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I had the pleasure of attending this conference organized by Adobe ColdFusion team, in the first week of December.
After the CF Summit West 2019 in Las Vegas which is the biggest ColdFusion conference in the world, which was in October, this event took place in Bengaluru.
It is a confluence of everything in the realm of web applications. If you develop web applications, this is the place to be. For designers, developers, strategists and thought leaders, the ColdFusion India Summit provides the perfect forum to exchange ideas, inspiration, and experiences.
In addition to opportunities to interact with ColdFusion experts, domain leaders and peers, get to learn about the latest technologies, techniques, and strategies to rapidly build and successfully deliver web applications to the market. With the web applications scenario evolving rapidly, explore how ColdFusion is driving change and how you can propel this dynamism.
Registration was complimentary.
The key takeaways and learning points
- ColdFusion Roadmap and New Features coming in Next Release
- Top ColdFusion Features and Benefits
- API Development and Management
- Performance Tuning and Management
- PDF Manipulation and Advanced Security
The morning was very interesting. To see so many interesting people (again) and meet new was such an honor.
Registration and we’re ready to start the show!
Adobe ColdFusion Keynote
Amit Dayal and Ashish Garg talked about a general CF stuff, but also gave us a heads up on the roadmap and what’s on Adobe’s sight for the next year.
We hear that we can expect ColdFusion 2020 alpha release soon.
Amit Dayal
Passionate about great products, new ideas, and technology excellence. Love bringing together engineers, scientists, designers, and product managers to build products that can help millions of users. Enjoy wearing multiple hats. Worked for many years in Silicon Valley, at both startups and large tech companies. Have now almost a decade of experience in Bangalore. In a past life, did serious hands-on work on parallel Unix kernels.
Ashish Garg
Ashish is Director of Engineering at Adobe Inc., Bangalore. Ashish leads the engineering teams for Adobe ColdFusion and eLearning products portfolio from Adobe, that includes Adobe Captivate, Adobe Captivate Prime and Adobe Connect. Ashish is associated with Adobe for close to 15 years and in this tenure, has worked on a numerous products and idea projects. Ashish has experience with a wide set of technologies and platforms ranging from desktop, mobile, server to cloud. Ashish is very interested in fostering innovation and is passionate about usage of technology in solving any type of problem. He likes to follow the technology trends and evolve products along with them. Apart from programming languages, he is a keen AI/ML enthusiast. Ashish loves sports, music and reading. Ashish holds a Masters in Computers Applications from Panjab University, Chandigarh.
Modern Approach for Monitoring ColdFusion Deployments – Performance Monitoring Toolset
The first talk after the keynote was by Nikhil Dubey and here are the key points:
- What are the monitoring requirements of any online applications?
- Overview of architecture of PMT
- Use cases and corresponding features with Demo –
- Node Down Scenario
- Black Friday – Sudden spike in Traffic
- Auto-Connector tuning
- Features without demo –
- Ease of Use & Navigation
- Memory Leaks
- Threads
- Caching
- Active Monitoring
- Alerts
- Archiving Strategy
Takeaways
- For developers, they get to know about important scenarios and what all metrics could come to their rescue in such situations.
- For System admin, they get to know about how using pro-active and reactive approaches running systems could be handled.
Nikhil Dubey
Nikhil works in Adobe ColdFusion Engineering Team as a Software Development Engineer. His latest work is on Performance Monitoring Toolset which comes bundled along with ColdFusion 2018. His responsibilities also include language changes, code coloring, autocomplete and various other features of ColdFusion Builder. His areas of interests are ColdFusion, Java, Elasticsearch and Machine Learning. In free time, he loves to read/watch news, cricket and Indian politics.
You can find the presentation here: COMING SOON
Schedule and Forget using ColdFusion
Suchika Singh gave a presentation about ColdFusion Scheduling engine. It is empowered by Quartz and has numerous features that can be used to automatically run your tasks. This presentation was focused on the advanced existing features such as:
- Using CRON syntax to schedule tasks.
- Running scheduler in cluster setups
- Attaching handlers to schedule tasks
- Making task management easy by setting task priorities
- Customizing the scheduled tasks using the quartz properties for standalone and cluster setups.
- Defining dependent tasks i.e. Chaining of tasks
We also learned about the new scheduling features that have been added in ColdFusion 2018 :
- gettasksbygroup – a new Admin API that would return tasks of a particular group
- fireinstanceid – a new key is passed to the eventhandler methods. This is a unique ID that defines the current scheduled run.
- create/modify/update – In previous versions , they was only one action to create and edit a task. Now we have added 2 new actions CREATE and MODIFY.
- UPDATE action remains the same
- CREATE will create a fresh new task. If task already exists, it will thrown an error
- MODIFY will modify existing task while retaining its old values. If task does not exist, it will throw an error
- current running tasks – A GIF in admin that indicates which tasks are currently running and an admin API for same.
- task status column – A new column in CF Admin that indicates the current status of task – active /paused/expired.
- pauseall/resumeall – pauseall & resumeall button in admin. This would be helpful while customers are applying a new update in CF
Suchika Singh
Suchika Singh is with ColdFusion Engineering Team at Adobe as Software Engineer. She has worked on scheduler, file-management and language features . Her technical skills include ColdFusion, Java, and JavaScript.
You can find the presentation here: COMING SOON
[Angularjs + Reactjs + Vuejs] + CF – Integrating Modern Day JS Frameworks with ColdFusion
Ketki Joshi ran us through this always-interesting topic of the top 3 modern-day JS frameworks and helped us understand how to build applications in them.
Key takeaways:
- Compared the pros and cons of each of them.
- Compared the code which we have to write in each of these frameworks to achieve a similar output.
- Learned more about building REST services in Coldfusion and invoking these services from any of these JS frameworks and hence completing the integration.
Ketki Joshi
Ketki is software developer working in Adobe ColdFusion team. She look into the features like Performance Monitoring Toolset, CFFiddle, API Manager and CFAdmin. In my free time, she love reading books, exploring new places and cuisines.
You can find the presentation here: COMING SOON
ColdFusion Security Analyzer by Edwin Samuel Jonathan
Web Applications are like Open doors to your website which interfaces the users/customers and the business happens over online. So it is essential to secure the website from the ever-changing threat landscape and increasing frequency of Web application attacks to smoothly run the business. This has forced the organizations to address Web application security through secure software development practices (SDLC). Web Application assessment reduces the risk to web attacks, persistent threats, malicious changes to your applications and reduce the potential for criminal activity that could affect your companies brand reputation.
Web Application Security Can Improve Compliance and Reduce Web Exploitation. The assessment of web applications can be done through static and dynamic scanning of applications. Static scanning of web application involves scanning of source code to review and find the potential & possible vulnerabilities through code analysis. ColdFusion provides such tool called Security Code analyzer which helps in reviewing the code to find out security issues. CF Security Code analyzer helps in finding many threats such as XSS, CSRF, Injection etc. and covers most of OWASP Top 10.
The session was focused on common web application vulnerabilities. Key takeaways:
- Provide examples of vulnerable code and give analysis on the types of applications where vulnerability is commonly found.
- Demonstrate the attack on a sample app & Discuss remediation strategies.
- How to use ColdFusion Security Analyzer to asses/scan and find such vulnerabilities.
- Cover some of the security best practices & the latest security threat landscape.
Edwin Samuel Jonathan
I am a software developer for Adobe ColdFusion team. I am a full stack developer having worked on features like WebSocket, ColdFusion Administrator, CfFiddle as well as the Performance Monitoring Toolset. I used to write Tech articles for a e-journal called Techzei and have a lot of interest in Android app development, rooting and modding for the Android operating system. My hobbies are football and playing the guitar. I play games as well in my free time and I was one of the most consistent FIFA 18 players in the highest division. In my spare time, I mostly read about new technologies as well as develop simple applications that enable skill based lobby sharing and location matching for games such as Fortnite.
You can find the presentation here
ColdFusion for the Next Decade – All about the Buzzworthy ColdFusion 2020
“One of the reasons for ColdFusion’s success right from its inception is that the platform has been able to pivot at regular intervals to remain relevant for the future. There are very few technologies that have managed to stay in the game for so long and that is something all of us in the community are proud of. ColdFusion 2020, slated to be released next year, is going one such pivotal release in the history of ColdFusion. The vision for ColdFusion 2020 goes like this:
“To be the modernized platform of choice for building cloud-native microservice applications with absolute focus on ease of use without getting locked to a particular cloud vendor (multi-cloud)”
Attend this session as the Product Manager for ColdFusion unravels every piece of ColdFusion 2020 that leads to the overarching vision.”
Rakshith Naresh
Rakshith Naresh is the Product Manager for ColdFusion and Captivate Prime Content Catalog. While his role as a Product Manager for ColdFusion can be as challenging as it can ever get, he enjoys working for a product that has such a passionate community following. Rakshith is keen to work with the ColdFusion community and deliver value to businesses. When not at work, Rakshith loves to travel. He also loves anything to do with fitness.
Learn more about it here
Modernize your Applications using Advanced Language Constructs
This session was dedicated to the enhancements that we have added in CFML like:
- NULL Support
- Object-oriented enhancements like default, final and abstract etc.
- Asynchronous Programming
- Advanced Array Manipulation operations
- Datatype preservation
- Optional semicolon
- Lambdas Support
- Advanced Query Operations
- Array/Struct Manipulation Operations
- using Loop over Struct/Query/Array
He covered some of the common world use-cases and learned how we can leverage the enhancements to solve the different problems.
Ashudeep Sharma
Ashudeep is working as a developer in ColdFusion Engineering team primarily focusing on Databases and Language.
He has worked on diverse products with exposure on distributed systems, query engines, data stores, Big Data, Compilers.
During his free time he enjoy playing sports(Cricket/Baddy/Volley etc), sometimes listening to light music and reading experiences on Quora.
You can find the presentation here: COMING SOON
Scaling Enterprise Applications with ColdFusion
The session was about the features in CF that makes it a suitable platform for hosting high volume enterprise applications. The features that enable ColdFusion to scale up to meet the demands of high traffic web applications.
- clustering CF servers – different ways a CF cluster can be configured.
- Using a web server connector for static content.
- centralized distributed caching – how different caching engines can be used towards a centralized cache for a distributed CF application.
- external session store – how Redis can be used to managing sessions in a large application.
Piyush Kumar Nayak
Piyush is a QA engineer with the ColdFusion team where he works on performance and scalability amongst other areas. He has Master’s degree in Computer Application and loves to read whenever he can find the time.
You can find the presentation here: COMING SOON
API Management – Why it Matters
The session was focused on the need to use API Management platforms and explain how they can benefit API Publishers and Developers.
Below are some take away from this session:
- Common API requirements and challenges
- Decoupling APIs and presenting facades
- How easy it is to manage API life cycle along with throttling and rate limiting
- Securing access to the APIs without writing a single line of code.
- Analytics and metrics
Nimit Sharma
Nimit Sharma works with the ColdFusion Engineering Team at Adobe and focuses on Databases, WebSocket, Performance and PDF service. He has also worked on other products at Adobe. He loves to explore new concepts and technologies. Most of his time spend in reading books or blogs, listening music and watching movies. You can find Nimit online on twitter @nimsharm. You can also follow him on his blog nimitsharma.wordpress.com
You can find the presentation here: COMING SOON
Tapping in to documents with ColdFusion
“ColdFusion is the most powerful language out there when it comes to plus and play with various kinds of documents such as PDF’s, Presentations, Spreadsheets, etc.
In this session, we learned how to create PDF’s, convert HTML and doc files to PDF’s and then Manipulate these PDF’s using cfpdf tag to sanitize, redact and much more.
We also learned how we can create Presentations; and create and manipulate spreadsheets using ColdFusion, and how various document interconversions can happen using ColdFusion such as:
- PPT to PDF
- PPT to HTML
- HTML to PPT
- Word to PDF
- Excel to Query
- Query to Excel
- Excel to HTML
- HTML to PDF
Ajay Rai
Ajay Rai Software Developer in the Adobe ColdFusion team. Looking after ColdFusion features cfchart, cfdocument and cfspreadsheet, cffile, s3 integration. Love travelling and playing games cricket, badminton
.
You can find the presentation here: COMING SOON
CF Summit India 2019 in Pictures
#CFSummitIndia kicks off. What an experience to be in Bangalore, so many tech firms here, so many people, so much traffic.#ColdFusion #CFML #cfsummit2019https://t.co/wGR8OQVlEo pic.twitter.com/jvxK28XK7C
— Michaela Light (@TeraTechCF) December 7, 2019
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