ColdFusion Alive

Elishia Dvorak talks about “Adobe ColdFusion Specialist Certification (new at CF Summit)” in this episode of the CF Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

Show notes

What is the CF Specialist Certification?

1. + 22 hours video training (get access to the videos and demo files 2 weeks before the hands on training). 

This must be completed prior to the hands on class

You can ask questions of the Adobe experts during this time

2. a full-day hands on class taught by top Adobe ColdFusion experts. 

Instructor plus TAs

3. Multiple-choice assessment 

4. Adobe ColdFusion Specialist certificate.

And LinkedIn badge to help you stand out from the crowd

Cost

$399 including the video training, hands-on class and assessment

Why Certify

See where your skills are compared to other CFers

Learn new features that you might have missed

Improve chances of promotion or being hired

How is this different from the old certification program?

The old one was CF 9

Only a test - did not include any training

The new one is video training and 1-day training with Q&A plus a test

1-day training

Small classroom format

1 instructor + 2 TAs

Requirements

Bring a modern laptop with CF 2018 and CF Builder 2018 already installed on it

Install help provided

Why did you decide to bring it back?

It has been 10 years

Developers, managers and organization for both certification and training from Adobe

Future - other topics such as CF Security (by Pete Freitag)

What does it cover?

All versions of CF

CF 2018 is best

Fundaments

Modern CFML coding best practices

It includes all the major features in the latest release of Adobe ColdFusion – to use CFML to develop, test, debug and deploy web apps. 

It also shows how CF acts as a glue between different systems.

Does not be cover non-language features such as the API Manager or Clustering..

Course Outline

Introduction to ColdFusion

Basics of HTML (Static Vs Dynamic sites)

What is ColdFusion and CF Builder?

ColdFusion Installation

Dynamic generation of Pages using CFML (Hello World)

ColdFusion Administrator

ColdFusion Datasources

Getting Started with ColdFusion Builder

ColdFusion Builder Primer

Debugging applications

Advanced features

ColdFusion Fundamentals

Commenting code 

Conditional statements 

Reusing code with  

Reusing code with Custom Tags and CFModule

Writing and Using CFFunctions

Working with forms

Working with forms – best practices

Database Operations

Displaying database data – cfoutput and cfloop

Introducing CurrentRow

Using the Resultset data – current row, record count, cache, column list, valuelist()

Using URL data in dynamic queries

Creating dynamic SQL for multiple search criteria

Query parameters and caching

Variable and Data Types

Working with lists

Working with arrays

Working with structures 

Looping over data

Shared Scopes and Handling State

Addressing the web’s statelessness

Session and Application Variables 

Locking shared scope variables

Application Framework

Using the application framework

Configuring application settings 

Handling application events

Handling request events 

Handling session events

OnServerStart()

applicationStop()

PDF Operations in CF

Installing HTML to PDF Engine

Creating PDFs with  

HTML to PDF Conversion with

Introduction to DDX support 

Object-Oriented ColdFusion

Instance-based components 

Caching instances

Adding methods to a component

Public and Private

Property getters and setters

Constructors

Inheritance

Composition

Interfaces

Models

When

Sign up now

Video release mid-Sept

On site class Monday Sept 30th

Availability

120 seats

Where

Mirage Las Vegas

Why Las Vegas?

Easy travel

Cheap flights to LAS airport

Airport in right in town only a few miles from the conference hotel

CF Summit

West

East

India

CF cert level

beginner/intermediate level

Learn CF in a Week

Why are you proud to use CF?

WWIT to make CF more alive this year?

Engage

Blog

Social post

Share your CF app story with Adobe

SaaS app

What are you looking forward to at CF Summit West?

Mentioned in this episode

https://cfsummit.adobeevents.com/adobe-coldfusion-specialist/

https://coldfusion.adobe.com/2019/07/adobe-coldfusion-specialist-certificate-program/

https://teratech.com/comprehensive-coldfusion-training-list-16-resources/

https://cfsummit.adobeevents.com/

Learn CF in a Week site and episode

Listen to the Audio

 

Bio

Elishia Dvorak

Elishia Dvorak is the Technical marketing manager for ColdFusion and e-learning products. She started out as a CF developer.

Links

CF Summit

Questions cfsummit (at) adobe.com

Linked In

Twitter  @elishdvorak/

Adobe blogs

Elishia (at) adobe.com

Interview transcript

Michaela Light 0:02

Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Alicia the divorce. God, am I saying your name wrong? That sounds like you're in the that grade that crazy keyboard that people use. But I know that's not you could have been though.

Elishia Dworak 0:16

No, but it's the same name. And actually, it's pronounced Dworzhack. But I don't do that because I'm from California, we make up our own names for everything.

Michaela Light 0:25

Oh, how do you pronounce it? Okay, same name different pronunciation. And if you don't know us, she is the Adobe e Technical Marketing Manager and knows all kinds of details about ColdFusion, and E learning products that come out of Adobe. And she actually started as a ColdFusion developer many years ago. So you may have seen her at CF summit on stage talking about the API manager or the the performance tuning monitor that just came out in ColdFusion 2018. So very famous person well in the ColdFusion world. But today, we're going to be talking about something new, which is the ColdFusion Specialist certification that is releasing at CF summit in October this year in Las Vegas. So maybe we better start off by asking what exactly is this certification?

Elishia Dworak 1:23

Thank you for asking. So the specialist certificate, it's a certificate program that will hopefully be the first of more to come. But this will be basically combined training with about I would say somewhere around 22 to 25 hours of video content, training you on the basics of ColdFusion development practices. So we'll follow best practices will ensure that we're giving you security hints and tips along the way. But you the courses actually designed for you to consume the video content ahead of time. And then come on site with us for a whole day of review and questions and answers and additional training on site. And the instructor will go over all of these different concepts and ensure that you have thorough knowledge of all of them. Before you take about I would say a quiz that's at the end, I would say it would be about an like 45 minute quiz at the end to get your certificate. And that will be a certificate of completion from Adobe, which will have badges associated with it that you can put on linked in for job searching and things like that. And of course, will print up a certificate for you as well. So it's really exciting, because it's the first of its kind actually.

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.

Carl Von Stetten, Daniel Fredericks and Dave Ferguson talk about “Learn ColdFusion in a Week” in this episode of the CF Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

Show notes

What is Learn CF in a Week?

http://www.learncfinaweek.com/

Learn CF in a Week is a community-driven training program that teaches all the basics you need to be a ColdFusion Developer in one week.

Online Course

PDF

E-book

Sample files

Started by Simon Free and many contributors for CF10, now updated for CF 2018

Adobe and others have helped

How much does it cost?

Free. Open source.

Why did you create it?

To bridge the gap between reading online docs and learning the language

Who contributed http://www.learncfinaweek.com

When was it first released?

Approx 2010

What versions of ACF and Lucee is it for?

All versions since CF 11  because CF is backward compatible

Examples for ACF, but mostly works ok in Lucee

What are the cool features of it?

Walks through features

Subsections

Hands-on exercises with solutions

Modern CF code - cfscript, commandbox

Written by developers for developers

Sections

Database access

Applicaton.cfc

Logic

Setup

Installing ColdFusion 10

Installing MySQL

Installing Sample Files

Basics

Decision Making and Scopes

Looping

Data Handling

Code Reuse

Application.cfc

OOP

ORM

Mail

Document Handling

Caching

Security

Error Handling and Debugging

I18n

What to do Next - learning resources

Is it realistic for a non-CF programmer to learn CF in a week and be productive?

Yes. Without human help!

What about a non-programmer (eg an HTML graphic designer)?

Yes if you spend more time on the Basics chapter

What other ways are there to learn CF?

Trial and error

CF docs - but just documents individual tags - not the why

Books

CF Web Application Construction Kit - now out of date

Learn CF in 100 minutes Ortus book

Training

Linda

Adobe college curriculum

Conferences

CFUG

CF certification

CF Slack channel

What plans do you have for the future of Learn CF in a Week?

Gotchas coming from specific languages

Advanced sections

Containers

Performance

API manager

Cloud

Frameworks

Package Management ForgeBox

More resources

Statistics

Learn CF a Week meetup at CF Summit

How can listeners help out with Learn CF in a Week?

Google group for contributors and help

Why are you proud to use CF?

WWIT to make CF more alive this year?

What are you looking forward to at CF Summit West?

Listen to the Audio

 

Bios

Carl Von Stetten

Carl is in his 19th year working as a Geographic Information System (GIS) Analyst with a San Francisco Bay Area municipal wastewater agency.  He develops and maintains multiple internal ColdFusion-based GIS applications for use by agency staff, and is well-versed in Microsoft SQL Server and Esri ArcGIS technologies.  He can often be found hanging out in the ColdFusion Slack team, on the Adobe ColdFusion forums, or on Twitter (@cfvonner).

Links:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/cfvonner

Daniel Fredericks

A ColdFusion Developer for over 15 years specializing in Government Contracts. Continuing to learn more modern techniques all the time such as OOP, API development and more. In my spare time I spend time with my wife and 2 kids, coaching and playing sports with them, and watching a lot of sports.

Links:

You can find me on FB, Twitter (@fmdano74), Slack and other CFML based sites.

Dave Ferguson

 

Dave has spent the majority of his life living in sunny Southern California. Over the past almost 20 years has worked in information technology after his attempt at being a career restaurant manager failed miserably. He has spent the majority of that time specializing in large enterprise-class systems. When not writing code, Dave is an avid gamer and competitive martial artist with multiple championship titles.

Links

https://twitter.com/dfgrumpy

https://github.com/dfgrumpy/learncfinaweek

Mentioned in this episode

https://teratech.com/comprehensive-coldfusion-training-list-16-resources/

State of CF Union survey

Interview transcript

Michaela Light 0:01

Welcome back to the show today we've got an exciting episode about learn CF in a week, which is an amazing website, free training. Oops, I let the cat out of the bag there on the how it's priced. And I've actually got three experts who helped put together local fusion in a week we've got Dan frederick's of the North Virginia CPG. We've got Dave Bergson, who's joining us from sunny California, and Carl von Stephen. And I'm forgetting where in the country you are call California as well. Another sunny California is on the other end at the other end of California, the Republic of Northern California. So I'm cool. Well,

glad you all could join us here and I think we should start off because not everyone knows what this thing is learn CF in a week. What exactly is it?

Daniel Fredericks 0:52

I'm gonna let Dave mentioned this because Dave is one of the originals. Just a quick history that did

was part of this originally when they put it together five, six years ago. That's been a while. And then he realized that we that it needed to be upgraded. So he conned or asked both Carl and myself to join in. And we've been sort of helping administer putting the new thing together. So Dave can probably give you a better sense of where learns the up for week came from DEF CON with cookies is probably a good, good thing, but I still haven't given you the cookies. So.

Dave Ferguson 1:29

So, backstory like Dan said learn CF in a week was started a long time ago to try and bridge the gap between somebody wanting to learn the language and just reading help documentation.

We can go online and go to CF docs and wherever else you want you to figure out how to write certain tags and so on and so forth. But there was nothing to really say if you're new to the language. Here's how you would start here's how you would finish and kind of just help you along the way versus just hunting and packing up.

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.

Daniel Garcia, Leon O'Daniel and Nolan Erck talk about “How to start and run a CFUG (experts panel)” in this episode of the CF Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

Show notes

What is a CFUG?

ColdFusion User Group

CFers gather to learn and share about CF. May have presentations too.

And other related technologies

Learn about opportunities, network

Why is a CFUG important?

CF still relevant

Share tips and tech

Help keep CF alive

Keep up with new tools and ideas

How do you start a CFUG?

Finding a Location is key

Important not to move every month

Free venue, allows food, has a projector and AV

Easy part of town to reach after work (allow for traffic patterns in your town)

Meetup Pro members in major metropolitan areas may have the ability to reserve space at WeWork (a Co-Working Space) for little to no charge.

HackLab - add to their calendar

Meet at User Group Member’s company conference rooms

Zoom Video Conference

Meeting time and frequency

Middle of week - Tues or Wed ideal, Thursday ok

Nth Wed of month

Ask members what day

6pm works if you have food provided or for sale

6:30pm - 8pm

Every month vs every other month

Don’t move the day around

Name badges and go around room intros

Name, company, what hope get out of group

Tips on getting speakers

Ask speakers from CF conferences (CF Summit, Into The Box, CF Camp etc)

Ask CF Vendors (Integral, Foundeo, BlueRiver, Ortus etc)

Tech Recruiters talk on job market

Tech people you know, CFers at your company

Ask related tech vendors and from other conferences

Alternatives to expert speakers

Code show and tell

Help members give mini-talks (5-10 mins)

Show a record preso and talk about it

Backup presenter

Get slides ahead of time

Developer show and tell

Hands-on workshop

Open forum Q&A

Promoting a CFUG

Email list

Several reminders

Website

Great for meeting announcements

Past meeting recording

Bio

Adobe

Forum

CF breakfast event

Free software give away

Extra tickets to speakers and attendees each month

Lucee

Eventbrite

Meetup - people can search for this

Your company

LI friends

CF Slack channel

Instagram - share speaker photo before event, share photos from event after

Promote active members on website

Freebies - Adobe, vendors, Training company such as Linda

At conferences - CFUG T-shirt, postcards

Grab extra swag

FB Live (or YouTube live) of meeting

Believe.tv allows for multiple presenters and screen share

Manager

Co-manager

Burnout

Vision and member guidelines

How do you deal with disruptive members?

Facilitate discussion on topic, keep concise

How do you encourage quiet members to speak up and participate?

CF Alive book - community guidelines

Why are you proud to use CF?

WWIT to make CF more alive this year?

What are you looking forward to at CF Summit West?

Listen to the Audio

Mentioned in this episode

Mike Born CF Popular article 

Bios

Daniel Garcia

Daniel Garcia is the founder and manager of the Chicagoland ColdFusion User Group.  He works for American Access Casualty Company as a Lead Application Developer as well as a part-time freelancer.  Working with ColdFusion since 1999 (CF4), he is passionate about the technology and strives to be a full stack web developer (or as close to one as he can be).

He is a husband, father, wisenheimer, cinefile, regaler of useless knowledge, barbershopper, and has an irreverent sense of humor.  His mantra is "work smarter, not harder" and "KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid)".

Leon O'Daniel

Leon O’Daniel has been designing and developing web sites using ColdFusion since 1997. He splits his time between being a Senior Web Application Developer and Leader of the Boeing ColdFusion Community of Practice for the Boeing Company, and Organizer of the Seattle ColdFusion User Group and Vice President for his company, O’Daniel Designs.

Leon is an avid Seattle Seahawks fan, father of 2, and has been married for 28 (almost 29) years to his wife Gina. Leon tries to make himself available to help other ColdFusion developers to help with anything he is able. You can contact him at [email protected].

Seattle ColdFusion User Group Logo:

Seattle ColdFusion User Group Link:

https://www.seattlecfug.org | https://www.meetup.com/Seattle-ColdFusion-User-Group

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

Interview transcript

Michaela Light 0:01

Hey, welcome back to the show here we have a special episode. And it's a panel of cold fusion user group experts. We've got Leon, Nolan and Daniel. So and we might have drew as well joining us, he isn't here yet. But if you pop in the middle, I'll introduce him there. And my name is Michaela light. This is the CF alive podcast. And today we're going to be looking about running or starting a cold fusion user group. So welcome, everyone. And if you don't know, our guests here, Leon runs the Seattle cold fusion user group. And Nolan runs a user group down in Mount Shasta area in California.

Sacramento, I'm sorry,

Nolan Erck 0:48

no worries, just it's just,

Michaela Light 0:49

it's just your company name has Shasta, and it gets me confused.

Nolan Erck 0:53

I had that happen before.

Michaela Light 0:55

Yeah. And then Daniel runs the circuit, Chicago ColdFusion user group. So we nearly got all the time zones covered in the United States. And if anyone listening, if you run a youth group, please let us know in the comments about it, we'd love to hear what you're doing. And if you're interested in starting youth group, let us know that in the comments. And if you just wish you could attend to us, or you can tell us that too. So I think we should start off by just explaining what is a ColdFusion user group or the acronym CPG that sometimes gets bandied around.

Leon O'Daniel 1:32

So you know, for, for my opinion, a confusion user group is a community of people that all have a common interest in cold fusion, and are interested in sharing their knowledge about cold fusion and about learning about opportunities and additional information in that area. also supporting technologies for cold fusion.

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.

You can read the show notes and download the podcast here Michaela Light 0:01 Hey, welcome back to the show here we have a special episode. And it's a panel of cold fusion user group experts. We've got Leon, Nolan and Daniel. So and we might have drew as well joining us, he isn't here […]

Raymond Camden talks about “Vue.JS FusionReactor and Therapy” in this episode of the CF Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

"...There could have been tools to make that a little bit easier to make the scaffolding quicker. It's, but like, it's, you know, it's like when I go anywhere now with my children, right? I don't like casually go anywhere, but my kids are coming. I'm bringing snacks and bringing diaper bag and all that. And I like them being with me. But it's a process. And that's kind of how I felt about Angular. You know, view, you know, view definitely has a process to it has a command line as a scaffolding tool. And you can build big applications. But then, but it also supports simple progressive enhancement..."

Show notes

Vue.JS

Why and what excites you about Vue

Simple progress web apps enhancements - easier than jQuery

Eg progressive search and filtering

Simple to get started with than Angular

Vue has two way binding between your DOM and JS data

jQuery this is manual

Easier with dynamic HTML with tokens that are replaced by JS data by Vue

Compare to Handlebars, mustache, Jade and Pug

Excited about its simplicity and power

Find other Vue logic from other similar sites

CodePen online code edit

Compare to Angular.JS

Angular hard to use on smaller scale use on a single page of an app - it expects to run the whole app

Needs more handholding, conventions

Major Angular update - leaders were not helpful to people upgrading

Even needing to explain the version numbering change

What Vue is especially good for

Apps

Single page enhancement

For micro apps (4 lines) just uses JavaScript

Example of Vue.JS on Plex media server

API Fetch - does  AJAX type calls super easy

Axeos library

Vue Challenges

More documentation for people new to JavaScript apps

What folders can you ignore when starting

Learning

Get started in an hour

Sarah Drasner CSS tricks site

FR first impressions for new CFers

Therapy with his wife dying a year ago

Neutral party listening to all the emotions and experiences

Good for any mental health issues - anxiety and depression

Mentioned in this episode

Progressive Web Apps- CF Alive episode

Why Programming in Node.JS is so powerful- CF Alive episode

John Farrar: Vue- more is less

CodePen

Sarah Drasner CSS tricks Vue articles 

Getting started with FusionReactor

Finding and fixing your slow ColdFusion pages with FusionReactor

Ray’s Wife died blog posts

Building a plex server duration search with Vue.JS

CF Suicide and depression- CF Alive episode

Oh my GAD- CF ALive episode

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Raymond Camden

Raymond Camden works as a Developer Experience engineer for American Express. He works on serverless, JavaScript, web standards, and enterprise cat demos. He is the author of multiple books on web development and has been actively blogging and presenting for almost twenty years. Raymond can be reached at his blog (www.raymondcamden.com), @raymondcamden on Twitter, or via email at [email protected].

Links

Raymond's Blog

Twitter

LinkedIn

GitHub

Interview transcript

Michaela Light 0:00

Hey, welcome back to the podcast. I'm here today with Ray Camden. And we're going to be talking about Vue.JS, FusionReactor and also Therapy. So if you don't know Ray, he is sometimes known as the Jedi Jedi Master. And he was for a long time in the ColdFusion community. He kind of went off in other directions, but now he's playing around with FusionReactor and doing some other cool stuff with Vue.JS. So he works as developer experience engineer for American Express now, and he works on server lyst, JavaScript web standards, enterprise cat demos, that sounds very enterprise cat demos. Yes. And he's also the author of lots of books on web development. And he's got a very prolific Brock blog. And he's done a lot of presentations. So welcome, Ray.

Raymond Camden 0:55

Thank you for having me. Thank you for inviting me.

Michaela Light 0:58

Yeah. So you're welcome. A lot of it's nice to have you back on the show. I'll link in the to other episodes you had on the CF Alive podcast and the show notes on progressive web apps and using Node JS. But today, we're going to look at Vue.JS, which is a front end framework that a fair number of ColdFusion developers use, in fact, I interviewed john Farrar a couple of years ago, and he was kind of excited about it. And I'll put that episode in the show notes too. But I'm sure you have a totally different take on it from John's, even though you both do have beards. So

Raymond Camden 1:32

yeah, I went to one of his presentations on view. And that was my first introduction to the topic. I don't know if I have a different take on it. But I have been using well before ups, I've been using Angular JS for a while. And I liked it. You know, I've been I'm potential I saying I liked it with a little bit of pain. Yeah, I could get things done. I liked it in comparison to everything else I looked at. But I wasn't necessarily thrilled to start a new project with it. You know, if I had some, like random, weird, stupid idea, which are even most of my ideas are like that. Just a thought of starting a new Angular project was a bit of a impediment in terms of all the stuff that you had to kind of set up and get working. And that could absolutely have been my fault. There could have been tools to make that a little bit easier to make the scaffolding quicker. It's, but like, it's, you know, it's like when I go anywhere now with my children, right? I don't like casually go anywhere, but my kids are coming. I'm bringing snacks and bringing diaper bag and all that. And I like them being with me. But it's a process. And that's kind of how I felt about Angular. You know, view, you know, view definitely has a process to it has a command line as a scaffolding tool. And you can build big applications. But then, but it also supports simple progressive enhancement. So I have one page site, that's totally fine. on that one page, I want to add a little bit of interactivity. And the past I would have use jQuery for that. And now I'll use the view because view works great at that smaller scale. And it also works great with for applications as well. And I want to apologize if I'm a bit my soapbox here now, but it seems like most people talking about JavaScript have the assumption that you're always building applications with routing and state management and all that fancy stuff, you know, enterprise JavaScript apps. Whereas like, a lot of my JS work over the years has been a much smaller scale, still important to the client, still, you know, adding good things for end users, but at a scale that I don't see talked about, and a lot of conferences and blog posts now and to me view supporting the full range of what people can bill makes it a huge win for me off the soapbox.

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.

I was a guest speaker in an episode of Chicago CFUG, with host Daniel Garcia.

Show notes

CF Alive Making ColdFusion Modern, Vibrant and Secure By Michaela Light

Who is Michaela

Overview

Legacy ColdFusion

Modern ColdFusion

CF Tools

Outreach

Marketing

Vibrant ColdFusion

CF dying?

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

Modern CF

Secure

Scalable

CF and Docker

Virtual machine

Share same config with others, staging and production

orchestration layer tools

Better testing

Free CF

CF Docker tools

Source control

IDEs

Frameworks

Server monitoring

REST APIs and microservices

CommandBox

CMS

Easy front end integration

Dependency Injection Frameworks

ORM

Package Management

Outreach

WWIT to have a happy, healthy ColdFusion developers community?

Education

Network

Teach

Hiring

Better CF Community

Marketing

The CF Alive Revolution

Mentioned in this episode

Lucee CFML

HackMyCF

Fuseguard

Fixinator

FusionReactor

Kubernetes

Heroku

Dokku

TestBox

MockBox

Portainer

CommandBox

Git

BitBucket

GitHub

Sublime

Dreamweaver

Preside

jQuery

WireBox

Listen to the Audio

 

Bio

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.

Links

CF Alive book

CF Alive podcast

CF Alive Inner Circle

TeraTech blog

TeraTech YouTube channel

Regular Social media posts (TW, LI, FB)

Interview transcript

Daniel Garcia  0:01

Okay, I like to thank everyone for coming this evening. We've got quite the treat. We've got Michaela light is going to talk to us about CF Alive. She's been doing some fantastic. evangelism, I guess is a great word for this and why ColdFusion is just awesome still, and it's always been awesome. And we're going to let her tell us why. So thank you very much.

Michaela  0:23

Yeah, thanks for inviting me to the Chicago CFUG. And, yeah, I'm going to talk about CF Alive, which is the title of a book I published last fall. It was actually released at the CF Summit West in Las Vegas. And the subtitle is making ColdFusion modern, vibrant and secure and we'll talk about all those aspects of it. So fabulous. And we go so the roadmap for CF Alive is that confusion is modern and alive. And it's great for doing complex data-driven applications. And while some companies have abandoned ColdFusion as dying, you know, more visionary developers like ourselves, have embraced CF and learn how to make it more modern. So more modern, secure. And also, I think if you look at how ColdFusion is used in the most modern web development, departments and shops is the most state of the art web development ecosystem. So we'll look at why that is.

So who am I? As I said, I wrote the book CF Alive. I'm also host of the CF life podcast. I just out of interest. How many people here have ever listened to any CF Live podcast episode? Maybe you can tell me how many people raise their hands if any four of us and one of our move on you with the podcast at Bertram? Oh yeah, he was a guest.

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.

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

"... every year, we are seeing an increase in the number of developers that are coming to the events like you would have seen, and even Las Vegas event last year was bigger than the year before. And hopefully this year, the Summit East is going to be bigger than what it was the last year."

Show notes

What exactly is CF Summit East?

Started in the second year of CF Summit in Las Vegas

For people who can’t travel to the West coast

Expecting 250-300 people, 400 registrations already two months out

How many years has CF Summit been running?

4th year

Also CF Summit India

Plans for an event in Europe

DevWeek in SF

Why is it so important to the CF Community?

Learn CF new features

Future roadmap of CF (through 2028)

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

Why all CFer should go?

To learn about Adobe’s commitment to CF

New features in CF

Direction of CF

CF Roadmap through 2028

Revealing the Speakers and topics that you are excited about

11 speakers

Keynote

Ashish Garg - Engineering Director, responsible for CF and other ELearning tools at Adobe and Adobe Connect

Ashish will be talking about CF 2018 and how CFers are using it.

Geek Out With The Smart Language Additions In Coldfusion 2018

Rakshith Naresh Product Manager for ColdFusion, Adobe

Adobe ColdFusion 2018 brings numerous nifty improvements to the language. The goal of this session is to not just show you the new improvements in action but also to inspire you to incorporate some of these powerful features in your existing applications. In this session, we will see firsthand on how the changes can be applied to a popular existing application. It goes without saying that new applications with new code can also take advantage of the new feature set. See a lot of code. Have fun. And hey, if you can apply what you learn, then you can also win at answering some of the interactive programming questions that might be thrown at you. More power to all you developers!

Rakshith is the Senior Product Manager for Adobe at ColdFusion. This is the man who literally decides the future direction of ColdFusion. He is very passionate about ColdFusion and greatly appreciates the useful input from the CF Community.

Making Your Applications Fast And Furious With The New Performance Monitoring Toolset In CF 2018!

Elishia Dvorak ColdFusion Solution Consultant & Evangelist, Adobe

The all-new Performance Monitoring Toolset in Adobe ColdFusion 2018 is geared towards today's development needs, providing a full-spectrum solution to not only self-diagnose and heal, but also a profiling capability for the developer who needs something more to tune existing applications for performance. In this session, attendees will learn how to easily diagnose bottlenecks in your current applications, be the first to know about production problems, and take your troubleshooting to the next level with the new self-healing connector tuning capabilities.

Elishia was once a CF developer, she quickly moved her way up the ranks to become Adobe’s Technical Marketing Manager for ColdFusion and eLearning.

Adobe Coldfusion 2018 Hidden Gems

Charlie Arehart ColdFusion Troubleshooting Consultant, CArehart.org

It's that time again-another new version of ColdFusion (CF) has come out: Adobe ColdFusion 2018. Now is the time for veteran CF troubleshooter and presenter Charlie Arehart to continue his tradition of identifying "hidden gems" within the new release, as he's been doing since CF4. Sure, most people can name a few of the big, new features in each release, while others will lament that "there's not much new," when in fact there is! Just as in every release of CF, there are always lots of things that go unheralded, which may be just what you've been waiting for, whether you're solving a long-standing problem or providing a new technique related to coding, troubleshooting, administration, enterprise integration, or more. Charlie will also help identify edition differences, pricing, migration issues, and more.

Securing Mature CFML Codebases

Pete Freitag Software Engineer & Web Consultant, Foundeo Inc.

Large and mature ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) code bases have unique challenges when it comes to ensuring that they are secure. This session will go over some techniques for finding vulnerabilities, and improving the security of your CFML application over time.

 Step Into Serverless With AWSAnd Adobe Coldfusion

Brian Klaas Senior Technology Officer, Johns Hopkins University

Adobe ColdFusion is a great tool for web applications, even if it's not the right tool for every job. For examples, it's not easy to do machine learning, video compression, and computer vision from within ColdFusion. Who wants to set up servers or Docker Clusters for those tasks when ColdFusion isn't the best fit? In this session, we will take a look at getting started in a serverless environment with Amazon Web Services' (AWS) Step Functions-a powerful, visual way to orchestrate functions and services within the AWS Cloud. Along the way, you'll learn about AWS services, such as Lambda, S3, Rekognition, Translate, and Transcribe. Join us to see how you can invoke and track serverless workflows from within your ColdFusion applications, and how to harness the vast array of AI and computational power that AWS provides with a simple "embrace and extend with ColdFusion" approach.

Faster Queries In Coldfusion & SQL Server

Eric Cobb Database Development Manager, Centauri Health Solutions, Inc

Adobe ColdFusion makes it easy to retrieve data from SQL Servers, however, sometimes, your queries may not be performing as well as they could be. In this session, we will take a look at ways to speed up your queries in both CFML and SQL Servers, as well as discuss things you may be doing that are slowing your queries down. With a detailed look at SELECT statements, Stored Procedures, indexes, and learning to read query execution plans, this session will have you well on your way to turbocharging your queries in CF & SQL Servers alike!

Refreshing Your UI: Modern Uses For Websockets

Giancarlo Gomez Owner of CrossTrackr, Inc. and Fuse Developments, Inc. & Senior Web Application Developer, Duty Free Americas

Is your application suffering from stale UIs? Is your server begging you to limit the amount of useless calls just to see if there is something new to display to your users? Do your users suffer from finger clicking pain due to refresh button abuse? Well, look no further my friend, we have the solution that is right for you- welcome to the world of WebSockets! In this presentation, attendees will learn how easy it is to implement WebSockets into your applications as of Adobe ColdFusion 10. Our speaker will review some real-world uses of this technology, and discuss some tips and tricks to help keep them up and running through several failure points. Attendees of this session should have some knowledge of JavaScript, as it is needed to work with WebSockets.

CF + ReactJS

Minh Vo Advantage Data Inc., Lead Engineer at Draft Studios, Head of Development and Security at Advantage Data

Today, it is still uncommon to find an Adobe ColdFusion developer with a high JavaScript skill that has had to deal with interactivity programming to a high degree. In this session, attendees will learn how to rig the following functionalities: parallax, scroll handling, simple animations, ColdFusion web sockets for real-time interactivity, fetching JSON from a ColdFusion CFC, and extreme reusability and modularity. Join us as our speaker conveys the essence of a ReactJS + CF project buildout in 45 minutes. You'll want to go straight home to build out the funky stuff we made!

The Many Hidden Benefits Of The Adobe API Manager To Unlock The Power Of API's

Brian Sappey Applications Architect at Market America and Manager of Engineering, SHOP.com

In this session, attendees will learn how to utilize the many hidden features of the Adobe API Manager, with a provided look and examples to get you started. Furthermore, attendees will gain a full understanding of the many benefits of using the native API's which power the API Manager. Whether you are migrating from an existing platform, automating your workflows, or integrating with third-party sites, this session will give you the ability to enhance your development experience. As an added benefit, our speaker will be providing a real-world example of a custom WordPress Plugin, which was built to integrate with our internal and external API's utilizing the Native Adobe Manager API's.

Revamp Your Monolith With Hierarchical MVC

Luis Majano President, Ortus Solutions

Come learn about building your applications using a hierarchical modular approach. Leave the age of monoliths behind with HMVC. In this session, we will explore the architecture behind HMVC and create a RESTFul application that is modular, versioned and scalable. We will then containerize the application and deploy it into a Docker swarm.

Keynote - Ashish Garg - Engineering Director, responsible for CF and other ELearning tools at Adobe, Adobe Connect

CF Summit 2019 Agenda

Date

Wednesday April 10th 2019, 8am - 5pm

Includes breakfast, lunch and breaks

Cost

Main conference Free

Pre-conference workshop $99 full day training

Location

Renaissance Washington, DC Downtown Hotel

999 Ninth Street NW

Washington, DC 20001

Near to the metro

(Same hotel as last year)

Other things you can in DC?

National mall

Museums

White House

What is new this year?

Recording sessions is planned

...

CFWheels is an open source CFML (ColdFusion Markup Language) MVC framework inspired by Ruby on Rails that simplifies application development through convention over configuration. With over 15 years of continuous development since its first release in 2006, CFWheels provides developers with fast application development, organized code architecture, and built-in features like RESTful routing, ORM capabilities, and database migrations. Whether you are migrating legacy ColdFusion applications or building modern APIs, CFWheels balances flexibility with developer-friendly simplicity, making it an ideal choice for teams seeking rapid development without overwhelming complexity.

David Belanger and Tom King talk about “CFWheels (A ColdFusion Framework for the REST of us)” in this episode of the CF Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

"... So, if you had to compare these four frameworks to personalities of animals, what would each one feel like to you?"

 

Show notes

What You Need to Know About CFWheels

MVC framework inspired by the Ruby on Rails (RoR) framework

CFWheels is an open source CFML (ColdFusion Markup Language) framework inspired by Ruby on Rails that provides fast application development, a great organization system for your code, and is just plain fun to use.

Team

4 wheels - Andy Bellenie, Adam Chapman, Tom King, David Belanger

Why is it a framework for the REST of us?

Hybrid development style - pop on legacy code into a View module and it will just work (then refactor later)

Convention over configuration

No XML config file - but do have config files with cfscript that set CFWheels variables

Streamlined ORM, but can add in SQL queries when you want to

Inspired by RoR with over 10 years of development (first commit 2006!)

Rails is an inspiration and not a rule of law, but a useful reference: i.e, routing

Friendly framework

Great for those who might have tried other frameworks and found them overwhelming

Convention over Configuration

Good for beginners

Lots of user-friendly documentation

How different is CFWheels from ColdBox or FW/1 or Fusebox? (They are all MVC frameworks)

What animal does each framework remind you of?

ColdBox = Friendly Tiger who does everything

FW/1  = Fast bird, who gets in an out fast, lightweight

Fusebox = Neglected dinosaur, powerful but has not been maintained recently

CFWheels = Horse - just get on and ride

Why use a framework at all?

See the first page of the CFWheels docs https://guides.cfwheels.org/

Team and maintenance faster

Why not use a homegrown framework?

Easier to pass code base on to other developers

Especially for open source projects

You benefit from other people fixing bugs in the framework

RESTful routing

https://guides.cfwheels.org/cfwheels-guides/handling-requests-with-controllers/routing

Resource-based routing

Can easily just turn your app into an API eg to an Angular front end

Microservices? Not so much

Single framework with plugins

Fads in IT

Own ORM (Active Record Style)

Dynamic Finders, i.e findOneByEmail

Model Validation

Own ORM so independent of CF engine ORM changes

Lots of stuff Built-in

Database Migrations / MySQL MSSQL Postgres

Documentation / automatic developer documentation

Test Suite based on RocketUnit

Commandbox based CLI

CORS handling (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing)

CFWheels 2.1 feature

Protect from CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery)

Flash handling

The Flash is just a struct in the session or cookie scope with some added functionality. It is cleared at the end of the next page that the user views. This means that it's a good fit for storing messages or variables temporarily from one request to the next.

Nothing to do with Adobe Flash player!

Plugins - ForgeBox

Future - next release 2.1

Bug fixes

Faster startup

CORS functionality

2.x Moved code to cfscript (from CF tags)

Form helpers

Small but Friendly community

Google mailing list for help

CFML slack channel #CFWheels room

Blog

Github

Twitter

You

Outreach? Mostly word of mouth currently

Why are you proud to use CF?

It always works!

Fast to develop

WWIT to make CF more alive this year?

Support Lucee

PHP beater

And in the cloud

More blogs and education

Talk it up in your proposals

Education - talk to teachers who are teaching the classes

Or teach CF at schools or universities yourself

More open source apps

What are you looking forward to at Into The Box?

Passionate

Fun

Mentioned in this episode

CFWheels

ColdBox

FW/1

Fusebox

State of the CF Union survey 

Into The Box conference

Listen to the Audio

Bios

Tom King

Tom is a freelance full-stack web developer and has been working with CFML since 2001, and with CFWheels since version 1.1.3. He joined the core team in 2014 and spoke on CFWheels 2.0 at CFCamp 2016. He has created everything from custom CMS systems to eLearning platforms with CFWheels, mainly for the Oxford Internet Institute and the Oxford Martin School, both at the University of Oxford. Alongside his freelance work, he's also CTO of a new startup, Kinherit LTD, which works in the area of end-of-life planning (wills and probate etc). When not coding, Tom will usually be found behind a set of drums, or hidden deep in a wine cellar.

Links

Website

CFWheels

Twitter

David Belanger

David is a Canadian ColdFusion developer who lives in Argentina with his wife and 4 extremely active children. He's been with CF since version 4.5 and was briefly the only reseller of CF in Argentina before Adobe acquired Macromedia. He's dedicated full-time to CF development on several new and legacy projects as well as a strong CF advocate and a current member of the CFWheels Core Team.

He currently works full-time “creating things that matter” at Intoria Internet Architects, a web development company based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Links

Twitter

Website

Main site 

GitHub 

Google Groups 

Slack Channel 

Facebook 

Twitter 

LinkedIn 

Episode transcript

Michaela Light 0:01

Welcome back to the show I'm here with David Ballenger and Tom King and we're going to be talking about CF wheels a cold fusion framework for the rest of us and we'll look at what CF wheels is and what's coming up in the new release of CF wheels and some really cool things you can do with restful routing and the CRM that's built into it and lots of other cool stuff so welcome Tom and David and if case you don't know them that two of the four wheels on the CF wheels team I guess you could call it a CF wheels bus so to speak and Tom has been doing cold fusion since 2001 and he he joined see if we'll switch from one what a while ago

and he even spoke on it and see if camp few years back so three years ago now so

and then.

David He is our Canadian ColdFusion connection

currently living in Argentina so he's very international and he's been doing cold fusion since version four or five which is a long while ago so and helps get cold fusion more exciting in Argentina and Latin America. So

welcome David and Tom

Both 1:29

Thank you having us

Michaela Light 1:30

yeah so I guess the the elephant in the room is for those people who haven't UCF wheels and I know from our cold fusion developer survey the State of the Union survey not everyone uses CF wheels the maybe people wondering what what is CF wheels I obviously has something to do with ColdFusion but but what is i

Both 1:54

was just you can just go ahead

Tom King 1:56

Well...

Tom King 2:00

In short,

it's an MVC based framework. And it was inspired somewhat by Ruby on Rails. And it's got about let's go over 10 years worth of development in it. And

the idea was to have a really successful framework where we got inspired by the Ruby on Rails concepts and translated them as Seth, I think, David, you know, a bit more about some of the sort of history side of it, don't you?

Read more

How TeraTech Approaches ColdFusion Framework Solutions

TeraTech brings a unique perspective to CFWheels discussion across multiple knowledge channels, recognizing that modern ColdFusion development requires frameworks that balance power with accessibility. Through the CF Alive Podcast and community engagement, TeraTech emphasizes how CFWheels enables development teams to maintain mission-critical applications while implementing modern development methodologies. We provide comprehensive resources including the free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist, which covers continuous integration, automated testing, and portable development environments that work seamlessly with CFWheels projects. By hosting in-depth discussions about framework comparisons and showcasing real-world implementations through our ColdFusion development services, TeraTech demonstrates how CFWheels solves the challenge of keeping legacy applications "alive" with modern architectural practices. This approach ensures that organizations depending on ColdFusion for mission-critical operations can confidently evolve their applications without abandoning the language that powers their business.

FAQs About CFWheels ColdFusion Framework

What is CFWheels and how does it differ from other ColdFusion frameworks?

CFWheels is an open source MVC framework for CFML inspired by Ruby on Rails that emphasizes convention over configuration. Unlike ColdBox (which provides extensive enterprise features like a "friendly tiger who does everything"), FW/1 (a lightweight "fast bird"), or the neglected Fusebox framework, CFWheels functions as an approachable "horse you just get on and ride." It offers over 15 years of development maturity, built-in ORM with dynamic finders, RESTful routing capabilities,...

In this CF Alive Podcast episode, Brian Cain joins host Michaela Light to compare ColdFusion vs PHP vs Java vs .NET—four of the most popular web-development languages. They explore which platform delivers faster development, simpler maintenance, and a friendlier developer experience. If you’re choosing a stack for enterprise or rapid-application development (RAD), this episode will save you some pain and arguments.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlxeFjG5LDM&rel=0

Speed of Development in ColdFusion vs PHP vs Java vs .NET

ColdFusion’s greatest strength is time of thought to launch—how quickly an idea becomes a live feature.

ColdFusion: Around 10 hours for similar features

.NET: Takes weeks, especially when changes arise

PHP: Days, flexible but less object-oriented

Java: Weeks, more structured but slower to adapt

ColdFusion isn’t tied to rigid frameworks or heavy methodologies. It allows faster pivots when business priorities shift.

Developer Friendliness and Ease of Use

Language

Developer Experience

ColdFusion (CFML)

Tag-based syntax for quick starts, cfscript and OO power for scaling up

PHP

Flexible open source, less consistency

Java / .NET

Verbose, require deep CS background

ColdFusion developers can onboard in 1–2 weeks, even from other languages.

Hiring and Training Developers

It’s easier to train PHP or Java devs to ColdFusion than the other way around.

Simple, forgiving syntax

Low learning curve

Strong community documentation

ColdFusion’s learning curve is kind to newcomers while remaining powerful for experts.

Technology Roadmap and Maintenance

Each language has a different lifecycle:

.NET: Controlled by Microsoft; large shifts per version

Java: Licensing and framework volatility under Oracle

PHP: Rapid evolution through open-source releases

ColdFusion: Backed by Adobe with a stable roadmap and strong backward compatibility

Clean CFML code saves time later with built-in tools like cfqueryparam and reusable components.

Security, Legacy, and Backward Compatibility

ColdFusion’s backward compatibility may look old-fashioned, but it keeps legacy apps stable without rewrites.

Further reading: Which Web Programming Language Is the Most Secure?

Object Reuse and Maintainability

Feature

ColdFusion

PHP

Java

.NET

Object Reuse

✅ Yes

❌ Limited

✅ Yes

✅ Yes

PDF Generation

✅ Built-in

Add-on

Add-on

Add-on

Education and Community Support

Adobe actively supports ColdFusion education through:

Free ColdFusion Curriculum

CF Licenses for Learning

Learn CF in a Week course

Events like CF Summit

Developers who think ahead about maintainability become the backbone of any serious tech stack.

Third-Party Add-ons and Integrations

ColdFusion includes built-in support for:

PDF generation

REST APIs

Scheduler and task automation

Secure sessions

Less dependency chaos. More productivity.

Why Developers Still Choose ColdFusion

ColdFusion continues to thrive in 2025 because it:

Delivers faster project turnaround

Reduces total cost of ownership

Simplifies hiring and onboarding

Integrates easily with Java libraries

Offers robust cloud and security support

It’s not just about speed—it’s about developer happiness.

WWIT (What Would It Take) to Make CF More Alive This Year?

Publicity matters. Even NASA uses ColdFusion—the same tech that helped humanity reach Mars. The community just needs to talk louder about its wins.

What Did You Enjoy at CF Summit?

Networking, new tech insights, and rediscovering the strong ColdFusion ecosystem.

Mentioned in This Episode

Learn CF in a Week

Free Adobe ColdFusion Curriculum and Licenses for Learning

Contact: Kishore Balakrishnan ([email protected])

Modernization of Adobe ColdFusion – More Secure Than Ever

Listen to the audio below:

About the Guest: Brian Cain

Brian Cain has 20 years of development experience, with 16 focused on ColdFusion. He’s the Development Team Manager for the Careers Division at Farms.com, managing enterprise CF applications at scale.

Connect with Brian on LinkedIn.

Interview Transcript (Excerpt)

Michaela Light:

Welcome back to the show! I'm here with Brian Cain, and we’re talking about ColdFusion vs PHP vs Java vs .NET—a four-way developer showdown. Topics include speed of development, object orientation, add-ons, and that dreaded L-word: legacy.

Brian Cain:

ColdFusion has always been the fastest and easiest. One keynote speaker described it as “time of thought to launch”—how quickly an idea turns into a live feature. One project went from idea to release in just 10–12 hours. Compare that to a .NET MVC project that took weeks and still needed restarts. ColdFusion just worked.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is ColdFusion faster than PHP or .NET?

Yes. ColdFusion allows shorter “time of thought to launch” cycles compared to PHP or .NET.

Is ColdFusion still relevant in 2025?

Absolutely. It’s widely used in government, finance, and enterprise systems, supported by Adobe’s active roadmap.

Which language is most developer-friendly?

ColdFusion and PHP are easier for newcomers. Java and .NET demand more specialized knowledge.

Listen on Your Favorite Platform:

Find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or the CF Alive Podcast Archive.

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 “Adobe ColdFusion 2018 (All that is new)” in this episode of the CF Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

Show notes

Performance improvements

Performance tuning

Server Monitor (NEW)

Flag performance issues and isolate problem areas so that you can initiate corrective action much faster. Know the average response time and throughput across the cluster, or specific to a node, application, or page, in real time. The information will also be automatically archived for historical analysis. More at https://coldfusion.adobe.com/2018/07/server-monitor/

Code profiler (NEW)

Swiftly identify and resolve complex performance issues buried deep in your code. Get the detailed information required to pinpoint the root cause of bottlenecks, and troubleshoot applications more effectively. More at https://coldfusion.adobe.com/2018/07/code-profiler/

Database Monitor (NEW)

Make sure your database does not act as a drag on application performance. Monitor all database queries, transactions, and query cache, visually, and get pre-determined or customized alerts to pro-actively take preventive or corrective action. More at https://coldfusion.adobe.com/2018/07/database-discovery/

External Services Monitor (NEW)

Zero in on external factors such as web services, file system, mail server, LDAP, Microsoft SharePoint, or transfer protocols, that could be slowing down application performance. Ensure that all the components of your IT infrastructure are working in sync. More at https://coldfusion.adobe.com/2018/07/external-services/

Automatic connector tuning [NEW]

Ensure that your websites are always up and running. Eliminate 503 Service Unavailable errors by allowing the Performance Monitoring Toolset to dynamically adjust connector settings based on incoming traffic. More at https://coldfusion.adobe.com/2018/07/connector-tuning/

Distributed cache (NEW)

Improve performance and enhance scalability by leveraging built-in support for three popular industry engines: JCS, Memcached, and Redis. Also plug in your own caching engine by implementing a simple CFML interface. More at https://coldfusion.adobe.com/2018/07/distributed-caching-coldfusion-2018-release

Security tools and improvements

Security code analyzer from CF 2016

Auto lockdown (NEW)

Now implement lockdown of your production server with a single click. All steps in the lockdown guide will be systematically followed, ensuring that the security measures are fail-safe and in compliance. Post-lockdown, the system will continue to be monitored for potential breaches. More at https://coldfusion.adobe.com/2018/07/server-auto-lockdown/

New Language features:

Asynchronous programming (NEW)

Boost the performance of your principal application by offloading resource-intensive code segments to a secondary thread. Simply use the RUNASYNC function to execute code without the overhead of managing multiple threads. Once the result is ready to be consumed, you will receive a notification. More at https://coldfusion.adobe.com/2018/07/asynchronous-programming-in-coldfusion-2018-release/

Modern admin UI (NEW)

Enjoy a sleek, new responsive UI built on single web page architecture. Carry out all admin tasks faster with easier access to all the ColdFusion settings—just search for what you need. More at https://coldfusion.adobe.com/2018/07/new-administrator-ui-coldfusion/

External storage for session scope (New)

Eliminate concerns about memory constraints to store session data because you can now configure an external distributed store to retain session data outside memory. Get rid of sticky session configuration, and enjoy complete load balancing across all cluster nodes.

REST playground (NEW)

Create and manage all your REST services from a single application. The simple, intuitive UI makes it a breeze to validate the accuracy of your APIs. Make changes to your REST APIs without having to restart your application. More at https://coldfusion.adobe.com/2018/07/rest-playground-ion-2018-release/

CLI and Read-Eval-Print Loop (REPL) (NEW)

Work with files, databases, and email, or invoke web services, by executing CFM via the command line. Now execute the admin API from the CLI to script your ColdFusion server settings. Test-drive or learn CFML with REPL support in CLI. More at https://coldfusion.adobe.com/2018/07/repl-coldfusion-2018-release/

Command-line interface (New)

Work faster by using CFML for your scripting needs. Execute CFM files via the command line to work with files, databases and email or invoke web services. Pass named or positional parameters to the CFM files for dynamic customization.

Comment exchange across files (New)

Make your review workflows more efficient. Easily export comments from PDF documents to XFDF files or vice versa. Comment positioning in the destination file matches the file from which the comments were imported.

Standardized PDF metadata (New)

Ensure consistency of PDF metadata across the organization. Easily create, share and apply metadata, including copyright notice, authoring data and keywords, by transferring metadata between PDF and XMP files.

Audience questions

Updates on educational books, training

Learn CF in a week

YouTube course getting started with CF

Complete web dev curriculum can

licenses for HS and college professors to help onboard the future of developers

Free education teaching license

Email [email protected]

Adobe CF certifications

CF 2018 March

Why are you proud to use CF?

Easy to learn

CF 2028

Raksith email and slack

WWIT for you to make CF more alive this year?

More community participation

Share cool apps outside CF Community too - to colleges and CIOs

CF Summit East April 9

CF Summit West 

What did you enjoy at CF Summit West?

What are you looking forward to at CF Summit India?

Mentioned in this episode

CF 2018 features https://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion-standard/features.html

Charlie Arehart Hidden Gems in CF 2018

https://www.carehart.org/blog/client/index.cfm/2018/7/19/whats_new_in_CF2018

https://www.carehart.org/blog/client/index.cfm/2018/7/19/whats_new_in_CF2018_part_2

CF training resources https://teratech.com/comprehensive-coldfusion-training-list-16-resources/

Listen to the Audio

 

Bio

Kishore Balakrishnan is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Adobe Systems with a Master Degree in Computer Applications. At Adobe he has held roles of a Quality Manager, Program Manager before becoming the Product Marketing Manager. He enjoys being the 'voice of the customer' within the organization, liaise with 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.

 

Interview transcript

Michaela Light 0:00

Welcome back to the podcast. I'm here with Kishore Bella Krishna from Adobe. He's the product marketing manager for cold fusion and we're going to be talking about cold fusion 2018 and we're going to cover everything that is new in cold fusion 2018. And it is a lot of things. If you haven't looked at what's new, you may be surprised by all the stuff that's in there. So

we're going to look at both things on the server side that are new with the new server monitor and profiler database monitor

and also the security improvements on the server and with the automated lockdown and other security tools and then we're going to look at a whole bunch of new features in cold fusion 2018. So that's what's coming up and if you have any questions

let us know in the chat if you watching this live and we'll see if we can fit those

In so welcome occasional

Kishore 1:03

thanks for for having me.

Michaela Light 1:06

And just in case you haven't met him before he he actually started out

doing computer science degree get a master's degree in Computer Applications and he's been all you know Quality Manager Program Manager but now he's the product marketing manager for cold fusion so if you're a customer called fusion you may well have met him at CF summit or other cold fusion conferences and he's always happy to talk with cold fusion developers and managers. So one So tell us about you know, cold fusion 2018 it just came out a few months ago was is that right? Yes, it came out in August and it's been a fantastic ride but corporation to MBA what we had been called called vision 28 or 2018 was

Kishore 1:56

we looked at the three pillars of ColdFusion,

of performance language and security,

since it's an application. So platform performance was been very critical for customers. And then most of the surveys that we run, and we do run quite a bit of number of surveys performance and security, where the top concerns of our customers. So this release, what we did was we double down on performance and said, like, how do we, you know, make the server faster as well as how do we make customer's applications faster? So from

how do we make the server faster, what we did was the server runs 30% faster than 2016 delays. So if you have an application, which is running on 2016, just by upgrading to 2018, your applications will run 30% faster. And obviously, then, then what we thought was, what about our customers applications, obviously, we can't do much tweaking around that. So we came up with the application performance monitoring to using which the customer could easily identify and fix any performance bottlenecks that they have on the server. And we are taking the first step towards, you know, self monitoring of the server with the help of auto connected to meaning. So there's any issues with your connector, if you turn on the auto connected tuning, it'll automatically fix the connector issues as