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.

Related: Adobe ColdFusion Summit West 2019 (Full Report)

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

1. ColdFusion Roadmap and New Features coming in Next Release
2. Top ColdFusion Features and Benefits
3. API Development and Management
4. Performance Tuning and Management
5. 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.

Related: Adobe ColdFusion 2020 Roadmap (Multi-cloud, micro-services and more), with Ashish Garg

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

1. For developers, they get to know about important scenarios and what all metrics could come to their rescue in such situations.
2. 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.”

Related: Adobe ColdFusion Comprehensive Guide (More Powerful, More Modernized, More Alive)

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

With the 2018 ColdFusion and CFML conference season heading to a close, we now travel to India! Bengaluru, India to be precise. India is home to some of the world’s foremost experts in Adobe ColdFusion and the ACF engineering team. This would be an absolutely phenomenal opportunity for any of those available to go. Also… it’s free to register!

In this mini-series, we will bring to light some of the topics at CF Summit India 2018 . Our first article will focus on ColdFusion Workflow and Document Management. Kailash Bihani will present this topic. Although some may find it to be relatively basic or introductory, there should be no gravity lost in just how important this really is.

CIOs or those aspiring to be should pay careful attention to what can be gained through the study of workflow and document management. Thankfully, Adobe ColdFusion is a top-notch platform for this.

“On the business side, we are really comfortable, we are very happy where it is. And that gives us you know like added incentive and possibly a little bit of headroom for us to kind of sit back and say, ‘You know like can we do something really big? Can we do something adventurous?’”- Tridib Roy Chowdhury, General Manager and Senior Director of Products at Adobe Systems

From CF Alive episode, “065 The Future of ColdFusion (it is Bright) with Tridib Roy Chowdhury“

What You Need to Know as CIO

Workflow and Document Management: What is it?

Workflow management is nothing new. As a matter of fact, even automated workflow systems have been around for decades. Let’s examine in detail what it is and why it matters to successful organizations.

According to PNMSoft,

“Workflow is the definition, execution, and automation of business processes where tasks, information or documents are passed from one participant to another for action, according to a set of procedural rules.”

You can picture a proper workflow operating like a clock.

The Hour Hand (The Business End)

Workflow is designed to make sure that all systems, personnel, and components work together efficiently to produce viable and positive business results.

The Minute Hand (The Bottom Line)

It is designed to help you:

• Save Money

• Process Transparency

• Improve Accountability

• Raise Customer Satisfaction

• Improve Productivity

• Get Results Faster

The Second Hand (The Manager’s Perspective)

The second hand represents the manager’s perspective as this is the non-stop action of your company. It ticks through all of these variables portrayed through the hour and minute hands. Yet, the primary focus is those of the most immediate. Get the best results faster and cheaper.

Document Management

Document Management is an integral part of the workflow. Yet, it is its own beast and should be handled as such. So, what is document management then?

Document management as defined via AIIM is:

“How your Organization Stores, Manages and Tracks its Electronic Documents”

AIIM stands for the Association for Information and Image Management. They are a global community of information specialists. If anybody is going to know about workflow and document management… it’s these guys.

AIIM conducted a survey titled The Digital Office: Improving The Way We Work. This survey was focused on all the issues that embody document management including filing, sharing, and approving documents.

What did the findings reveal?

This survey was taken among 204 active members of AIIM.

• 71% share via the network drive
• 56% have an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) or SharePoint system, but staff primarily use file-share day-to-day.
• 55% do make use of shared folders for support documents.
• 48% feel their users aren’t given an easy choice of where to file things.
• 40% percent want a simpler way to sign contracts, etc., with customers.
• 35% use open documents to collect input during meetings.
• 32% agree the need to extend approvals capability to mobile devices.
• 31% feel that their ECM or SharePoint systems are too cumbersome.
• 22% use automated circulation of meeting agendas and minutes.
• 15% share via a cloud file share

Document and Digital Disruption

Technology is ever-changing. And by doing so, it is changing the modern working environment.

Successful organizations need to move more and more to full digitization.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And nowadays it can be easy to accomplish. Why? One word.

Millennials.

According to many older generations (particularly the baby boomers), millennials are the most entitled generation. They are often portrayed as lazy and constantly complaining. Even if this were true, would these characteristics make for a poor worker in technological and IT fields?

Hell no. Here’s why.

They’re lazy and complain. That’s right. You heard correctly. What some see as negative may be construed entirely different. You see, a lot of Millennials put into practice the whole “work smarter, not harder” concept. This may seem like laziness, but in reality can be a much more efficient way of getting work done. And the complaining… well, they don’t like to just sit back and get steamrolled by anything.

This means that they are more susceptible to change that will empower vice being stuck in old, outdated ways. Heck, it’s difficult to get some boomers to change from a dot-AOL account–let alone a fully automated document and workflow management system. And yes, they will complain. Complain to make their lives easier… which includes introducing more efficient and effective office policies.

Now contrary to popular belief, the baby boomer (and other subsequent) generations are not going to be running the workforce forever. These millennials will soon be the new leaders of IT. And that means change.

In order for this to happen though, we need outreach. Instead of rejecting our new successors, perhaps we should encourage them more to get involved with our ColdFusion communities.

“To make ColdFusion more alive, I wish it gets included in the academic courses at schools and universities.”- Uma Ghotikar, Web application developer at ICF

From CF Alive episode, “077 Fundamentals of Unit Testing, BDD and Mocking (using TestBox and MockBox) with Uma Ghotikar“

The Biggest Challenge for Workflow and Document Management

There are many numbers of small hiccups that could stand in the way of workflow and document change. These could include:

• Office Policy
• Allocated Funds for Change
• Legacy Infrastructure
• Stubbornness to Change

But the number one challenge for workflow and document management change is… the technology itself. Or the rate at which it changes. As I’ve stated earlier, technology is ever-changing. And it’s changing so much more rapidly than we could have ever imagined. So trying to keep pace with tech is proving to be exceedingly difficult. This is an issue that doesn’t seem fully solvable as of now. Yet, that does not mean we shouldn’t be vigilant in our pursuits though.

For Aspiring CIOs

In today’s world, a CIO is more than just a senior technologist. Today’s CIO is also a savvy strategic leader capable of running a proper and effective workplace.

This is why it is so important for those looking to fill a role as CIO to understand workflow. There are two major areas that you can focus on to help your understanding of not only workflow and document management but leadership as well.

Vision and Innovation

This is a crucial lesson for prospective CIOs. Here you should take a step back and try to obtain a holistic view of the company. By doing this and thinking forward, you can stay a leg up on your competition. Embrace your new vision and support it with creativity and innovation. Let’s take an example from one of the greatest innovators of our time. Steve Jobs.

Do you know why Steve Jobs chose the name Apple? Sure, it’s a snappy and catchy name. It’s easy to recognize and hard to get out of your head. But he chose it also because it came before his major competitor in the phone book. Atari.

See, he had the vision to pull ahead of his competitor through his aggressive business move. And he had the innovation to achieve it.

Board Level Knowledge

If you want to be one the top dogs, you gotta think like one. Having guts and creativity can get you places. But having the right knowledge can keep you there. Part of that knowledge as a CIO is workflow and document management. No doubt about that. With proper workflow, you can not only relay your business efficiency to your employees and customers but to the rest of the C-suite as well.

How can I Improve my Workflow and Document Management?

There are three areas of focus for improving your workflow and document management.

1. Learning
   1. By increasing your knowledge of workflow, you can start to utilize its intricacies. Workflow and document management can be a bit tricky at times. Through education, you can start cutting through the tricky parts and start building your system.
2. Automation
   1. Maintaining every step of a manual workflow management system can be rather vexing and taxing at times. But with the use of automation tools including ColdFusion, you can more effectively make sure every aspect of your system is carried out correctly.
3. Get the Right Tools for the Job
   1. Just as you wouldn’t use a fish to hammer in a nail, you wouldn’t want an old rank and file system for your complex work management needs. For your document management needs, you need to get yourself a great system that can support all your document needs. Luckily for us… We have ColdFusion.

“I think the first time I used ColdFusion was in my college days, and this was way back long time back. So I started using ColdFusion there. At that time, I realized how easy it was.”- Kishore Balakrishnan, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Adobe

From CF Alive episode, “058 All about the Adobe CF Summit East 2018 ColdFusion with Kishore Balakrishnan“

CF Tech Talk

ColdFusion supports a wide array of documents and has many functions you can use to manipulate them as see fit.

Documents Supported by Adobe ColdFusion

From PDF to XML to spreadsheets, ColdFusion can handle it all. But what’s probably more important are some of the document conversion and manipulations that can be handled by CF. Here are just some of the conversions ColdFusion can do straight out of the box:

• PPT to PDF
• PPT to HTML
• HTML to PPT
• Word to PDF
• Excel to Query
• Query to Excel
• Excel to HTML
• HTML to PDF

CF Tags

Let’s take a look at some of the CF Document Management Tags as defined by Adobe.

• cfspreadsheet

  • Manages Excel spreadsheet files:
    • Reads a sheet from a spreadsheet file and stores it in a ColdFusion spreadsheet object, query, CSV string, or HTML string.
    • Writes single sheet to a new XLS file from a query, ColdFusion spreadsheet object, or CSV string variable.
    • Add a sheet an existing XLS file.

• cfhtmltopdf

  • <cfhtmltopdf> creates high quality PDF output from a text block containing CFML and HTML using the PDF Service Manager.The WebKit implementation for <cfhtmltopdf> is referred as PDFG (acronym of PDF Generator) which is shipped as part of the Jetty installer. The component running inside the Jetty  server is referred as the service manager, which takes request for PDF conversion from one or many ColdFusion server/s.

• cfpdf

  • Use the cfpdf tag to read an existing PDF, write metadata to it, merge PDFs together, delete pages, create thumbnails of the pages, extract text and images, add or remove watermarks, electronically sign or unsign documents, sanitize and redact PDF contents for better security, and safeguard the PDFs with a password.

• cfpresentation

  • Defines the look of a dynamic slide presentation and determines whether to write the presentation files to disk. The cfpresentation tag is the parent tag for one or more cfpresentationslide tags, where you define the content for the presentation, and the cfpresenter tags, which provide information about the people presenting the slides.

• cfpdfform

  • Manipulates existing forms created in Adobe Acrobat and Adobe LiveCycle Designer. The following list describes some of the tasks you can perform with the cfpdfform tag:
    • Embed an interactive form created in Acrobat LiveCycle in a PDF document. You use the cfpdfform tag to embed the PDF form in a cfdocument tag.
    • Render an existing form created in Acrobat or LiveCycle. This includes prefilling fields from a database or an XML data file and processing form data from an HTTP post or PDF submission.
    • Extract or prefill values in stored PDF forms and save the output to a file or use it to update a data source.

• cfdocument

  • Creates PDF or FlashPaper output from a text block containing CFML and HTML.

CFpdf Deep Dive

In Kailash Bihani’s CF Summit India talk, he will perform a deep dive into one of ColdFusion’s most pivotal CF tag for document management –cfpdf.  This is a powerful workflow and document management tag and some of its functions include:

• Merge several PDF documents into one PDF document.
• Delete pages from a PDF document.
• Merge pages from one or more PDF documents and generate a new PDF document.
• Linearize PDF documents for faster web display.
• Remove interactivity from forms created in Acrobat to generate flat PDF documents.
• Encrypt and add password protection to PDF documents.
• Generate thumbnail images from PDF documents or pages.
• Add or remove watermarks from PDF documents or pages.
• Retrieve information associated with a PDF document, such as the software used to generate the file or the author, and set information for a PDF document, such as the title, author and keywords.
• Create PDF portfolios
• Add and remove header/footer from PDF documents
• Optimize PDF documents

This deep dive will also include discussion on redaction, sanitation, and digital signatures and forms.

All in all, this session gives each and everyone of us what we need most. A review of fundamentals. Fundamentals which can help to create a better workflow and document management system for your company.

Kailash Bihani

Kailash Bihani, a Software Engineer in the Adobe ColdFusion team. Kailash responsibilities for ColdFusion features include Security, HTMLtoPDF, Websockets, and Mobile. When he has free time, he is either working on AR technologies or taking a trek somewhere in India.

This article is inspired by the hardworking Adobe CF team members who are giving sessions at the upcoming CF India Summit. Many sessions will be given on new features and
advancements that they have worked so hard to implement into Adobe ColdFusion
and CFML. These newest advancements in our platform and language make me ask:. How can we keep up with all this tech change?

Have you ever looked towards the future curious to what may be in store?

Of course. We all have.

As a matter of fact, looking ahead to future advancements is a driving force of human
nature as a whole. Without foresight, there would be no wheel, calendar, or
mathematics. Certainly, computers and associated software could not exist.

In a 1968 book titled Toward the Year 2018, a group of
12 technological experts sat down in a think tank to hash out their predictions
for the year 2018.

Now, as you can imagine, some of these ideas have not happened.
For example, anti-gravity belts and man-made hurricanes are still figments of
our own imaginations–unless we’re talking about Spanx and global warming. But
others… well, they’re pretty spot on.

3D televisions are now available at retail stores worldwide. Picture telephones
have become a reality with programs such as Skype and Facebook. And text
messaging has become so commonplace that is it slowly taking over as the
primary form of communication between individuals. But one prediction from Toward the Year 2018 affects us as IT professionals and CIOs more than anything.

The Internet.

Since the release of this book, the pace at which our technology has expanded has been
next to immeasurable. New systems and products are released every day in a hope
to make our world bigger, faster, and stronger.

And we as CF developers are right in the thick of it all.

Looking ahead to the 2018 CF India Summit, I noticed something rather interesting on the schedule. The docket is full of sessions on upgrades, new features, and version news. These
advances may seem just like common patches or simple fixes to us. But they are
much more than that. They are a symptom of a problem known as Tech
Info Overload.

Yes. Tech evolution can be a problem. But only if you let it.

“Putting broadband communications, picture telephones,
and instant computerized retrieval in the hands of such an organization is like
feeding pastry to a fat man. It is ‘much too optimistic' to assume that these
same technologies would entail the ability to use them wisely. Applying
technology, like all human efforts bears bittersweet fruits.”

-Andrew
Oettinger, Harvard Scientist

The truth of the matter is this:

The advancement of technologies is a double-edged sword.

On one side, new breakthroughs can help us to be more secure, efficient, and
productive.

But on the flip side… They can cause you hang ups and setbacks.

Normally, these setbacks are not caused by the tech itself. They are essentially caused
by the failure of us to adapt to the changes. If we decide to stay outdated to
current technologies, we will get left behind. Plain and simple.

This is particularly true for the IT industry. Can you imagine
if your business was still running Windows 3.1 and executing old DOS commands
to run shareware? Or if you were still collecting AOL CD-ROMs trying to get
that newest version? (To be honest, I kinda miss that old dial-up connect sound sometimes…) Point is that you would have been left behind. Just a blip on the radar and no more.

Related: State-of-the-Art Tools That Keep ColdFusion Alive

We know what we need to do to though. Stay up to date. Yet, this is much easier said
than done.

Even the most tech savvy of us will fall behind. And that’s ok to an extent. It’s not
our faults necessarily. Technology is just changing at an unprecedented rate.
It may seem like each and every day, we need to change just to stay current.

Let’s take a look at 3 MAJOR changes to Adobe ColdFusion in just the past 5 years alone.

1. Cloud computing

Five years ago if you would have asked me about the cloud, my answer would be hazy at
best. Sure, we all understood the importance and the impact that it would
eventually make. It was only used in limited applications. But nowadays… cloud
computing is the norm. It’s become the new paradigm shift like that of the
Virtual Machines of the 1990s.

There are 4 primary choices of hosting.

1. Shared Hosting

2. Managed Servers

3. Dedicated Machines

4. Cloud hosting

As of now, the most popular choice of hosting is in-house hosting. Yet, the current trend seems to be moving towards the cloud. To put this all in an easy to understand metaphor:

Shared hosting is like a hostel dormitory. You share a room with all the other people. If someone gets drunk and throws up on the bunk bed, you have a problem. A managed server is like an apartment complex where there are other apartments but they are walled off from each other. A dedicated machine is like having a detached house – you have to furnish it and fix the faucet when it leaks. Still some work, but you don’t have to worry about your bed being vomited on. Cloud hosting is like having a virtual dedicated house – one that you can instantly clone for more space when a horde of out of town guests arrive.

The cloud and cloud technologies are also lending a hand to one of CF’s hottest new advancements. Containerization.

Platforms such as Docker can increase your CF computing abilities through:

• Speeding up the App Building Process for New Developers
• Integrating Modern Methodologies and Automate Development Pipelines
• Infinitely Scaling your Apps in the Cloud
• Providing an Integrated Security Framework

Building modernized apps is a crucial task for the future. Here soon legacy CF apps will be rendered near useless with the growth of both CF and integrated technologies.

According to John Marcante, CIO of Vanguard, the cloud is a force to be reckoned with. He states, “The growth of cloud computing services has fueled the global economy, produced new ways of working and enabled companies to capitalize on global markets. For startups all over the world, cloud computing has been a catalyst, powering them with the low cost, distributed, resilient, compute utility they need to innovate.”

Related: 011 Portable CFML with Cloud deployments, Microservices and REST with Jon Clausen

2. The Evolution of Agile Methodologies

In February 2001, The Agile Manifesto was created. According to the authors, they did not agree about much. Agile methodologies were still largely undefined at that moment. Yet,
this group of 17 authors came together around 4 basic principles:

1.   Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
2.   Working software over comprehensive documentation
3.   Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
4.   Responding to change over following a plan

An agile process normally consists of five separate stages. This cycle will then repeat itself
until project completion.

1.  The Plan

2.  The Design

3.  Development

4.  Implementation

5.  Evaluation

This particular sequence becomes exceedingly useful in software development. Especially when it comes to testing. Using a modern testing environment is critical to software engineering  (and keeping CF alive).

Use portable testing environments — such as CF Builder— as well. The benefit to using portable environments is making the reuse of the development environment configuration much easier.

The lack of a mature testing environment can lead to absolute chaos during the run-up to deploying new code. Agile testing plans include many different types of testing avenues including TDD and more notably BDD.

Another way to increase your agility when it comes to testing is to take full advantage of automation. But…

According to the 2018 State of the CF Union, 44% of CFers polled do not automate or use CI deployment tools. If you are not automating your builds, you are missing out on saving time and improving your deployment and testing process.

However, for those who use CI tools, Jenkins seems to be the most popular tool of choice.

Related: 077 Fundamentals of Unit Testing, BDD and Mocking (using
TestBox and MockBox) with Uma Ghotikar

Agility lends much to your company as well. It no longer benefits strictly the
development team allowing for:

• Increased Flexibility

• Increased Transparency

• Increased Productivity

• Minimizing of Missed Goals

• Higher Quality Projects

• Increased Client Satisfaction and Engagement

Tom Soderstrom, IT Chief Technology Officer for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, believes these changes in DevOps are the possibly the biggest changes we have been experiencing recently.

“The way we handle development is the biggest change. Today, we iterate very quickly and develop minimum viable products to measure the user response as quickly as possible. We use Agile development and incorporate developments from others, so we can change direction with little impact.”

-Tom Soderstrom

Related: Is Control Better than Speed for your ColdFusion Apps?

3. ColdFusion: Champion of IoT and Blockchain?

IoT or “Internet of Things” is one of the newest up and coming forces of the tech
world. But what actually is it?

As defined by Wikipedia,

The Internet of things (IoT) is the network of devices, vehicles, and home appliances that contain electronics, software, actuators, and connectivity which allows these things to connect, interact and exchange data.

To put this in layman’s terms…

You probably have some smart objects. We have desktop computers, laptops, smartphones, even smartwatches. But a smart lamp? Or just a smart light bulb?

Let’s call these lamps and light bulbs “dumb” objects. Now, what if we could take these dumb things and make them smart? How neat would that be?

But as many of you know, this is already happening. Through technologies such as Amazon Alexa and Echo devices or Apple HomeKit, modern homes are being transformed into those found only in science fiction novels.

This concept is the Internet of Things. And we as CF developers are playing a part in its creation.

At the 2017 CFCamp in Munich, Evagoras Charalambous gave a presentation on the foundation of using ColdFusion to build Alexa skills. He focused first on defining your app on the Amazon Development Portal. Next, he discussed how to make the skill talk to your ColdFusion code. He provided a sample CF project for the user to take away and use to develop their own app.

This was not the end of IoT in ColdFusion however. The topic stuck like like glue and made another major showing at this year’s 2018 CF Summit in Las Vegas. This time Mike Callahan covered everything from consuming utterances, intents, and slots. Attendees also walked away with a custom framework and all the information needed to start constructing Alexa skills.

Related: CF Summit 2018: Adobe ColdFusion 2018 and Amazon Alexa
Skills

However, this IoT is not without its issues. The key among these being cybersecurity
issues. Some believe that these can be alleviated via Blockchain.

A blockchain is a growing list of records, called blocks, which are linked using
cryptography. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a
timestamp, and transaction data. Once designed for the protection of cryptocurrency in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto, blockchains have since evolved. Newer blockchains are now used for a
myriad of applications particularly the IoT. Just remember there is no silver
bullet for IoT issues, but blockchains do offer hope.

But why use blockchain with CF? How is that relevant?

Mike Brunt breaks down blockchains in one of my podcasts. One of his biggest reasons for using blockchain with CF is that Blockchain uses RESTful API technology. As we all know (or should for that matter), building RESTful APIs is a breeze with ColdFusion– particularly when using Ortus Solution’s ColdBox MVC.

Related: CF Camp 2018: Madness in Munich Part Two- Building APIs with CFFractal & ColdBox

Related: 082 ColdFusion and the Blockchain Revolution with Mike
Brunt

Why is Tech Changing So Fast and How I can Keep Up?

The growth and capacity of digital devices are just bonkers. In a previous world-changing industrial revolution, growth was measured on an arithmetic scale. A scale that shows a constant linear growth. Yet, the digital era is breaking traditional laws. Growth can only be fathomed on geometric scales. On these scales, the constant factor is no longer added year after year. Instead, the factor is now multiplied! In order to even show this progress linearly, logarithmic functions must be incorporated.

This digital revolution is not only surpassing traditional laws but creating new ones. Moore’s Law illustrates the effects of technical progress of microprocessors. Moore’s Law is named after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore.

As you can see, tech is not moving one step at a time. It is moving in leaps and bounds.
But why?

This can be explained by three separate conditions.

1. Advancements are taking place at different speeds particularly in
   hardware and software development. This creates gaps between new components and
   older ones. These gaps need to be overcome somehow. So… this leads to the
   development of new concepts of modularization, substitution, and adaptation techniques.
2. Sometimes, the invention of something so innovative–such as
   lasers and microprocessors– leads to the development of many more uses. The
   development is actually consumer driven. People always want bigger and better things.
3. The third condition relies heavily on the previous two. Due to the
   stimulated growth from the first two conditions, any new product entered into
   the world today must anticipate the world it will be released in. That’s why
   each new smartphone or computer is always top of the line. The most basic of
   tech 5 years from now will be very close to the supercomputers of today.

Needless to say… keeping literal pace is actually impossible.

But that does mean we can’t stay up to date. We just need to realize what needs to be
prioritized.

Priority Upgrades for CIOs

With so many changes and upgrades available, how do you even know where to begin?

Check out this survey conducted by TechTarget. They polled nearly 300 IT professionals– including CIOs and IT chiefs– regarding the IT Priorities of 2018.

These are just some recommendation priorities from other IT pros, but they are pretty good rules to follow.

Funny thing is that this also applies specifically to our wants and desires as CF developers. When polling CF’ers prior to the release of CF 2018, Rakshith Naresh found that 71% of everyone polled wanted NETWORK PERFORMANCE UPGRADES.

When they applied these changes in the release of CF2018, many of these performance upgrades were implemented through IT AUTOMATION–i.e. The Auto Security Lockdown feature and Performance Monitoring Toolkit.

Related: 042 Revealing the ColdFusion 2018 Roadmap details with Rakshith Naresh

Security was not mentioned directly on this list though. Security, however, is often worked into the other priorities as you can clearly see with ColdFusion 2018. So, keeping your network up to date actually will help prevent security concerns. This is important as security threats often evolve just as fast as the tech they affect.

What’s Next?

The real question now is:

What’s next?

In all reality, we have no way of knowing. Perhaps, a true AI lies just around the corner in wait. Maybe a grand unified programming language?

Either way, how are we supposed to keep up with it?

There’s only one could answer to that question. We do the best we can.

As previously stated, this article drew inspiration from the many different new features and upgrades that will be showcased at the CF India Summit. These include:

• Geek Out with the Smart Language Additions in
  ColdFusion 2018
• Speakers:

• Vijay Mohan: Vijay works with Adobe ColdFusion Engineering group as a Computer
  Scientist. His focus area is ColdFusion Language components. He holds B.E in
  Computer Science & Engineering. He has good experience working on
  Java/J2EE, Javascript, JSF, Oracle techstack
  (ADF, Oracle DB) , Rest, SOAP, Hibernate,
  Spring, MySQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, Spring
  StateMachine etc. He likes to delve deeper into various techstacks and explore what's new. He is an avid reader and active
  technology blogger. He takes deep interest brainstorming over design and
  architecture of software components. At leisure, he likes traveling, badminton and music.

• 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 to
  distributed systems, query engines, data stores, Big Data, Compilers. During
  his free time he enjoys playing sports(Cricket/Baddy/Volley etc), sometimes
  listening to light music and reading experiences on Quora.

• Making Your Applications Fast and Furious with
  the New Performance Monitoring Toolset in CF 2018!

• Speakers:

• 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.

• Mayur Jain: Mayur
  works with Adobe ColdFusion Engineering team, as Computer Scientist. His focus
  areas are Web Services (REST & SOAP), PDF and Spreadsheet components of
  ColdFusion. He is also involved in design
  and development of ColdFusion API Manager. Mayur enjoys exploring latest development in the field of Programming
  Languages and Machine Learning. He holds B.Tech in Computer Science and
  Engineering.

• Developer Insight into Why Applications Run Amazingly Fast in CF 2018

• Speakers:

• Venkata Pavan Kumar Sannisetty: S V Pavan Kumar currently works as a developer
  at Adobe and contributes to ColdFusion. He loves to develop new features &
  securing the things. He looks after many aspects of ColdFusion such as
  Security, Session Management, Net Protocols (HTTP,
  FTP etc.) & many more. He also
  contributed to many features of API Manager for providing security to the
  published API's. In free time he loves to read fiction and play cricket or
  table tennis.

• Speed Up Your Programming With All New Adobe ColdFusion Builder 2018

• Speakers:

• Poonam Jain: Poonam has been working with Adobe for 6 years. She has worked across teams such as ColdFusion, which
  she is currently part of, and Acrobat. Her area of expertise is developing web applications and automation.
  Despite being a working mother to a 3-year-old
  daughter, she finds time to nurture her creative skills. She is an avid yoga follower as well.