Find the show notes and download the episode here.
Michaela Light 0:00
Welcome back to the show. I'm here with these amazing ColdFusion experts got Charlie Earhart, good friends, Ben Adele and Mark drew from all over the world got Charlie is in the middle of the United States in Kentucky Ben is in New
Charlie Arehart 0:20
flyover country.
Michaela Light 0:22
flyover country. Yeah, Ben is in the edge country on the East Coast in New York. Mark is joining us I think from London in the United Kingdom. He's probably got the queen in the background celebrating a jubilee with her cold fusion apps. Yeah, there she is. She can't come on camera right now. We'll bring him on. Come on. One of the corgis behind you.
Mark Drew 0:45
They've eaten a little bit too much right now.
Michaela Light 0:48
Yes. And good is joining us from the center of Europe. Which part of Europe are you in Switzerland or some other? The neutral one? The neutral one? Yes. That must be
Gert Franz 0:58
allegedly neutral.
Michaela Light 1:00
Yes. Allegedly. Yes.
Mark Drew 1:02
Queen had tea with one of your compatriots this weekend. Paddington Bear from deepest, darkest Peru, which is Oh,
Michaela Light 1:11
yes. Hope she served marmalade sandwiches. So
Mark Drew 1:15
they did. The exactly did. He brought his own and she had one in her handbag, which I never knew about. Boris, Queen
Michaela Light 1:23
always good to have a marmalade sandwich in your handbag. In case of emergencies, you know, cause you have a hard-to-solve ColdFusion bug, you can whip it out, munch down on it, and then that revives your brain to solve the problem. That's a tip for everyone. So this is part two of our panel discussion on Adobe ColdFusion and Lucy ColdFusion, or CFML, as they like to say. And if you haven't checked out last time, I'll put it in the show notes. But part one, we covered the ease of programming modern IDE, and open source versus closed source licensing differences. Some of the cool features in Adobe ColdFusion and Lucy, are ease of installation community in third-party tools and engine speed, scalability, and performance. So all of those topics, check out the first part. But this time, we're going to be talking about other things in Adobe ColdFusion and Lucy all the way cool places you can get documentation from how you can get help and support some of the podcasts out there. And engine updates. And we'll probably talk about some other things too because Gert gave us an extensive list of extra topics that we will work on fitting into the episode along with any other topics that Charlie Ben, and Mark provided. So and then if you don't know these guys, Charlie is a performance tuning optimization Gen ColdFusion. expert. He helps out people when their servers are broken. Gert is part of the Lucee. What'd you call it? The Lucy? consortium Association Association? Yeah, say no. And he works on both supporting people with Lucy and also developing the Lucy engine. Ben is an extensive blogger. He posts more on LinkedIn and Facebook and writes posts. Yeah, I think you I don't know how you get any work done, Ben, because you write all these amazing posts every day. I wake up.
Gert Franz 3:29
No, I think that generated
Michaela Light 3:33
Oh, it's an AI. This isn't the real
Mark Drew 3:36
tools. He just says I want to talk about and I just got right. Has it. There
Michaela Light 3:45
you go. If you haven't checked out Ben's blog, he's got one of the most popular ColdFusion blogs out there. So check out lots of cool investigations he does into new features in Adobe ColdFusion. And a bit of Lucy has been doing those sometimes me
Gert Franz 4:00
even though sometimes folks just go there to see their picture. And
Michaela Light 4:06
yes, he's famous for taking pictures with other people, other ColdFusion developers. And then Mark is an epic Lucy developer these days. And he works on really big sites. I interviewed him opposite in the show notes where he was converting I think gigabytes of data. It was quite amazing. So welcome.
Mark Drew 4:27
Now Now we've increased the amount of data that we're doing. Know when I now do a lot more on the DevOps and application building side. Oh, I've moved from from worrying too much about gigabytes of data. That's God's job. I make sure that I try to do artisanal code, which goes from farm to table or from your ID to the server in the most gracious and robust and QA diverse way. Wait possible? So that's my new new
Michaela Light 5:02
hat. Excellent. Good to have a new hat. Always good to be learning in ColdFusion in any programming language, I think. So let's start by talking about documentation because I think that's a key thing. Any, programming language or tool that has dubious documentation and is not easy to learn. So where do we go for documentation guys for Adobe ColdFusion? And then for Lucy,
Mark Drew 5:31
I have a bone to pick on this because this is literally how I got into the CFML world back when CF Eclipse was. I couldn't afford any editors at the time and you had to pay for all of them. There were many free ones. And I got involved in CF Eclipse and the first feature that I built for CF Eclipse as a contributor was to do the help documentation. So like if you press f1 over a tag, it would send you or go and get I remember, it's been a while now. The CF docs, so I can't remember who I worked with at the time that we got like little links for all the tags and stuff like that. So I've spent a lot of my life looking at Lucy docs, looking at CFML docs looking at love figuring out different ways to cut and slice the dogs. Because as you say, there are two dogs right at the moment but say there are Lucee and ColdFusion dogs, right. But then you go like, Well, what about which version? What about the United 2019? Or whatever? Version? You know, and that's kind of important because like some tags are deprecated. And, and what have you, you know? So yeah, I have I have a dog in this fight. And there's that one is sleepy,
Charlie Arehart 6:50
which you can say what the solution to that was.
There you go. So yeah.
Mark Drew 7:01
Yeah. Which was, which was, I think Pete protag that one years later, he did a well, we have different solutions. But elusive was Docstoc lucee.org. Not sure what Adobe's doing with CFML dogs? That's a Charlie question because I'm gone to them. But I keep on ending up on the coffee and nine dogs whenever I google anything or Ben's blog. But you know, but dogs are hard. I mean, this is you have, you know, a lot
Gert Franz 7:30
of stuff in there. One thing, one thing that strikes me always is when I go to the documentation even in Lucy or see if docs or the Lucy docs, they mostly give me the latest documentation, right. So if I'm stuck on an older version, then I might need to have the older version of the documentation. That's why there is rudimentary document documentation within the Lucy admin. So if you go to Lucy, slash Lucy slash Doc's dot CFM, er, Doc dot CFM, you get the documentation for that installation that you have on your machine. And that's why I wish cf docs.org would have some kind of a drop-down saying what version would you like, Hey, you go. And then you just get that documentation. Because very often, you might, you're inclined to use a feature. And that feature can be used because it is not there, or it's deprecated, or whatever. And that's why I insisted on us having a Doc's dot CFM. Within Lucy, because we have everything coming from tags, and from two functions and Lucy gets the documentation just extracted from the internal description of the function or attack.
Mark Drew 8:43
And I don't know if people know this, but there's try does try to see a panda or which is included in the Lucy dogs anyway, I don't know about, again, you know, your might there are other providers available, your mileage may vary, but which allows you to try out that code immediately. Because it's one thing of going like okay, how does an array slice work? You know, I have to picture it, I have to code it, I have to spin up something to try it but try CFM is great because within the docs, you can copy-paste or you have examples and do that. I think that has been a massive step forward. In CFML has been able to like try it there and like looking at funky function, what does dump do, you know, dumps like not used in a lot of other languages. You know, you have to like console log and do various other things. But you know, being able to see a whole structure and use it is magnificent. Yeah,
Charlie Arehart 9:39
those couple of things that mark just mentioned. So in addition trying cfm.com, which supports ColdFusion and Lucy and prior versions of both, including I, think even back to CF 10. So it's 1011 2016 2018 and 2020. and Adobe also has CF fiddle.org. So let's go ahead and add that to that list. There you go next, cf fiddle.org. And that's been out for a couple of years. But you know, it's not as well known, because it's only going to be talked about by that community, you know, as opposed to both communities. And the CF Docs do have examples that point to that they don't tend to point to try cfm.com. So yeah, that you know, each organization is learning from each other and making things better. CF Doc's dot org. Another benefit of that is that anybody can contribute examples to that. Whereas, you know, you can't contribute to the CF Docs as readily. You, I assume, can contribute readily to the Lucy docs, although I saw a thread of discussion about that just last week, I believe. And it was kind of surprising to see what one has to go through to contribute to the docks, because it's like a build process, and you have to set
Mark Drew 11:03
that's to build all of the docks. So that's a weird one that's like, hey, I want to regenerate all of the tags and functions within the blue sea docks. And again, I know sounds like I'm just because this is what I'm doing, but you can have direct links to GitHub. So you can go like, click here and you create a PR with. So I do this all the time. And I do pull requests all the time for typos and descriptions.
Charlie Arehart 11:29
The docs do have GitHub
Mark Drew 11:36
is more generating like more complicated things, like if you add new arguments and things
Charlie Arehart 11:41
right, right, right. But if you just want to add Charlie, that's great.
Gert Franz 11:44
Just to clarify that Charlie, this is for the Integrated documentation when you install Oct. Right? It's not for the official documentation, which is out there, which is based on pull requests, and they are merged into the lucid documentation as well. But they are the good thing is that they are generated from the tags and functions that are existing within that version.
Charlie Arehart 12:06
Somebody wanted to add requirements if somebody wanted, yeah, they could do that through GitHub. Yes,
Gert Franz 12:12
they can do that on the see on the docs dot lucid org page. There, you can add examples.
Charlie Arehart 12:18
And does that end up editing a GitHub page? Yes. I so wish Adobe would do that, you know because right now, the Adobe docs are locked up in an Adobe proprietary system. And in fact, let me throw this out to folks. Just quickly, since we're talking about docs, one thing is that many, and I've been on this course for years, and still not well known by a lot of people, many people when they do Google stuff, and they do get to the Adobe docs, all they get to is the CFML reference. And that's understandable. But the CFML reference is just one of several different docks with ColdFusion. And you really can't learn how to use the thing from the CFML reference. That's like trying to learn to speak a language by reading a dictionary. And yet, that's what most people do, because that's all they're led to. Well, there's the developers' guide, the ColdFusion developers guide. And it's like, if you could print out a PDF of it, it'd be 3000 pages, it's a big document. And it's got a lot of explanation of how things work, and how the feature works, and more examples, and just sad that most people don't ever find it. But even more sad is that back in the CF 2016 timeframe, Adobe was forced, and the CF team was forced to move their docks into this Adobe proprietary dock system. They didn't write it Adobe people did, and it supported all Adobe products. Well, most Adobe products were you know, had relatively simplistic dots, CS docs, go back to you know, early versions of CF 456. They, if you look at them, over the years, they've just gotten bigger and bigger, but they're very deep. And they might be you know, like a chap, a book with a chap with a section and subsection. And unfortunately, that system that Adobe was forced to put the dots into, doesn't know how to traverse more than about three levels deep. So if you've ever noticed, if you Googled something, and then ended up on a Doc's page, and it was like, a couple of paragraphs, and it was clear, there was more that followed it, but there was nothing following it. That's what happens. They might take you to this like island of information, which has no bridges to it, no airports on it, you're stuck with just that little island. Next previous, there's no what he called breadcrumbs at the top. There's no other context for it, right. There's no context, not even a left navigational toolbar. And I've complained about this over and over. And the CF team feels like there's nothing that can be done. And that's just so sad because that developer's guide is awesome. Now that leads back to a point made earlier, which is that they used to produce a PDF of each versions doc, And if you, if somebody were to Google ColdFusion, Docs, archive, or COVID, and Docs PDF, you see that there's a page at Adobe site that was kept up to date with links to the CF 11, cf 10, CF nine, and each of the PDFs. And so I still point people to that page and say, Look, get the developer's guide from ZF 11, that was the last one they produced. And that's also related to this new dock system, it can't produce a PDF, more than three levels deep. So they should in 2016, try to produce that PDF. And if you saw it, it was like 200 pages. And if you didn't know that, it should have been 3000 pages you want a, but if you read it, you'd get like, you know, a paragraph or two into a subject. And again, it would just stop. It was terrible. So they gave up on that. And they no longer produce PDFs at all. And yeah, so sad. And a lot of people don't know this. But they're sort of just get the CF, PDF, and you will learn stuff. If you've never seen those docs before you'll learn amazing stuff.
Michaela Light 16:06
My amazing tip, Charlie, maybe they should rewrite that Doc system in ColdFusion. And then it will know how to program programming
Mark Drew 16:13
language like Ruby, we should send them a copy of Lucy
Gert Franz 16:19
or they are folks who could just go to Benedict's page. That's where they play. Learning how
Ben Nadel 16:26
to piggyback on something Charlie said one thing that I think the Adobe Docs does well, historically is articulate what's in a new release, or what are the new features in the new release? So you can say, well, you know, I got a confusion 2021. And it's, you know, here's a 40-page document that outlines all the new functions and plugins and whatnot. And, and Lucy, I, I have a little bit trouble sometimes understanding what's available in the new stuff, like on the Lucy dev forums. There's always a new release post. And it lists a lot of the JIRA tickets that have been closed as part of the release. So you can go through the JIRA tickets and roughly see what it is. But there is something nice about Adobe sort of making that very first-class citizen, just it's a little easier to consume at a glance.
Gert Franz 17:19
Well, it's very simple. Just go to our release manager and tell him to do that. Oh, we don't have one.
Michaela Light 17:28
release manager. It's not
Gert Franz 17:30
No, it's actually no, no, no, the thing is this, Zach does a great job on explaining Zach Spitzer is does a great job on explaining what's coming into and what's not coming into. But he recently more or less took that over. And what we can do once we jump from five, nine to 510 or six, then we should maybe take an article and just write everything that's in there. And especially maybe group the tickets a little better. So that you can see these are new features. These are regressions, and these are bug fixes or what have you.
Michaela Light 18:03
And Lucy is open source if anyone listening wants to contribute to that. And you know, it's such a small thing.
Gert Franz 18:16
Hang on, Ben, if you want to contribute no problem.
Ben Nadel 18:19
I know I feel bad ever bringing it up because it is open source and Zach shot to his credit, he has oftentimes told me to just open PRs for stuff and I'm very lazy about that.
Mark Drew 18:32
Maybe what you'd like one of the things that you have in October I'm pretty sure it's October I might be wrong on a month is a bug bounty. So it's like how many pull requests you know, right? Is November happening? October Yeah, October hack October, sorry, not hat Tober but hack, which you get like free T-shirts and things like that. So maybe we should sponsor a few, you know, like the tempo requests and like a lot of the pull requests that I do every week even to like for example to autists to command box to their documentation and sometimes it just docks I'm reading and go like that's a typo that makes no sense or whatever. And if I can do it I just do it and put it out there and carry on with my life because it's not I think it's getting used to being able to do these pull requests and do them pretty quickly and once you've done them done a couple it's I'm gonna say a second nature because it's not complicated but it's just the barrier to entry of doing one is doing one right I mean
Michaela Light 19:37
yeah going from zero could be a future Ben post you know he does all these great posts on how to do it your first pull request if you're a pool virgin. Yes, I just want a with new features. I do want to mention Charlie does this amazing series of articles and blog talks he calls them hidden gems in whatever the version is. I think that He's been exclusively Adobe ColdFusion. I don't think he's done that for Lucia yet. But maybe in the future, you never know.
Ben Nadel 20:06
It's too expensive for us.
Charlie Arehart 20:09
Nobody pays me to do that. Sorry,
Michaela Light 20:15
I was maybe you can share a link to that because I did a Google search for Charlie's hidden gems and found a lot of them. But there's no like one link that says Here are all the hidden gems in Charlie's universe. And here's how to dig them up. So
Charlie Arehart 20:32
well, I just put the show notes. And by the way, we'll be sharing the show notes
Michaela Light 20:36
later. Oh, absolutely. Show Notes are a part of the podcast. So I
Charlie Arehart 20:41
shared earlier. So I shared earlier a link to the discussion about Did you know there's far more to the CF docs than just the CFML reference. And that's the one also where I talk about the size of the docs and how the PDF problem happened and where to find the old PDF. So that's all there. And then, as far as how Oktoberfest, that's a more generic thing than just Lucy. And the point was more to say that Lucy does participate in hack Tober fest, and I posted a link there to hack Tober fest. And
Michaela Light 21:11
maybe we can convince the Adobe dev team to his pain that there's no reason why they couldn't write no, they're not open source, but people can't do pull requests. Yeah, you can't do pull requests,
Charlie Arehart 21:23
nothing like that. As far as the Hidden Gems, I just provided a link to my presentations page, because that's got them. If somebody goes there and searches for hidden gems, you'll find all the versions I've done. Anyway, when you got an article back to the CF 401 was the very first hidden gems article like
Michaela Light 21:38
wow, yeah. Ancient hidden gems. Yeah.
Charlie Arehart 21:42
And some of them are still useful today. Absolutely.
Michaela Light 21:46
Well, I appreciate you doing that, Charlie, I think we should wrap up this documentation section because we could talk about improving fusion docks and all the resources for a whole episode, I'm sure but we have other topics to cover. I do want to mention here that the artist guys do all the box products have great documentation, they have all these books on their products they put in get open books or whatever the technical term for that is. And then Louie Louie. So I interviewed Luis about his learn CFML and 100 minutes book and some of his new books coming out this year. And that book is great, I learned new things from I thought I knew everything in CFML. But I still learned new stuff there. And then his 102 Tips and Tricks book on coldbox. Learn new stuff in there too, even though we use that a lot. And then I do want to mention I we kind of mentioned in passing, but most of the ideas you mentioned CF Eclipse mark, but VSS vs. Call him to say the bloody thing. vs. Code. Thank you. I want us to get an extra letter slipped in there VS code and you know, all the other ideas have amazing help just built in. I mean, I I know when I first started doing cold fusion in I think it was 1997 or something. We didn't have IDs back then, you know, we crept out of our paper bags where we live in the street if you remember that Monty Python sketch and then we had to use Notepad, where do I call fusion? Now we're so lucky. We got VS code. We've got the new Adobe vs. Code add on. We've got sublime and you name it. I'm probably missing out on your favorite editor. Sure. But they're all very helpful.
Gert Franz 23:30
Home site.
Michaela Light 23:32
Home site. Yes. There you go. Cream. Yes. So yeah, lots of things out there. If anyone listening has other suggestions or things you think I'm missing in the CF Doc's, well do speak up. I will also make just mentioned learn CF in a week, because although that's not that's more learning site, no doc site, but it has amazing stuff in it. They revamped it a few years ago. So that's worth checking out as well. And also see if costs if you love videos, they have like 300 plus videos on ColdFusion, which, again, more learning the documentation, but I've learned a lot through it. So let's move on to how do you get help for your confusion, you get stuck, you need tech support? What are the different ways to achieve that?
Mark Drew 24:20
I think it depends what you're looking at what kind of help you're looking for. If you say a support, that generally to me defines a product that you bought is not working as expected. Right. And you're trying to get round, you know, round an issue. I think this is day in Memorial we've we've had the how do I do this kind of question that there's some great resources out there both from Stack Overflow, which we have to mention. I mean, the copy and paste Bonanza that I've had from Stack Overflow has meant most of my code breaks pretty quickly. But you know, I think that Different things is that. And if you've got people from Lucy, and you're talking about support on the actual product, there's two ways around it, right? It's like, well, you can provide support on the product. But that's done by raesha Gertz company, which provides commercial support for Lucy, because because you haven't paid for it. And Adobe, I presume, part of the prices, a certain amount of support tickets, but I don't know how fast if I was running Adobe ColdFusion, how far we'd go, right? Because it's supporting the product itself. And then the supporting your application built on that product. I think which is defined not by I mean, you can define whatever we can talk about whatever you want. But, you know, I think there are kind of like shades of difference between here's like, you know, ColdFusion is broken, it doesn't do the thing. It says in the book, it should. That's one level as for, I don't know how to do the CF login.
Charlie Arehart 26:03
or something's broken, and how do I fix it,
Ben Nadel 26:06
I get most of my help from the various forums, Lucy has their their dev was like dev.lucy.org is really great. And then there's a there's an Adobe ColdFusion form as well, I go to that less frequently, just because professionally, I'm doing Luci, but both seem to be very responsive, you know, a lot of community driven support.
Mark Drew 26:27
Once it was the main resource for Adobe kind of discussion, so you gotta be
Charlie Arehart 26:33
ColdFusion forms. I mean, if you mean, on the Adobe website, in their forums, which is community.adobe.com. Okay, right. So it's the same forums that have existed forever, and they're just as active as ever, they're still very active, there's, you know, several threads a day, usually. So, you know, it's just, there's, there's people that live in different worlds. But for sure, there was some starting to be discussion about other community resources. And we've got in the notes that we would have gotten to these, but let's get them out before anybody thinks we're not thinking of them. There is, of course, a CFML, Slack. And that is incredibly active. And if you're a Slack fan, you should definitely be on the CFML, Slack. Anybody can join it. There are many different, you know, categories of subject channels. And people often ask questions there and get answers within seconds or minutes. And, you know, if I have to admit, I'm not a fan of slack, because to me, it's like, a river is flowing all the time. And if I'm standing on the side of the river as stuff goes,
Mark Drew 27:37
on the slack is problematic, because there's a femoral inflammation. And because it's free slack, and if you want a not to be free, or super expensive, right, because there's like X amount per person. Slack is not very good for communities, because one, you can't look, do very fast searches into the back, I think there's X amount of, you know, starts wiping information. So it's not there all the time. It's very difficult to, to find by topic or anything like that. And also, it's not, as you say, it's like a river of stuff. I can't just search for an answer from somewhere else. And I've noticed a lot of topics become very I have to read a whole book to find the answer, right. And it's a whole book of different comments. So it's like,
Charlie Arehart 28:31
different places, because even though it supports threading, somebody will reply in the thread, and somebody else will just reply on the main channel. And it's very disjointed. And we should say that so people understand, you know, again, we're not knocking it and that some people love it. Slack did add threads, and the threads do help tremendously in that now, you could focus on all the discussion of a particular topic, because it's in a thread, and it opens in a separate window. But the problem I have is that one has to think to respond to the thread. And if they don't, and that's not in the thread. And then sometimes there's different answers in different places.
Michaela Light 29:07
It's a general weakness of all slack, not just for any kind of every one eye and, and also, interrupts it's very interrupt driven, you know, it's kind of very in the
Charlie Arehart 29:18
chat systems like that, you know, be there. What was that thing that there was a group of people that loved talking on it? Back about 15 years ago, it was it was just a
queue or what I whatever, follow that.
Mark Drew 29:33
And messenger, okay, no, no, the
Charlie Arehart 29:37
point is, they all have that dilemma is that, you know, it's an even Twitter, I would argue, is just a reverse. Back to the point about searching it. Let me just throw out that I had learned recently of third party service that's currently free for open source slack communities called linen. I think it's linen dot Dev. And I had mentioned it on the slack and Shaun Corfield who's still is kind of heading the slack, saw it and took it under his wing and arranged a meeting with the folks from linen, and talk through the because there's, of course, lots of challenges. And I could foresee that there would be people that would complain about this or that anyway, I didn't say what the point is. The point is linen, as a service provides for exposing the slack content, oh, by a searchable interface and browsable interface. So it basically, you know, makes a slacks content possible, available, even through Google Search could eventually find it. And I had learned that from another organization, a company that uses slack for their support. And they celebrated that they had done it so that people searching for things, you know, on Google and Bing and stuff, could now find that stuff. And I thought, yeah, that's, that's another beef I've had with Slack. Is it locked up in their intended nose there? So anyway, Shawn took that under his wing. He looked into it, he felt his answers were got he got satisfied, satisfactory answers. And he did it. And so that is now there. And he did a blog post. I don't know if somebody else did. I haven't done one yet. But that's that's a step in the right direction. Now, of course, let me just say, I'm sure somebody's listening to this is broiling, at the thought that way, to me, you're telling me that stuff I wrote on Slack is now open to the public. And as Sean said, in reply, when you signed up for the slack, you know it, it wasn't a private system. It's a public system. So the guy and that's a debatable point. And so he he's he wanted out how it was clear in the terms of agreement, all that stuff. So anyway, I'll leave folks who are interested in that subject to look into it more.
Gert Franz 31:46
Yeah, I have to say, I'm a bad user of slack in CFML terms. First of all, I think it's just good for instant help. If you're stuck, somebody can help you can move on. But I'm a very bad user, even a very bad receiver of support. If I'm stuck, I either DM Misha or mark and that's it.
Mark Drew 32:10
Well, I mean, it's a good it's a good pattern in in. I mean, yes, getting in the right people, but in the greater ecosystem of the web, apart from just losing everything else. Sometimes finding who the people are responsible for certain projects, and you say, I'm trying to do this, you'll actually get a better answer than how do I do this with this? Because they'll say, Well, what are you trying to do? And the answer sometimes comes back is it's more conceptual than, than the individual I had a conversation yesterday with, with Brad wood about trying to solve something and say, I'm trying to do this, this tiny little, I'm trying to do this, like this. And he said, Well, what are you trying to accomplish? And we, we discussed and then realized there was a much simpler solution if we just took a different path. And I think this is a a good habit to get into something too. Sometimes it's, you know, we call it rubber ducking, you know, talk to the rubber duck and, and sometimes you can talk to like actual human beings on the internet, but know all about this.
Michaela Light 33:14
Yeah, just explaining the problem to someone else often helps you figure it out yourself. Well, they'll ask questions you never thought of, I will say that the Facebook, pro CF programmers group or whatever ColdFusion group is very good for that. I mean, it's not quite as snappy as slack. But you know, usually get answers within the same day. And it great advantage of that Facebook thing is it's threaded discussion, people respect the threading in that forum. And usually there are very thoughtful comments in there. And it's searchable within the group. It's not open to Google searching it, which is a bit of a shame. But there you go. And it's permanent, the contents there forever, as far as I know, or at least until Mark Zuckerberg runs out of billions.
Gert Franz 33:59
I think one of the important things is that you sometimes in the future, or shortly in the future, getting more face to face with folks, just to get this vibe in the community a little more active, you know, during the corona disrupter. We are missing. I miss lots of you folks, I haven't seen you in years, three, four years. But last week, Mark and I and Matt Gifford and some others. We met in Zurich, and you can I can't tell you how refreshing them so I really do hope that something like CF camp comes alive again. And that we start doing conferences again, which would be we
Michaela Light 34:37
are doing conferences happening in person this year. Adobe is committed to doing the Last Vegas CF summit in October. I can't remember the exact dates but sometime in October beginning they're off I believe. And then and then to the box is in early into the box in Houston. It's coming up as well as also an in person into the box in El Salvador for those who speak Espanol. So I do wish I do look forward to CF camp returning maybe next year in Europe. If anyone listening knows any other ColdFusion events happening in person, you know, let us know. And there's a
Mark Drew 35:15
big dorsal European side CFML events, I think that just because of the scale of it and everything else, because the US stuff was great, but that's a big journey for a lot of developers. And, you know, there was like, some Syfy nighters in in London, which is great for me, but I don't mind somewhere else. And in the rest of Europe, you know, because Vegas as wonderful as heading out to a desert is it's also a little bit far.
Michaela Light 35:47
Yeah, it's a long way from Europe. I agree. So I think there is room for maybe there's room for an informal get together, like you saying, you know,
Gert Franz 35:57
and I would, and I would definitely love to have been to come to CF camp, finally. Yeah, I really, I'm working on you. I'm working on you on this for years already.
Ben Nadel 36:12
It's gonna pay off I promise.
Gert Franz 36:15
Okay, you folks, you heard that. Right. So, Carla?
Michaela Light 36:19
Good. Yeah, I just want to mention the autists box stuff, they created some discord channels, which are very good for all their box support, they've kind of moved out of slack, I think they still have the Slack channels there, but they kind of redirect people in discord and discord is a better service and slack and doesn't have the retention issues, you know, the post stay there forever.
Mark Drew 36:43
There's a gap, you know, there's a, there is a, I mean, if we only could program websites, you know, it'd be great. But there is a gap between forums in which you can have permanence and be able to say, like, this has been answered, this is a question and answer type thing. Rather than, like, we're just chewing the fat and, and talking, hey, you know, you did something wrong, etcetera, etcetera. There is a big gap. I think for that, because all this knowledge, you're going to think if you look at the web in a few years, all these things that we relied on, like Stack Overflow, and things like that, will will are hidden behind slacks, and even discord servers, right? Because if you delete a Discord server by by Discord server, you know, it's not public. I mean, you can I think
Michaela Light 37:32
there's a benefit to getting things into StackOverflow. Two things. One is it's Google searchable, which Facebook group and slack are not except for this linen thing that Charlie mentioned. But the other reason is, I'm forgetting the names of those companies that kind of look at different programming languages, and, you know, say how wonderful they are. To you. But yeah, they often just, they don't delve down that deep into Slack or Facebook groups. They just look at Stack Overflow. And so Oh, there are only three posts about ColdFusion on StackOverflow. Last month, so it's not nobody's using it nearly right. Yeah. Which is a bunch of BS, because you're all these people, which is why I always encourage people, you know, do post stuff into Stack Overflow, because it helps pump that up, as well as being searchable by Google.
Charlie Arehart 38:18
For that matter, let's just get that out. Because that's been a long standing thing that the tob index ti o p e, people say, Oh, ColdFusion so down low on the list, if I understand correctly, it's it's driven by searches literally, they search who's searching for things. And one of the beefs I have with that is that if they don't reconcile someone might search for cold fusion CFML cold space fusion, Luci? You know, there's so many different variants, and each of those break, FM CFM. Right. And then also someone might, you know, ask and talk about topics and mention the specific thing and not feel the need to say ColdFusion or CFML. So it's sad that they they probably underreport and under represent us. And that's just I just want to throw that out. Say that, that to be thing. If you look into it, it's it's not a reasonable. It's not like measuring who's using the things. It's not measuring. How many sites use the knob, none of that. It's based on searches. That's yeah, yeah.
Mark Drew 39:20
Be from Adobe, from my, from my Adobe days. And when I was a ACP it was people going like, oh, well, this newfangled thing is really popular with the CTOs Right? and W just looking at what was popping in Taiwan, which is like, well, hold on a minute, you know, looking at licensing, you're not looking at, like Boeing, I knew for a fact had a hundreds of CFML developers. They weren't supposed to 200 I think, right. Right. Exactly. You know, and but those weren't marked, were they, you know,
Gert Franz 39:55
yeah. And I also have to say, I think that we have have about I would say the folks that I know that 200 very heavily dedicated folks that are putting their their work life into CFML hands, both on Adobe's, and on Lucy's side and folks using it. And you know, there are other languages, like, for example, let's take Objective C, or, or even Ruby that have come and gone. Confusion, and Lucy are now here for 25 plus years, 27 years. And at least according to my future plans, it's going to be around for the next 10 years, definitely. And I still love working with it. And it's actively developed. And as long as we all keep this same enthusiasm that we have, for the language itself, it won't die off. You know, you can say whatever, whatever search says around the world, as long as people stay so enthusiastic about it, it won't die off at all. And getting new programmers into CFML, or Lucy is pretty simple. Just get anyone who understands any kind of programming language, training them on CFR on ColdFusion, or Lucy, piece of cake. Yeah.
Mark Drew 41:09
I want to jump on what Kurt saying that if, if I may, and give space for for Ben, because Ben hasn't said much. He's been too loud this time. But, you know, we've been going around saying for years, just get a web developer and mentor them. We've had actual United stats of new developers that have joined a company that we work for, not CFML developers, they've been ramped up in, I want to say, a week just over that they did CFML in a week to get the head round. We've had a university student, he's doing his degree at the moment. So working part time, he's been committing stuff. And he's been pushing me saying like, so what are the tests? You don't feel like pushing me like to get stuff, like sorted out for them in the way that they want to be working? And it's great, you know, and so I think it's a bit of a a weird thing, like, you need CFML developers, generally you need developers, you need smart people in your company. Isn't that right, Ben?
Ben Nadel 42:14
Yeah, well, and I think we touched on this in part one, is that now with modern CFML, both on the Lucy and the Adobe ColdFusion side, the code itself looks basically like a lot of other languages, if unless you really looking at the details of how the typing is done, or you know, some of the lower level syntax. If you open up a script based component, like it looks like a JavaScript class or a TypeScript class or kind of like a Ruby component. I mean, it's, it's not a huge leap for someone to come from basically any other language and look at CFML and be able to maintain it. And it's just there's not such a huge learning curve, or there's no bigger learning curve, I think, in CFML, than any other language for sure.
Michaela Light 42:59
No, it's much smaller learning curve. Research has shown that people take six to 12 weeks learn Java, they take one week to learn ColdFusion. I mean, that's an incredible difference.
Gert Franz 43:11
Michaela, well, that just says it's easier to make, you have to be maybe not learn so much to make mistakes in CFML. But you have to learn a lot to start making mistakes in Java, you need to be very smart.
Ben Nadel 43:24
Well, this is I was listening to an interview a couple of weeks ago with the guy who created PHP three, and I don't, I'm not familiar with the PHP world. So I don't know if that's like a major version or branch of something else. But he was saying that PHP, if PHP and coefficient came out, I think, like in the same year, and PHP has a pretty bad reputation historically. And his point of view was, yeah, it's a bad reputation. But it's a bad reputation, because it's so easy to write. So you have a lot of people who don't have any background in application development, jumping in and being able to get things done with PHP, and maybe it's not the best, but they're, they're able to do it. So this is very low barrier to entry. And I feel like CFML is the same way. You don't have to go through, you know, months of theory on computer science before you can compile something that actually runs, you literally open up a text file called a dot CFM file, put some output on it, and you have a working application. Like it's just, it's just that easy. So a lot of people can participate, which means there's going to be a lot of, you know, dicey code out there, but I think that's a that's a benefit of the language now that
Mark Drew 44:32
drawback I love that example of CFML is going to create a CFML font type Hello World.
Gert Franz 44:40
And, you know, the one thing that we must not forget, we all base our existence on folks not knowing how to precoat being out there, right. So we try to help everyone so I mean, if we're, if we're happily helping folks, it's mainly because they do. They produce issues they may be shouldn't? And yeah, so in my opinion, I always, whenever I presented Rylo, or Lucy to someone, I said there was a good thing about Lucy, it's easy to learn and the bad thing about it, it is easy to learn. So, but having
Mark Drew 45:17
said that, I'd like to increase the growth of Lucy, either or CFML. I beg your pardon? I think there's two, there's a couple of challenges. And we'll see if I can hold them both in my head, one of them is adoption into slightly different areas, or known which areas that can be adopted into. So is it just gonna be a web language? And if the web becomes a lot more front end heavy? Is it just a back end API, right. And if it is, lean into that, I mean, I know we can do rest and stuff like that. But there's a whole bunch of other things happening like Graph QL and various other different infrastructures. So the lean into that. And the other one is other ways that languages are being used, like lambdas, as an example, like, and therefore, things like startups, and Docker and good. And containerization means that your server is not this, this precious little thing that can take 10 minutes to start up and, and, and get yourself dressed and ready and put his hat on to go outside and serve people is like, we're expecting you to start up in like, less than a second to do something and then shut down and then leave the string on Mark. Yeah, exactly. The mankini comes on in at least two seconds. But yeah,
Michaela Light 46:33
there you go. I think that's a great point that, you know, modern languages and model ecosystems, they're more in the cloud or lambda. And Lucy has done a great job keeping up with that Adobe for fusion, I feel is a bit behind on that. Because of the licensing issue, we thrashed to death in the last episode. Technically, it's fine, they've cut down their load size, you know, they've given lots of packaging tools to, you know, if you don't want to use all the features. But anyway, let's say we mentioned conferences, and we kind of touched on finding Adobe ColdFusion and Luci developers. But I know that's a pain point for a lot of companies using ColdFusion. So and if we want to, you mentioned to mark, that your company, hire good developers from other languages, just cross-train them in a week on ColdFusion, which I think is an excellent solution. Any other thoughts on hiring, and Lucien Adobe ColdFusion developers
Gert Franz 47:31
that are complex? Well,
I have, I have also to say, sometimes, and I have take myself as an example, as well, sometimes sometimes I'm stuck in my my way of thinking. So that's why it's even a good choice not to take someone who's maybe just stuck in the CFML world, get some new ideas, you get some new impulses to well even improve the language or improve your code think outside of the box. So in my opinion, going for different developers is just the right thing to do. And it's almost the only thing to do, because it can be very challenging to while to find those CFML developers, and you might lose a lot of opportunities when you're narrowing down your search on LinkedIn or wherever. To see it from experience.
Michaela Light 48:23
I think the big word I would say to anyone having trouble hiring is just opening yourself up to having people be remote. Because a lot of people don't want to be in an office these days, or they only want to go in one day a week. I mean, I know Elon Musk wants everyone to be in 40 hours a week at Tesla, but I think he's making a mistake there. You know, a lot of developers work better, because they, the problem with being in an office or a cube in an office is you get interrupted all the time. It's hard to get any work done, programming is a deep, deep thing, you've got to focus on it, you've got a whole lot of things in your head. And some people say, you know, research says it takes 30 minutes to get back to that flow state of programming, where you're really producing good code. And if you've been interrupted every 15 minutes by beeps next, you know, on the Slack channel. You know, your manager, pointy haired boss coming in and tapping you on the shoulder or co workers yapping about yesterday's football game is
Mark Drew 49:22
I'll agree and disagree with you. You're right. That's the situation. But one of the big things that I've tried to do since the pandemic and everything else is leading into the challenges, right. So if you have an environment that you will be, you know, you know that you have this kind of challenge, break down your tasks smaller, you know, be able to accomplish stuff quickly. I use a technique called Pomodoro, the Pomodoro Technique, which is over 25 minutes. So if you ask someone can you just bother me in five minutes? Because I've got 25 minutes to do. Do that. I mean, I think all the challenges in the world are sometimes their challenges and we feel that they're a brick wall that you you're hitting. But sometimes you just have to lean into that that thing. Being remote as you say is one of the challenges, we have to be separate the best people are across the country will lean into being remote. Oh, that they're in a different timezone. We'll lean into communicating, what can you do to communicate better, right? Oh, but I'm a manager, and I want my whole team to have a meeting or stand up at the same time. Why don't you get them to write their standup notes every day? And that way, everyone's keeps informed and keeps churning, right? It's tried to lean into these challenges a lot more. You know, okay, so we don't have enough here from our programmers. And every one of them is old and looks like me. Why don't we train up some people? You know, lean into that? Okay, fine. We can't find them. So what do we have to do? We have to train them up.
Michaela Light 50:56
Know, or some people teach at local community colleges. I know several community colleges or ColdFusion courses. So I noticed Charlie wrote CFML training down there and on your resource page, I want to call out folks, that is good. Yeah, so they're saying one of
Charlie Arehart 51:14
three training resources, I just want to make that point clear. There are several there are ones, different people, different organizations, ones that are updated even recently. So this was following on the topic of bringing new people on, point them to that resource and let them find which any of those they find compelling, from offices modern, you know, modern, modern, CFML. And under minutes, that's basic training. And there's many, many more.
Michaela Light 51:42
Well, I mean, I just want to mention Adobe territory, can autists probably other people have great YouTube channels, this podcast goes on our YouTube channel, as well as gone out on, you know, iTunes, and all the other stuff, and then on and those are all free, and then see if casts have some free content, but it has, you know, hundreds of things, they even dump their whole full-day training thing onto there. So you pay 30 bucks a month, or whatever it is you pay annually. And you can access all that training. And it's not just box stuff, they have ColdFusion stuff in there. And then also, I just want to give a shout-out to the Adobe ColdFusion certification, which they dropped the price on to their cost, which is 150 bucks, they have to pony out to the people who do the testing. And that contains 24 hours of video training on, you know, Adobe ColdFusion 2021 as well as you get the test where you can see where your gaps are because like you scored good in this area, but you didn't score so great in that area. So lots of training stuff, right? Does Linda still have a cut for you and stuff like that? I'm not sure now. I got folded vendor is no more. And then there are podcasts out there. There's this podcast, CF lives, there's the autist modernize or die podcast. And there's various flavors, their news flavor and you know the more in-depth flavor. I'm giving the wrong technical term. So that and then Ben, you have a podcast. Tell us the name of your podcast.
Ben Nadel 53:10
Yeah, it's the working code podcast. It's headed up by Adam Tuttle. Adam tunnel I would describe as a recovering ColdFusion programmer. So came I hesitate to call it a cold fusion podcast, but I certainly try to sneak cold fusion in cold fusion adjacent topics and as much as I possibly can. Is he again working with CF? He straddles the CF and Node js world.
Michaela Light 53:35
Oh, okay. And then, Mark, you want your local host podcast? Is that still cranking out? Or is that? No,
Mark Drew 53:42
I think I think it's hiatus, we went too big. And it's just too much time I've been doing another podcast on game development of the level design podcast. So there are only so many podcasts that you need a bald white guy in? Well,
Gert Franz 53:58
maybe we can just start it off again, Mark. Just maybe.
Mark Drew 54:03
I'll be doing a lot more stuff now that I want to talk about, which we did before it wasn't so I have a question
Gert Franz 54:09
though. I would like to sneak something in if that's I would like to hear a different opinion from Charlie. And then maybe we just recently had a ticket that Lucy wasn't following and Adobe functionality, how it was. The functionality has been introduced by Lucy a couple of years ago, and now in CF 2021 has been introduced, but it doesn't follow quite how we did it. Now we have been asked to just change our functionality to follow ACF no matter what. And I'm inclined not to because there might be code out there. Yeah, there might be code out there that is already using the functionality. And in my opinion, it is now a living and breathing organism CFO manner. It's not only Adobe defining it, and everyone else has to follow suit because As it goes both ways we follow what Adobe does. And Adobe sometimes follows stuff that Lucy does. Right ask
Mark Drew 55:08
for petrol in his cars.
Gert Franz 55:12
Kind of, and I am more or less inclined or not inclined, I'm convinced that once something has been out there for a while, it should be staying as it is because we would break compatibility to existing code and I know of certain applications that wouldn't work properly anymore without an update. I don't know what your thoughts are on that.
Michaela Light 55:38
Well, I, you know, you've got it two ways, right. You've done it the better way, right. Rather than what the clone version was done in Adobe, I'm just joking there. I mean, who knows? I don't know the details on that. But the issue is people migrate between the two versions, people, a lot of people migrate from Adobe ColdFusion. Loosely, some people migrate from Lucy to Adobe ColdFusion, according to our State of Union survey. And then. So I would, you know, if you think you've implemented it better, keep it that way, maybe you have a way to run it their way, you know, compatibility switch, if you feel like it, or if someone well really needs through,
Gert Franz 56:20
I can tell you what we have done in the past. So for example, if there were different arguments or attributes used, they were just called differently, we just put a link, or an alternative version that can be used as well, like, for example, CF loop index item or key value. So in leucine, you can use key value. And in ColdFusion, you can use index and item, right, we now just allow both, both of them. Yeah, right.
Michaela Light 56:45
That's a great way approach. Because, for the ColdFusion users, they don't care what Adobe or Lucy thinks so much is the code compatible, you know, that's one of the major quotes, selling, I know, you don't charge money for Lucy, but the major selling feature Lucy is it's, you know, 99% compatible with Adobe ColdFusion. Or when I talk to people, that's what they're interested in, can we easily move our CF nine app over to Lucy, because we don't want to go through the headache of upgrading to ColdFusion 2021. And the costs involved with that. And then I will mention another thing that is good for Adobe ColdFusion. And I believe for losing her backward compatibility, there's quite an effort done to retest old code and make sure it still runs in the new release. Version. And I think that's pretty important because people have, I don't know how much legacy ColdFusion code there is out there. I was gonna say billions of lines of code, be interested in the kind of getting a guess on how much but there's a lot. And if you can't, when you install the new version, if you have to go through headaches, it's a problem. I don't know, Adobe has an enormous library of users' donated code, so they can backward test stuff and make sure it runs at all without errors. And B, it runs efficiently. So I know that some of the optimizations they did they made sure that some of that code that you were talking about earlier, and a mark that wasn't written so well, because they were, you know, maybe newbie developers still run efficiently.
Mark Drew 58:18
I think that's not usually the problem. The problem is not like written code. Generally, the problem is going to be stuff like well, we use like a CF form UI stuff, we use CF flash, we use a lot of like CF Ajax and things that are completely replaced in modern CFML. And it depends on what the goal of loose Blue Sea is going to be. If the goal of loose is going to be just you're stepping off point for not paying for ACF and your application is going 100% And Ron I don't see that as a much growth industry that's a call the sacking industry as in for while we're doing Lucy right we wanted like features that I asked for another moment because of my DevOps hat is like it has to start quickly it has to be able to be configurable it has to be configurable from in Docker images, we should be able to the image should be smaller we should only add what we need, you know, things like that which bring it to the life you know, bring it into the as a modern environment as I come from the ancient times, but I mean, from my day to day development changes having Lucy has a goal of being your, the way for you to just eke out a few more years of your multibillion multimillion dollar application for free. I don't think that's a goal for Lucy I mean, it shouldn't be should be like a third party at best. You know.
Michaela Light 59:53
I've no I agree. I'm sorry.
Mark Drew 59:55
It's not gonna be you know, I'm gonna be then you know, this is
Michaela Light 59:59
a Korean ADF challenge for both the Adobe development team and the Lucy development team are developing new versions you want to bring along the people from the old versions, you want to add cool new features, improved performance, improved security, all the great stuff everyone does. And at the same time, you've got to make it easy for people to migrate their apps. Because if you do what some languages have done, where they totally redid the language, I think PHP was guilty of this. I can't name the version numbers, they did it between but they made they made it or Python. Python did this between python two and python three, it's totally effing incompatible. What an idiot move guys, I mean, I know you had good technical reasons for doing that. And you want to get rid of a lot of technical debt, but like it for the regular Joe probe, or Jane programmer, it's a disaster zone, because now you got to rewrite all the code
Mark Drew 1:00:48
for a simple solution I think I might agree with me might not well, maybe Lucy users might or might not agree with me is the fact that you can easily upgrade and there's multiple releases a year, we have multiple releases, like month to month, if not more. Now, the problem is that for Adobe is that they do like a massive step release that you have to pay for every year or so if not more every two months to year, every two years, every two years. Right. So like if you change some model, which they've done with Photoshop and everything else to say, hey, look, this is a license thing. I mean, I'm not in the, you know, in the business side of stuff. So there's reasons probably why that doesn't work. But the continuous distribution of our features would mean that people are maintaining up to date, there's less security issues, you know, security updates. I mean, I know they're separate and free and stuff like that. But it's saying that say that the mechanism that you know that your App Engine has been updated, frequently the same way that Chrome does.
Michaela Light 1:01:55
Well, I think that's great. I think that's a topic. I think I'm just gonna interrupt you, Charlie. I think that's topic and several other things we could talk about in another episode if you guys are up for it, because I know it has a urgent thing he needs to go to and he extended himself for 10 extra minutes into the show. Appreciate that, Gert. So why don't we wrap this one up? Now, if you're interested in doing another panel, or some of you are happy to do it, it's been a great discussion. Lots of stuff I didn't even know about in ColdFusion that I learned from it. If anyone listening has suggestions for future panel topics, please let us know we do have a few things leftover that we added in here that we didn't get time to cover. And if people want to find each of you online, what's the one best way to find you online? Charlie?
Charlie Arehart 1:02:50
Care heart.org c a r e h a RT care heart.org or care heart all social.
Michaela Light 1:02:58
Mr. Good.
Gert Franz 1:03:00
Well and disliked in Lucy dev or somewhere there you can find me, mostly there.
Michaela Light 1:03:07
There aren't that many good friends in the world. Ben,
Gert Franz 1:03:12
there is one in my home. In my home city. There is one and I'm not related to him. Even written in the same way as I am.
Michaela Light 1:03:21
But Ben Adel, how find you.
Ben Nadel 1:03:24
I write on Ben adel.com. And then at Ben Adel on Twitter is probably the easiest way to just ping me.
Michaela Light 1:03:32
Mr. Mark,
Mark Drew 1:03:34
where if you want to have a laugh about how old my how few articles are posted on my blog, you can go to Mark drew.io. And I did write one this year, but this one from two years ago before it and stuff like that, or you can find me on Mark drew on Twitter,
Michaela Light 1:03:51
and folks and find me on Terra tech.com. That's only one rtra te ch.com. I post blog articles several times a month and same with podcast episodes. And I'm pretty active on LinkedIn and somewhat active on Twitter and other things. Well, thanks guys. Fever, cold fusion and Viva Lucy. I kind of include Lucy and Adobe ColdFusion in the phrase ColdFusion so I think it's all good stuff. And hope to see you all another time.
Ben Nadel 1:04:24
Thank you very much.
Gert Franz 1:04:26
Thank you very much. Have a good one. Bye bye.