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Michaela Light 1:34
So I think we should move on to PDFs because a lot of enterprises you know, need to produce PDFs, either reports or, you know, other cute PDF stuff. And there's two major enhancements here. First of all, how you can create pixel perfect PDFs, which sound very sexy, particularly if you're producing things like tax forms or other forms that must be absolutely perfect. And then I think you did some under the hood stuff too. So tell us about what the you know, you've got this HTML to PDF version feature
Mark Takata 2:08
All right. So in fact, all of those things are all coming from the same location, which is the new engine that we put in, the old engine that we had in there was really not brought up to date very much, or very often over the years, it had gotten a little bit long in the tooth, it still worked fine for the things that it did. But things like HTML, CSS, they kind of moved on without it. And so it didn't support things like, you know, CSS Grid, or Flexbox, or all of these new features that allow you to really position things exactly the way that you want them. So to make these pixel perfect pages, say that sometimes fast, you needed to do all sorts of stupid web tricks, right? And it was frustrating and annoying. And I was one of those people I made so many reports, I lost track years and years ago. And you know, you had to do these silly little things like add a pixel here. And then why didn't the pixel to make it so that this line lined up? Right? It was just annoying. And to be fair, every reporting system on the planet that I've ever used had this problem. So this was not necessarily anything new. But you know, we felt that we could do better. So this new engine improves all of those things. So now when you output something, it looks the same in the PDF as it looks on your screen in the browser. Pixel Perfect. Oh, I don't hear you.
Michaela Light 3:35
I muted myself, I was shocked, I was so shocked, I had to meet myself. No, but that's great that it can look the same in the browser as as in the PDF, and that makes doing creating PDFs so much easier. Because, yeah, and all your tricks and all your designers to to make it look great. On the webpage,
Mark Takata 3:58
I actually had a really, there was a really neat use case that I saw that I had never thought of and you mentioned tax forms, and government forms and things like that, which are super important. I know, you know, most of the government uses ColdFusion Sure, everyone knows that, you know, Social Security Administration, and NSA, all those guys use it. But this one company was so excited about this feature, because the thing that they do is they actually will get invoices. So you know, people buy stuff from them, they'll get an invoice and the invoice is something went wrong, right? Somebody ordered 20 reams of paper, but the invoice said 21 or whatever. And they had to regenerate the invoice but because it was they did work with the government, they had to alter the the invoice that was coming if or something along those lines, it needed to be exactly the same as the invoice because they had it recorded. And then they were going to add this as a new version. And it had to like match up. So they were able to use this engine to generate an identical pixel perfect copy of the old version with just the change that they needed, the number of the invoices, the price or whatever. And it worked seamlessly out of the box first time, and they were just blown away. I mean, like that was they had been waiting for this forever. They tried like other external PDF generators, and no one else was quite able to do it this way. But here, it's a tag, it's it's enough PDF, you create your HTML, the way you want it to look, boom, it outputs to, to what you need. So yeah, that's, that's a really big deal. It also added a bunch of support for things like you can embed audio and video that's new, and really cool. It doesn't work. If you print it, though, just know. I tried really hard to get him to do that. But, um, and it also supports SVG. Which, as you might know, SVG is scalable, scalable vector graphics. And that, that allows you to have like things like logos, or photographs, or pictures or architectural diagrams, or whatever. And you can scale them to nearly any size. And they're used by a lot of people in a lot of different industries, and we just have not had any kind of support for them at all. Now we do. And again, it's it's about pixel perfection, right? Like, because those are, you know, if you're familiar with vector graphics, they don't have pixels, they describe the size of the lines, the width of the lines, the alignment of the lines to each other, all of that. So you can scale it to the size of a building or, you know, the size of something you'd print on a pen. Yeah, and it should still work across both of them.
Michaela Light 6:44
So those and you still have all the the old tanks for you know, manipulating PDFs merging different files into one PDF or PDF forms or, yeah,
Mark Takata 6:54
So we still support ddx we still support and that's actually a really important thing because that was a question people asked me a lot was, well, wait a minute, is this going to break all of my code? Does it still support it? All that? Yes, it's still supported. Is all of the old tags, we didn't actually change the functionality of the tags. Now, it might look different. If you were doing stupid web tricks to make things align, you may not need those anymore, you may need to refactor back to just the basic HTML that you would want to describe your page. However, if you want to upgrade to 2023, and maybe do the work later, you can actually choose the old engine inside of the administrator if you want to, and still have the so it's not going to just immediately break all of your stuff and make your boss yell at you. You can you can downgrade the engine, use the old one until you've refactored, like your deaths will be running on 2.0. The server could be the production server, it could be 1.0. And then when you're ready, you can move all the code, pop it into 2.0, and then you're off to the races. The other thing that is not well known about this, this new upgrade, as you just heard me mentioned, we didn't change any of the tags. That means we didn't add anything either. And we're using about 50% of the capabilities of this new engine. So we have got a lot of headroom in the future to add and replace things that you know maybe are a little bit old, right? People complain about ddx. ddx is the old life life site or lifecycle engine that allows you to do merging and headers and footers and things like that. So that stuff is a little bit old. Like it doesn't have the support for like new tags, it doesn't have really support for like CSS and things like that. We're talking about maybe replacing some of that in the future or adding mod, we need to figure out how to do it, we don't like breaking old stuff, because Oh, don't break us. We don't want to break compatible, we want to be backwards compatible. But having said that lifecycle is a dead product. It's very old, it's long in the tooth is not even applicable, the tooth is rotted away, it's been so old that nobody else uses it. I think Am forums might might still use it here or there. But to me that feels unfair to the the customer, I feel like we should be updating upgrading him. So my suggestion is hopefully, you'll be able to use the same tags, but just put in the correct CSS. So instead of saying like, you know, bold, true, or whatever the facilities, CSS three commands are our HTML for sorry, HTML three commands, you'll be able to actually like, send it to a stylesheet or whatever and do it that way. I'm hoping at some point we'll be able to get to there and upgraded. That's sort of my internal plans. That's not saying that it's coming out or anything like that. So, but it's something I would like to see. But having said that the improvements that got put in are staggeringly awesome. Like, you will not be disappointed at the output and the quality and the clarity of the new engine. So
Michaela Light 10:14
Excellent. And how did the new engine affect anything else like, you know, the CF search tag with soulless free text search or
Mark Takata 10:23
So the big actually, the really big thing that it affected was, there was some limitations on sizes of files that could be converted. That limitation has gone up by like 100 times or something like that, like I forget what the limit was before but it actually wasn't that day. It was like 100 Meg's, or something like anything above that would overflow some, some register inside of inside of the old engine. That's how old it was. The new one is like 100 gigs or something, don't quote me. But it's some like if I saw a document that big and that you were converting it, I would be scared for your server.
Michaela Light 11:09
Really service in the cloud, you do not have to be scared.
Mark Takata 11:12
That's true, you could just turn the dial then open your wallet. That's fine.
Michaela Light 11:18
That sounds slightly saucy, to be honest. But let's move on to the CF admin. You made those tweaks there. I think in ColdFusion 2023. We
Mark Takata 11:28
Did, we made a somewhat of a small change, but actually a really, really important one. And this one came directly from our customers. So one of the things that people were constantly asking us to do was to add some form of single sign on to the administrator login, right. So as you might know, in 2001, we added the ability to do SAML SSO in your applications, which is great, but the the administrator was still kind of old school, right? Like you would have one password or a couple of passwords and getting it wasn't really good about maintenance long term for all of your hard working admin folks. So these are not the people who are necessarily doing the cold fusion They're the ones who take care of your servers, they take care of your sign in your off, right. So if you, you know, I'm sure because you've been in tech for a long time, these people have the very ugly job of when someone gets fired, going through the password lists and removing people from access to their various computer systems, every time you add a new password list to them, they cry a little bit, because that is one more place that they could forget to, you know, have access. And depending on how that person left, if they have access to your production ColdFusion server, they could do a lot of harm, right. So what this does is it allows you to integrate your ColdFusion Administrator access to SSO or LDAP. Right, so you could use your SAML integration, if you had like Octa or whatever, you could use that. Or you could use LDAP, including groups, which is a nice little feature. And it lets you very pin pointedly allow access to certain parts of the administrator, that was the really, really big addition here that people love. Because maybe you don't want them to have access to your clusters, right? Or to the update, you don't want, you know, your your dev going, Hey, there's an update, I'm gonna run it. Right. Right, that's all server like goes down, or something? I You never know, people might do that. So, um, you know, but maybe you want them to be able to set data
Michaela Light 13:37
Sources for themselves. That's what I was thinking. Yeah. Right.
Mark Takata 13:42
Like it just you could say, this group of, you know, devs, yeah, has access to the data source, manager, production. So really powerful. Like, it's a tiny little feature. It's like a couple of lines in the the thing that the impact this had on companies was huge. Big thank me all the time. They're like, You made my life just easier by letting me just tie this in, because, of course, you're going to remove them from SAML or LDAP, right, whatever you're using internally, I hope you would, and I hope you would write it's part of your process, probably automated, HR might even have a button. And when that happens, it it just cascades down and removes them out of that. So and vice
Michaela Light 14:25
Versa, when you want to add new staff, new developers new DevOps, very easy to they've got automatically got permission they need. Exactly, exactly should be added to a group, that group automatically gets added in there. And that's what I was thinking you'd have a group for developers a group for DevOps, or whatever groups you need. Now, what about when you've got multiple servers? Is there any additional feature in cofee? 2023, when you want to do CF admin on multiple servers or?
Mark Takata 14:54
Yeah, so we added a feature. And it's, it's pretty I'm gonna I'm gonna preface this by saying it's a little bit young. So this, the idea for this came from a multitude of different sources internally, and it was this idea that it's really hard currently, to set up a multiple set of servers from one location, like you can have a cluster and you can have a little bit of control that way. But there wasn't really a way that you could like, take the settings on one server and apply them to another easily. Now, if you're Charlie Earhart, you can, you know, you know exactly where that's copying company and over, you could probably automate that and send some kind of bulk nickel to grab it and throw it into the thing. I don't know, he does magic stuff. But for the rest of us, there wasn't really a tool that we had internally that was set up. So we decided to build this thing called CCS central configuration server. And it runs at the command line, basically, and allows you to control your servers from a central location. So things like you know, setting up a server to be either production or development or staging. So that, you know, you can actually like access that, that variable inside of your code just to set it to the correct settings. You can set things like data sources, remotely, you can set up like your, your JVM arguments, you can copy everything from one server to another. But here's the part that I love. There's a back button. There's an undo, which has never really been Wow, four, there's an Undo. So if you do something and everything blows straight the heck up, you can go back, don't undo and it'll undo it back to its previous state and then start working it so first time that that's been a thing in ColdFusion ever it's my favorite part of that feature. Now having said all that, is super easy to use as Yeah, it we we need to do a little bit better on the developer experience. That's that's the feedback that I've gotten from folks is it's a little bit hard to get spun up, right like To get it running, once it's running, it's seamless, it works great, all of the features were worked wonderfully as they should, it's just that initial getting things in place can be a little bit of a bear similar to like PMT, if you've ever used the, the performance monitoring tool, like getting it off the ground, we could do a little bit better in the developer experience of getting it set up properly. But once it's running, easy peasy. You just go in there, you know, and see what your servers are doing. And it just kind of runs and does its thing. So it's a neat feature. And I highly recommend people look into it, if they aren't running multiple servers. Like if you've got one production box, I mean, probably won't find that much value of it. If you've got multiple staging, multiple production, or even one one production, multiple staging dev boxes, you know, like review boxes, and you want to control them all from one place. It's a it's a godsend people, people love it. So very
Michaela Light 18:10
Cool. So we've gone through all the major new features, but I think there's some other improvements that were made, which we wouldn't call features. And let's look at a few of those. Quickly. What about performance? Because I know in past versions were substantial performance improvements made, how does 2023 Compare in performance to 2021? Or 2018? Or? Yeah,
Mark Takata 16:27
That's a really good question. And it's come up a few times, because early on, it's actually sitting improved, there were improvements made past shipment. So there were some issues of originally, when it first came out, it was a little bit slower. And we've added a lot of features. And a really big thing that and maybe we're going to cover this, but I think it's important to talk about here is 2023 came with a Java update. And it was a really big one. It was it was actually kind of a headache. Java. So Oracle did a bunch of very, very deep complex changes to Java 17. And it broke the living heck, out of a lot of people's code, including C F, we did a lot of work, a lot of late nights getting getting stuff running again, unfortunately, some of those things, I mean, all of them were done for security, basically, people have found ways around some of the reflection stuff that was happening. And so they removed a lot of the reflection stuff, it slowed down a lot of stuff, because often use reflection for performance increases. So we had to go back and do some changes and updates to sort of, you know, mitigate some of those changes, and we got it back to about the same speed as 2021. So today, you go and grab 23, you update it, you run it, it's going to spin up at about the same speed as 2021, which is actually a good thing, because we added a bunch of stuff. It's way more complex, it's more secure. It's using new Java, which technically is slower. So that's actually a win. And in my book, I'm paid to say that but still,
Michaela Light 18:05
Just as a few run out on a different job range. And this is Oracle seven, Java, Java runtime 17. But what about running on J boss on our engine? Yeah, I
Mark Takata 18:17
Can't really speak to that. I mean, it would depend on the engine and probably your code, how much of the stuff that you're, you know, that you're leveraging? And to be to be totally honest, I haven't done that a lot in in 23. Certainly, in older versions, I've I've done that. And it all it all just kind of depends like what your use cases. And of course, it also depends on your like, what are you running it on? Or is it in a container? Is it? Is it running on like a seriously powerful box up in the cloud? Are you throwing a lot at it? Right, like? So. Yeah, there's, there's, there's some questions there. Now, having said all of that, one of the things that we are looking at very, very seriously, and I can't give you any details yet, they definitely don't want to steal my my product managers thunder, she is going to be talking about some of this in DC. And that is performance improvements are big on their high on our list to improve going into cf 24, which is coming out this year. So that's been something that we have kind of buckled down and said, We're going to go back to like speeding things up. Because I think we can do it. We're challenging ourselves, even though there's going to be more stuff added even though it's more complex. We're still in the same Java version. We're gonna do some improvements to to performance. So yeah, we're going back on that every year, right?
Michaela Light 19:41
Yeah, exactly. I look forward to hearing about that at CF Summit in Washington DC, which is what you meant by in DC. Correct? Yes. One of your acronyms. And did you guys have a polite or shouty discussion with Oracle about what the heck they were doing slowing up the outs running on top of their Java runtime engine, so they, you know, they
Mark Takata 20:03
Just they don't, they don't reply to my calls, I
Michaela Light 20:06
Don't know, half an evangelist that interfaces. So take feedback.
Mark Takata 20:11
I think they might have thrown that evangelist volcano at some.
Michaela Light 20:16
Oh, sorry to hear. Well, hopefully, maybe never know, when a volcano, I've
Mark Takata 20:21
Tried to avoid them as much as possible. Yeah, it should be to be totally fair, sometimes things have to be done. Sometimes you just don't have a choice in making changes, you know, like, especially when it has to do with security. Right? It could just it can just be a thing. And every time that we've had to do something to see if, because of security, you know, I cringe I go, you know, we're like, we're like reducing the developer experience, we're making it so that it's, you know, more irksome to use CF in some way. Because some person somewhere behind the computer decided that they could do this thing and hack into people's stuff and be a bad actor, right? And then, you know, our users end up suffering from it. So I get it, I get why they did it. And the problem
Michaela Light 21:09
We need to make these users in Russia or North Korea or wherever they are paying money for the ability to hack those machines. Yeah, should be a tight tie that
Mark Takata 21:20
To my wallet. If you do that, if you could just Yes, a couple pennies here and there from each one will be fine.
Michaela Light 21:25
Yeah. And go. So speaking of security, what got improved in security?
Mark Takata 21:31
So I mentioned a lot of those, those additions. So the big the big one was really SSO, right, we actually so one thing that was a big deal in 2021, was we removed the ability to see logging information. So logs because of a security hole, actually, that was discovered. And that was one of the things that just broke my heart, like I love that feature in CF, and I used it constantly to do my debugging, and we had to remove it and someone found a way to use that. So in 23, we so because of the way the systems changed, we weren't able to put that back with the security pieces in place, because now we actually had the ability to lock people out. Because the changes to the engine. Unfortunately, we're still figuring out how to do it on 21. Without breaking it again, or exposing it again, and I don't know if we'll be able to do it honestly, that the attack was a really egregious one. Yeah, they could do. They did horrible things for yes. I said, Okay. Yeah. So that was, you know, that's a security improvement in some ways, but it's more of a developer experience improvement related to security. And, of course, you can still use SAML SSO, you could still do all of the things that you could in 21. So all those things are still there. We updated a bunch of built in libraries, to the newest version, rid of a lot of those things. And we've had updates to to a number of libraries. And there's another update coming here pretty soon in a month or two or three, something like that, which is going to improve more libraries and improve security more. So we are constantly every few months, trying to limit the exposure of people I know a lot of people talk about, like, oh, Tomcat has this CVE this other CVE this other thing, right? And we're as much as possible and trying to keep up with those things and improving, you know, updating those libraries, getting them in and working. So we're up to I think we're up to 9.9 point 0.7573, something like that don't quote me, that's like the latest one that is in the current update. The next update, I think, pushes us up another, another layer and gets rid of other cities. So yeah, that's it's an ongoing process. Unfortunately, it's not a well, when he three improves this thing or that thing. It's like constant vigilance. It's an absolutely
Michaela Light 24:05
Important key key. I mean, cohesion is one of the most secure language platforms out
Mark Takata 24:10
There. So yeah, and we want to keep it that way. Yeah,
Michaela Light 24:13
We did an analysis of CNET's you know, zero day and other hacking reports and how fusion had the some of the least, problems compared to other languages. So yeah, keep up the good work with the security. And of course, for many enterprise and government clients, that's critical because you really don't want your applications hacked on people getting into your data. Okay, yeah.
Mark Takata 24:41
I mean, it's, it's, it's funny when I talk to these big corpse, these giant destroyed customers, the things they want, our security, stability, backwards compatibility and reliability. They half the time don't even care about all the sexy new features like, Oh, we got this, we have this you have this language feature where this they're like, don't care. Are you? how secure are you? Where are your libraries? How often are you updating? Who do I call this breaks? Like, like so that's it's, it's sort of weird because the you have African excited. Yeah. It's always like, sexy new thing cool, shiny. Look at the Yes. Right.
Michaela Light 25:22
But the reality is, same thing with buying a car if you buy one of those, you know, what's the is it not? I can't think of the brand that comes from Sweden. That's very safe. But yeah, yeah, elbow, if you've got a family, and you don't want them to die if there was a car crash, and you want it to be super well built, but that's not a sexy new feature. Right? You know? And the same thing, you know, do you want to have to repair the car every five minutes? Or do you want it to like be reliable, and start up every day? You know? so forth. So
Mark Takata 25:57
I literally bought a new Subaru specifically because they're incredibly safe and incredibly reliable. There you go. Anyway, it's, it's not sexy. It's not the fastest thing out there. It's not super awesome off road or, you know, yes. All electric or run on fusion power, whatever the crazy new thing is. Old school. It's kind of industrial, it has like a tractor motor in it. But that tractor motor will go for hundreds of 1000s of miles. And, and get decent enough MPG where you know, I don't mind it so much. But you know, it's not even in California. Yeah, well, the cost of the gas is still high, but at least I get a little bit more gas. Yeah, for per mile or less gas per mile.
Michaela Light 26:42
Does Adobe, you mentioned stability was important to Adobe and your customers? Do you have some measure of service stability? How often the server crashes or is measured by someone? There is
Mark Takata 26:56
A really good question. I don't know that we've actually put the metrics out for that. But that could be a really nice thing to put out because that's an important, you know uptime. Yeah, it can be it can be a little unfortunately, the measure of that has so many variables, right. But I think if we set up sort of a, this is what a server looks like to us. And this is how much usage it's getting, how much bandwidth is it's using, and it's up. And number of times, I think we could probably put something like that out. But I will say the stories that I hear about, you know, folks that created really, really high usage utilizations of CF, there was a government organization that needed to put up a, an app in just a few weeks. And it was it was for the entire United States. It was tracking information across all of the population. They ran it on one ColdFusion server for a year. zero downtime. Wow. And I mean, the code was brilliant and super efficient and nicely done. And it was running on a monster server. Right. So they gave it the horsepower it needed. But it didn't need updating. It didn't need rebooting. It didn't have memory leaks. It was just like stone reliable all the way through. And they were impressed with it. I mean, they continue to do work inside of CF after that. It was not so they were not a CF shop before this. They literally became one because they were given a three week deadline to ship this and no one else would say yes, except this guy in the back of the room that knew CF and said I could do it and see if you need to buy me a license. And so they reached that's how we know about it. They reached out and they did it. I can't do details because no no sometimes will think is is a little bit hush hush but but when I hear the story, it's just like, this is this is what CFX really is. It's this really reliable, secure, super fast to develop in your application runs fast. And it's fast. It could be screamingly fast. Yeah. Well, faster, just throw more hardware at it.
Michaela Light 29:11
Yes. Well, you know, I we have an episode and I'll pick it up and stick it in the show notes with Brad word where he compared CFX to various other languages in real world situations, not a Hello World program one line, but like doing database access, and all the other stuff and CFX actually came out, I think it was either first or second and speed. And some languages are really slow when you put real load on them for a real app. So, you know, take a pat on the back.
Mark Takata 29:44
I mean, not not to not to unload on a on a particular language, but a lot of I hear a lot of folks moving to like node, right? And let me tell you, I'm gonna get like thrown out a window for this probably like an identical node app and a Cold Fusion app, the cold fusion app will kick the notes. But, like left and right, because it is single threaded. And if you do not know how to use workers and stuff like it will get blocked and will run very slowly. And it's a it's a problem, because JavaScript is single threaded, at the end of the day. ColdFusion is not it's multi threaded. So if you've got the CPU to handle all those threads, and you code correctly, it's so much faster. And that's just one thing people don't think about when when they're moving over. They're like, Oh, it's, you know, snowed JavaScript super easy. Like, yeah, but we thought about performance, you've got 30,000 people trying to hit it in five minutes. You're gonna blow your server up, it's just gonna die, you know, like, so anyway? Well, I
Michaela Light 30:48
Think the important point is here that comes straight out of the box. You don't need to mess around tweaking around with ColdFusion to get it to support that. It just deals with events dealing with all of memory being cleaned up. And
Mark Takata 31:01
Yeah, no garbage collection is all built in. You've got Yeah, VM doing that for you. Right. So
Michaela Light 31:08
I think people forget this, you know, that that's under the hood. This is doing some sophisticated things to do the multi threading and having things run well and efficiently and talk to even just talking to the SQL database efficiently is another thing, you know, um, well, so now, were there any bug fixes in Adobe? ColdFusion? 2023? Or? I
Mark Takata 31:31
Think there were several 100 I don't think there's ever 100 I'm
Michaela Light 31:35
Impressed. Yeah.
Mark Takata 31:37
Yeah, there were there were several 100. We're, I think we're clocking I don't remember what it was, but it's like half 1000 of them for for the next version. Yeah, we found we've our engineers have been absolutely on fire. The last six months. Like I don't know what they're feeding these boys. But they are just rocking stuff out. You should have seen we had a big bug bash over the over the winter holiday. And these guys were just, I mean, steamrolling through JIRA. It was amazing. I was like wash, I'd like to be asleep. What's going on? Like, it was amazing. So yeah, lots of bugs fixed. Several 100 and more to come. And more bugs get fixed when the updates come also, that's another thing. So when it shipped there, were there were a lot of them fixed. Every update that's come out. There's been at least some bugs fixed. You know, software security updates, obviously. So yes, I don't know, if you want to call Is there a public
Michaela Light 32:37
Bug? Database, people can see what bugs have been fixed or can report bugs. So how does that work? So
Mark Takata 32:45
There is a there's something called tracker. So tracker.adobe.com is a place where you can report bugs. And there are bugs listed for Adobe ColdFusion. There. When you want to check what bugs were fixed, you actually have to go to the Update page on our help x for the particular update. So if you go to like updates for ColdFusion, you'll see the updates that have been there in the past and current one. Yes, they will actually have the bug ID and what was fixed. And all that
Michaela Light 33:13
Amazing, maybe with this incredible Graph QL and other things, you can kind of integrate your internal JIRA bug system with a tracker at Adobe and automatically update it. Wonderful. Yeah,
Mark Takata 33:26
It's, it's it is it is actually integrated into it. Is your it one way? It's not the other way? Yeah, it's one way. And it's also using Angular. Which, yeah, I don't know who in our group actually knows Angular, but it was done this way, years and years ago, because so tracker is actually not just a CFA, it's for multiple products. It was just so yes, I understand. Right. So unfortunately, I think there's only two products left in it that are still valid. I think Robo health and ColdFusion are the only ones like wow was in there. That one's gone. Yeah. Air was in there. That one's gone. Flash was in there and that one's gone. So yeah, we've there's been a lot of talk about updating it, upgrading it, fixing it, improving it. I think right now, what we've done is we've we've set a team on getting in and fixing some of the most egregious things that people are complaining about where like, they're not updating for them, they're not getting emails when updates occur. And some of that, there's there's some things in there that we have to fix. So like to give you an example of why this happens occasionally. Let's say you put in a bug for a particular language feature. I find a different example of it. So we both find it at the same time, which surprisingly happens more often than you would think we both put pugs in. What will happen is Maya Every year bug, whoever was was was the first one will get merged in to the other bug. That merge removes the active state of that particular bug. But it doesn't send you something that says this was merged with someone else's thing. Oh, doesn't have that feature. That's not a thing. That's, that's built into it. So what ends up happening is if yours was the one that was merged, you'll come back and go, where's my bug?
Michaela Light 35:29
Ah, what
Mark Takata 35:30
the hell? Where to go?
Michaela Light 35:31
What's this app written in?
Mark Takata 35:33
Right? Yeah, what the hell is this written it right? This is terrible. And it's frustrating, because then you're like, Well, what the hell happened? And then, you know, usually what could happen is, then you'll email me, I'll look it up, I'll find the old one, because it keeps the stub of it. And it'll say, marched into this one. And that wouldn't send you the link, because I have to do that manually. This app
Michaela Light 35:55
Needs refactoring, fracturing or rewriting in ColdFusion 2023. I would recommend God to refactor it to Oh, sure, it needs refactoring as well. Yeah, you know, you don't have to write, like, you know, actually, yes, I have several bottles of aspirin that I've taken due to Jura. So I mean, it's full of useful features. It's just to be like Microsoft Word, they just kind of pack too much in and didn't kind of re clean it up. And,
Mark Takata 36:24
And you know, we're doing it's mostly usable. Yes, yeah, things go horribly wrong to easily at it.
Michaela Light 36:31
Now let's, let's talk a little bit about the annual release cycle. Because not everyone listening may realize the cold fusion has switched to an annual release cycle was announced last year, I think. Kishore shared that information in a podcast with us sounds where that was publicly announced. And so that means we're going to have a cold fusion 2024 coffees in 2025 2026, and so on. We don't know an exact date of the release, because it depends on when the code is ready to ship, you're not going to ship it early, just to meet an arbitrary marketing date. I'm gonna ask a random guess based on all prior releases that prior to CF summit in Las Vegas, in October, I'm expecting either will have been released, all the features will be well known. Correct?
Mark Takata 37:21
Yeah. In fact, I can pretty much guarantee or there will be a lot of yelling from the evangelist at a particular team. Internally, we will have cf 24. At the summit four or five customers to take a look at and fingers crossed, we will announce the the beta there and you'll be able to sign up. That's soon as my house is in April, right? This no I'm sorry. This is in this is in Vegas in in October or September. Yeah. Later later this year. Yeah. Yeah. So late, late later this year, in early fall, whatever that would be late summer, early fall, when we're in Vegas, we will actually have you know, we'll have a booth will have cf 24 running on it, you'll be able to play with new features, take a look at it, talk to the engineers about the new stuff out there and try it out. And then hopefully, we'll open up the beta for people to come in, and then really try it out and try it and play with it. That's my that's my definitely that definitely a beta. I'm still like, we need to be ready to have the beta build. Right? So if that happens, it'll happen. I hope so. Because that's pretty late in the year. You know, occasionally stupid stuff happens this new. Well, no, but you know, everything else being equal? Yeah, we'll have that. So yeah, we're releasing yearly. And, you know, from
Michaela Light 38:52
Why was that? Why, what's the benefit of having yearly releases for fusion developers and see, it
Mark Takata 39:00
Allows us to keep up with with changing tech, you know, that's the thing that's been that's just been going faster and faster and faster, is every single year, I feel almost like every single month, there's some new technology, there's some new framework, there's some new way of doing things and new pattern, something that affects ColdFusion developers, and having a new version every year allows us to actually, like be reactive, and in some cases, proactive in providing, you know, those features to folks. It's just really important now, you know, it sucks for the development team, because good lord, this guy's working really hard to try and make make the deadline. I mean, they got half the time
Michaela Light 39:47
Of the lesson half the time some release cycles were two and a half years. Yes. So
Mark Takata 39:51
So it's been pretty, it's been pretty rough on them. But you know, we've also improved a lot of our internal processes, we've made everyone efficient. And you know, they're there. It's going to be a great release. Like, I'm really excited about about 24 coming out, it's going to be, it's going to be great. And yeah, that's really the big thing. I mean, a great example here is AI. Right? And not to say that weren't necessarily publicly
Michaela Light 40:20
Exist until January of last year, right? And then it right snowballed throughout the year, it is now now a critical feature to have access to and you can access that from cold fusion, as some of your talks have shown. So
Mark Takata 40:36
Yeah, so So I just read something outrageous 77% of the companies out there are using AI in some way, up from 0% in 2021. Born adults and the adoption curve has been vertical, basically, I mean, it's been a totally wild ride. So not everything is like that. Obviously, AI is a little bit wild Westy right now and crazy. But we felt like a two year release cycle was just not providing the value and the agility that we need it to service our customers out there. Yeah, makes sense. Yeah, it just it just kind of it just kind of makes sense to to have everyone out there. And of course, Kishore likes it because he's got something new to talk about every year. Well, marketing people in marketing, so I could joke, a joke about it, because I'm, I'm part of his
Michaela Light 41:34
Team, you have a foot in each each boat marketing and development. I do. So now let's wrap up by asking, you know, what is 2024? Why are you proud to use ColdFusion? Mark,
Mark Takata 41:47
You know, cold fusion is responsible for my entire career. Like it was the first language that I really, that I really learned, it was the first language that I used professionally. And it made me the person that I am today. And I learned 13 Other languages since then. And I have professional experience in all of those. But I always go back to ColdFusion every single time, if I need to do something, even if it's another another language, which drove my other bosses crazy. I actually was a C sharp developer at UC Davis for a little while I was in a group that just did C sharp development, I did my prototypes of cold fusion. Because I could prototype something, get it in front of users and get feedback on the actual experience of workflow in hours or days versus days or weeks in C Sharp. And even my manager was like, because the first time I did it, he goes, What are you doing? Why are you Why is this in ColdFusion? And I'd be like, because it's ready. Yeah, right. Like you're seeing the app, like, go ahead and use the app. It's real. It works. He's like, holy crap. I told you to do this, like two days ago. I was like, yeah, exactly. That's what ColdFusion does. Now. Unfortunately, I couldn't get him to then be like, well, maybe we should all develop cold fusion because I was the only person there that knew it. And so he's like, Well, you know, because he actually copped to the fact he was like, he's like, Okay, I will admit, this is an amazingly fast development. Like I like he couldn't do that in C Sharp as fast as I could do it, and CF, however, then he made a good point, if I left, which I was going to present as a contractor, they would all then have to learn CF. And he made the same argument for Python, because we actually I built a, I started building and then another friend of mine, a contractor came in and built a Python text importer, because Python superfast, they actually refactor it back into C sharp because nobody there knew Python. So which to me is just like, well, you guys should be polyglots. Right? Why don't you all learn multiple languages, but that's not I think
Michaela Light 43:52
Everyone should know at least two or three languages just because you buy even if you're not going to code in them every day, it gives you insights into how languages work. You know,
Mark Takata 44:01
It's Thank you. I agree with you. 100%. I think that's, that's totally true. And I continue to learn new ones as often as I can. It's fun.
Michaela Light 44:10
It's fun, sometimes it's useful. Sometimes it gives you insight. And in your position as the ColdFusion tech evangelist, it gives you like ideas for cool things that could be added to ColdFusion. So
Mark Takata 44:21
Well, it helps talk to teams that are doing other things, like I'll come into a group that's doing C sharp, or Python or PHP or whatever. And often, they'd be like, well, this is like, we don't know what you're talking about. But I do. I've developed huge applications and all of those languages in the past, I know what I'm doing and all of them and I prefer ColdFusion. And here's why. So they actually can respect that. So yeah, it's a that's that's kind of what that's where that's where I come from, you know, I'm proud to to do it and the community is so amazing. Like it is just every time I interact with the community It's just like, I don't know, it's rainbows and unicorns and puppies and ice cream, and sprinkles. Like, it's just everyone is so happy and, and supportive, and you know, like, we're trying to grow. And that's something that I wanted to mention too. You know, you're one of the amazing people who continues to hold CF alive things you have, it's not dead. Right? And I am watching from my sort of unique perch as it is, it's really growing, it really is like, it's there. There's more jobs in ColdFusion than I think ever before, or at least in at least a decade. Right. There's, there's I actually saw there was one of those, you know, like hack, like, learn how to hack, learn how to code, things that came out. In ColdFusion, it was a CFML, when they had 40 Something lessons in CFML. I had nothing to do with it. I was blown away. When I saw this. I said, Who the heck is doing this? This is amazing. And I went in there. And sure enough, you could go and you could take a course and learn, like how to how to program in in in CFML. I had not right. Yeah, I had not done anything about that. So just by itself organically. It's growing, people are becoming interested in it. I run several, like startup and programming meetups here in town, I run one that's like a social for all the different programming groups in Sacramento, where I live. And I'm having junior developers for the very first time come up to me and be like, tell me about cold fusion, I keep hearing about cold fusion, and you're like the cold fusion guy, like, what is it? Why should I learn it? Should I learn it? Right? And this is the usually I had to like, but my way into those conversations like, Hey, have you ever considered cold fusion? Right? They're coming to me, for the first time ever, like it's actually kind of happening. So it's really a wonderful thing. Yeah, it's, it's, it's I kind of feel like, I don't know if we're gonna have a Python moment or not. But you know, Python is older than CF. That's something that a lot of people don't know. They're like, Oh, I like modern languages, like Python. I'm like, I thought ah, it right. But it had a renaissance because of data science, and, and all of that, right. Um, and I feel like that same sort of thing is happening with ColdFusion. People want simpler, more efficient ecosystems development. And CF is that it really is it's easy to pick up if you know JavaScript, you're 80% of the way there. Like I can grab a JavaScript developer off the street and have him doing CFML at a couple of weeks and pushing Is that
Michaela Light 47:39
Something you do in Sacramento drive around grabbing JavaScript developers off
Mark Takata 47:43
The street? I do I have a I have a lasso. In my new Subaru, right, that's why I got a moonroof so that I could like, pull them in. Well, pretty much any full stack developer knows JavaScript. Right? And that's, that's the amazing thing. And yeah, that's another that's another thing people are like, oh, yeah, I heard about that. It's got these weird tags and stuff. And I'm, like, fair, okay, we do have the weird tags. But we also have CF script, which is a fully modern, like, it looks like JavaScript folks like, and on top of that, by the way, just code in Java if you want. So, if you have a Java shop, your Java devs can come over and do a little bit of Java inside of the CF, and it just compiles down to the same stuff. So yeah, it's super flexible. I don't need to tell you, you know, these things, you
Michaela Light 48:36
Need to tell the audience. So now, what would it take to make cold fusion even more alive this
Mark Takata 48:42
Year? Yeah, we,
Michaela Light 48:44
It's a great thing to bear. But is there anything else anyone listening could do? Or? Yeah,
Mark Takata 48:48
I mean, I think I think if you've never tried cold fusion, try it. That would be a big thing. And if you want to learn how reach out I'm super, super reachable, to talk about how you can get a hold of me. But I've got tons and tons and tons of great learning like free resources to learn cold fusion, and really just kind of go out and look at our resources, take a look at the community and see what we're doing. Because there's a lot of really wonderful things that people are doing with CF. I mean, the whole US government runs on CF, a lot of huge companies run on CF like it's it's a little bit of a hidden gem to steal something from from from from Charlie, but it really is it's it's this sort of under under the radar language that's been around forever. And is fully modern, but you don't really hear about it because the people who use it most are not allowed to talk about it. So I think talking about it is the really the first step go out there and do a talk on it at your local meetup. Right. If you're a CF Dev, maybe skipped it or one night with the family and go and do a meet up, meet your local dev folks and tell them about how cool CF is As I mean, I do. That's what I do I my JavaScript meetup I always sneak in every few months, I sneak in a CF talk, right? I'll use, I'll use the, you know, I'm doing an htm X Talk or I'm doing a talk on Alpine. But what am I? What's the back end? It's CF every single time. And I should have them all that code and I show them how easy and quick it is. And every single time you see those light those eyes light up, right? They're like, Oh, I could figure out how to do that. That's super cool. That's super easy, right? And then they ask, How do I get? How do I get it running? Where do I go to? And I'm like,
Michaela Light 50:36
Let me get to some info. Yes, it gets you on
Mark Takata 50:39
That. And education too, I think is the other side of it. And that's something big that we're working on. I think a few there's going to be a few big announcements at at Summit in DC watch for those that are going to sort of change a lot of the ways that people learn how to use cold fusion. So lots of exciting things, kind of on the docket here. That we're just we're buttoning up and getting ready to announce so yeah. Are you going to be in DC? Are we going to make it up?
Michaela Light 51:10
I'm not this year now. I don't think. But I'll try and make it to one of the events. The into the box events happening in DC this year as well. So the RMA. So you got to, I think, see if some it's April 24. I want to say we're we're making up the box, I want to say is the sixth seventh eighth of May a so if you're in the area, that's a lot of confusion to goodness to receive. But speaking of CF Summit East, in Washington, DC is what are you looking forward to this year?
Mark Takata 51:47
Oh boy. So that's one of my. So I love both of the seven. It's for different reasons. Of course, Vegas is just kind of a circus. And I'm a circus freak. So hey, you know, truth in advertising. But what I love about DC is it's it's a smaller event. And it's just really sort of an intimate chance for developers to knit. Without all of the hubbub and craziness and gambling and smoking and whatever, crazy stuff that goes on in Vegas, which you just can't escape no matter where you are, where you're at. It's such a big venue there, DC is small, and there's less of us there. But we're also in this kind of like tight, tight group, we actually have our own conference center, like it's just us this year, there's no other people going on. It's a very small space, we're in the headquarters of one of our partners. There, they've got a full conference facility, and they're just giving it up for us this year. So it's going to be super cool. Yeah, we're not we're not at a convention center, or hotel or anything like that. So there's no distractions, you can just hang out, you know, that the person standing next to you is someone who is in cold fusion, you know, for sure. And they're, that really drives this openness about being able to just talk about stuff, right? You can, it reminds me a lot when I go to gaming conventions. I'm a gamer, clearly, I've mentioned it like 10 times. But when I go to gaming conventions, I love it because I could go there and I know if I say something totally off the cuff about damn low or, or, or Wow, or one of those, the person is likely to know what I'm talking about. And that's a whole other way of thinking it's the same way in DC that person next to you will probably know whatever trouble you're having with, you know, serialization speeds, or whatever it is that you're having issues. And maybe they haven't solved it right, you can actually get information from them, you maybe can work together on a project or whatever it happens to be. And if you're in government, which a lot of those people are, the person standing next to you is probably also in government. And that's another thing, those people are often siloed the people in government don't get to talk to each other very often. Here, we're giving them an opportunity to do that. And I love love, love to see that it's a way of building community that really doesn't exist nearly anywhere else. So that's really my main thing, just getting to see people and be with them in that space. And, you know,
Michaela Light 54:16
I think it's well worth going to what's the cost on Adobe CF Summit East?
Mark Takata 54:21
It's pretty high. Yeah, that's the only problem. It's $0.00. Wow.
Michaela Light 54:27
Totally free. And you can see in Washington DC is actually in Washington DC or it's in
Mark Takata 54:34
it's a little south. It's in a Ralston rested. Maybe rested Virginia. Yeah. So that's on the metro. So I think it's on the metro. It's super close to the airport.
Michaela Light 54:48
It's last that's another advantage.
Mark Takata 54:50
It's very close. Yeah, so there are and by the way, there's there's a couple of things happening right next to each other. So on the 23rd There's a certificate training. So if you are interested in becoming a certified Adobe Professional in cold fusion, you can take take the day long class and then try your luck at the end of it, if you want to do it, I would suggest if you've never done cold fusion, you're probably not going to pass. Just throw that out there because a couple people have tried that. And I'm like, do you do this is a real certification, you got to know what you're doing. And you probably should be pretty good at object oriented programming to just throw that out there. But that class is Rockstar, we've got Brian sabay teaching that class? Uh huh. Yeah, he's one of the best instructors really on the planet, one of the he's a great guy, one of the premier developers period out there. And so that's, I mean, that's worth the price of admission there. So that class is $99, which again, for a full day class plus certification,
Michaela Light 55:52
That's a dirty s on a deal. And that includes breakfast and lunch, too. It also includes about 24 hours videos, you can watch it before you do the certification. So yes, the day you're there to, you know, you'll get training and you can ask as many questions as you want. And, and then you can take the test. And so and we do cute logo to stick on your LinkedIn profile. You
Mark Takata 56:18
Also you get access to those videos for a year after that as well. So I want to go back and just, you know, refresh things and figure out oh, yeah, how did you do this thing? It'll actually be there. So yeah, I highly recommend that one. So that one's 99. The actual summit itself on the 24th is free, and also includes breakfast and lunch. So a
Michaela Light 56:42
Heck of a deal free and a free lunch.
Mark Takata 56:46
They say there's no such thing as a free lunch, but sorry, it's free. Yeah, it's included. So yeah. Wow. It's an
Michaela Light 56:55
Action probably will be people hanging out at local watering holes afterwards is my guess.
Mark Takata 57:00
I were hoping I do not know that event. We are. We're planning one. I don't know that. Yes, exactly. decided where we're going to do it because there's a few spots in Reston that we could go and and Yeah. But yeah, there will be plenty of opportunities to network. That's guaranteed for sure. Lots of great talks, we've got wonderful talks lined up from from folks in two tracks for the for the full day. So definitely worth it. We've got Chavi do so she is our, our product manager for cold fusion. And she will be talking about all cool new stuff that they're working on stuff that's going to be coming out in 2024. And getting some feedback and information from the crowd. So if you want to help build ColdFusion and make it awesome, you can go there and talk to Harvey. So she would love to hear from you. Excellent.
Michaela Light 57:57
So really appreciate you coming on the show and telling us so much about Adobe ColdFusion 2020 3d. It's quite amazing how much is in there. I didn't even know everything that was added in until you told us so. And I've been reading articles on it for you know, 18 months. At happy to help a no, yes. Now if people want to find you online, what's the best way or ways to do that.
Mark Takata 58:27
So the easiest places to get a hold of me honestly, are the two best places that I'm always at our LinkedIn. So there's there should be a LinkedIn link that I posted to you or they can just search for Mark Takata pretty easy to spell and I'm the only one at Adobe with that MAs and the other place that I'm at constantly is the CFML slack so that's that's a place that I'm sort of always on especially in the Adobe channel if you ever need to DM me or whatever both of those ring my phone so please don't puffer me today. I'm know something is literally on fire. But I probably will hit her thing that early and I have for some folks. But yeah, those are those are the two main places. And then of course my email Takata adobe.com happy to get email from everyone and anyone about whatever you have questions on, you know if I need to connect you to somebody internally to answer I'm happy to do that. So yeah, those are my my main ones. I'm also on Instagram, but it's mostly pictures of like my dog and me running, which nobody wants to see.
Michaela Light 59:39
All right. Very cool. Well, really appreciate you coming back onto the show Mark and I wish you the best of luck with your talk at the CF summit online that's happening right now and at CF Summit East in Washington. Well in Reston, Virginia, just outside Washington, DC. So thanks so much.
Mark Takata 59:59
Awesome. Thank you for having me it's been a pleasure seeing you again and being on here and happy to come on as often as you want me on here
