FusionReactor

Ortus Solutions

TUXEDO Computers

U2D

CONTENS

TeraTech

Kondoku

Evening event

The Famous Code Masters game show with 2 teams

CFML related questions

Mark Drew and Rob Dudley hosting

A lot of fun

Why should CFers come to CF Camp?

Only CFML conference outside the US

Not driven by one company like CFSummit.  

A wide spread of topics

Started with 30-40ppl and it’s growing from year to year (now 150)

Networking with cool CFers, talk with speakers and venders - a “CFML family reunion”

Easy access to the Lucee engineers

Why are you proud to use CF?

The most powerful and easy to use language

Fast performance

A productivity abstraction layer over the JVM

Lucee open and transparent 

Easy cloud deployment

WWIT to make CF more alive this year?

Modern CFML command box, modules and libraries like Node, Repl with Java etc

A killer app written in CFML (compare to WordPress on PHP)

Easier CF Hosting - but Docker containers sidestep this issue

Talk more about what you have built in CFML

What are you looking forward to at CF Camp?

Mentioned in this episode

https://www.cfcamp.org/

Listen to the Audio

Bios

Kai Koenig

Kai works as a Software Solutions Architect for Ventego Creative in Wellington, New Zealand, which he co-founded with two partners.

Kai's work comprises a mix of consulting, training, mentoring and actual development work using a range of technologies, common themes being Java, Android, Kotlin, Flutter, CFML, JavaScript etc. He is well versed in Java and some other JVM-based languages like Clojure or Groovy and recently (re-)discovered the pleasure of writing software in Python and Go. Kotlin and Dart are his newest language loves though.

Other stuff Kai occasionally does: Writes for magazines, produces a Podcast (2 Developers Down Under) with his friend Mark Mandel from Melbourne/San Francisco and since 2007 fly small, single-engine airplanes around New Zealand and sometimes Australia.

Links

Kai tweets at AgentK (https://twitter.com/AgentK)

Michael Hnat

Michael is developing CFML application for more than 15 years and installed his first ColdFusion Server (4.0) from floppy discs (can be seen in several museums). He developed applications for several customers using different Framworks and techniques.

He has been organizing the CFCamp for nine years meanwhile.

In his free time he's playing ice hockey.

Interview transcript

Speaker 1:                           00:01                     Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Kai Koeneke and Michi hat and we're going to talk about everything, CF cam. So it's the amazing CFML conference in Europe coming up in October. And we're going to look at where it is, some history on it and what does it cover and all the exciting speakers and topics. So let's get going. So welcome guys. Hi, welcome. So those people who, who haven't come across CF camp, which is hard to believe because it's been going for years now, how many years has it been going? Meanwhile we have the 10 year anniversary. Wow. Um, yeah, it's, it's, I'm already really long time. Are you doing something special for the 10 year anniversary or oh, well, um, we did all the years and I figure we'll be a again, no, you're really good at great show. Uh, what we are, uh, happy to have for this year again is the famous, uh, cold Marsters in the evening, which is so old.

Speaker 1:                           01:05                     Always a fantastic show. And this year we really have a fantastic lineup of speakers and talks. So we'll be really, again, a fantastic event, I guess. Well that's great. So basically CF camp is a cold fusion conference. You know, originally focused on, Lucy now covers Adobe ColdFusion as well. Is that right? Or have I misunderstood what it is? So, um, it started, it started with the idea of bringing a conference to Europe. And, uh, we first talked to Lucy about that. Um, this was, oh yeah, 10 years ago. And we realized that, um, it's not about Lucy, it's about really CFML. And this includes, uh, Adobe, which means for the first year, uh, we, I think we haven't had Adobe as a sponsor for this conference. This was a one day event with, um, I think about 30 or 40 people. And from the next year on, um, Toby and Lucy has been a part of the sea CF camp.

Speaker 1:                           02:13                     And it was really, we have the focus on CF camp is not talking about the product, it's talking about a language. So this means we have a lot of things that are running in both worlds and we have a lot of things that are around CFML. It's not only about coding or CFML stuff, it's about tools and techniques. You are, you need to use around CFML. So how about monitoring? How about lock file analysis and security and stuff like this? Cool. So is Lucy bigger and in Europe than in the u s do you think Chi or would personally say

Speaker 2:                           03:00                     yes. Um, and I mean we don't really have any actual numbers because obviously, um, Adobe is not providing specific information on how many licenses they sell in various regions or

Read the show notes and download the episode here. Speaker 1:                           00:00                     Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Kishore Barry Krishna and we're going to be talking about CF summit west 2019. All it's new and there's a lot new in this. So a new location in Las Vegas, uh, some new speakers […]

Kishore Balakrishnan talks about “Adobe CF Summit West 2019 (All that is new) with Kishore Balakrishnan” in this episode of the CF Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

"...all the ColdFusion developers, that's one place where you get to meet the actual ColdFusion developers who develop the product and interact with them as well. And it's also one place where, and they also in fact, but, uh, it's sort of a place where you could get some ideas from each other. Uh, it's not, it's not an everyday occurrence that I could envision a developer who's developing ColdFusion that is the Adobe engineers, uh, get to interact with the developers, but the actual code developers to know how the features which they're developed are being utilized...

Show notes

What exactly is CF Summit West?

One place where all CF devs, designers, decision-makers and thought leaders come together

Meet the CF engineers in person

 Why all CFer should go?

40 sessions from top CFers

CF Specialist Certification

Showcase your CF skills

Help in CF hiring with a portal of certified CFer

Career development 

Full day CF classes with Charlie Arehart and Pete Freitag 

How many years has CF Summit West been running?

7 years

Why is it so important to the CF community?

Shows Adobe is fully backing CF

Show new features in new CF releases

65% of attendees are new to CF Summit

Seeing who is using CF and cool ways they are using

Community building

Revealing the Speakers and topics that you are excited about

How - open call for speakers - 160 topic submissions to a topic selection committee led by Elishia

Abram Adams, Charlie Arehart, Kailash Bihani, Brian Bockhold, Rick Buongiovanni, Matthew Clemente, Mike Collins, Paul Dumas, Elishia Dvorak, Nolan Erck, Dave Ferguson, Tony Ferraro, Daniel Fredericks, Pete Freitag, Ashish Garg, Uma Ghotikar, Matt Gifford, Giancarlo Gomez, Edwin Samuel Jonathan, Brian Klaas, Josh Kutz-Flamenbaum, Andy Lambert, Luis Majano, CEO, George Murphy, Rakshith Naresh, Piyush Kumar Nayak, Uday Ogra, Eric Peterson, Gavin Pickin, Brian Sappey, Suchika Singh, Denard Springle, Greg Stanley, Mark Takata, Andrew Tarvin, David Tattersal, Intergral , Minh Vo, Carl Von Stetten, Dan Wilson, Bradley Wood, Kevin Wright, Bruno Zugay

Topics

Adobe ColdFusion Keynote - CF 2020 sneak peeks

Angular for ColdFusion Developers

Approaches to more secure ColdFusion code

Augmented Reality powered by React Native and ColdFusion - A transformation to mobile app development

Automating your tasks using ColdFusion Scheduler

Beyond "Read All": Build Fine-Grained Control of Amazon Web Services in Your ColdFusion App

Caching and Performance in ColdFusion

Closing Keynote

ColdFusion and Vue - building CFML-powered reactive applications

ColdFusion for the next decade – All about the buzzworthy ColdFusion 2020

Customer Showcase: Learn How Central San uses ColdFusion to Interconnect and Manage Enterprise Infrastructure Assets

Document workflow and management made easy with ColdFusion

From Legacy to Modern, Techniques to update your Legacy Sites

GET /cfml - A Guide to Writing API Wrappers

Getting Started With CF's Docker Images

Harness the Best of the Best: ColdFusion and Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Integration

Humor That Works: The Secret to Being More Productive, Less Stressed, and Happier

Making Modules — Utilizing Reusable Code through ColdBox Modules

Meet Solr, ColdFusion's Search BFF

No more excuses - let FusionReactor instantly show you performance problems and defects in your code

Please pass the salt: Serve up passwords with a side of entropy

Practical Functional Programming in ColdFusion

Rapidly Prototyping Single-Page Applications with Coldfusion & Javascript

Real-time SMS Texting with ColdFusion & AWS

Reinforcement Learning with ColdFusion - Adding Practical Autonomy To Your Web Applications

RuleBox : The natural rule engine for CFML

SQL, I learned enough to break everything

Scaling enterprise applications with ColdFusion

Shake N'Bake: Top 10 Performance Tuning Tricks to put you in First Place

Shut the door to vulnerabilities in your code with these tools

Start `Integrated` Testing - The biggest and easiest ( testing ) bang for your buck

Step-by-Step: Migrating Existing ColdFusion Workloads to the AWS Cloud

Testing - How Vital and How Easy to use

The What, When and How of Eerie Real-Time Personalization

The business case for upgrading ColdFusion in 5 easy steps

Try This At Home: Building Your Own ColdFusion Swarm

Unleash the Power of the Adobe API Manager

Using ColdFusion to produce Dynamic Financial Letters

Vice President and CIO, Coalesce Holdings

WebSockets 101 : An Introduction to WebSockets on ColdFusion

WebSockets 201 : Beyond the introduction

[Angularjs + Reactjs + Vuejs] + CF - Integrating modern day JS frameworks with ColdFusion

Preconference classes

Adobe ColdFusion Certificate Program

Going from Zero to 60 with Docker and ColdFusion images

Hands-on ColdFusion Security Workshop

Postconference classes from Ortus

ColdBox From Zero to Hero

ColdBox From Hero to Superhero: API Edition

The Special Event this year

Reception at The Still  

Dates

Monday, Sept 30th - pre-conference classes

Tuesday, Oct 1st and Wed Oct 2nd - the main event

Cost

$99

Includes breakfast, lunch and breaks

Location

The Mirage Hotel, Las Vegas

On the Strip

Only a few miles from the airport 

Easy to get low priced plane tickets to Las Vegas including Southwest

Other things you can do in Las Vegas?

Stay over the weekend after the event for fun

Bring your spouse and kids

Casinos

Tiger zoo

Mir

Big Shows - 

Big shows, musicals, magic, celebrities and more

Absinthe

Blanc De Blanc

Blue Man Group

Celestia

Criss Angel MINDFREAK at Planet Hollywood

Elvis Presley's Heartbreak Hotel in Concert

FRIENDS! The Musical Parody

Jabbawockeez

KÀ by Cirque du Soleil

Le Rêve - The Dream

Menopause The Musical

Michael Jackson ONE

Mystère by Cirque du Soleil

O by Cirque du Soleil

Opium

The Beatles LOVE by Cirque du Soleil

Tournament of Kings Dinner & Show

V - The Ultimate Variety Show

VEGAS! THE SHOW

WOW - The Vegas Spectacular

Zumanity by Cirque du Soleil

Amazing locations

The Mirage volcano

Paris

Venetian gondolas

Bellagio fountains

Great restaurants and bars from simple to swanky

What is new this year?

Other CF Summits

India Dec 7th, 2019

Washington DC April 26th, 2020

New Europe event

Why are you proud to use CF?

Gets the job done more efficiently than other platforms

Doesn’t get in your way

WWIT to make CF more alive this year?

More community participation

Help to start and run a CFUG

CF 2020 release

Products and tool build on CF

Showcase of CF solutions on Adobe site

Adobe forums

Spread the word

What are you looking forward to at CF Summit?

Mentioned in this episode

CF Summit website 

Adobe ColdFusion Specialist Certification episode

Adobe ColdFusion 2020 Roadmap with Ashish Garg

State of the CF Union 2019 Survey Final Results

CF Camp

Ortus Post-conference classes 

Las Vegas show

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Kishore Balakrishnan

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

Links

Twitter https://twitter.com/kishore31 

FB https://www.facebook.com/kishoreb 

Email kishore (at) adobe.com

adobecoldfusion (at) adobe.com

Interview transcript

Speaker 1:                           00:00                     Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Kishore Barry Krishna and we're going to be talking about CF summit west 2019. All it's new and there's a lot new in this. So a new location in Las Vegas, uh, some new speakers and topics sneak peaks about ColdFusion 2020 and um, also some exciting pre-conference classes that we'll get into being selling like hotcakes. So very cool stuff. So welcome. Kishore

Speaker 2:                           00:32                     thanks Mikayla. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1:                           00:35                     You're welcome. And just in case you don't know, he is now the principal product marketing manager at w got a promotion cause he's been doing such great work marketing confusion and not yes or no, only that he's still coats and cold fusion on occasion when he's not, you know, figuring out how to market the product and putting together amazing events like CF summit with the other team members there. Um, and he does a lot of listening to customers to help understand what's going on and also explaining to people why cold fusion is the best language to use these days. So, um, and he's, Eh, lives in India where he's calling us from. So welcome.

Read more

Join the CF Alive revolution

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

Get early access to the CF Alive book and videos

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

Contribute to the CF Alive revolution

Connect with other CF developers and managers

There is no cost to membership.

The final results for the 2019 State of the CF Union survey are out. Thanks to all the CFers who filled it out this year. Discover what most developers use for tools, languages, database and development methods.

Before we begin with the results, we’d like to thank everyone who participated and responded to this year’s survey. And a special thanks to Brad Wood who helped me edit the survey questions and reviewed the results with me.

Show notes

If by any chance you are new to ColdFusion, it is a development platform for creating modern web applications on the JVM. The CFML language has tags that resemble HTML syntax for templating HTML and script that resembles JavaScript syntax for writing business logic. It is designed to be powerful, expressive and easy to get started coding in. Many features are built into ColdFusion that require add ons for other languages.

Related: Why ColdFusion is still alive

A lot of people are still on ColdFusion 11. This means that still so many people need to get out of the legacy hell. Upgrading people! That's what makes a programming language alive!

Everyone's welcome to read the results. They're at the TeraTech survey page and you can all see all the results in as much detail as you care to. Let's just have a look at this.

1. What version of CFML Engine do you use? 

2. What type of CFML Engine are you running? 

3. What CF Server OS are you using 

4. What OS do you run on your laptop/PC? 

5. What browsers/client platforms do you support in your apps?

6. Databases you use? 

7. What MVC Frameworks do you use? 

8. What ColdFusion-based CMS do you use?

9. What JavaScript libraries do you use? 

10. What CSS frameworks do you use? 

11. What CFC dependency injection frameworks and tools do you use? 

12. Which persistence frameworks do you use?

13. What testing and mocking frameworks do you use? 

14. What type of CF Mobile development frameworks are you using? 

15. What CF features do you use for code reuse? 

16. What do you use for source code control? 

17. What tools/IDEs do you use? 

18. What Browser Dev Tools do you use?

19. What do you use to build REST APIs 

20. What caching solutions are you using? 

21. How many years have you used CFML? 

22. How many years have you used OO? 

23. Other languages/environments you use? 

24. How many CF developers at your organization? 

25. How many total employees at your organization? 

26. How often do you attend ColdFusion User Group meetings? 

27. Which CF conferences will/did you attend this year? 

28. What online CF communities do you participate in? 

29. I listen to the CF Alive podcast 

30. What types of DEVELOPMENT setups do you use? 

31. What types of PRODUCTION deployments do you use?

32. What hosting services do you use for your PRODUCTION deployments? 

33. What Docker Image(s) are you using, if applicable? 

34. What deployment/build tools do you use? 

35. What monitoring tools are you using? 

36. How do you lock down your servers for security?

The first part of the analysis is done. We will do part 2 very soon. Make sure to follow us.

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Brad grew up in southern Missouri and after high school majored in Computer Science with a music minor at MidAmerica Nazarene University (Olathe, KS). Today he lives in Kansas City with his wife and three girls. Brad enjoys all sorts of international food and the great outdoors.

Brad has been programming ColdFusion since 2001 and has used every version of CF since 4.5. He first fell in love with ColdFusion as a way to easily connect a database to his website for dynamic pages. He enjoys configuring and performance tuning high-availability Windows and Linux ColdFusion environments as well as SQL Server. Brad is the ColdBox Platform developer advocate at Ortus Solutions and lead developer of the CommandBox CLI.

Links

CFML Slack Box Channel

Twitter

Brad

Interview transcript

Michaela Light:                  00:00:00               Welcome back to the show today. We're here with Brad wood from Ortus Solutions and we're going to be looking in detail at the results from the state of the ColdFusion Union survey 2019. So welcome Brad.

Brad Wood:                        00:00:34               Hello. Thank you. Good to be here.

Michaela Light:                  00:00:35               And Yeah, good to have you here again. And for those of you don't know, Brad is like the chief, uh, intelligent, a ColdFusion cold, CommandBox and other...

Brad Wood:                        00:00:47               I thought you were gonna say chief monkey there for a second.

Michaela Light:                  00:00:51               Well maybe you do a bit of a chief monkey on occasion. He gave an amazing number of talks into the box. He gave so many talks. I think he had to be split into parallel versions to be able to give the same talk, same time in different rooms, firms almost.

Michaela Light:                  00:01:05               Um, so anyway, good guy to check out. And his a blog is a coders revolution, if I remember right.

Brad Wood:                        00:01:15               That's my personal blog codersrevolution.com I typically blog stuff on the ortussolutions.com blog as well if it's box related, so.

Michaela Light:                  00:01:24               and occasionally he's seen on the a CF slack channel as well. Occasionally like every five minutes.

Brad Wood:                        00:01:31               You know, I actually, I just hit my 7000th message in the general channel just a few minutes ago. There's a little optic, there's a little Bot that keeps track of how much you talk and if you, if you blabber too much, they'll pop up and give you a little kind of anniversary notices like, Hey, you're 10000th the message, you know?

Michaela Light:                  00:01:50               Wow. Well, I think everyone listening appreciate all the support you give in the CF slack channel and all over the interwebs, so I appreciate you doing that.

Michaela Light:                  00:02:01               Anyway, today we're going to look at the results of the ColdFusion union survey. This is an annual survey that TeraTech runs for the ColdFusion community and it's a about 46 questions in it about all different aspects of ColdFusion tools. People use frameworks, uh, you know, what people think about ColdFusion and where it's going.

Brad Wood:                        00:02:20               So the survey orders order gives us a good kind of barometer of where the community is at. Um, you know, a lot of our open source libraries like ColdBox and ContentBox, you know, we're at, we're asking ourselves questions like, you know, what versions of ColdFusion do we need to be supporting? What versions of ColdFusion do we need to be supporting, what data bases are the most popular? So the state of the CF Union survey gives us a good kind of the, uh, know indicator where people are at, what they're interested in and, uh, and we kind of know what to focus on. So I always look forward to a survey every year.

Read more

 

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

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

 

Join the CF Alive revolution

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

Get early access to the CF Alive book and videos

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

Contribute to the CF Alive revolution

Connect with other CF developers and managers

There is no cost to membership.

Ashish Garg talks about “Adobe ColdFusion 2020 Roadmap (Multi-cloud, micro-services and more), with Ashish Garg” in this episode of the CF Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

Show notes

ColdFusion Future

PM → VM → Cloud → Containers → Serverless

What will make CF take off more

CF 2020 Vision - To be the modernized platform of choice for building cloud-native microservice applications with an absolute focus on ease of use without getting locked to a particular cloud vendor (multi-cloud).

Multi-cloud

Micro-services container deploy

CF 2020 Roadmap - modernized ColdFusion for the next decade

Compare to the move from CF5 to CFMX J2EE

That enabled Enterprise java development using CF

Now cloud

Cloud

Most enterprises are moving to the cloud

Why is cloud so important to enterprises and CIOs?

Less upfront cost

CapEx vs OpEx

Pay monthly vs up front.

Computing as a utility vs investment in build and maintaining, specialization of server building and maintenance (including security patching, upgrades), better redundancy

And more flexibility for having to know how many servers you need up front - or change the number of servers day to day, minute to minute. 

Better for the budget - more predictable 

Faster time to market, less work on maintaining servers. Easier to manage

Managed services - including software

Many extra services available via the cloud

Eg database as a service

Sizing, no downtime or maintenance

No need for DBA (apart from database design)

40+ AWS services

Backup is taken care of for you

CF will provide easy access to key cloud services - See Services section below

The old distributed vs centralized debate

Easier to scale

Reliability 

Better but now centralized so when it does go down it affects everything

AWS went down

Multi-cloud, multi-region deployment

Multi-cloud - better features or implementation on certain cloud providers

Eg HIPPA compliance easier on Azure

Better regional availability, government restrictions on US and EU govt sites

Can start small for development then easily scale (both in how beefy the machine is and number of machines in the cluster)

CF makes multi-cloud easy

AWS

Azure

Combined AWS and Azure make up ⅔ of the cloud market for CFers currently

Other cloud vendors coming in future

Cloud platform-agnostic - portability

Portability layer so CFers can write this for new cloud providers   as DO

How fast can it move to a new cloud

Depends on how the app is written. Containers make this easier. Full-blown cloud app needs abstraction layer. Database provisioning may take time.

AWS cloud formation template to make a new one

CF cloud licensing 

Moving to cloud licensing (granularly pay per hour/minute)

Rakshith working on this

Technical issues are easier to solve

Free Intro pricing for developers compare to AWS - Freemium marketing - low barrier to entry

CF AWS already has hourly pricing - AMI

Monitoring

Monitoring, security and scaling built-in

Performance Monitoring Toolset (PMT) will be transformed to be cloud/container ready - Monitoring of cloud services

Messaging and alerts of performance issues

AWS cloud watch integration

Centralized performance monitoring of cluster (Virtual Private Cloud = VPC)

Auto-scaling? Kubanetics or ECS orchestration of containers

Move to serverless

Calls going out, coming back, performance metrics of cloud services

Logging

All logging to be sent to a centralized repo across all the nodes. The idea is to make log inspection for debugging across your nodes and microservices super simple.

Possible new dedicated logging service and integration with existing logging services such as Splunk

API Manager logging, control and monitoring of API use will move into cloud too

Container support

Why - move from monolith apps to REST-based API microservice apps and granular runtime modules

Lean and small code, more efficient use of computing resources

Fast loading

Granular roll back to an earlier version of service API

Better QA because can test each microservice separately

More agile, safe to take more risks

CI/CD pipeline

Fast deployment

API manager and microservices

a hidden CF advantage

Some future improvements to API manager have been made

For cloud compatible

Run on the cloud with common Redis caching in your VPC

Installation

Nimble runtimes

Download a tiny zip containing a core base and a package manager – instead of the present 1 GB installer. From 1 GB to less than 50 MB.

May not have an installer GUI

Easier container creation for average developers

Speed of loading/startup time 5 seconds or less

Similar to NPM = Node Package Manager 

Auto-scaling of code to see what tags are used

Great for microservice code that 

Could it auto pull in any extra code at runtime?

DevOps - Tool to scan ColdFusion app and infer CF modules that are required

App + dependencies to build/create CF Runtime and Docker image

Integrate with CI/CD tools such as Jenkins to host the build/Docker image and host it on the cloud

Container - Fully scriptable Docker container to programmatically configure all the settings needed

Full modularity to create a micro container including just the modules that the microservice/application needs

Language

“CFScript 2.0”

We will have an ECMA Script compliant CFScript version that fully resolves the script syntax issues that we saw previously.

Availability of developers - easier to hire programmers who understand JavaScript

Polyglot programming - creating apps in multiple languages

Frontend in Angular, React or Vue with backend in CF - similar language

Why React and Node became popular because language is similar

Backward compatibility with prior CFScript version 

Cloud Skills 

94% of IT managers find hiring clouds skills very hard

There is a huge upside for you ColdFusion developers out there too. According to the OpsRamp cloud skill survey, 94% of the IT decision-makers find it difficult to hire cloud-native and multi-cloud operators. So we are not just talking about a cloud skill gap, it is a cloud skill crisis. With the future version of ColdFusion, all you ColdFusion developers will be upskilled to become competent cloud-native and multi-cloud developers with the ease of use that ColdFusion has to offer – with this CF developers will be amidst the cloud technology that has a huge skill gap. You can call yourselves cloud-native and multi-cloud developers with the vision that we have set of ourselves.

Compare to move to Java with CF 6 - making Enterprise developer

Services

On AWS and Azure, you will be able to use a common API interface across clouds to access

Storage eg S3

Database RDS, Azure SQL

NoSQL

Caching Eslatic Cache, Redis?

Messages/notifications SQS, push notifications

All this in less than 1/4th the code needed, say in Java using the Java SDK.

EC2, ECS

Serverless support?

Why: ease of coding, Multicloud

Can use Extra services - use in a cloud-aware way - but lack of portability - via REST so easy to call from CF. Expose Java SDK?

Configuration

The idea is to ease the configuration of servers or containers and applications in one centralized server. You no longer have to deal with CAR or migrate settings from one server to another through a manual copy of files. Everything will be taken care of by this centralized configuration using which you can push changes to all or some of your servers/containers/applications.

DevOps easier - scriptable deployment

Serverless

Tool to build CF runtime to deploy your serverless code on Amazon Lamda or Azure function.

All this happens across AWS and Azure to begin with. We will be a true multi-cloud solution.

Key is a small runtime and fast startup of CF

Ideally needs CF licensing on a per-second basis

Conclusion

We are supercharged with this vision. And we really hope you are as charged as we are as we ColdFusion to a whole new level in the coming versions.

70% of Fortune 500 using CF for app dev

New customers coming to CF

Why are you proud to use CF?

WWIT to make CF more alive this year?

What are you looking forward to at CF Summit?

Mentioned in this episode

ColdFusion CommandBox vs Node.js (Dev Feature shootout), with Nolan Erck

From Local Dev to Production with CommandBox, CFConfig, and Docker

ContentBox in the Cloud (Docker Magic) with Gavin Pickin

The Docker Revolution for Faster ColdFusion Development (and Easier DevOps) with Bret Fisher

Using Portainer.io (Docker Container Management) with Neil Cresswell

Secrets From the Folks Who Make the Official Lucee CFML Docker Images, with Geoff Bowers

Getting started fast with Docker, with Mark Drew

Revealing the ColdFusion 2018 Roadmap details, with Rakshith Naresh

Adobe ColdFusion Specialist Certification (new at CF Summit), with Elishia Dvorak

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Ashish Garg

Dir of Eng for ColdFusion and e-Learning, 15 years at Adobe. Responsible for many successful projects. JRUN 4 years. 

Links

LinkedIn

Asgarg (at) adobe.com

Interview transcript

Michaela Light:                  00:00:01               Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Ashish Garg, he's the VP of, uh, one of the director of engineering. Sorry, gave you a promotion then accidentally. Um, and when we talk, yeah, you're welcome. And you will to this podcast because we're on this, it's an exclusive look at ColdFusion 2020 roadmap and we're going to be looking at all the exciting features that are coming up in, uh,...

Nolan Erck talks about “ColdFusion CommandBox vs Node.js (Dev Feature shootout)” in this episode of the CF Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

Show notes

The myth that JS has all the cool tools and CF is dying

Node.js has lots of cool dev tools

CommandBox

What is Node.js

JavaScript based webserver and dev tools, CLI

Very popular and lots of updates

What is CommandBox?

CFML based webserver and dev tools, CLI

Installing Node

Installing CommandBox

1. Ease of install

Both Easy to install

Both Open source and free

Score: CommandBox 1 Node 1

2. Command Line 

Both have REPL -  read–eval–print loop

Both Run Batch files

CommandBox BulletTrain add on - more colors and more informative prompt

Score: CommandBox 2 Node 2

3. Running files

Both Easy from the command line

Replaces other script languages such as BASH with one you already know (JS or CFScript

Eg file processing, production deployment, photo file processing

Score: CommandBox 3 Node 3

4. Built-in Help

Node --help

Box help

Help name spaces

Score: CommandBox 4 Node 4

5. How they work

Node

Running a JavaScript application engine on your computer (or

server)

Code is processed thru the engine

Spins up different services as needed

Customizable per project via ".json" con

CommandBox

Running a CFML application engine on your computer (or

server)

Code is processed thru the engine

Spins up different services as needed (modules, packages)

Customizable per project via ".json" con

Score: CommandBox 5 Node 5

6. Ease to set up a new project

npm init

Wizard interface asks questions

Node json file

NPM = Node Package Manager www.npmjs.com 

box init

Same with box json file

Score: CommandBox 6 Node 6

7. Dealing with dependencies (frameworks and libraries required for production)

Node

In package.json, "dependencies" section

Things your app needs to run

jquery, lodash, Angular, libaries from your team, etc

"npm install"

Node goes out to "the registry" and grabs those assets

Puts them in "node_modules" folder

CommandBox

In box.json, "dependencies" section

Things your app needs to run

jquery, lodash, Angular, libraries from your team, etc

"box install"

CommandBox goes out to "the cloud" and grabs those assets

Puts them in "installPaths" folders

Score: CommandBox 7 Node 7

8. Dev dependencies (dev tools)

Tools and libraries you want on dev machines but not production

Eg Testing frameworks 

Node

In package.json, "devDependencies" section

Things your app needs to build

CLI Tools, Typescript transpiler, Code Analyzer, Linter,etc

Angular CLI, TypeScript, Webpack, etc

"npm install --dev [thing]"

Node goes out to "the registry" and grabs those assets

Puts them in "node_modules" folder

CommandBox

In box.json, "devDependencies" section

Things your app needs to build

jquery, lodash, Angular, libaries from your team, etc

"box install --saveDev [thing]"

CommandBox goes out to "the cloud" and grabs those assets

Puts them in "installPaths" folders

Score: CommandBox 8 Node 8

9. Package management

Node

npm Registry

Magic place in "the cloud" where reusable JavaScript lives

"npm install [some library]"

Node talks to "the registry", downloads the lib

These dependencies live in the "node_modules" folder of your project

Adding My Project to npm

Create a package.json le

Follow a few basic guidlines

README, semantic version, Author,

etc

More details

CommandBox

ForgeBox

CommandBox has a Registry: ForgeBox

The "npm" of the CF world

Not just *Box stuff!

Can install CFWheels, Mura, FW/1, etc

Any general CFML project can live here

ForgeBox replaces

CFLib, (RIAForge), GetMura etc

How do I add my project to ForgeBox?

Create a box.json 

Follow a few basic guidlines

README, semantic version, Author,

etc

More details

Score: CommandBox 9 Node 9

10. Docker containers

hub.docker.com/_/node

hub.docker.com/r/ortussolutions/commandbox/

Score: CommandBox 10 Node 10

11. Making Games

Node

Tons of resources

Many game engines support JavaScript

Can get as simple or advanced as you like

CommandBox

box snake

Vintage gaming at its finest!

Minh Vo's preso on React at Gov't Summit

draftstudios.com

Giancarlo Gomez's preso on WebSockets:

"Refreshing Your UI: Modern Uses for WebSockets"

Score: CommandBox 11 Node 11

12. Contributing

Node

Main engine is written in C++, not JavaScript

Add-ons can be JavaScript but not the core

e.g the Angular CLI, create-react-app

CommandBox

90% of the core is CFML

Remaining 10% is Java

Installing CommandBox also gives you the source code!

Score: CommandBox 12 Node 12

But my custom commands have to be ColdBox apps, right?

NO!

Which to use?

Both

They serve different purposes

CommandBox is…

Free, open source, well

supported

Supports all CFML engines

Lucee and Railo

Adobe CF as far back as version 9

CommandBox Really is a Game-Changer

You can do all the cool things that Node/JavaScript developers do

Uses for Node.js

It's ubiquitous with modern front-end development

Front-end tooling requires Node

Angular, Vue, React, PhoneGap, Grunt, Gulp, Stylus, SASS,

SCSS, LESS, WebPack, Babel, TypeScript, etc

This is a "given" nowadays

Uses for CommandBox

This is the way to tell modern CFML developers from legacy programmers

Spinning up Dev environments, testing everything,

containerization, onboarding new team members

Managing production web servers

Building CLI tools for development AND production servers!

How to learn (Resources)

South of Shasta - onsite and remote training

nodejs.org

docs.npmjs.com

commandbox.ortusbooks.com

Ortus Solutions training

Brad Wood's Blog

Talk to people at the conference!

What are you looking forward to at CF Summit?

Mentioned in this episode

Preso, videos and demos

http://sacinteractive.com/

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Nolan Erck

Chief consultant at South of Shasta Nolan Erck has been developing software for 19 years. Starting in the video game industry working on titles for Maxis and LucasArts, then advancing to web development in 1999, his list of credits includes Grim Fandango, StarWars Rogue Squadron, SimPark, SimSafari as well as high-traffic websites for clients. Nolan manages the SacInteractive User Group, teaches classes on aspects of software development, and regularly gives presentations at conferences and user groups across the country.

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Interview transcript

Michaela Light:                  00:00                     Okay. Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Nolan Hook from the south of Shasta and we're going to be talking about ColdFusion command box versus no js and all the cool development things you can do with each. And we're doing a developer feature shootout today to see which one is the better one to use field development process. So if you have not met Nolan a, he has been developing software for more than 20 years and he started off from the video game industry but quickly came into web development and he now runs the sat interactive user group in Sacramento and he teaches classes on all kinds of software development. Cool stuff. And he is a prolific presenter. I lost [inaudible] into the box in Texas, but I think you're going to a CF Summit in Las Vegas on you as well now.

Nolan Erck:                         00:51                     Yes, I am.

Michaela Light:                  00:52                     Excellente. Well welcome back to the show. So, um, maybe we should just, uh, start off with the breaking some myths because uh, we want people to be crying at home cause they miss the broken. Um, no, you don't have to cry, but we didn't want to dispel a few myths. So I think one of the myths out there is that JavaScript has all cool tools like no js, uh, and the ColdFusion is dying and has no tools and is naked in the wilderness.

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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 increasin