Contents

The Adobe CF Summit basics
- Let’s talk numbers
Speakers
- What about the keynote?
- Why should CFers go to CF Summit conferences and events?
Agenda
Day 1
Day 2
Best practices for attending online events

This was the ninth edition of the Adobe ColdFusion Summit. And it was interesting, to say the least.

The Adobe CF Summit basics

The ColdFusion Summit conference 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 Summit provides the perfect forum to exchange ideas, inspiration and experiences.

Not only that. As well as 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 world evolving rapidly, explore how ColdFusion is driving change and how you can propel this dynamism.

Let’s talk numbers

Being online helps to increase the number of attendees from all over the world. Last year’s event was supposed to have 5000 registered attendees. It had 6000+!

Here are the stats from this year, directly from Adobe:

6000+ Registrations
2300+ Accounts
30 sessions
91.6% Attendees’ rating on summit speakers
90.8% Attendees’ rating on summit content
87.4% Attendees’ rating on summit experience

Speakers

Dave Ferguson,
George Murphy,
Brian Klaas,
Mark Takata,
Elishia Dvorak,
Charlie Arehart,
Pete Freitag,
Brian Sappey,
Jessica Leener,
Corbin Crutchly,
Ray Camden,
Mike Brunt,
David Tattersal,
Matthew Clemente,
Coraly Rosario,
Mary Dowd,
Nolan Erck,
Mike Hartington,
Adam Benzion,
Megha Bhat K,
Rochelle Hannah,
Brian Bockhold,
Aditya Nema.

What about the keynote?

Ashley Willis did a keynote session. She is the Director of Developer Relations for Microsoft Azure and a certified Google Dev Expert, dedicated to working with Open Source communities. Ashley talked about the future of DevRel, and, why Developer Relations jobs are now more popular than ever, and how DevRel differs from evangelism.

I am curious to learn more about this topic, but I am also curious to find out why did Microsoft had a keynote talk at the Adobe ColdFusion event. Perhaps we could dive into the speculations but, let's leave that for now.

Why should CFers go to CF Summit conferences and events?

Learn about a lot of changes in ColdFusion in recent years
Especially now
CF goes to cloud
Talk to CF experts and developers
Also with Adobe CF crew
Drop by Adobe booth anytime during the conference
Contribute to the future of ColdFusion (2022)
Raffles during the event

Agenda

Day 1

DevRel: How we got here and where we're going, by Ashley Willis

As Developer Relations jobs become more popular you may have asked yourself, “What is DevRel?” This talk aims to answer that question and many more. Ashley will talk about the history of DevRel, how it’s different from evangelism, and what the future holds.

Hidden gems in CF2021, a year later, by Charlie Arehart

It's been a year since the release of CF2021, and also since Charlie Arehart offered his “hidden gems” talk at last year's CF Summit. Perhaps you caught his talk then, or not, and maybe you've started using the release–or still have not. Either way, there've been a number of updates as well as some changes in features since the release. In this updated talk, Charlie helps both audiences consider aspects of CF2021 that they may have missed.

Here's Charlies presentation

Gatsby Talk, by Corbin Crutchley

If you've worked with React developers anytime in the past few years, you'll likely have heard the terms “SSR” or “SSG”. Likewise, if you're on Twitter, you've likely heard of Vercel (previously ZIET) or Gatsby.

What are they, why are they useful, and what's the deal with airline food anyway?

In this talk, we have covered:

What SSR, SSG, and CSR are
Benefits (and downsides) of SSR and SSG
How the React ecosystem takes from both new and old
What's Gatsby and how does it differ from NextJS?
Livecode a blog with pagination, author pages, strong SEO results, and more!

CFML Design Patterns and Uses, by Nolan Erck

Design Patterns are some of the biggest benefits that come from using CFComponents. They're reusable techniques that can solve problems in a variety of projects – and the same patterns can be reused across other OOP languages as well. Just like a for() loop or an array, learning how to apply Design Patterns to your projects is a skill that will be helpful regardless of the type or size of your projects! You may already be using a Design Pattern or 2 and not even realize it!
That sounds great and all, but how do you actually USE these things!? Enough UML diagrams, we get paid to write code! When the heck should I put the Factory Pattern to use? What's a Template Method Pattern look like in actual code and why do I care? That's what we'll cover in this talk – we'll look at actual code samples from real-world applications, all of which use these patterns, and we'll take a close look at the problem that was solved with each pattern, so you'll walk away with a better idea of when to implement such patterns in your own applications.
Target Audience: CFML developers that are comfortable building CFComponents. Attendees should know how to create a CFC and be familiar with the basic benefits of using components. They should also understand some fundamental concepts of OOP such as constructors, inheritance, and composition. The code examples we'll give in this talk will be done in CFML but conceptually the information will work in a variety of other languages as well.Main takeaways:
What is a Design Pattern?
The Design Pattern you're already using and don't know it.
Some common patterns: Factory, Template Method, Dependency Injection.
Real CFML examples of when to use them.
Are there such things as bad design patterns?

Here's Nolans presentation

The dawn of Machine Learning, AI, and You, by Adam Benzion

Machine Learning and AI are massive buzzwords but are they relevant for you? You might be surprised to know Machine Learning is available on Supercomputers, Smartphones, and tiny Internet of Things devices. No longer the domain of Artificial Intelligence PHDs, AI and ML have been democratized and are ready for your use. In this talk, I discussed the current state of ML, and AI, show you practical examples of both, and then give a demonstration of TinyML, a service to enable machine learning for all developers with an open source device SDK.

Tackling ColdFusion Security, by Pete Freitag

Security can be a thorny and intimidating topic. Where do you start and what should you prioritize? In this talk, we had aim to set you on a path to improving the security of your ColdFusion Applications.

UX Best Practices in Games and AR, by Coraly Rosario

Designing for games and AR comes with its own set of UX challenges. In this talk, attendees came away with a practical list of UX best practices that anyone on a team can use as a guiding light to create seamless experiences.

Relationships are not for everything, by Dave Ferguson

The majority of systems have some data aspect in them. That could be from something basic to something very elaborate. For most, when starting a system, you go with a select few databases. Why? Well, probably that is because that is what you are used to. Just go with the old tried and true because you know it works. It's not wrong, but maybe there is a different way. Maybe a better way?
Most systems don't need an elaborate, and possibly expensive, relational database. Most can get by just fine with something else. This session is aimed at looking at the different database options that exist. Using that knowledge we can see what database type is more appropriate than others for certain data. We will also look at where using a hybrid of databases makes sense and how that would look to a system. We will also demonstrate the ease of use and power of ColdFusion 2021 when using these alternatives.

CFX_Blockchain, by Mike Brunt

Yes, this is in our ColdFusion past; however C++ and Java are increasing in usage in blockchain as is the need for API interaction, this because of the use of oracles (not necessarily the database, although it could be) and cross-chain bridging. After working on blockchain based projects for the past 2-3 years I showed where the “swiss-army” toolset which ColdFusion gives us, as we move ever more quickly into a blockchain-distributed ledger (DLT) world. Of course I am not suggesting we create a CFX_Blockchain custom tag; however I do feel we can go “back-to-the-future” with ColdFusion. I shared my experience and thoughts on ColdFusion and blockchain in this session, as we rely ever more heavily on outside dependencies.

Faster Apps That Won't Get Crushed With Queues And Pub/Sub Mechanisms, by Brian Klaas

We all want our web apps and APIs to respond quickly and scale to dizzying heights of traffic, but have we really built our apps to scale to ten times, or even double, our current traffic? Asynchronous messaging is a powerful architectural pattern that will help us avoid fundamental problems with scaling while keeping our ColdFusion apps fast and responsive. In this session, we'll look at how systems like Amazon's Simple Queue Service (SQS) and Simple Notification Service (SNS) – along with similar systems from other cloud providers – can help you build highly responsive, highly scalable apps and services. We'll also see how easy it is to talk to these messaging services from your ColdFusion apps with the latest cloud integration features in ColdFusion 2021.

Here's Brians presentation

Migration Migraines: Common pitfalls to avoid when migrating your Adobe ColdFusion stack to AWS, by Brian Bockhold

Migrating your Adobe ColdFusion server infrastructure from on-premise to Amazon Web Services can feel like a massive undertaking. In this session we covered lessons learned from challenges that we faced and explain how we overcome them, preventing unnecessary headaches for you.

Whether you are mid-migration or still in the early planning stages, successfully mastering these challenges will put your organization ahead of the curve by enabling an accelerated plan-to-execution with reduced time needed for troubleshooting design or process issues. So if your goal is to do it right the first time with minimal downtime, workarounds, or delays, please join us!

Day 2

CSS Crash Course for CSS Haters or Novices, by Jessica Keener

This class is intended for a complete novice to CSS, or those who know enough to get by but hate everything about it. We will be covering the basics of CSS (including specificity), using preprocessors, as well as several practical best practices to keep you out of CSS hell. Whether you are mid-migration or still in the early planning stages, successfully mastering these challenges will put your organization ahead of the curve by enabling an accelerated plan-to-execution with reduced time needed for troubleshooting design or process issues. So if your goal is to do it right the first time with minimal downtime, workarounds, or delays, please join us!

How To Be A Cyber Superhero by Strengthening Your Organization’s Security Posture, by Mary Dowd

Be a Cyber Superhero by evangelizing and implementing preventive measures to help thwart cyber criminals in order to keep your customers safe and your organization out of the breach headlines. We covered the most impactful ways to bake security into your applications and infrastructure (even if you’re in the cloud) so that you can spend more resources on developing awesome things and less on refactoring, remediation, or even worse, fines.

New Features and Enhancements in PMT, by Megha Bhat K & Rochelle Hannah

Performance Monitoring Toolset is an application monitoring suite that helps to gain insights on how your applications perform at runtime. This session started by explaining the process of onboarding ColdFusion servers to PMT. Then, they walked us through the major PMT enhancements made in support of CF2021 which includes Cloud Services monitoring like AWS S3, Azure Blob, AWS SQS, AWS SNS, Azure Service Bus, AWS DynamoDB, and NoSQL database i.e., MongoDB. They also covered a few other major enhancements like Authentication in ElasticSearch, SSL support on datastore, having refresh interval, non-request data collection frequency, shard and replica count configurable to the user, option to set request threshold and advanced monitoring which allows selective collection of data for optimization.

Can’t see the wood for the trees – just focus on the logs, by David Tattersall

Logs have been around pretty much since computing began. Logging is more prolific now than ever before – logging is easy, storage is cheap, applications are more complex – which warrants more logs to understand what’s going on – logs are here to stay.

This presentation discussed what companies expect from logs and who benefits from what. We also showed you what components can be used to build a modern, scalable open source log processing architecture.

Finally, we demonstrated how FusionReactor’s new log capture and analytics capability can transform your ability to manage, process and gain immense value from the good old logs.

Using ColdFusion with No Code & GraphQL, by Mark Takata

In the last few years, we’ve seen the rise of the citizen developer leveraging no code and low code solutions to build useful, powerful integrations and tooling. In this talk, Mark focuses on utilizing the popular Airtable online visual database building application combined with a plugin that allows you to expose that site as GraphQL endpoints in building web applications with no need for a database developer or database server architecture.

Taking Jamstack All the Way to Eleven – An introduction to Eleventy, by Ray Camden

Eleventy is quickly becoming one of the more popular ways to get into the Jamstack due to its Node.js foundation and its flexible approach to building web sites. In this session, we talked about how Eleventy works, cover its major features, and cover practical tips on how to go into production with an Eleventy-based web site.

The Apex of Agility: ColdFusion 2021 and Automated Pipelines, by Brian Sappey

Feeling overwhelmed with the mountain of tasks building in your application queue? Are project managers and stakeholders continually asking for updates to satisfy their next Scrum Meeting? You are not alone. The endless rotation of updates and tasks should lead you to one solution, do less, with less. Let me explain.
With the economic shifts and labor shortages, we must adopt a different way of thinking. Through automation, you can challenge the old mantra of, do more, with less, by doing less, with less. This holds especially true with application development. ColdFusion 2021’s architecture has key advantages over previous versions with respect to DevOps and automating your development and build processes.
It’s a fact, automation increases your organization’s resilience and agility. By allowing developers to hyper focus on development and feedback loops, their productivity will undoubtedly increase. This presentation looks to break down the underlying process of CI automation and builds. With live demonstrations, simple coding examples and tutorials on how to configure various toolsets, you will gain a firsthand look at how to accomplish the task of automating your builds. From Groovy scripting to webhooks, you can achieve utopia in your development lifecycles, and be on your way to depleting that queue of applications.

Building the Next Generation of Secure Developers, by Rey Bango

As companies migrate to more resilient cloud infrastructures, threat actors continue to turn their attention to the application landscape as the new entry point for compromising systems.

Despite cyberattacks happening at a pace of every 39 seconds, only 3% of U.S. bachelor's degree graduates have cybersecurity-related skills. While several factors play into this, the most glaring is that faculty just don't know about the security field, leading to gaps between academia and industry. Unfortunately, the gap has gotten wider due to constant changes and growing toolchains in software development.

This is compounded by a consistent lack of employee training in secure coding principles and how it applies to the software development life cycle, causing new entrants into software development to be ill-prepared to build secure systems.

This session delved into:

The growing security challenges developers face today
The current perceptions of “security” within the developer community
The need for secure coding education at the university level
Opportunities for learning secure coding in educational and corporate environments

Liftoff to the AWS Cloud with Adobe ColdFusion 2021, by George Murphy

Have you been thinking and procrastinating about how to launch your stack to the AWS Cloud Platform? If so this is the session for you. George showed how to simply and easily launch Adobe ColdFusion 2021 Enterprise with Ortus Solutions Contentbox 5 or any web application in less than 10 minutes. The tools that we use to accomplish this be Ubuntu Server 20.04 LTS, Nginx, Adobe ColdFusion 2021 Enterprise, Commandbox and AWS Cloudformation to build it. The building of the stack will all be through a GUI. We hope you can join us.

Beyond CFPDF: Adobe APIs to Supercharge Your Document Creation and Processing, by Elishia Dvorak

In this session, we learned about new Adobe Document Services to extend your existing applications and easily create template-based invoices, agreements, letters, and more. We also talked about how to dynamically extract content from any PDF file into JSON format for data analysis, content publishing, or other downstream processing. Two new APIs, Adobe Document Generation API and Adobe PDF Extract API, provide everything you need to supercharge any document workflow and can be implemented quickly using our Java SDK.

Cold Brews: Getting Started with Java in Your ColdFusion Apps, by Matthew Clemente

For ColdFusion developers without a background in Java, the language can be intimidating and its use within applications is ignored or misunderstood. Let's dispel this confusion and deepen our understanding of Java, opening ColdFusion applications up the wealth of features and functionality it provides.

Here's Matthews presentation.

How you can do pixel perfect mobile development using your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript skills, by Mike Hartington

Mobile usage continues to rise globally but building apps natively for all major platforms requires expertise in several very different platforms. Who has time to learn all that? What if there was a way you could use your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript skills, and even the front-end frameworks you like, and build pixel-perfect cross-platform apps? Sounds like a dream, right? What if we told you you could have all that, plus a thriving ecosystem complete with thousands of ready-to-go plugins for all your development needs? How much would you pay? Oh really? What if we told you it was all there, ready for the taking, and it was free? Interested? In this session, I showed you how you can build mobile apps your users will love while staying true to the skills you already have.

Best practices for attending online events

The virtual event will imitate a traditional in-person event with opportunities to interact with speakers and other attendees in a virtual environment on the web, rather than meeting in a physical location.

Register
1. Sign-up with your official email ID
Login
1. Look for our update emails and use the provided credential on the virtual event day
Attend
1. Get access to the virtual event: Presentations, Panel Discussions, Networking Areas, and a lot more

Michaela Light is the host of the CF Alive Podcast and has interviewed more than 100 ColdFusion experts. In each interview, she asks "What Would It Take to make CF more alive this year?" The answers still inspire her to continue to write and interview new speakers.

Michaela has been programming in ColdFusion for more than 20 years. She founded TeraTech in 1989. The company specializes in ColdFusion application development, security and optimization. She has also founded the CFUnited Conference and runs the annual State of the CF Union Survey.