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Michaela 0:00
Welcome back to the show. And today we're looking at breaking out of your cold fusion comfort zone and how to make cold fusion mainstream with ego Alinsky. And we'll look at cold fusion from a business perspective when it works when it doesn't work when it makes sense or not obstacles, benefits of cold fusion, stumbling blocks for cold fusion, gaining mainstream status, and how you might be operating in a bubble using cold fusion, and how you can step out of your comfort zone to do that. So welcome, Eagle.
Igor Ilyinsky 0:32
Thanks for having me.
Michaela 0:35
Oh, you're so welcome. And in case you don't know him, he's been in the cold fusion community for a long time. And he's the founder of firm wise and that company designs lot hundreds of websites for law firms. So
so he's been doing he uses cold fusion for that. And he's been doing it for over 10 years. So let's just come back to that first point. Kofi from a business perspective, because so often we just look at programming languages from a technology perspective. But what do you think of cold fusion from a business perspective,
Igor Ilyinsky 1:11
right? Well, I've learned over time to look at things from a business perspective, even though people like me, many people, like me, have started out in the developing world and have shifted towards business ownership, Business Management throwing our teams, and you do have to look at it from the perspective of
the bottom line, what is the cost of cold fusion, both in terms of the hard costs and soft costs of developers and things like that? How does that play into the marketplace? And ultimately, what is the maintenance cost over time? And, you know, what is the cost of doing things like finding new developers, if it's really hard to find developers here, we tend to spend a lot of time on those initiatives and closing costs, the take into account these well, and sometimes you have to pass those costs onto your clients. And that may make you less competitive in some cases. So the business perspective is very important to think of, in terms of confusion as a platform. And
I think over time, what I've done is I've used a variety of different technologies to determine what's the best technology to do some specific scenario. And sometimes it hasn't ended up being cold fusion, sometimes it's it's been different technology or different platform. The other reality that we deal with these days is that there's a lot of familiarity with platforms for CMS, like WordPress that are so prevalent online, that you just can't get away from knowing them, using them being well, first in them. So I think one of the things from a business perspective again, this some time ago, we made a decision that we weren't just going to be focused solely on cold fusion, we could be more competitive, more well versed in a variety of technologies, CF is still go to in many cases, and it's, it's a platform that's worked very well for us many, many years. But at the same time, it's not always the one platform and you need to know and execute.
Michaela 3:33
That's very interesting. So what criteria Do you use as a business person to decide whether to use cold fusion on a particular project?
Unknown 3:42
Well, generally, it depends on the size of the project, it depends on how much we have already built in cold fusion. So much of our platform works off of the cold fusion engine. And we built the many of the front end functions and the backend functions on CF. So in many cases, what we'll do is we'll utilize that for standard deployments, what we might consider, but if somebody comes to us, and they say, well, we want to add a blog, or we want something that's very basic. In those cases, we may just use WordPress, sometimes it's not our decision, a client may come and say, you know, our Managing Partner heard that WordPress is what you should be using. So you need to be using WordPress for this specific project. And so we'll do that in those cases. So it's not always from our end that the decision making cars, but we do try and as often as possible, choose the right platform for the job.
Michaela 4:49
What makes sense? Are there any technical reasons why you pick cold fusion, or WordPress or some other technology,
Unknown 4:58
sometimes they are. So it we're integrating with third party tools will actually take a look to see what kind of
Unknown 5:05
features cold fusion may have that are already built into the platform that we can just plug in, but oftentimes will choose a different platform for that specific integration. A lot of time, there's pre written code that exists that may help us develop something much quicker, so will utilize a different platform or different programming language like PHP just for that specific purpose, because it gives us that much of a head start.
Michaela 5:38
Well, that makes sense. So what what kind of obstacles Do you see in with cold fusion?
Igor Ilyinsky 5:47
Well, there are obviously a lot of obstacles, I mean, cold fusion has become a lot less relevant than it was when I started programming in late 90s, these at that time, there were, you know, just a handful of options, ASP being one of them, you know, Pearl being another. And the reality was that at that time, cold fusion was the lowest barrier to entry. I think that was a blessing and a curse in that, because it was so easy to use, many people had jumped on that bandwagon at the time, and developed a lot of interesting applications. But there also was the opportunity to have a lot of bad cold fusion developers, people who didn't necessarily, you know, utilize the language properly, or do a lot of good things, and ultimately gave, you know, develop the stigma for cold fusion. Oddly enough, I think WordPress suffers from that same stigma right now. And that you probably have to go through about 50 bad WordPress developers before you find one good one. But at that time, cold fusion was was one of the best tools available for the same reasons that you were able to connect to databases, and you were able to build robust applications without having to write, you know, thousands of lines of code.
Michaela 7:20
Yeah, I think that's great thing, you know, it's so easy to get into cold fusion, you know, whether you're coming from another language, or if you're coming from doing HTML, it's just very easy to get going and very productive. So you, you were saying, when, you know, 20 years ago, when cold fusion came out, it had the lowest barrier of entry to not feel that's the case. Now, whether other languages that have a lower barrier to entry than cold fusion?
Unknown 7:51
Well, there's definitely a perception of lower barrier to entry. I mean, there are a lot of languages that you can find a variety of tools with, that you can just go online and begin programming not have to set up servers not have to set up the platform, you know, I don't know that that cold fusion is, is among that list. Or at least if it's a, if it's a relevant sort of thing in terms of that, I know that there are a lot of different, you know, web service providers or
Igor Ilyinsky 8:26
platforms, maybe some platform as a service providers that will let you just come in and spin things up and, and run, you know, new programs based on having absolutely no infrastructure in place, I know that Google does a really good job of that kind of thing. And, you know, I'm sure her Roku to some degree, I mean, they're just all these different platforms out there, that you can jump out and begin developing without having to set up a server or anything like that. So to some degree, I think it is probably a higher barrier to entry these days, comparatively, because while we did have to set up servers back, you know, in the late 90s, before we could do anything and connect them to databases, before we could do anything to a large degree, you had to do that with every platform.
Michaela 9:21
Yeah, I mean, not. That makes sense, though. I think some of the cold fusion ISP, you know, they have cloud things where you just click a button, and you've got a new cloud server, but maybe you're thinking of some of those the panel things where you can just click to create a server or create a database, and it does it for you.
Unknown 9:43
Yeah, I mean, I think I'm in terms of, I don't know, necessarily all the technologies that are in play. But I think with, you know, Google technologies like Node. js or
Unknown 9:59
Angular, you know, there are options for just getting into something and spinning up a full infrastructure and beginning to code that I don't know, there are comparables in the cold fusion world.
Michaela 10:17
Yeah, I mean, the probably the closest thing to that would be using command box together with some with darker and some cloud deployments. But even that, you have to kind of tweak around with it a bit. So maybe there is room for there for some improvements to make it instant
Unknown 10:38
setup.
Michaela 10:38
Yeah, so I guess part of the issue with cold cold fusion is, even if you can set up the cold fusion server instantly, we should, you basically can with a lot of cloud ISP, you'd still need to create the database
in it. So I guess some other languages, you don't really have a database that you control, the language itself controls little database stuff. And that's why you don't have to set that up.
Unknown 11:08
Yeah, that's part of it. I mean, I think it's also like, you know, Docker ization, which you mentioned, you know, a lot of these technologies require some underlying fundamentals that you need to do, and seems like for cold fusion, that's a more of an uphill struggle than it is with some other platforms, they're more considerations. One of my jobs before I started, my own company was infrastructure, cold fusion infrastructure manager for a big bank, Credit Suisse First Boston, and we had a pretty big cold fusion infrastructure there, I'm not sure if it still exists today, I'm sure to some degree, some of those apps are still in play. But we had something like 23 or 24 different cold fusion development units within the the company that would build various different internet apps. And part of my job was to come up with a basically a silent install of cold fusion, so that you could, if you were one of these departments, you could just say, Hey, you know, we need a new Cold Fusion server setup. And we would silently you just press a button and it silently gets installed without throwing you any prompts or anything like that now, some great people back at that were involved in cold fusion back in those days, Stephen era and forget who else it was. But, but some of those people really did an amazing job and helping me because we were such a big cold fusion customer helping me established cold fusion in a way that you could deploy these things very easily. But at the same time, there were other technologies like, you know, various j to web servers, or
Unknown 13:03
a variety of databases that were already built that way from the get go. So, you know, it seems like a lot of the things that we're doing in cold fusion that are even available today, like Docker ization, seems like an uphill struggle. And while people have been doing some great work in sort of establishing baselines and standardizing and giving us options for utilizing those technologies, it's still seems like, there's a long way to go in making them straightforward for, you know, the, the typical developer
Michaela 13:43
so let's flip that to the other side, what do you see the benefits of cold fusion?
Unknown 13:50
Sure. So obviously, rapid application development, I mean, we've been saying that for, you know, 25 years, you know, since the lair brothers
Igor Ilyinsky 14:02
got involved with this technology, I mean, the, the reality is, is that there's no quicker way for me, even as a as who, someone who doesn't really code much anymore, and really focuses on the business end of things, I'm able to get in and try things very quickly, I'm able to, to get in and develop features very quickly for my product. And while I don't code very often, I'm still able to deploy a lot of value to my organization, utilizing cold fusion, something that with another language would take me significantly longer. Now, that's not with everything. Unfortunately, that's not with all the types of things that I may need to integrate with, or, or build on. But the reality is that in in many ways, I'm able to, you know, build something very quickly and charge my clients for at a reasonable price, a very competitive price, and still make a very healthy margin.
Michaela 15:07
So what other benefits do you see in using cold fusion,
Unknown 15:13
some of the other benefits is that there's a strong community around it, even though it's not as big as many other development languages, there's a strong community around cold fusion, like I said, there are people who are thinking about, you know,
Unknown 15:28
deploying to the cloud and, and deploying
Unknown 15:34
Docker ization and deploying a variety of different
Unknown 15:39
technological mechanisms that are kind of important for the, for a future for cold fusion. So I feel like cold fusion to some degree is, is future proof given the community that's involved. And, and we're not just deploying things to that co located server and connecting to that separate database, you know, one of the first things I had to do it, my corporate job was figure out how to incorporate enterprise load balancing into our cold fusion setup. And we always had to have a web server with a cold fusion server behind it, those are two separate machines. And then you had your load balancer in between them, or in between those nodes in the other nodes that you had set up. And that was always, you know, a big hassle. So the fact that people have have figured out how to Docker is co fusion and deploy it to things like s3, Amazon Web Services, this three instances and, and things like that is, is a big bonus. So that's one of the advantages in terms of cost of ownership. It's not the cheapest technology to manage and maintain. But in terms of the costs, it's really not that much of a burden neither. So I would say that's generally a positive in the long run. And, you know,
Igor Ilyinsky 17:05
just having the ability to, at least for me, find cold fusion developers, it hasn't been that difficult these days when you're when you're looking for for CF Debs, if you're you know, if people are dedicated to cold fusion, then they're generally going to be a high quality cold fusion developer. So we don't have that issue. We had, you know, 1520 years ago when everyone was jumping into cold fusion when they probably had no business being programmers in the first place.
Michaela 17:41
Yeah, I think what I've seen last 20 years, this is a lot of emphasis on learning modern programming techniques. And you know, from object orientation to database stuff, and just your general interest in growing scales.
Unknown 18:01
Yeah, absolutely.
Michaela 18:04
Now, one of the things I've been impressed with recently I know in the WordPress world they have an enormous number of plugins that can give you functionality and the the whole forge box thing with the modules is a an interesting initiative there to create a kind of open market of modules that you can just take existing code and plug it in CRM So sure, yeah, I
Igor Ilyinsky 18:31
mean, it's a blessing and a curse. If you think about it. The reality is that anytime you have any technology that allows plugins, you're going to have some level of risk, you know, that the developer who developed a plugin actually did a really good job, you're going to have to have peer review and things like that, to make sure that that people are doing things well, you know, and we can't forget that some of the biggest, you know,
Unknown 18:59
for holding abilities within technology have been within open source software like WordPress, the Panama Papers hack was a direct result of outdated WordPress plugin. So the reality is, is that there, there is some quite a bit of assumed risk with having a technology that does allow open plug and play with other, you know, developments.
Michaela 19:27
Yeah, I think it's always important to be updating your plugins or your modules, or your cold fusion patches or versions. I mean, typically what, from what I've seen of security incidents, we can call fusion, or any other language, if you'd applied all of patches to everything, you'd have been fine. It's they usually get in from some patch was issued like two or three years ago, and you never bothered to, you know, put it in, I was talking the other day too,
someone who has, you know, a big cold fusion site. And, you know, they hadn't updated it for probably more than a decade. And they and they hadn't updated their windows Eastern Surprise, surprise, they got that what was that virus called? Want something or another
the one that takes over your computer and then ransoms you in Bitcoin,
Unknown 20:26
right?
Michaela 20:28
I'll remember the name later. But, you know, the only reason it it got in it was not because they were using cold fusion, it's because they hadn't been applying patches and getting updates. So yeah,
Igor Ilyinsky 20:37
that's right. That's, that's definitely, you know, one of the other considerations you have to take into account. And we always make our clients aware of that, that, depending on which platform they choose, they may have to also take into account a lot of the extra leg work that's involved. So, you know, our cold fusion systems have been locked down. The only developers that have seen any of that code are our developers are people who we've subcontracted to work with,
I'd say as the author of the majority of that code, 80% of it is code that only my eyes have seen. So that certainly takes down the full vulnerability level. It doesn't make us impervious to attack, but it certainly does make it March a much smaller target and a much more manageable type of security infrastructure. Whereas open platforms like WordPress, you really do need to stay on top of the patches. Because with open source, it's, it's not a question of whether or not somebody is going to look for that vulnerability. They absolutely will.
Michaela 21:58
Yeah, I think that's fair assessment. And, and also, you know, Adobe puts a lot of effort and insecurity, they have, like a whole security process, they train all that, that developers how to write secure code, they have a securities are and I think they have a security, I don't know, hot room. Whereas if there is a security incident, you know, that will senior management like prioritizing dealing with it. And I, you know, I was talking with Caribbean who's the general manager of Adobe cold fusion,
and he seemed very serious about security. And he told me, they hadn't really hadn't had a day zero security incident where, you know, the been something someone had hacked into a cold fusion system with an unannounced vulnerability for I think, over five years. Now, frankly, That's way better than PHP, or Java or Ruby, you know,
will WordPress for that matter?
Unknown 22:57
Yeah, you're absolutely right. And that's it. That's a very, you know, strong benefit of cold fusion. And I think in your,
Igor Ilyinsky 23:06
your survey, recently, the vast majority of people have not experienced a vulnerability in cold fusion. And, you know, the last several years, which is, which is a great thing that's really a powerful testament to CF. But at the same time, you know, it's it, it too is a double edged sword in that, you know, the, the developers of cold fusion engines, especially Adobe, you know, may be reluctant to deploy certain functionality, or it may take them longer to deploy certain functionality because of, you know, an, a real desire to make sure that security is addressed, certainly, with a lot of governmental clients, you know, cold fusion has a very high risk profile. So that may be an impediment to deploying new functionality that the marketplace may want.
Michaela 24:11
Yeah, it's a trade off, you know, away secure, I mean, no, it's just like securing your home, if you leave your doors unlocked, it's easy to get into the house. On the other hand, other people can get any easier if you put, you know, seven dead bolts in, like you're living in New York City, and, you know, having an alarm system on a an aggressive dog. Yeah, that's going to keep most people from breaking in. But it's also going to make your life more of a hassle as well. So it's always a trade off with security and ease of use. So anything else that caught your eye in that state of the CF union survey?
Igor Ilyinsky 24:49
Um, yeah, I thought, first of all, I thought it was a real eye opening survey. So I appreciate that, that you do that. Again, as someone who doesn't do a whole lot of development anymore, it's important to me to still keep an eye on what people are dealing with, and what kind of issues they're having, and where they're having successes. Some of the things that caught my eye is that a lot of people who are doing CF these days have been doing it for a very long time, it's kind of been the primary language for them for a long time. And that many of the people who do use CF within their organizations are doing so because there was a, an invest meant made in CF in a long time now, for for over a long period of time, I think the investment in CF is is less of a
Unknown 25:45
indicator of good things. I think, in fact, that if people are developing in CF, just because they've invested to it, that that kind of brings it to that concept of the bubble, right? I mean, we're, we're deploying CF, because that's all we know, or we're deploying CF, because we've invested a lot of money into it, that's not really a future proof mechanism, or from a business perspective, the the proper way to go about assessing what technologies to utilize. But that's one thing that jumped out at me from that surveys, a lot people are still deploying cold fusion and building in cold fusion, because, you know, that's what they know, or that's what they've invested in, or their organizations have invested in, you know, so. So I think that's an important characteristic. And to some degree, that also plays towards the argument against cold fusion, in many ways, is that people are not jumping into cold fusion, perhaps because of some of the investments that are required the licensing, at least from the Adobe perspective or acquired those maybe things that are holding cold fusion back, whereas, you know, maybe the approach to the platform and how it's being marketed and how it's being
Unknown 27:14
developed and continued is is something that may be hurting CF in the future.
Michaela 27:22
Yeah, I mean, I think that is a concern, you know, how do we get more young people into it. And, you know, when I was talking to trivet, you know, the GM of cold fusion, he, you know, he was, I, I didn't, you know, I knew there was a free version of cold fusion for colleges and universities. But, you know, he told me a bit more about that. And also, they have a whole bunch of training materials that colleges can take to, like, if they want to set up a class in cold fusion, Adobe will provide a whole bunch of training materials to them for free. Yeah, so I don't know what else I'm sure there's some other things we could be doing to get, you know, new new people into cold fusion. And of course, the open source cold fusion, Lucy CFL, you know, that's totally free to start, and, and anyone who wants to try it out at home, you know, the, the Adobe cold fusion developer license is free as well. So,
Igor Ilyinsky 28:17
right. Well, I think that's, that's really where we need to be focused, in my opinion, because the reality is, is that technology engagement and in technology use, and it's pervasive, this doesn't really come from the universities teaching it. I mean, you know, universities are based on demand. So if the demand is there, for PHP, that's what they're going to focus on. And if the demand is there for another language, that's what they're going to focus on. But the reality is, is that it starts with people who are at home trying to program something, maybe they have a business idea without much of a background in development, and, you know, they want to deploy that idea. So that's something that I think people may want to do. And we, as the cold fusion community should be maybe thinking about, okay, well, what, how do we make that easier for people? How do we make it easier for them to, you know, start writing cold fusion and give them a view into how easy it is, I think cold fusion is probably one of the easiest languages to learn for people who don't currently programming cold fusion, if you're a, let's say, a PHP developer, or an ASP developer, or, or something like that, you can probably jump into cold fusion very easily, because you already know HTML, you already understand the tag based syntax. And, and that's easy for you to do. And you can always jump into, you know, CF script and write script based
programming. So the reality is, is that I think you have to look at where these things start. And they start a from the perspective have, you know, individuals who are just deploying something from scratch, and not really don't necessarily have their feet wet with anything. But it also comes, as I said, from the business perspective, does it make sense financially, and in the long run from a business perspective for me to code things in CF, in some cases, it may, in some cases, it may not, we need to try and find more ways for that may to, you know, to be
Unknown 30:33
the the option that people go with.
Michaela 30:37
Yeah, and I think certainly from the entrepreneur point of view, they want something that they can just get started with immediately. They don't have to install a server or whatever, I mean, it's fine to have a server installed later, but, you know, you want to be able to get started easy. And then I think the other thing is, How easy is it to have get developers productive? And how easy is it to hire good developers?
Igor Ilyinsky 31:07
Alright, cool. Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing to think about is, you know, from the, from the perspective of the direction of the language and the technology, I think you ought to consider, you know, what's good and bad for full fusion. Personally, I see a lot of downsides to the way cold fusion is being managed by Adobe, in that it's not, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's kind of a secondary product for them. It's not, it's not the big moneymaker. I'm sure it's not their primary desktop and or cloud based applications, you know, so so maybe it doesn't have the infrastructure or the resources that it needs. And, and I don't know that the community's been very, you know, forthcoming with trying to push the language further and deploy a lot of different things. I know that over time, there's been discussions about maybe forking the language and allowing developers of, you know, Lucy, or other CF engines to deploy new functionality, you know, engage in in technologies that are prevalent in the world without having to have Adobe's blessing on that, you know, I think the way Adobe manages cold fusion is a lot different than the way Google manages No. js or Angular. So the reality is, is that we need to think about that, and we need to determine as a community, whether or not there are things that we can be doing better to make cold fusion more pervasive, if there are things that we could be doing from the from the language perspective, you know, and developing new tags and things like that, that are, you know, on par with the other technologies out there?
Michaela 33:03
Yeah, I think the, you know, there's plenty of room to do innovation certainly in the, in the open source, Lucy CFL, and you know, you can there's a public feature list for Adobe CF, though, you know, as you mentioned earlier, that, you know, they have to make sure the security and other stuff is there, and they have a bunch of other priorities. So, maybe getting new features implemented in the open source. One is, is the way to get you things I'm curious with, when you mentioned Google and Node. js, what do you particularly admire about how Google manages the Node. js project?
Unknown 33:40
Well, it seems like it's a lot more engaging of the community in terms of, you know, trying to develop
Igor Ilyinsky 33:50
technology that is going to be utilized, it's what the, what the end users want, it seems to be a little bit more collaborative, in terms of, you know, people being able to contribute to the language without necessarily having to, you know, rebuild it, a lot of things. I mean, it's, it's, it's not necessarily all that much from the perspective of the language itself, as maybe it is, from a marketing perspective, but from for me, there's a perception there that, you know, no, j. s, is, is billed by Google as the platform for everything you want to do on the web. And, you know, Adobe seems to have a much tighter grip on cold fusion and seems to be a lot more, you know, to seems to have a lot more influence and oversight on the language. So, you know, maybe that's it. The other thing is that there are probably some political implications here as well. I mean, you have to recognize that Adobe as a company a has very specific
Unknown 35:03
technologies, you know, software that it deploys on lots and lots of machines throughout the world. And that plays into things that plays into decisions that they may make to integrate with something or not to integrate with something because it may not be PC to do so, you know, cold fusion has always had this concept of a VOD bc connection to a database. Well, you know, we've got connections to things like, you know, solar search, and we have connections to things like in memory cache. Well, why can't cold fusion have, you know, Dave database built into it? Well, maybe that's been a political decision that's been decided, you know, not to incorporate, what about incorporating things like NO SEQUEL or, you know, a variety of other database technology. Geez, that may or may not come down to politics, I don't know. But I know that from the perspective of Google and the way it manages its technologies, it doesn't seem to really be that concerned about Oracle or Microsoft, or, you know, any of the other providers out there.
Michaela 36:21
Yeah, I mean, it could be partly, you know, politics side, I mean, usually cold fusion works with several technologies, like in the database area work basically works with any database, and they've been pretty open handed, not to, like favor one over another.
But it is interesting that there isn't one directly built in night, I guess you could say the O r. m, stuff sort of goes in that direction.
And then some of the other things, you know, I mean, Adobe is a big company, I, is it 4000 employees there, they've got a lot of employees, and obviously, you know, most of those employees, uh, you know, they've got, how many products is it 40 products. So, a lot, a lot. But I think having said that, you know, they've got a large engineering and marketing team behind cold fusion. So, I don't know, if it's totally fair to say they don't really, you know, focus on it, but maybe we don't get to hear about all the stuff they get up to
Unknown 37:23
there. You know,
Michaela 37:28
so that that's one of the thoughts on that. And then you mentioned the tagline for Node. js I was kind of racking my brain what is the tagline for cold fusion? And I couldn't think, you know, if there is one or have you ever heard of one?
Unknown 37:39
No, I mean, I think it you know, I just think back to the days when, you know, when Ben for to use to do
Unknown 37:49
see fog meanings for me, when I was back in Chicago, I was I started up the, the local cold fusion user group back in 2000, and three or 2002 or and he would say things like, you know, this is there's no smoke and mirrors here. It's it's all
Unknown 38:09
just about rapid application development. And that seems to have, you know, maintained its its lower to the, to the languages that it's, you know, it's just rapid application development. But I don't know that there is any official tagline
Michaela 38:26
Well, maybe if anyone listening either knows what the official cold fusion tagline is, or you have a suggestion then let us know in the comments to this on the show notes and let Sarah tech site be interested to hear if there really is a tagline for it, or suggestions what it should be learning that would actually help. So great, great idea. They Eagle
Unknown 38:50
now
Michaela 38:51
what about stumbling blocks for cold fusion, gaining mainstream status? What do you think that is? Yeah, great. If if it cold fusion was mainstream again,
Unknown 39:03
right? I think it would, I think it would make you know, it's, it's not all roses. Of course, there are some downsides to something like cold fusion being mainstream will will have a lot of bad developers again, surely. But it will also have a lot of services that we can benefit from right out of the box. And I think that's probably one of the downsides of CF is that as you go to a variety of different places, and you look at, you know, oh, hey, we integrate with any technology, here's, you know, some sample code, you're never going to find that sample code and CF, well, maybe it's the CF communities job to say, Hey, here's the sample code, you know, we, we just recently deployed a integration with Amazon Web Services for their cloud front
Unknown 39:55
load bound, not load balancer cloud front con
Unknown 40:00
content delivery network, right. And so integrating with that was kind of a nightmare. And the reality was, was that it wasn't that complicated. It was just the right pieces of code that you needed to find and put together and, and understand how their system works. Because, you know, the document Taishan of API's is never that amazing. But ultimately, it was, it was like, you know, jumping through hoops just to try to get integrated with something simple, like Amazon Web Services. And we found some code that actually somebody contributed probably three or four years ago to, you know, on GitHub, or some someplace like that. And we found, you know, a pretty decent infrastructure that there was already built out, the problem was that it was based on, you know, their, their original authorization mechanism, and not their new authorization mechanism. And so it was just very complicated to get implemented. And I think if you, you know, with anything else, like they had code for code snippets for other programming languages, but you just didn't, we didn't find one for CF, it just didn't exist. And so that's, you know, that kind of stuff makes it hard for people to engage and even learn about CF. So maybe we as a community need to come out and say, Hey, you know, here's a code snippet, here's something that we can contribute to you that you can share with other developers who may be engaging in this technology, who may be looking to utilize this technology, because I mean, let's be honest, Amazon Web Services, like why isn't there an AWS CF AWS tag? Right? I mean, why isn't there a lot of these things that we need on a regular basis if we're going to be part of the future?
Michaela 41:56
I think that's a great idea. And I know Brad would, who's the evangelist for a box products over artists solutions, he's a number of times he's gone to API's or services like that, and actually, you know, provided them with cold fusion code, and then
how can I put this politely hassled them until they got it up on their website?
Unknown 42:19
And that's, I mean, I think that's what its gonna take is just some clicks, but to get out there and say, Look, you gotta you there are a lot of people out there using this technology, and you don't want to turn them away, because they don't have a code snippet,
Michaela 42:34
right. So, you know, it's a combination of both technology and a little politics of like, you know, gently encouraging those vendors to have those code snippets. And to be honest, if you've given them giving them the code snippet, you know, they don't have that much work to do to list it up on my website. Hardly any, the other idea that comes to me, and maybe this exists not Yeah, the other one idea comes to me, and maybe this exists is perhaps the needs to be a, like a central list or repository, maybe it could be part of forge box or somewhere else that that, and here are some other important ones that we don't have code snippets, for example, code, and if anyone's got some already, then let's contribute it. Or if you want to help out, go ahead and write it, because I think that would really
Unknown 43:25
improve things. Yeah, I
Unknown 43:27
mean, the other thing you have to recognize about cold fusion, and what what maybe that we don't have that other languages have is this concept of
Igor Ilyinsky 43:39
building the package that you need, based on the technologies that you need to use. So cold fusion, you know, the engine is, is all encompassing, and there's a word for it, it slips my mind at the moment. But basically, you know, you you call the templates that you need, when you need them, I might not need CF, you know, HTTP, or see a graph for my programming. So maybe I exclude those individual components of the language from the engine, that all adds overhead. So maybe that concept is something that to some degree could be incorporated into CF
Michaela 44:23
Yeah, I don't know if that's like some kind of just in time, or late late integration, or late, I don't know quite what the right word is there. But
that's one way to do it. Or maybe you can, you could have a cut down version
just gave you a minimal set. So that is an interesting idea. Any other stumbling blocks, you think that stopping cold fusion from getting mainstream status,
Igor Ilyinsky 44:53
um, it, you know, it's, it's, it's hard to say, I mean, I think that those are kind of the main things, I think, when people are looking for a platform, especially from the business perspective, you're looking for, you know, cost effective cost effectiveness, first of all, the model has certainly shifted from what it was many years ago, when, you know, you would buy software, and then you deploy it, and people would support it, because you bought the software these days, many people are happy to pay for software support as an add on to a free, you know, to a free platform. So, that's something that I think, you know, Linux pioneered. But in terms of platforms, that's kind of a very standard model now. So, again, it comes down to the question of barrier to entry, if, if what you're deploying is free. I mean, look, Amazon has a free tier for pretty much every, within AWS, I mean, you can build out a company and for either, you know, the first year or until you hit a certain critical mass, you can be running your infrastructure entirely for free, but you better believe that once you know, it starts kicking in and they start charging you You're, you're going to be, you know, paying market rates, and that's fine. That's just kind of how our technological world has evolved. The other thing is having something that is very lightweight, you know, people feel like, if they can deploy a lightweight technology, then it's much more portable, they don't have to worry so much about the portability of their application, if it's deployed on a lightweight platform. So having, you know, that that kind of ecosystem where you're building a platform, or you're, you're stepping into a place form that a you can grow with and be doesn't have a very big footprint to begin with, certainly, from the financials perspective, that's very enticing to business owners, maybe for cold fusion, you know, as a language, we need to engage other platforms and other languages, you know, there's nothing specific about JavaScript, other than the fact that, you know, if you know how to program for the web, then you generally know JavaScript. So yeah, why not use that, you know, as the platform for Node. js or as the platform for Angular JS. But why can't there be a you know, why can't there be a node CF, right? Why can't there be something that utilizes cold fusion as the programming language because at the end of the day, it's all compiled into Java or c
Unknown 47:57
or something else anyway, right?
Michaela 47:59
Yeah, well, and you mentioned JavaScript there, you know, I forget which version that happened, like it was a version or two ago, you can write all of your cold fusion purely a script language, you don't have to use tags at all anymore if you don't want to. Yeah, no,
Unknown 48:14
thank you. I mean, I think part of the appeal of cold fusion is tag based syntax.
Michaela 48:21
So you mentioned earlier that, you know, sometimes it's cold fusion developers were operating in a bubble, you know, what, what can we do if we want to change that ourselves? How can we get out of our comfort zone? Well, I
Unknown 48:35
think more than anything, it's engaging the other technologies that are out there that operate from a different perspective. You know, we talked about Docker Docker ization a little bit and we talked about
Unknown 48:49
AWS s3 and and other types of, you know,
Igor Ilyinsky 48:54
platform containers out there, or runtime containers. I think that we as a CF community ought to start engaging those a little bit more seeing how we can make things a little bit more turnkey for those, even for those within CF that are just starting out, you know, I think Amazon has a great set of products available. And, you know, generally they hate Google Google. So they should be all aboard trying to get more people to utilize CF based platforms and in technology. So, you know, just helping that that we'll gain some critical mass gain some motion is really what the community I think needs is is let's talk more about containers ation, let's talk more about deploying CF in a very scalable fashion in a very, you know, highly available fashion. I mean, we're dealing with the language that has such a bad stigma in so many ways we're dealing with comparisons of you know, well, Facebook was, you know, built on whatever, PHP or, or, you know,
Pearl or something. And cold fusion, you know, was the driving force behind MySpace, so, and MySpace tanked. And, you know, so, I mean, there, there are a lot of these things that may have absolutely nothing to do with the language though I I will tell you from a first person perspective, that we did have a lot of scalability issues with cold fusion early on. Thankfully, a lot of those issues have been dealt with. And there are other technologies that we can incorporate, you know, to help CF scale but it's, it's still not driving the headlines, you know, it's still not the technology that that that the, you know, movers and, and
Unknown 50:58
up and coming, you know, platforms or
Igor Ilyinsky 51:03
startups are really engaging. So, I think we need to work our way into that both from the perspective of the engagement of the platform and making sure that people are aware and have the right tools to engage in it. And also from the, you know, PR perspective, I think that's, that's a big part of it. And SCF developers, we come from a world where you're, you know, we're, we're beholden to the corporate entity that controls it, whereas much of the other technologies out there, though, the ones that are gaining steam are really perceived to be from a community based, you know, sort of ecosystem and I think that's what we need for CF week is that we need more of, you know, community can you community based activism? Hmm,
Michaela 52:00
that sounds good to me more. And, you know, that's one of the reasons I started the CFL Live podcast, because I wanted to
get some good stories out there of house called fusion can be alive and a modern language. So yeah, well, it is and it's being used. And I'll you know, I can tell you and not just me, but I'm sure many people I saw a good number of individuals on the CF
Igor Ilyinsky 52:27
survey that you sent out that basically like myself, have been able to establish very good businesses based on CF like myself have been able to established very comfortable incomes based on that several different people have reported incomes of over 150, $200,000
a year there, they're no different than, than you or I, or any of us in this community. And that CF is really a powerful tool for building products and platforms that that can, you know, sustain very nice lifestyle. So I think from that perspective, there isn't a problem with CF. But there is, you know, that stigma and the more of us that come out and say hey, you know we UCF and here's why we love it. And here's a number of things that we can do to make it better, then, as a community, we ought to engage that rather than, you know, kind of assume that there's going to be something that comes down from the top, that's what I used to do is assume that, oh, yeah, you know, CF, Adobe will come out with that tag eventually, or, you know, and a lot of CF, mild CF life has been waiting for that, you know, next version to come out sitting there, you know, biting my nails waiting for, you know, from from version nine to 10, or, you know, for, for that Java engine on the back end, or, or, you know, whatever it is, there have been so many things just waiting on CF. And I think we need to change that paradigm. A little.
Michaela 54:10
Yeah, I think Part A lot of this is not the technology, it's, it's changing people's mindset around cold fusion. And like you say, getting some news and press out about success stories with cold fusion. So if anyone has something on that, you know, let let us know here at the podcast will be happy to, to interview you, or help you get the story out. So I did do an interview with someone else about the business case for cold fusion. And I'll link that in the show notes. I'm spacing out on the exact title. But
I did do another interview about six months ago on that topic. So I think it's great that you're talking about it today.
So you mentioned you you were running the cold fusion user group in, how did you get started what's called fusion equal?
Igor Ilyinsky 55:03
Well, it's kind of very similar to I'm sure a lot of developers back in the late 90s, I had graduated college in about 1998, and I was living in New York at the time, I'm actually a native New Yorker and graduating college when, you know, into Manhattan, looking for my first job. And cold fusion was one of those technologies that were people were using for web development. This was, of course, before they were really any web development classes. No one was teaching cold fusion at the time. But for business people that wanted to set up cold fusion, or that wanted to set up websites that were consuming things online or selling things online, it really became a decent option for them. You know, at that time, like I said, there were, there were limited options. And fusion was one of them. And it actually from the corporate perspective, it was a really good option. Because building internet became so easy for people to do with CF. And, and the licensing was very reasonable and manageable from that point of view. So at that time, around 1998, I had gone into the corporate world, I was actually working at a company called AXA equitable, which is still around today, big insurance company, and I was there, their webmaster. And basically, there was a guy who's working next to me. And he was building stuff and cold fusion. And it's funny, because at the time I was developing stuff in server side JavaScript, and you know, very few people have actually touched server side JavaScript. But what was interesting about it at the time is that this was based on Netscape Enterprise Server. And it was, you know, it was just, I had always been programming. So I figured, let me let me try and learn this server side JavaScript language. And I was able to put together my first CMS Actually, it was a first the first Content Management Console I'd ever seen, but just developed this concept in 98, and deployed it to the website for this, you know, national international enterprise. And
as I was sitting along this other program, or that was programming and cold fusion, I'd keep looking over and say, Wow, that's so much easier to do in cold fusion, why didn't I just use that technology in, you know, integrating into databases instead of reading flat files in and out. So I realized that that was a pretty good language to engage in in about that time frame. And then maybe a year or two later, in 99 or 2000, I started working at a variety of different startups in Silicon Alley, which we call it at the time, which was the startup scene in New York. And, and, you know, I'd probably gone through three or four different startups in the span of a year and had built my CF acumen over that time. And along that time frame or also developed you know, rd BMS capabilities and database design
concepts and in acumen, and so ultimately, by the time the bubble had burst in 2001, on the startup scene, I had basically everything I needed to go and deploy robust, cold fusion application. So I started doing a little bit of consulting also went to work for another big bank, as I mentioned, and ultimately, ultimately just just building out my cold fusion document until I decided at some point to focus exclusively on on building CF websites and for my own clients, and specifically jumped into the legal field started working with law firms. And, you know, since then just haven't looked back, I built the platform that works really well for our clients that incorporates a lot of things, including CMS and e commerce and number of other things. And like I said, I haven't really programmed and probably the last six or seven years, but all of my efforts today and all of the benefits I read today, we're, we're based off of that old cold fusion development.
Michaela 59:31
Ty is a great story Eagle. So I Are you going to any cold fusion conferences this year? Oh,
Unknown 59:38
I actually haven't gone to a cold fusion conference since I think, gosh, I can't even remember it was at the swan and dolphin in Orlando is probably maybe, I don't know, 2004 2005.
Unknown 59:52
So if I remember that one. That's the Arizona where I'm based right now. I encourage the organizers of these conferences to set up something here so I can come
Michaela 1:00:06
that is a great idea. Of course, the the CF summit West is in Las Vegas, which isn't too far from Arizona. So yeah,
Unknown 1:00:12
not too far. more hours drive.
Michaela 1:00:15
Yeah, there you go. Real quick flight if you prefer flying,
so that's probably the closest one I can think of. And then
I know Houston is not a quick drive from where you are, but is a quick flight. So the into the box conferences fairly close
to possibilities. So great. Well, I really appreciate you coming on the podcast today, Igor, and thanks for sharing all your thoughts about the CF business case and the future of cold fusion and how we can get out of the bubble in our cold fusion developer comfort zone.
Unknown 1:00:54
Yeah, absolutely. I'm happy to do it cold. I hold co fusion very close to my heart. So love to see the the language and technology prevail.