Find the show notes and the full podcast episode here
Michaela Light 0:00
Hello. Welcome back to the show everyone. I'm here with Gavin Pickens, the world expert on ColdFusion. and author of he's shaking his head or you're not the world experts, not the one on one of one of the many experts in the world. Yeah, I feel like I'm doing a Monty Python sketch here now. But that would be the Spanish Inquisition. For those you didn't get that reference. But we're not going to put people under the Spanish Inquisition, we're going to be talking about the state of the ColdFusion user survey, and all the insights and cool tools and things you may have missed out on. And Gavin has done some extensive analysis of the results. And we also have a lot of cool graphs you can find on the Terra Tech website, we'll put the link to the results in the show notes, which you can find on our podcast page. And we also will talk about a certain conference that's coming up and those of you on video probably can guess the name of it. But it has the initials it be. We'll reveal what those mean later, if you don't know what it means already. Welcome, Gavin.
Gavin Pickin 1:09
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Michaela Light 1:11
You're welcome. And for those of you don't know, Gavin is the co host of the modern boy modernize or die podcast, which is all about modern ColdFusion. And he has been a software consultant for decades. More decades, actually, I think that two and a half decades, I want to say if the mat No, two and three. Yeah. Enough. Yeah. Enough, enough. And he's been he originally comes from New Zealand, but now he's in California, beautiful, sunny state. And although he's called Gavin, he's not related to the Governor of California. So don't worry about that.
Gavin Pickin 1:50
Yep. Some people take offense.
Michaela Light 1:53
Well, some people are fanatic fans of Gavin Newsom, and other people don't like him. Very few people haven't heard of him. Anyway, we're gonna be talking about cold fusion, not politics today, unless it's politics of cold fusion. So maybe we should start out. It's possible some people listening have never even heard this state of the ColdFusion union survey. So what is that Gavin?
Gavin Pickin 2:17
Well, obviously, you should know a lot about it. Since you guys started. It sounds like it's, it's been going on forever that I've known. But I think you guys said it started in 2007 F cfunited. Conference. So basically, it's a survey to try and ask ColdFusion developers about, you know, what are they using? What are they working with? Are they working with, you know, what servers? What JavaScript frameworks, what ColdFusion frameworks, you know, why do they like cold fusion, there's all these different questions. And we're just trying to get a sort of a roadmap of what the cold fusion community is, using, doing, where it's going. And it's kind of cool to sort of see all that because, you know, for lots of different reasons, different people want to understand the coffee community, you know, those who want to build tools, like auto solutions builds a lot of tools for the community. But just in general, you know, like, we're, as a community, we want to know, sort of what people are using and pick up on those trends. And so the survey, you know, you guys do it every year. And it's great, because it looks like we're getting more and more respondents every year. And we're hoping that, you know, if you haven't taken the survey that you'll take it, but also you'll tell all your developer friends that never get out and never on the forums and not on Twitter and don't know about it, because the more people who answer the bitter results we get.
Michaela Light 3:32
Absolutely. And thank you for telling people about a survey on your podcast. Your Brad would mention it in social media, as of course have i i will mention some other reasons people love the survey managers like to see, you know, what technology is out there, who's using what version of ColdFusion? How many people have upgraded? You know, some people like to see what problems people have had with ColdFusion, or why they love ColdFusion. There's also a comment section where people say a variety of things, and we'll have a look at some of the things they said. And it's all anonymous. So you know, hopefully everyone feels pretty okay, sharing their info. And, you know, see if developers often tell me that they take the survey, and it mentions tools for ColdFusion that would make me live their life earlier, easier, and earlier, easier. That they didn't even know existed until we took the survey and they're like, oh, there are tools for that. So it's also a nice way to keep up to date with what's available. Because I know when you've got your heads down, programming, you don't always you sometimes miss those announcements from found do or autists or Adobe or whatever. So,
Gavin Pickin 4:49
yeah, for sure. Those are some of the reasons that's adverse. The reason built that CFML news podcast because I couldn't keep up with all the stuff. So now after I run the news podcast, it's my job to go figure out What's new, so I can tell everybody else. So I keep up?
Michaela Light 5:03
What a great way to do that. Yeah. And just like you said, not only does autists and found yo and integral and all the other third party vendors, but also the two major manufacturers, if that's the right word of CFML, engines, Adobe, and the Lucy Foundation, or association, or whatever their name is last, I think it is right. Both of them study the results of this to see what's going on in ColdFusion. So you know, they get to hear your voice as a ColdFusion. Developer, by you filling out this survey, and seeing what the trends are. So all good reasons for that. And from my own personal point of view, you know, here at TourTech, we have a mission to make ColdFusion more alive. And people being aware of using more tools and best practices, and new, you know, upgrading the version of Adobe ColdFusion. Or Lucy, to me as part of that. And also for me to, you know, see people's feedback, what problems are they having close to the coalface of ColdFusion development, where they get their hands dirty? You know, what's that, like, for people, and obviously, I talked to dozens of people every month, but when you get all the people filling out a survey, it's a much bigger way to hear what's going on.
Gavin Pickin 6:27
So it's definitely a big plus to have all the results. And like you say, we can do some number crunching on it and everything. And it's, it's really interesting to see, because you only get a taste of it. Again, the survey is only as good as the number of people who fill it out. So we always recommend, when you fill it out, tell everybody else, you know, make sure other people filling it up. Because, you know, it all adds up. So yeah, and
Michaela Light 6:51
I want to say thanks to autist and Adobe and integral and I think found do or gave prizes for a raffle to get more people to fill out the survey this year, which was a great innovation. So thanks, Gavin and everyone else who contributed to that Luis, whose head is the head honcho or handheld autists solutions. And so, and also we do listen to if people have suggestions on how to phrase the questions better, or how to, you know, other questions we should get rid of, because they're useful are the new questions that will be helpful to add on new options to questions. We always have that many of the questions have a writing area where you can say, well, there's this tool you didn't even list in your survey. You know, and we every we do analyze that Brad and I have done that every year where we look through and try and figure out, hey, are the for example, are there editors that very few people use and it's just cluttering up the survey to leave them in there? Let's take them out, or other new ones people have told us about that need to be added in for next year. So always looking to improve it.
Gavin Pickin 7:58
Yep.
Michaela Light 8:00
Cool. So maybe what I'm going to do if it's okay with you, and the people watching and listening, I'm going to go ahead and share the survey results on the video. But don't worry, those who are listening, we will talk you through as though you're listening to a baseball game on the radio, if you ever do that. So you know what the heck we is talking about? For sure. So, service starts off with what version of ColdFusion use and here's the cute graph of it, showing well maybe you should tell us about it, Gavin because you're the guest. Yeah.
Gavin Pickin 8:43
So the funny thing is, is that originally when you first wrote your review several months ago now, Adobe cf 2018 was the most popular version of the engines out of all the different Adobe ones and Lucy ones but now this graph is updated over time. And now Lucy five three or later actually has PIP them all. So overall, we have 195 respondents out of the 836 respondents and people can choose multiple versions of these agents. So let's get let's get that clear right away. They might use Lucy for some and they might use Adobe, you know, maybe see if you know 2016 For others, but overall, yeah, Lucy is 23.3% of people are using Lucy five, three or later and ColdFusion 2018. Is it 21 points, you know 21.2 So it's it's not far off. It's pretty close. But um, yeah, so so far for a single use, you know, a single engine, Lucy five, three or greater is the most popular one there. But overall, most people using this, you know, filling out the survey. We have 537 of the 836 respondents that using an Adobe engine so you know that shows A big percentage there. So we're we're still seeing a lot more people using Adobe. So it's 64%. You know, it's about 36%, using Lucy, and most of the Lucy, people are upgrading to five, three. So 75% of the Lucy, people are using the latest five, three, or, you know, one of the five, three, minors because five through 1234567, and eight, but they're in that batch. So that's kind of kind of cool to see, don't you think?
Michaela Light 10:29
I think it is cool to see greater adoption of Lucy, and we'll probably come back at the end of the year. And do Gavin had a really clever idea to do like a retrospective of all surveys and see the trends over years. So we're gonna make some graphs of that for people curious on that. But for I've seen Lucy grow in size on users. The other thing I'll point out, as Gavin mentioned, people use risk on this question, they fill out multiple responses, and plenty of people, you know, for example, using 26, Adobe 2016, and Adobe ColdFusion, 2018 or 2021. At the same time, you know, maybe they have a production box using the old one, and they fire up a development server with the newer version, and they're in the middle of a migration. And then the other trends I noticed here, as you mentioned, most people in Lucy get latest version, they don't mess around with old version. So I have bumped into a few people who do that. For God knows what reason. No, it's an assurance tech that, you know, I understand the reason. But with Adobe, there's a much slower upgrade, whatever you want to call it, like pace velocity. And partly that involves money. And from people I've talked to people, I mean, Adobe spend 1000s of hours making everything backward compatible and back testing against prior version code, you know, they have a whole library of code that customers have led them under NDA that they can back test stuff on, and it's not all pretty code, they have some pretty, you know, people voluntarily gave them ugly code to make sure the engine still runs ugly code correctly. So even though Adobe do that people seem to be kind of resistant to upgrading. Whereas Yeah, I mean, well, that's not true.
Gavin Pickin 12:15
Yeah. And that's the thing is, you know, Lucy also has that one button, click upgrade and revert, which I think is a big deal. You know, upgrades for ColdFusion. A lot of times if you do do the upgrade, even just a patch upgrade, sometimes it'll blow away your you know, your button code configuration. i Yes. doesn't know how to find ColdFusion anymore. And people have had a lot of struggles with that. But I think it's the big thing is licensing, like you said, and then the other big thing is, yeah, they're scared about upgrades. But they have 40,000 regression tests, apparently and the Adobe testbank that they run when they do this. And like you said right now Adobe cf 2018. Is it 33%. So 33% of the people that are Adobe users are using cf 2018 28% of ces 2021, which is pretty good. It's almost there. So they're almost half the people that are using Adobe ColdFusion 2018. You know, like there's pretty similar numbers, but then 2016, there's still 17 and a half percent using that.
Michaela Light 13:15
And that's it. I just want to point out 2016 As far as I recall, went end of life earlier this year, I think
Gavin Pickin 13:23
we're looking at CF 2023. Like they're teasing, teasing previews the end of the year. And so far right now, you know, we're basically right at 60% of people are using a supported ColdFusion licensed product.
Michaela Light 13:36
I'm pretty interesting. These ones here are on supported for for security fixes for getting new features, obviously you don't get new features in older versions, but they're not getting the hot fixes. What's with the CF nine. I mean, what year was CF nine guys I want to say was 2009
Gavin Pickin 13:53
I think I think in 2011. I went end of life. So it's been out of life for living? Yes. Even if you had the crazy Adobe support packages they ran out years ago because you know, they'll get an extra three to five years. But yeah, so right now 40% of ColdFusion boxes in your server environment are basically not licensed, not updated, not patched. And yeah, that's kind of crazy and scary. Yeah, so 4% are using CF nine or earlier. And then 10 cf 10 is 4.8%. And cf 11 is 12.2. And see, that's where I think those trends will be nice, because I know they see if you live in a few years ago. You know, there was a lot of people using CF live in 2016 and 2018. They came out it was like 2016 Now, you know, like 20% I'm curious, how much has that gone down over time? Or is it stayed about the same? Because those people will never upgrade? You know, it might just be No,
Michaela Light 14:46
it's not they'll never upgrade. They need to have a motivation, I think and I talked to CIOs all the time and you know, often the motivation is they've had a security probe thing run and it's pointed out this thing's out of life, and they're, you know, at risk of getting hacked, basically. And that's often the motivation that happens Other times, you know, a new person comes in at the top of it job, and they're like, we can't have all this technical debt, we need to get this upgraded. So, you know, I'm sure you guys see that to a lot of folks. So, anyway, I just want to encourage everyone to just Mao you know, to misquote that, you know, American Uncle Sam guy saying Your country needs you post told people to go fight for America. You know, your ColdFusion needs you to upgrade to the latest version. I understand when something when Lucy six comes out later this year, obviously, you might want to wait a bit until there's a dot release. Right? And they fixed anything came out. And same with Adobe ColdFusion. We didn't update people to 2021 until there was a hotfix. And then we've started rolling that out. But there is absolutely no excuse for not keeping your software up to date. And lately, we don't have a question about versions of SQL Server or Windows underneath. But I come across people who are running Windows Server 2009. Guys that went End of Life A while back, it's a liability. Anyway, I'll get off my soapbox. I think we should should honorably mentioned Blue Dragon is officially dead at this point.
Gavin Pickin 16:24
Zero people responded that they still use blue dragon. Pretty low for a while. But there were a few. You know, it was one of the other open source engines back in the day with Railo. and stuff. And
Michaela Light 16:35
yeah, good stuff at the time. Yeah, and the guys behind Blue Dragon, I'm forgetting the name of the company. But they helped us with getting cfunited off the ground together with CF dynamics guys. Because we used to have the C fund conference and they said you need to make it more professional and charge more money. So you can have better quality event. So I do want to thank you for that. But you know, as far as the language use, no great reason to use it unless you're heavily wedded to dotnet or something.
Gavin Pickin 17:06
Yeah, so apparently, just for end of life discussions, so cf 11 into life in April 2019. So it's been three years, since 2016, into life, February 2021. So that's been out alive for 16 months at the time of recording. And then 2018 is only good for less than a year, it's July of 23 its end of life, or support. So that's poor support, you can get the extended versions, a lot of lot of people using Adobe do have those big government contracts or integrasi contracts with extra support. But yeah, so it's just good to know that, you know, you've only got a year left. So if you're on 2016, you're gonna go to 2018 or even 2021.
Michaela Light 17:50
Yeah, the support for gold, possibly 2023. By the time they actually do it. Sorry, I shouldn't be mean to the people listening. I'm sure they will have excellent reasons why they haven't upgraded. And I will say something else for people thinking about upgrading. The development and staging licenses for all Adobe ColdFusion is free, right? You don't have to pay for a staging license. Do you want to play around with this? You can install it on a staging server or development server without paying Adobe any dollars. And you can test out your code see it you know, fix any issues? Check it goes through QA, okay. And then you can tell your boss write the check for the license for the production version.
Gavin Pickin 18:38
And so back to Lucy real quick, we'll see that Lucy like we said 75% and running the latest Lucy five three and there are a lot of different branches in that Lucy five three has been around a long time, but five to five one is 20% There's still a lot of people that haven't jumped to five, three. And then they're almost you know, I think five 310 right now is almost sort of at the the end there as well. And then Lucy for there's about 5% and Lucy for earlier and then railer for Yeah, so it was still almost almost 1% So it's good to see that they're upgrading but you know Lucy's path usually is a lot better. They have bugs, things pop up, but they're usually pretty good about fixing them and the Lucy 538 And 539 has been pretty stable on five 310 that's about to come out I believe. And then they're working hard on Lucy six. So
Michaela Light 19:31
what I put up I think that the Adobe ColdFusion development team in Bengaluru, India do a great job of fixing this too, but it's slightly less transparent and it's a little less under your control. Whereas with Lucy the whole thing is totally transparent. You can do a pull request on staff. You can fix it yourself. That's super important. You can pay you know you can get a sponsorship or what I forget what they call it, but you can pay money to the Lusatian switch and say move this bug I reported to the top of your bug list and fix it Now, right? What do they call that they have a name for it.
Gavin Pickin 20:05
The hot fixes mean or
Michaela Light 20:08
no way you pay money to them. And they actually fix the bug in Luzzi now instead of in six months time.
Gavin Pickin 20:14
Yeah, I mean, I think was just the the sponsored support. I mean, I don't remember the exact name they have for it. But yeah, okay, basically, yeah, they get the hotfix out, and they get it to you, and then you can test it, and then they'll roll it out into it and update right away as well. And Adobe does that for the support customers too. And I know that was a big thing, where the, they've been waiting for updates for a while for that they released some updates on May 10. But people were running all these hot fixes on top of things. And so that's one thing, I think that both the engines can do better is get those fixes out faster. You know, security updates is one thing with version changes. But you know, get those little fixes out hot fixes are great, but they gotta roll them out and get a release out so people can start using them. So,
Michaela Light 21:01
indeed, so let me I'm just gonna stop the share for a moment so people can see us on the big screen. And let's see, what would make sense. Do we care about enterprise versus standard? Do we want to yap about that a bit? Are we
Gavin Pickin 21:22
Yeah, it looks like it's a 6040 split? I think roughly so like 60% of the 6% of people are using Enterprise, you know, that? The number? I mean, more and more going towards the enterprise over standard? I mean, obviously, there's a pretty big price difference between them. But four to
Michaela Light 21:41
one. On the other hand, you do get more cores, and, and some extra features.
Gavin Pickin 21:46
Yeah, for sure. So, I mean, it looks like you know, basically 5545. So it's been about the same for a while, I think it's just the enterprise is slowly creeping up, you know, so that's a good sign for Adobe, and they are releasing more, you know, more of those features. And to use command blocks, you have to be on an enterprise license for being trying to get them to allow standard because of the wide deploy.
Michaela Light 22:08
Yes, there will be people listening to this podcast, please, please let people run command box against Adobe ColdFusion. Standard.
Gavin Pickin 22:17
Yep. And then I know that a lot of their discussions this year will have been about licensing and, you know, like, those enterprise, what does it cover? How many Docker instances is it? per core per instance? Per, you know, like, so there's been a lot of debate about licenses and how they cover it. And you know, I think people will be more comfortable using Adobe once they're more certain about the licenses because that's thing is a lot of people moving to Docker, we'll talk about that later. And Docker with Lucy is easy, because you don't to worry about the licensing, but Docker with Adobe, you have to consider the licensing and, you know, if you're like, if you're going to scale up or down, like, do you have to preorder the licenses? How much does it going to cover? But I think enterprise, you have to have Enterprise liability for the Docker stuff. And so maybe that's why that number is gonna creep up. I'm
Michaela Light 23:06
not sure that's 100% True, but it would be pointless, because you're only allowed to cause with standard. So it's kind of like any reasonable Docker cluster setups gonna have way more than two cores floating around anyway,
Gavin Pickin 23:20
you would think Yeah, yeah. So
Michaela Light 23:21
and also the answer a question I've never heard answered. Maybe it has been answered, which is, where do you count because you counting them in the Docker virtual instance? Are you counting them in the underlying hardware underneath?
Gavin Pickin 23:34
That's the thing is like, is it what's allowed to run or what's actually running. So that's where it gets a little.
Michaela Light 23:42
So I don't want to go down that licensing rabbit hole, because I had a really heated discussion with Mark from Adobe, who, which I hope he's forgiven me for at this point. And I also we had a we did a rat a panel with, you know, a bunch of ColdFusion experts, where we talked about licensing and looked at all the issues. And also I, I shared a vision for where I see what I think confusion and how it should be licensed with more transparency and easy to fair and easy to understand terms, like charge by the hour, or by the minute, or whatever the CPU unit is, and other things. So I think there is a vision forward. I you know, I have sympathy for the engineers at Adobe, you don't totally control this, because there's a whole legal department who gets involved as well. And I think there is a brighter future for this, and I'm sure it will happen eventually.
Gavin Pickin 24:40
I think it'd be really good for ColdFusion in general, when that happens, you know, like I said, Absolutely, thing is, and I just hope that it gets to a point where it's just more clear. And I know like I understand it's complicated, and a lot of things are you know, they're locked down and they can't report home and so, you know, like there's a lot of complications of this stuff. Don't get me wrong, I understand, I just hope that they can figure it out. So people feel more comfortable. And you know, that'll help.
Michaela Light 25:06
And also, there is a better version of ColdFusion. on AWS. There's a metered version there that you can get.
Gavin Pickin 25:14
You can use the AMI, Yes, yep. Right.
Michaela Light 25:17
So anyway, let us move off that contentious topic. And look at what people are running underneath ColdFusion. So Windows, Linux, Mac.
Gavin Pickin 25:31
Yeah, this is, again, one of those interesting ones, right? So for the longest time, it's been a very, very Windows controlled, set up. And it looks like that way, it's continuing probably because of the enterprise and big business, you know, Windows has always been a little stronger. And so they're 58% and 30 32%, for Linux is, you know, what I'd probably expect and then Mac now, it doesn't say if this is your production server or not. Right. So this could just be some local development server at about 10%. For Mac, for that for your server always. So I'm kind of curious if Yeah, how many people are running production?
Michaela Light 26:11
servers on Mac? Yeah, I think a handful do because their Mac affection? Arctos? Yeah, but you may be right, a lot of this may be development servers, or whatever. And I think, you know, a lot of enterprises are window shot, I'm not going to Windows shops, there, Microsoft shops, and they, you know, if Microsoft makes it, they love it. So, I think that explains a lot of the windows. And of course, many people, you know, do not only do the ColdFusion programming, but they do their own DevOps, and they, they have to do the patching and installation, and they're more comfortable with a Windows Server than line x. So now, it must be said modern line. exe is pretty straightforward to use. Yeah,
Gavin Pickin 26:51
it's definitely a lot better than it used to be for sure. There's a lot of different variations out there. Now there's like a million different options.
Michaela Light 27:02
Yes. And I think also, to be fair, my I mean, maybe I'm wrong on this, but my understanding is underlying the current version of Windows, and Mac, really, the kernel is more or less line x anyway. So it's not like you're that technically different?
Gavin Pickin 27:20
Yeah, I mean, that's a lot of the time it's comes down to, you know, the files, sensitivity, like case sensitivity and everything. And now I think all more people are probably going to use Windows with the fact that, you know, the Windows Linux subsystem is so good. You know, that's really made a huge difference to people that they needed to have that Linux subsystem. And so people went Mac, because it wasn't quite Linux yet a little bit more user friendliness and everything. And that probably leads nicely into our next one for on your development, PC or laptop, what are you using, and those numbers are a little bit different than the server numbers. So
Michaela Light 28:00
let's, let's have a look at those because that does differ things. So let me just reshare that. So And for folks coming to TourTech website for this, you know, we split this up into eight pages. So the pages run quicker. But you can get a PDF of the whole thing if you want it. But we're going to look here, what you're using on your laptop, and browsers and databases, I think are all key development questions.
Gavin Pickin 28:29
Yeah. And so on that one, actually, Mac takes a big jump up, because it goes from 10% on the server to almost 28%. If you're on the actual, you know, your laptop, and Linux goes down from 32%, down to like 10 and a half percent. So a lot more people using Linux on servers, you know, they're probably using nginx and Apache, you know, they're running possibly on Docker or just Ubuntu servers, it's just way more common to run Linux on production than Mac. But windows, it's only goes up from 58% to 61. So, you know, that stays about the same. But basically, you know, all those Mac users probably on their laptops. Yeah, they're probably just deploying to a Linux based system, because that's what they're used to. And it's kind of interesting that the two others that show up on your list, they are pop OS and Linux on vagrant. And so the Chrome OS, oh, yeah, this Chrome OS two, but it's two users out of like 515. So it's not even happening, I've seen. So it's kind of cool that you can run some of the stuff and some of the editors we'll talk about later, you know, you can run them on a Chrome OS now like these, so it actually runs in the browser, you can actually do it. So it's pretty slick.
Michaela Light 29:40
It's very slick, particularly if you're working at some incredibly mega lockdown server where you can't install any software without getting seven forms filled out in triplicate, and have a poor print from your dog on the form as well, you know, so yeah. Let's look at browsers because
Gavin Pickin 30:00
That's a big one.
Michaela Light 30:01
It is a big one. What browsers Get Target has been browser wars over the past two and a half decades or three decades when the browsers get invented 1995 or almost mid 90s. Netscape came out. Netscape doesn't appear on this list anywhere except Firefox is the grandson of Netscape, I guess. Sort of maybe. But most popular browser is what Chrome from? Yes, it's followed by the fox.
Gavin Pickin 30:35
Yeah, Firefox, but it is right up there. So that is actually pretty similar. It just jumped up so much. It's it almost the same percent, I'm gonna get these percentages worked out for us as we keep chatting. But it's 307 versus 344. That's pretty good numbers. I mean, I use dropped off quite a bit, too. For those who are white. Well, IE
Michaela Light 30:56
has been outlawed by Microsoft. And they say, we're not going to issue any releases, and you can't download it anymore. And if you use it, you'll be put in the corner and told to write out 100 times I will use edge. Pretty much. I'm exaggerating. But they did have an announcement two or three months ago saying IE is no more.
Gavin Pickin 31:14
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's probably a good thing. I mean, I know everyone's so happy. They don't have to support a living anymore. And it is a Chromium browser. So there's a lot more compare compatibility, a lot more things in it. They're more like the other modern browsers. So I know, it's a huge relief. But again, looking at percentages is what people have to do to see if they still support it. And most companies are looking at their, you know, their stats, like how many people are actually using this browser. And some people are still having a scary amount of people still using it. And it's probably because there's a bunch of OSS out there that just haven't been updated if you're running Windows seven or eight, or you know, like the old ones, because I still at 4.6%. Here is what they're using. So
Michaela Light 31:59
there are some some people Yeah, they like you say they have the, the they're using an old version of Windows, and it's got it. Other people did use special features the IE has and the total we use as you must use IE, you know, that's I've seen that.
Gavin Pickin 32:13
I mean, this question is what browsers and client platforms do you support? So it doesn't mean that yes, but they're supporting them? So I mean, only 5% are supporting IE is not good. But it just it supports to get more tickets. So this one here. I mean, Chrome was 35% of people are checking it. But again, you can click multiple things. So a lot of people are looking a lot of them.
Michaela Light 32:37
Oh, yeah. I mean, often will support Chrome and Firefox and edge. And sometimes we throw safari in there too, because that's another popular one on the Apple side of things. I do want to give a shout out for the brave browser, because it's, you know, basically chromium, but without all the privacy invasion, BS that Google Corporation pulls, and Firefox for that matter these days. They're not the world's best privacy browser anymore. Unfortunately. We don't have a section for search engines, and we probably never will. But maybe I'll ask that in the ColdFusion developer Facebook group, what search engines do people use? Because I think that's been shifting over time, too. That's a bit of a tangent. But I was reading about two new search engines coming out. One was called Yep. And one was some cryptos based search engine that look cool. So I think I'll write about those elsewhere. And I'm happy yeah, I'll take them up for you, Gavin. On maybe I'll stick them in the show notes. And then there's a bunch of other ones mentioned, let's move on to databases, because you can't have a ColdFusion app without a database. Unless you're incredibly, incredibly clever how you write your it's really bizarre application? For sure. Yeah. And the most popular databases in this year.
Gavin Pickin 33:58
Wow, it looks like it's the same one we've had the last few years SQL Server is out ahead was like 271 of the respondents are picking SQL Server versus 221 for MySQL, which is the big, the big two front runners there. I mean, I've got a lot of other, you know, honorable mentions. And I'll give you the percentages, you know, here as well, but
Michaela Light 34:23
Well, Maria DB is basically a flavor of MySQL but more for cluster eat IP things. I think it's a four Correct? Yep. Yeah, and then Oracle, whose was this oracle database, who makes that? I don't have that slipped into this survey. It's the original. It's the original RDBMS Larry Ellison's company Oracle churned out many moons ago. I worked on Oracle, version two databases sometime in the 80s. When we use Oracle version one, and I forget, it was really ancient, but it did do a relational database. Oh,
Gavin Pickin 35:00
yeah, just it's very different. That's the way I'll put it. Yes, I've used it before. And it's just very different. Yeah.
Michaela Light 35:09
Well, some people have it. And let's face it ColdFusion is great at gluing together various, you know, enterprise apps, and they may have Oracle floating around in the mix somewhere. So,
Gavin Pickin 35:20
yep. And so SQL Server likes, it leads the pack of about 30%. MySQL zero 24. And then the next the next big ones, Maria DB is at 9.2 with 84 people using and then articles actually fourth, which is why are staying there ahead of, you know, actually, sorry, Postgres just kept on Postgres has 74, like 8.1%, and then Oracle's 55. Point 7.7%. But it's, it's pretty close to there. But yeah, MySQL and SQL Server, the big ones. And again, you said, Microsoft shops, right? Microsoft shops are all about, use my
Michaela Light 35:58
server SQL Server. Yeah. And you know, at the lower lower end of apps, SQL Server rent price at SQL Server Express is free, if it's less than a 10 gig database, and various other conditions they have. So for smaller apps, it's great, you know,
Gavin Pickin 36:13
yep, their their Linux support, you know, like, you can run SQL Server, and you can run all that stuff, and Docker, through Linux. And you know, there's a lot of cool options there. So it's doing doing good, it's still holding strong, and those are the 10, big ones.
Michaela Light 36:28
And then also on as year, you know, they have a cloud version of SQL server where you don't even have to maintain it. It's just like a Platform as a Service, what do they call it? I don't know, they have a name for a database as a service.
Gavin Pickin 36:40
Yep. And there's, you can actually do, you know, straight SQL server like that, or you can actually get their modified version of it. I think that's the Aurora one, which we only had one and a half percent people using Aurora. But a lot of people using SQL Server, they just they treat it like SQL Server, because it's basically saying that a lot of them are modified versions for that scalability, but a lot of services like Digital Ocean and everything, they have a lot of these tools, Postgres and MySQL, Maria dB, you can run them as, basically databases as a service, and they're pretty slick. You know, take away all those slick.
Michaela Light 37:15
I love DigitalOcean. They're like a quarter of the price of AWS. And they have more than Flexity. Yeah, exactly. Now, they don't you know, if you've got to do OCR, or voice recognition, or some other AI clever thing, no, they don't have it. But if you just want to run a ColdFusion site in a database, it's great. Inside droplets using your containers from Docker, I will I don't quite know what the stats is here. But I want to say 25 ish percent are open source solutions here, maybe more maybe 30, MySQL, Maria dB, I think Mongo DB is open source. Couchbase. I want to say that Postgres
Gavin Pickin 37:55
Yeah, a lot of them have community editions, even if they are commercial. So like Couchbase has, you know, some premium editions, but they have the Community Edition, that's probably what SQL Server is doing with that smaller size, you know, same with Redis. There's, you know, the normal open source version, there's the more the commercial version with more cores and more threading and everything else. So, yeah, it's, a lot of them are doing that that's smart, that they're, you know, trying to get people in, and I think that whole, you know, taste test, give them a try. And then once you get bigger, bitter, and your app is doing better, than you're more willing to pay a little bit of money to upgrade if you need to scale. And I think the ones the businesses that are doing that style these days are really, you know, they're winning, right. And I think Adobe, pretty smart with their standard version now, like basically everything in standard you can do in enterprise and vice versa, it's just you get a scaled down version, you know, so it's not, it's not like some things where like, you cannot do this, unless you're getting a price. You know, usually it's like, you just get one, you know, you only have one thread to create PDFs, and standard. But if you have Enterprise, then you can do multi thread, you know, which is pretty cool.
Michaela Light 39:06
And the same with the performance management tool and the security tools and the API Manager. I want to say all of those now you getting coffee in with ColdFusion 2021. They all are available in standard, but like you say that they have lower capacities, which is fair enough. Yeah.
Gavin Pickin 39:25
That's a good way to support those people as they come up. And as they get bigger and bigger and more successful, then you know, then they can play it this year.
Michaela Light 39:32
I do think we have to mention this database right at the top of the list. It has a few users.
Gavin Pickin 39:38
See if you do that, yep. The first database I ever used
Michaela Light 39:43
me one foot No, it wasn't I used TB two. I think it was the first database I use.
Gavin Pickin 39:48
Actually, first one with cold fusion. Let me pull out this DB
Michaela Light 39:51
two here made by IBM, I'm talking about the the PC database and I can't remember the name of the company bought it but I think Borland bought them out
Gavin Pickin 40:00
I remember Wallen, and then
Michaela Light 40:02
db to Fox is it clipper and Fox Pro, I think they were all flavors, that same flat file. Anyway, access totally valid if it's not a public site, and it's only got a few users. It's like a small departmentally app. But it's not a real database guys and SQL Server Express these days, the user interface is almost, you know, as easy to use as access anyway. So
Gavin Pickin 40:27
the funny thing is access has over 2%. And there aren't too many that have, you know, there's only a few have more, I mean, SQL Server, Redis, Postgres, Oracle, MySQL, Maria, DB MongoDB. But like, DynamoDB has less CouchDB has less Couchbase has less. So a lot of the database providers are lower than people still using access. So it's actually one of the leaders, it's still probably like six or seven out of the list. Yeah.
Michaela Light 40:57
So yeah, very cool. On databases. Let's whoopsie. Let's have a look. We're going to look at frameworks and methodologies. Next, guys, lots of juicy tools in here that you may or may not be using. So let me go in and shatter that page. So we're going to look at MVC frameworks and CMS is JavaScript libraries, CSS frameworks, CFC dependency, persistence, frameworks, testing, mobile development tools, miscellaneous frameworks, and code reuse. I think that's the end. If you feel you need, we need to skip a Gavin, just tell me no,
Gavin Pickin 41:43
it's funny, because a lot of them are very similar. You know, a lot of people, like for example, WordPress, some people say WordPress is a framework when it's, you know, it's a blogging platform, CMS, but, you know, people use it as their framework, because it's a framework to, and so some of these, you see, answered, vice versa, you know, this. So it's very interesting, for sure. And obviously, from all this, we have a quite a few products in here, and our MVC product is called bucks. And it's kind of nice to see where we have now outgrown the custom homegrown frameworks, which is for the longest time, none, or, you know, or my homegrown framework where the winners for several years, but now call boxes ahead of, you know, all of them miles ahead of, you know, some of the other frameworks. But it's kind of cool to see because, you know, none. And previous years is basically almost the winner of every category.
Michaela Light 42:42
Yeah, it's nice to see that people are recognizing using some framework, whatever it is, is probably better than not using any. And also that, although a homegrown framework can be cool. You know, you can pick from cold box, or FW one, or I wouldn't pick fuse box these days, because it's just not be maintained. But CF wheels, those are all maintained frameworks. I think Mark Two or model glue are no longer maintained, if I remember correctly,
Gavin Pickin 43:10
yeah, they're pretty much dead on the water. But, you know, again, like fuse box is similar, you know, there was trying to be trying to revive that a while ago. But, I mean, really, they do a good job. And they did a good job at the time, but you really wanted to pick something active and supportive. And yeah, you know, I mean, even framework one, I, for the longest time, it was way up there with coldbox. But, you know, since Sean Horfield left, you know, like there's a few other people stepped up in their in their community. And they're, they're keeping it alive and stuff, but it doesn't have the same push. But CF wheels has come a long way. Peter and Mary and, and Tom have come, you know, really done a lot in the last few years to pull it up. And they're doing a lot of great things. So I'm actually surprised that it hasn't got a few more people there yet, but they're definitely doing a lot of great things. So yeah, there's, it's good to see, you know, some competitive frameworks there. Because in the end, if we have strong frameworks, we'll make a stronger language because most languages, if you look at things like Ruby, and you know, in groovy and stuff, they're not known for the language, people, basically, they're not a Ruby developer. They're a Ruby on Rails developer, you know, they're not a groovy developer. They're Grails, you know, the, you know, most people, they identified by their, their framework and most other languages. They do well from strong frameworks. And so it's, you know, that sort of stands out like PHP got really popular, when WordPress came out and did really well, those apps, right, those frameworks. That's what really people grab, on.
Michaela Light 44:40
And on. And on the higher end, Drupal is in PHP, I think, right?
Gavin Pickin 44:44
Yeah. But I mean, that's the thing is, you know, most of those languages have been around the same time as ColdFusion. But they got a really popular framework that, you know, had a bunch of tools that made their lives easier, and developers latched on to them. And so, you know, it's good to see that we've got options because, you know, not everyone's a pillbox fan, and that's okay, you know, but there's there's CF wheels and framework one, and they have their everyone has their pros and cons, but there's definitely a lot of reasons to use a framework and, you know, don't repeat yourself. And you know, there's, there's a lot of good stuff in there. Don't reinvent the wheel. You know, I
Michaela Light 45:17
think I think the thing that thing for people listening, first of all, let me say MVC stands for Model View Controller for those people listening who didn't know that. That means separate out your code between the logic and the model, the view or the HTML or other views, stuff, and the controller that decides what goes, you know, what gets sent, where and what bit of logic gets run next, or what piece of display gets run next. And really, in some sense, if you want to be agnostic, it doesn't almost matter which of these you pick, though, it does matter. And we could talk briefly about that. But having some way to organize your code, so it's easy to find stuff, when you come back to the app six months later, or someone else's maintaining it is a big aid. And then my understanding, and you can correct me if I'm messing this up. But coldbox is what I call a full featured framework. It has lots of features in it, but maybe it's a bit more complicated to get started on framework. One is really bare bones. It's really just dragging things around. And then CF wheels is kind of analogous, I would say to rails and a Ruby on Rails in which it's always I forget what they say it but where you put things, they make it. So you have do less coding.
Gavin Pickin 46:30
Yeah, it's over configuration. And that's what called to. And so yeah, if you if you want certain things done a certain way, and to be honest framer one does this to the way that generates models, like you put them in the certain folder, like services, have a folder and put it in there, and it'll auto wire things up. But that's a good thing is like a lot of boilerplate stuff that you would normally do yourself, can be done by a framework. And you know, there's usually good reasons for it. And there's, you know, design patterns that you may not even know exist that are in play. And you know, all of them have those benefits. And the funny thing is, is that those people that say none, I don't use a code framework, they have a framework that is just their own, they just don't know they're using it because they have folder structures they have. I mean, I hope they do, because if they just throw code at usually there's like a naming convention for file stuff. These are things you
Michaela Light 47:20
- Yeah, I'd say some of the time there is a pseudo framework that may have been followed part of the time, I've come across code where there was no framework whatsoever. It's just a total spaghetti disaster zone.
Gavin Pickin 47:33
Yeah. And I said, there's a lot of frameworks about the things that really come in ahead and make you really get those nice user experiences is when the framework does things for you, that you would have to do yourself. And in stuff, like, you know, with Rails and everything there and like CF wheels, it handles some of the objects, like the ORM stuff for you. And so it handles creating objects, and it has these little helpers for you for doing some sequel, you know, and if you want to, if you want to see if see, you can ask for it. And then the dependency injection framework handles a lot of that you don't have to worry about making your Singleton's in the Application Scope. And then your transients, you know, just live anywhere, a lot of those get done for you. And then they called box when you use modules. It does a lot of the wiring for you. So if you add a module from Forge box, like it'll load the JAR files the right way, it'll make sure everything set up and everything is done for you. And you know, a lot of people use pobox modules in framework, one that just give it a little bit more work to get it to work. You know, there's a few things you have to do that the framework does for you. And that's usually the time people go, Oh my gosh, I didn't realize coolboxes doing all this. It's like, yeah, that's what it does behind the scenes. And so I find those experiences are kind of cool, because that's when they realize what it's doing. But, but yeah, I mean, they're, they're all great frameworks. I mean, and again, there's a lot of lot of experience over the years, I mean, Shawn coalfields, a great developer, and he's did a lot of work to make framework one, do what it should do, and provide things like routing, and you know, all that type of stuff. And so if you're doing it yourself, you know, it's, you're just not going to have it as polished as a group of professional out there who are sharing and learning from each other and improving and so, but it's cool to see that, you know, more and more people are using these frameworks. And like I said, for us for info box, you know, we do a lot of a lot of work trying to, you know, get the education out there and build these modules and share it and so it's kind of cool that we're finally building those, those nuns and those home groans.
Michaela Light 49:43
So one other little guy would would add from our we use cold box, quite a number of projects. And one of the other benefits is you guys are always adding new things like that Elastic Search. I think there's some other cute search that's coming going to be announced. At the end of the box conference coming up real soon now, whose name escapes me. But the point I wanted to make is when you, when you use a framework like coldbox, you're exposed to a lot of new technology, modern technologies that you might not even been aware existed. And it kind of makes it easy to use them. So I think that's a hidden benefit of using both coldbox and CF wheels. For that reason, framework, one less so because they're not, it's not so quite so active. And, and also, like, it's a stripped down framework. It's not, you know, not as whatever the word is full featured.
Gavin Pickin 50:36
Yeah, I mean, it's just it does this core MVC piece, and just not diving into some of the other parts, which is fine for most people, you know. So, you know, again, pros and cons, everybody, you know, pick their best. And it's kind of interesting, the the others, we see fall prey there a couple times and cold spring, and a couple of see of fuse blocks, hybrid, etc. So, it's interesting that we see Kendo UI or JavaScript framework listed there, too. Well,
Michaela Light 51:04
yes, we have a question Java's framework somewhere else, but people don't always read the question, when will they answer it? So? Yeah, so Okay, let's look at content management system, CMS says, well, the winner here is don't use one at all. And the second place goes to custom homegrown CMS. So opposite situation to MVC frameworks, but all this will be happy to see that Gavin, in particular, because you're the lead developer on content box, that content box is the top, whatever you want to call it. I was gonna say commercial, but it's open source. So I can't say commercial. But yeah, what do you want to call it?
Gavin Pickin 51:45
We'll just say it's developed because it's not a homegrown or an answer. Yes. It's an open source tool. And speaking of open source, I think Murer previous years has been the winner. And the reason probably, that it dropped is because Mira went commercial. And so they dropped down there, and you have 35 people now. And so they're they're basically right that 7%, or content boxes, almost 9%. But in the others, there's a lot of people saying Massa, because Massa was one of those, that was like the open source fork of mirrors. Commercial, man, we have to be a mess. Yeah, so we probably want to update that because I bet there's quite a year. So if you combine those two, it's, it's, you know, that will probably be a representation of what mirror was previously. But yeah, a lot of people have left near because of the commercial change. And some of them are camped content box, we had a lot of people migrate to content box. And then then a few people have been, you know, working with Mira fork, which they called masa. And so that's, that's something else. So that's probably right up there, too. And then, you know, preside has got a great CMS, they do a lot of work of sort of marketing and sort of clubs, you know, they've sort of got like a niche. There's like community type setups. And so but there's a lot of myths.
Michaela Light 53:06
There's a lot of features in preside. I interviewed the president of exotics late about preside on the on the podcast, and they've got all these marketing support features in in preside. And it's got some really cool object orientated features as well. And I think we should nice, yeah, we should give a shout out to commerce bond contents, which are both paid CMS is. And you know, there's nothing wrong with paying for stuff and getting what you need. So I certainly we have customers who use common spot for various things. So
Gavin Pickin 53:40
it's definitely a it's nice to see. And it's kind of cool like for us to have preside doing so well as they actually use coldbox under the hood, but there are Lucy only deal as well. They tie into a lot of the Lucy stuff that you can't get Adobe. And so it's kind of interesting. They do some really cool stuff. So if you know, they have a lot of marketing, and it's very, very specific to their niche, other people are using it. But yeah, there's a lot of good solutions. And it's kind of nice to have so many in there. So it's not just one, you know, for the longest time. We were really struggling a lot of the blog CFCs. And all those from the older days kind of passed by. And yes, but there's another one that's come up recently. Galaxy blog is a new one. Yes. Gregory Alexander has been working on and Yeah, well, now's the time. Yeah. For a
Michaela Light 54:33
new open source one. Yeah. So that's another one to add in. Let's move forward to JavaScript libraries. very vital part. Pretty much every ColdFusion developer has some JavaScript running. And I'd say 90% of developers use a library of some kind of another. What's the number one library this year Gavin?
Gavin Pickin 54:54
No surprise here is still jQuery. Still
Michaela Light 54:57
jQuery three first To tile low overhead when you use it.
Gavin Pickin 55:03
Yep. And I've been using that since way back and see if seven days. So it's been around a long time, it did a lot of stuff that, you know, that ColdFusion helped us with. And over time with those ColdFusion functions, we migrated to jQuery, and, you know, but it's almost a 50%. So it's kind of nice to see, you know, the the next one on the list is the Vue js. So that one is 16%. Which no surprise to me, I think it's the best fit for a ColdFusion developer to pick up a JavaScript library. And then, right, right there, it's pretty close. Angular just pipped react for third spot with 10%. And then reacted like 9.9. So very close. For those next two. So yeah, so jQuery, the big winner, view the next one, and then React and Angular pretty close, and you got backbone, and Ember, and kendo. Those were all around the 1%. But cincher Cintia x x TJs is still at 3%. So that they're still holding on. So they're, they're hanging in there. And then of course, quite a few others as well, people using like Mootools. And Alpine Jas has been the next big one coming up. And there's quite a few people talking about that. And then some htm exes as well. I read a few things about that. And there's quite a few people mentioning that too. So pretty interesting.
Michaela Light 56:22
It is very interesting. And I will tell you that one for a lot. I don't think this is so long, true. But for many years, we had a we still have the article on the site 18 tips for jQuery. It was like more popular in our ColdFusion articles. Maybe people who use other languages also use jQuery. But let's go to CSS because most people use CSS. Some people don't use it at all. What's the top CSS library this year?
Gavin Pickin 56:52
This year? It's bootstrap again, it's still holding strong. Why is that? I guess it came out and very, it was just the most popular one. And it did so many things. Well, it did all the minification. You know, and it did all the zeroing out of all those crazy things that your browsers would do. So it really helped people across browsers. So I think that's the big winner. It looked good, it looked professional. And that just really, you know, it was like jQuery, it just it did all the things for all the different browsers. And it just, it was pretty
Michaela Light 57:26
comebacks to it doesn't add a lot of bloat, I don't think even now,
Gavin Pickin 57:30
it's pretty good. I mean, and they've kept updating it to like, you know, the bootstrap five is out. I think, three, four, and five are pretty popular for for quite some time. And so a lot of people using it. And
Michaela Light 57:43
I want to say the R word at this point, if it's okay with you responsive. You can make a responsive site. And that's one of the reasons we use Bootstrap.
Gavin Pickin 57:54
Yep. And I think to like they really did good with getting out themes and templates and customizing after after it came out. That was the first thing is every site looked like Bootstrap for a while. Everybody was like, This is ridiculous. But I think they've just got so much thing support now like, like some people using that. And there's like 13%, using none. But the next one's really, you know, like tail winds, probably the next next real one near 8%. And you've got foundation that for and beautify it three. And 68% or 69%, basically is Bootstrap. So it's miles ahead. I mean, it's seven times more people using Bootstrap and tailwind. That's kind of crazy, because tailwinds really taken off. It's really good. But foundation I thought was pretty strong. So kind of
Michaela Light 58:43
a few, a few other few other ones. Boomers, probably the biggest right in option people put in. Yeah, but even that. Yeah.
Gavin Pickin 58:52
Because I mean, Boomer has five or six right ends and then like that is that will basically be right about 1%. So So yeah, so that was the other there was like 3%. Other. And then 1% of the total was was Ballmer. So.
Michaela Light 59:11
So yeah, let's let's print it is it is amazing. And if you're not using CSS, maybe this year is a good time to pick up a little CSS allows tailwind. To make your apps look more modern and be responsive. So they work on tablets, and desktop and mobile without having to change the code. All kinds of other good reasons. Let's move forward to CFC dependency injection. And some people are probably asking what the heck's that? Because I see, the most popular answer is no, you don't use anything. Yeah, why? Why would someone want to use dependency injection? What's that
Gavin Pickin 59:48
all about? So I mean, it really comes down to in the old school days, you know, people would just say, hey, invoke a new CFC and then the good a CFC that use it and then it would disappear. here. And over time, you know, we started making more and more complicated CFCs, right. And that's where things get trickier. And they always get back to the composition thing like, Hey, if you want a car CFC, you need an engine, you need tires, the engine needs spark plugs. And so if you start to do some crazy object oriented code, and your CFC, like your years of service needs, you know, it needs basically your security service, but your security secret service needs your user service. So what you'd normally do is you'd create a user service, and then you'd pass it to the function that creates the security service, so they could use it, or inside your security service, you would make it use the service inside you use the service, you'd make a security service. And now you have this loop. And so dependency injection just says, Hey, I want a security service, and I want to use the service. Can you make this for me and get them to me. And the cool thing about that is, is that you don't have to worry about what a security service needs. When you're writing your code to get it. You're just like, hey, give me a security service. And something like wire box or di one, or Coldspring says, Okay, you need a Security Service Security Service, what do you need, and it says, I needed this, I need this, I need that. And it goes against those. And then it basically figures it out. And the cool thing is, if you only need one security service for your entire app, it'll store it somewhere like the Application Scope, so you share it. So you don't have to keep creating them over and over and over again. And so that's where dependency injection gets really, really powerful is that, you know, it's storing the right objects the right way. So you don't like rebuild objects, you don't need to rebuild, you don't need to worry about like how to build them, Did I already build one on this request? Should I go look and see if there's one hiding in the request scope doesn't matter, you just say, hey, like, I use wire box with Botha solutions. And you don't have to use coldbox to use wire box. But you just say, hey, wire box, I want to use a service. And I said sure. And inside that if the user service needs to have a logging service, and it needs, you know, sentry service, you can do bug logging, whatever, you don't have to like build all that out, and then give it to the user service. And you know, you just say whereabouts I want to use the service. It says, Here you go. And that's all you need to worry about. So it's so inversion of control, you know, let your just ask for what you want. And it'll figure out the wrist.
Michaela Light 1:02:12
Yeah, it abstracts out all that dependency stuff. So you don't even have to worry about it. And if it changes in the future, if there's a new version of that object that now has extra dependencies, it deals with that without having to change your code and avoid some errors. If you get the dependency stuff wrong. If you are coding it by hand, it avoids all that kind of bugs can be quite subtle to work out. So
Gavin Pickin 1:02:36
I mean, you can't use like a lot of the tools that we build, we couldn't do it like commandos uses wire box, because command boxes really needs that type of stuff. I mean, just something like if you want to use Quick, quick uses a bunch of different things. And they all like some of it needs, you know, if you're using bcrypt, you need a jar file, and so on wire box will get the JAR file loaded the right way for you, you know, like it'll handle all those things. So you don't have to worry about it. And if you install that module, that module does the work to get it ready for why about so you don't have to do it, then that's whenever framework one, if you install, like bcrypt into framework, one, you have to figure out where the jar is and how to load it and tell me I have to set all that up. But with a wire box, the way it works with COBOL. So it just it knows what to do figures it out. It's just there. So,
Michaela Light 1:03:23
and all of these frameworks for independency injection are all open source is my understanding. So you know, they're all good. I think Coldspring I'm not sure cause springs being actively developed.
Gavin Pickin 1:03:36
No, that's a very old one. And actually, Luis has built a tool to help convert blog posts to be able to convert Cold Spring over to over the wire box, because we had quite a few clients that have been running that forever. And we're like, you need to get upgraded. And I'm like, Well, can you help us? So Luis is like, well, I better publish that. So everybody else can you know, when and so called Spring, there's still 6% of people using cold spring, you know, but 45% for 46% of people don't use any framework. And like some homegrown ones about 12
Michaela Light 1:04:12
Yeah, there's no point in group building your own or this at this point. I don't feel
Gavin Pickin 1:04:17
so far be fair.
Michaela Light 1:04:18
Some people some of these people may not be using a lot of objects in their code. Others may be and they're just not aware this would save them time. So
Gavin Pickin 1:04:26
yeah, I mean, I had code in my Application cfc would say, Hey, do I already have a use of service and Application cfc if I don't put one in there, you know, and I have all this code basically checking to see if I had it and if I needed it, how to build it. That's what I used to do. And so I put wire box in as one of the first things I did in the old legacy app was put wire box in and so there's 26% of people using wire box 8% are using di one which is framework ones one. So it's those are the two modern ones. And obviously the rest are called Spring and I think there's the I've never heard of Praveen. But
Michaela Light 1:05:03
I don't know it was only one right in answer. Let us proceed to the persistence frameworks. And what is the persistence framework? Because most people don't seem to use them.
Gavin Pickin 1:05:13
Yeah. So, I mean, basically, it's a way to help you store your data somewhere, you know, you want to store it persistently. You want to store it in the database. And these frameworks help you do that. And so most people would probably be familiar book and ORM, Object Relational Mapper. And so you've got, you know, Hibernate, which is built into Adobe, and Lucy, those are probably the most familiar ones. But there's also, you know, some different ones, like preside has preside objects, and there's Far Cry core has its own little ORM. And CF wheels has its own built in. And then quick, which is a codebox module is written in CFML. And it's basically made to, you know, store in the database without using, you know, queries. And so just an easy way to map your objects to your database and make your life easier, don't have to spend all your time writing credit queries over and over and over again, because you've written the same query probably a million times, right. So these will help your life and they'll make it easy to load data, retrieved data search for data, and just yeah, really happy with all that. And coolboxes CRM CRM module is a little helper library that lives on top of hibernate, for ColdFusion. And Lucy, and so that gives you a lot more helper methods to make it even better. So it's, there's a pretty good group here. So obviously, none but 249. A lot of people love writing SQL, right?
Michaela Light 1:06:41
I think a lot of people do love writing SQL. And there's nothing wrong with writing SQL or stored procedures, if you're using SQL Server, or whatever the equivalent is, in your database flavor to Sure. But not for doing, you know, inserts deletes updates, you know, yeah, it's just,
Gavin Pickin 1:07:01
it's just boilerplate. I mean, one of the biggest reasons I like, you know, quick, it was probably my favorite out of all these, but all around was good, too. It just reduces the amount of boilerplate code you have, which means you've gotten less code to, you know, try to figure out when you're debugging later is less legacy code to maintain, it's easy to, you know, look at it and just know what it's doing. And for me, that's, that's a big one, right? Just maintainability.
Michaela Light 1:07:28
Yeah, makes it more maintainable. It abstracts out. So if something changes in the database, you don't have to change it all through your code. It's just in that one. And
Gavin Pickin 1:07:35
that is the key because that module, yeah, a lot of people when they change versions, or databases or change databases completely, that's probably the biggest thing that I didn't mention is that you can change from SQL Server to MySQL, just by changing the language for ORM. And most your code will just transfer. Not many people do change databases, let's just put that out there. But if you needed to, you could and poor thing is locally, you can have MySQL running, and you can deploy to MySQL, SQL Server, or something else. And the ORM will translate that for you, which is nice, although I don't remain and I don't recommend having a different database locally than on the production server, because that will
Michaela Light 1:08:17
bite now. Yes, don't want to do that Keep it keep the most equal as you can. Same environment, same a staging server. So I mean, we do use rm and some are apps. But I will say if if the queries get complicated, and you got multiple tables and all kinds of wacky stuff, sometimes it's easier just to write some SQL.
Gavin Pickin 1:08:41
And I recommend highly recommend that if you're doing something more than crud, or very simple searches or like filters, then you should definitely be doing in SQL, there's no there's no thing that says, if you're using our Ram, you cannot write SQL. And I, I think a lot of people will think that and they freak out and like nope, yes. Because yeah, because Oh, Rem trying to do reporting an ORM is not fun, because, you know, generates objects and generating objects. And ColdFusion, sadly, is not as fast as it should be. They are pretty optimized for that. But yeah, there's a lot of a lot of things you can do in SQL that are better. And so definitely don't hold that back, you know, but it's kind of nice to see that. RM is 11%. The whole box CBRM modules about seven or 8% Quick has gone up to almost seven or 8%, too. So as many people using quiches, the ORM module for coldbox on top of normal hibernate. So that's currently but
Michaela Light 1:09:42
it is amazing. Let us move on to testing and mocking frameworks. Why would I even want for those all those people who answered none to this question? What's the benefit? What it was this testing and mocking stuff all these other people are doing?
Gavin Pickin 1:09:57
So yeah, I mean, we talked about my regretting versions. And if you don't have any tests, then that gets a lot tougher. And so, yeah, for the longest time testing was one of those things where most people said, half the people in ColdFusion aren't testing and the other half are lying about it. Everybody just clicks around their apps and think they have to do manual testing. But this test this year, not a lot more not now. Yeah, I mean, selenium, right. Yeah, these non ColdFusion ones are showing up on this list, which is neat, because for the longest time, it was, you know, it makes unit back in the old days where people would use. And then we fought in this unit, when, when everybody basically stopped supporting that we made test box. And, you know, that's, that's got way more than anything else here except for none, because there are a lot of people that are not testing.
Michaela Light 1:10:51
And I just want to point out to people, a lot of these products end in the word box, you don't have to use code box to use test box guys are all the same for white box and command box, I'd say the majority of bots products have, you know, a totally independent of each other, or code box. So
Gavin Pickin 1:11:12
exactly. So, but there are, there are a couple of options in here. So if you're using CF wheels rocket unit is built into this, you know, 13 people using that. But it's kind of nice to see selenium is actually after test box. Selenium is the most used testing framework. And then Cypress is just a couple more spots back, which is another, you know, into in sort of testing framework that a lot of people are using, well,
Michaela Light 1:11:39
if I understand it correctly, test box is where you add test box calls in your code that tests that the functions are working, right, or the overall functionality of the whole app is working right there. They're I think they call them assertions in computer science or something like that. Whereas my understanding of selenium, it's kind of like you're pretending to be a user running the app, and it kind of runs the app through its paces,
Gavin Pickin 1:12:02
kind of, but even in selenium, you know, you're like, I'm gonna go to the login page, I'm gonna click this button. And I'm going to assert that I see this takes showing up on this page, or I'm going to, you know, put my mouse over this button. And I'm going to assert this is a drop down, pop up. And so it's, it's sort of like, you're actually in a browser clicking around to do stuff. But it's still still on the end of the day, you're basically you're, you've got this plan in your head of what should What if I do this, this should happen. And text boxes code saying, you know, if I run this function, and I give it these two arguments, I should get this back. Or if I hit this URL in my browser from call box, and I do these few things, it should try to redirect me to this page, because I'm not logged in, you know, and so, so they're basically getting better and better at those types of things. And selenium is one of those things you can do manually, and it creates a script for you to rerun, and Cypress is really cool. There's so many cool testing tools out there. But I mean, right now, and 26% of people are using test bots, which is pretty cool. That's cool. And then selenium. And then you know,
Michaela Light 1:13:05
what I'd say to people, I mean, there's kind of a spectrum of how much testing do you do on the app, you know, the hardcore and test driven development, you actually write the tests before you write the code. That's why it's, it's called Test Driven Development, or behavior driven development is a slightly different flavor at a higher level. Or the other end you just the bits of your app that were buggy, write some tests for them, when you were fixing those bugs. So you run a test, the bugs really are fixed, and they don't know what other bugs come back in that bit. And as you go, slowly expand the amount of code that has tests in it, you know, or, you know, use cases that you've written tests for. So, you know, don't feel that it's an all or nothing thing, you can add a bit of testing into the bits that need it more and add more over time. And I think it's pretty rare that I just to be fair, on an enterprise size app, the probably well, first of all, probably isn't automated testing for everything. And secondly, not all the coding gets exercised when the app is run.
Gavin Pickin 1:14:06
That's why the fusion reactor plugin that we we built with test box now, if you have a license, you can actually do you can actually do code coverage when you do your tests. And they'll tell you, are you are you covering 33% of your code? Did it go up? Did it go down? Did you actually, you know, add some tests. And on some of our continuous integration, we actually show those numbers. And so we could say, oh, Gavin just submitted some code and his code coverage went down. 8% It looks like you didn't add the tests. So, but yeah, it's kind of nice to see sort of those those types of things.
Michaela Light 1:14:39
And that's where Brad's Raspberry Pi display thing puts a red light next to Gavin's name, you know, no, just kidding.
Gavin Pickin 1:14:46
I've thought about that. But yeah, there's physical reports and everything you can do from that. But yeah, it's good. And like I said, for tests, you can just I think if everyone just basically wrote a test for every CFC they had and said, Can I create the CFC with blowing up their lives would be 100 times better because that times that you fat fingered a typo in your function name or whatever, just that alone would save people a lot of headaches. And so in some of my testing webinars and presentations I've done, like, that's how you get started, you write as, you know, a test for each UCF C's, can I invoke the CFC without it blowing up in my face? Because if you knew that, like, that's a big part of your app, probably, you know, every CFC can compile. You know, that's a big part of the apps failing all the times. So just that alone will give you some, you know, ability to sleep at night.
Michaela Light 1:15:34
I am all for less stress in development. You know, when I did a survey asking about health issues, people have like backache neck ache, right? You know, what are the that's risk thing, people get trapped anyway, carpal tunnel? Yeah. And a lot of developers have all those things. But the number one thing they listed was stress. And, you know, I'm all for let's get rid of the stress. Let's get rid of the health issues that developers have. Be healthy, happy developers. Alright, final question
Michaela Light 1:17:28
So final question. For this episode, we're going to come back to the other questions in the survey in another episode of this mobile development frameworks.
Gavin Pickin 1:17:46
Yeah, and this is something that's changed over time. For the longest time, the native was native Android native iOS was a lot higher than previous years. So now we're down to basically 4% and 5%. And actually, Ionic is higher, flutter is higher put overs, right at 4.9%, as well, progressive web apps is, you know, probably the leader there. But even things like PhoneGap, which is the same as Cordova is basically Cordova is the open source version of PhoneGap, which kind of got killed off. That's a 3.3%. And then react native 4%, and then quasar, which is what I love using, it actually outputs to Cordova and capacitor. And those are, you know, view apps. And so basically, it looks like almost 80% of the people that are doing apps now are not doing NATO, which is really cool. Like, for the longest time. Apple, you know, their iOS apps, like they basically punished you, if you use the WebView. In their lead, they purposely slowed down with views inside of an app to the point where it was like, severely limiting. And so now, it's kind of cool that they've they've got to the point where you can choose Chrome or something else inside your your apps. And you don't notice the same as before, because several years ago, if you had a non native app, you could tell they just didn't have the performance. You didn't have it. And it's great to see now. So half people aren't doing mobile there. But the half that are 80% of them are doing, you know, basically some version of you know, sort of transpiled WebView style
Michaela Light 1:19:31
app. Yeah, because all those other libraries basically compile into the native one, or they're doing other tricks. That means you can write it once and it runs on Android or iOS.
Gavin Pickin 1:19:41
Yep, exactly. And some of them do let you say like React Native and flutter, they'll actually, like compiled down to a native Android or native iOS, but a lot of like Cordova and capacitor, they're just doing web views, but the web for us, so it's nice. Yeah,
Michaela Light 1:19:56
it's nice. And And also, it's not really listed here. I mean, we've got progressive web apps and I know the app you guys have, if you're into the box conference, I think that's a progressive web app. And so that's doing a responsive web view plus it store. You know, if there's connectivity goes away, it still runs.
Gavin Pickin 1:20:14
Yeah, manifest files and online store offline storage and stuff.
Michaela Light 1:20:18
But what I want to say is a fair number of people these days are running a responsive browser version of our app, and it runs in the phone just fine. And you can save it to the desktop or the phone. So let's wrap up this episode of people. I'm just gonna stop sharing the screen or Rooney. For those who are watching on our YouTube channel on video. Hopefully those who are listening on iTunes or any of the other podcast platforms, were able to follow along with our play by play audio description of what we were looking at. But if people want to find you, online, Gavin, what are the best ways to do that?
Gavin Pickin 1:21:00
On Twitter, at G Pickens sounds like you're picking something up off the ground, but the G is on the front, not the back. That's the best way to find me. But I'm always on otter solutions.com. I'm blogging. We're doing presentations. The moderniser die podcast is every week, Tuesday at 10am. Pacific, and I'm usually your host there but that has a lot of information too. There'll be into the box I'll be at CF summit I'm speaking about for those conferences too. So you know, plenty of places to find me. And I'm noisy. So you'll hear me talking about something and I said well, we'll come back and like maybe after into the box before CF Summit, we can do the next set of questions and work our way towards the end of the year. I said I'd really like to go back and sort of see the trends, it'd be pretty cool to see you know, some of them like how the JavaScript frameworks have died over time and come through and the engines have been upgraded or not so I think that'd be pretty cool. But again, thank you for doing the survey we Yes,
Michaela Light 1:21:53
yeah, thank you so much for coming on the show and picking apart so to speak as a pawn for those not picking it up the results and have a hope your presentations are into the box and CF summit go great. For those of you haven't already signed up for into the box or CF Summit, please go sign up for them support your local coffee conference in Houston, Texas or Las Vegas, Nevada. Or if you're aren't able to travel for whatever reason. Sign up for CF casts, which has lots of great workshops on ColdFusion or there are lots of YouTube channels TourTech youtube channel at Adobe while on the autist One might even be some other YouTube channels that have a lot of confusion content on so look forward to seeing you in a month or so as time Gavin and see everyone else next week.
Gavin Pickin 1:22:49
Sounds good. Thanks, everybody.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
