008 The Best REST You’ve ever Had: ColdBox REST with Nathaniel Francis

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

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

Episode highlight

• Why REST over regular CF
• Separate front end from data
• Easy to support multiple platforms such as phone, desktop, and IoT
• Versatility
• Why the CB REST API
• CB, CF Wheels, ACF, Node
• Move to CB REST is easy   Converting from CFM to REST
• SQL Hibernate ORM -> REST
• REST and CouchBase Lightweight Star Wars app
• Why are you proud to develop in CF?
• WWIT to make CF more alive this year?
• What are you looking forward to at Into The Box?
• Nathaniel Best SciFi books End Game and Dune, or a Git merge of both!

And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.

What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.

And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.

You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.

All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.

Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.

No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens Next

ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist

Modern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.

√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production

√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading

√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF

√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free!

 

Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Mentioned in this episode

• REST
• IoT Internet of Things
• ColdBox
• ORM
• CouchBase

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Speaker details

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

Links

• Twitter
• Website

Interview transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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