CF Camp 2019 Full Report (Slides, Interviews, Everything CFML and Lucee)

What is CF Camp

CF Camp 2019 Slides and Presentations

Day one, morning in the Freising, near Munich Germany. Lots of familiar faces, and lots of new ones. That's why CF Camp is so great. (among other reasons…) As Matt Gifford said,

I LOVE @cf_camp. I say this every year, but it really does feel like a family reunion. #cfml #coldfusion

— Matt Gifford (@coldfumonkeh) October 16, 2019

Michi Hnat gave the introductory talk about CF Camp and it's 8th year. Lots of cools stuff has happened and more is expected.

A very cool thing organizers did this year is speakers booth.

Lucee 5.4 & 6 by Gert Franz and Michael Offner-Streit

Gert was born in 1967 and lives in Switzerland since 1997. Back in the late eighties he studied astrophysics in Munich but switched to later IT as a profession and programmed for several companies in the past as a database administrator and system analyst.

Michael found his way into the information technology during the dot-com hype. He started Railo as a diploma project where he was supposed to write a compiler for translating CFML into CFXD. In late 2014 Michael left the Railo project. A few months later he started the Lucee project as a fork of the Railo LGPL code.

The presentation isn't available yet.

Automated Database Migrations with CFMigrations by Eric Peterson

cfmigrations is a tool to describe database changes and version them with your application code.

Find out how cfmigrations can help you tame your database.

Eric Peterson is a CFML and javascript developer at Ortus Solutions (ColdBox, CommandBox, etc.). He is a prolific module developer and the creator of projects like qb, Quick, and ColdBox Elixir. 

You can find the presentation here

Flutter for Web: Beautiful Apps and Websites with a Single Codebase by Miguel Beltran and Lara Martín

Flutter is a portable UI toolkit for building beautiful, natively-compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase.

Find out  how you can use Flutter to build mobile applications and websites with a single codebase.

Miguel Beltran is a Freelance Consultant specialized in mobile development for Android and Flutter. He has been working in tech for more than a decade developing products for remote international teams.

Lara is a self-made Android developer based in Berlin. Her passion for Android made her transition from her background in science to software development. Her dream is to make apps more accessible for everyone.

You can find the presentation here

Preside in the wild, 2019 by Alex Skinner

Preside, the Open Source CFML application development platform, is a growing platform and community powering a wide array of applications; from large CMS driven membership website, to intranets, mailing list software and stand alone APIs.

In this talk, Alex Skinner, CEO of the Pixl8 Group from London, gave us a tour of what is possible to build with this exciting platform.

Alex is the co-founder of Pixl8 Group – a London-based creative technical consultancy and digital products business with a wide reach into the membership sector.

The presentation aren't available yet.

An in-depth introduction to Vue.js by Matt Gifford

Vue.js has proven itself to be an incredibly easy to learn yet powerful front-end reactive JavaScript framework.

Explore how to iterate over data, how to build a component, how to nest components (and why you would want to), using the Vue router to navigate around your application, and using Vuex for data persistence.

Matt Gifford is owner and primary primate at his own development consultancy company, monkehWorks Ltd. His work primarily focuses on building mobile apps and ColdFusion development.

You can find the presentation here

Practical Lessons Learned from 250+ Legacy CFML Projects by Jorge Reyes

Legacy Land is not a nice place to be and moving away from it requires courage, commitment and shear willpower.

However, in this session, you could learn valuable practical lessons around Legacy Projects, practical lessons, when put into practice, can help increase the chances of project success. 

Jorge is a passionate Industrial Engineer born in El Salvador with 9 years of experience managing projects. He currently manages web development projects for Ortus Solutions, Corp.

The presentation isn't available yet.

Deploying and Testing your sites with Bitbucket by Mark Drew

In this talk, Mark Drew was talking about how we have been using Bitbucket pipelines, Docker, CodeceptJS, TestBox and other tools to get our full suite of tests and assurances that our sites are up after each deployment.

Mark has been programming CFML since 1996, and even though he has had forays into Perl, ASP and PHP he is still loving every line of code he has crafted with CFML.

The presentation aren't available yet.

Testing My Non-ColdBox Site With TestBox by Nolan Erck

Ever had this thought? “Sure, TestBox looks great, but I built a bunch of web apps that aren’t based on ColdBox. How do I test those?”

Answer: The same way! TestBox is an entirely stand-alone product! It in no way requires that your apps be ColdBox based — TestBox really is a tool available for all CFML developers!

In this talk, Nolan showed how easy it is to install and configure TestBox.

Nolan Erck has been developing software for 21 years. Starting in the video game industry working on titles for Maxis and LucasArts, then advancing to web development in 1999, his list of credits includes Grim Fandango, StarWars Rogue Squadron, SimPark, SimSafari as well as high-traffic websites for a variety of clients.

The presentation isn't available yet.

CFConfig – a new way to manage your CF Engine config by Brad Wood

In this talk, Brad was talking about a new library that’s the answer you’ve been looking for if you’ve ever wanted to script out the complete setup of a server without manually copying XML files around.

CFConfig is a command line library that is built on top of CommandBox so it can be run anywhere by hand or as part of an automated script. 

Brad has been programming ColdFusion for 12 years and has used every version of CF since 4.5. 

He enjoys configuring and performance tuning high-availability Windows and Linux ColdFusion environments as well as SQL Server.

You can find the presentation here

Testing – How Vital and How Easy to use by Uma Ghotikar

She showed us the basics of writing unit tests using TestBox and MockBox framework. We were looking into the demo examples that cover xUnit and BDD style of testing in TestBox.

Uma enjoys coding especially the back-end application development and learning new technical skills.

You can find the presentation here

A Comedy of Errors … in Web App Security by Rob Dudley

A lighthearted look at the serious business of modern web application security, with life lessons those who got it really wrong! 

Rob is a software developer, CTO, company co-founder and has spent his professional life growing applications beyond their initial designs often with limited resources and budget

You can find the presentation here

Multi-language / multi-OS communication using RabbitMQ by Wil de Bruin

He was explaining how they tried to automate the various workflows by using a messaging system such as RabbitMQ for communication between our cfml based customer control panel and these services.

In 1994 he founded Site4U BV, at that time a company specializing in software development and web design. One of his first application was to find Dutch ISPs at local area rates written in PHP/Mini SQL, but soon he discovered this kind of interactive websites could easier be built with DBML using Cold Fusion by Allaire.

Download the presentation here

Asynchronous and synchronous code. There and back again. by Maciej Treder

This session covered in-depth the asynchronous JavaScript code execution (with the event loop explanation) and its drawbacks.

Maciej is a Senior Software Development Engineer at Akamai Technologies. 

You can find the presentation here

Distributing Teams: No Kid-ing! By Gert Franz and Mark Drew

The session covered the journey of how to take successful and well running one-man show into an equally successful remote team spread across the world.

The presentation isn't available yet.

Hardware connectivity on the progressive web by Majid Hajian

In this session, Majid was going through some of the web capabilities to connect devices into a progressive web app and show how the web could go beyond the browsers and take control of our devices around us.

A software developer at heart, Majid is passionate about web platform especially hardware connectivity and performance and in particular Progressive Web Apps.

You can find the presentation here

A REST API in under 5 minutes with Preside by Seb Duggan

In this talk, he demonstrated how, with just a few lines of code, you can expose your Preside data layer to the world via a REST API with the following features out of the box:

• basic authentication
• automatic Swagger documentation
• data queues for users to subscribe to data changes

He built his first website in 1994 and started getting paid for developing for the web soon afterwards. He discovered CFML in 1998, and have never looked back…

You can find the presentation here

But doesn’t everyone on the Internet speak English? by Jen Doherty

In this talk, Jen introduced different localization and internationalization techniques relevant for a CFML-based tech stack. 

Jen is the internationalization coordinator for Cupid Media, an international online dating company. en manages a team of 20 freelance localizers and coordinates the translation duties of 7 bilingual customer service staff.

Jen’s team mainly works with CFML, Java, Javascript, and Kotlin.

The presentation is here

Building secure applications by Joel Stobart

Joel introduced how application be attacked to leak information, to destroy the information you do have, or to prevent access to your application, and how can services be affected, and how can we develop software better, to mitigate the risks.

Presentation highlights:

• Intercommunication Encryption

• Auditing, Logging and Monitoring vs. Privacy

• Firewalls

• Access Controls

• Securing dependencies

He is a CFML, Java, Spring Boot, REACT and Angular developer, CTOs and Software Engineer.

The presentation isn't available yet.

End to End Testing of Coldfusion Applications using Test Cafe by Francisco Mancardi

The talk content:

-a Brief refresh of one of well known patterns used on Test Automation: the Page Object Model

-why Test Cafe is the choice vs cypress vs selenium

-design and setup of the test governance process using Open Source solutions

-adding Test Automation to your CI chain using Gitlab and docker

Francisco Mancardi is electronics engineer. +30 years of experience in software development, networking, development languages experiences.

The presentation aren't available yet.

The trials and tribulations of moving to Linux as a developer by Kai König

In this talk, Kai talked about and explained the pros and cons of a move to Linux. Starting from hardware and distribution choices to very specific development and infrastructure challenges.

Kai is one of the co-founders of and works as Software Solutions Architect for Ventego Creative Ltd, he's also the CTO of Zen Ex Machina, a recently launched startup in the fields of digital & user experience consultancy.

You can find the presentation here

How To Design With Your User’s Needs & Expectations In Mind by Eleftheria Batsou

She presented general rules of thumb and mostly apply any web and mobile application with some exceptions.

She focused on mobile/web applications rather than on physical products.

Eleftheria is an App Developer and freelancing as a designer and a content creator.

The presentation isn't available yet.

Go passwordless with FIDO2 by Rob Dudley

Rob is a software developer, CTO, company co-founder and has spent his professional life growing applications beyond their initial designs.

You can find the presentation here

Mouseless Development in vi-mode by Miguel Beltran

In this talk, he introduced Vim and modal editing, basic actions, cursor movements, how to configure Vim for your needs, and some of the tricks that helped learn and fall in love with it.

Miguel Beltran is a Freelance Consultant specialized in mobile development for Android and Flutter.

The presentation isn't available yet.

Squeezing performance of a Lucee application using FusionReactor by Dom Watson

Dominic introduced how he discovered seemingly minor changes in Pixl8’s core platform stack that made some drastic improvements to performance. 

Presentation highlights:

• Micro optimization
• Getting to the bottom of hard to debug problems
• Improving overall problems in your applications

Dominic trained as a Musical Theatre actor before embarking on a career in London's westend. Fortunately, this folly was cut short by an overtaking love of all things programming that led to a decisive career change building web applications.

The presentation aren't available yet.

Design Patterns: Common Solutions to Common Problems by Brad Wood

This presentation covered some of the most common design patterns along with examples and their pros and cons with examples in CFML.

You can find the presentation here

Comparing Monitoring Solutions for CF and Lucee by Charlie Arehart

In this session, Charlie introduced several monitoring alternatives, and which are available for various releases of CF and Lucee. He identified several goals (problems to be solved or features one may seek) and then identified if and how each different solution meets each goal.

A veteran server troubleshooter who's worked in enterprise IT for more than three decades, Charlie Arehart is a longtime community contributor who as an independent consultant provides short-term, remote, on-demand troubleshooting/tuning assistance for organizations of all sizes and experience levels.

The presentation isn't available yet.

Comparing Monitoring Solutions for CF and Lucee by Charlie ArehartWhy the Firefox DevTools are not as bad as you might think (and why Firebug had to die) by Sebastian Zartner

In the talk, Sebastian introduced the history around Firebug and the Firefox DevTools. 

Also, he outlined some of the important features the Firefox DevTools have making them unique over Firebug and also the Chrome DevTools including hidden features.

Sebastian was one of the main Firebug contributors. He started web development at the time between PHP 3 and 4. 

Though since he learned about ColdFusion back in the time when MX 6 was the latest, he loved to work with it.

The presentation aren't available yet.

Who are the CF camp sponsors

1. Adobe

2. DistroKid

3. Lucee

4. Pixl8

5. elastic

6. FusionReactor

7. Ortus Solutions

8. TUXEDO Computers

9. U2D

10. Bokowsky + Laymann

11. CONTENS

12. TeraTech

13. Kondoku

 

Beside CFCamp there are also several interesting events, like the CFAcademy, trainings sessions (i.e. Coldbox), product presentations and so on.

Organizers' goal is to reach every level of programmer, starting with 101 sessions on many topics and going right up to pro skills.

Evening event

The Famous Code Masters game show with 2 teams. They  have CFML related questions with Mark Drew and Rob Dudley hosting. It is a lot of fun! You get to enjoy watching CF experts sharing their knowledge with the rest of the attendees and offering a lot of positive energy during the evening. Now, I don't drink beer, but for those of you that do, prepare… It's very good, real German beer.

Two teams, EU Vs. US, Guust Nieuwenhuis and Matt Gifford Vs. Charlie Arehart and Nolan Erck. It was a lot of fun. Spice Boys (EU team) was defending their title from the last year.

Every year CF Camp has been a fantastic event, including a pre conference dinner and a party at the first evening of the event and it was great. That's probably why the next day takes a while to get up to full speed… 🙂

 

Related: CF Camp 2018: Madness in Munich full report

Video recordings of the sessions

Each year, all the video recordings of the Sessions are available. Attendees of CFCamp get an individual link and get them for free. If you haven't got your code already, send them an email.

For all the others there's a small fee. It's understandable, and you should invest in your knowledge, don't be shy.

The videos can all be found and purchased here: videos.2018.cfcamp.org

To give you an impression of what you get, here are the two keynotes from Adobe and Lucee:

Adobe keynote:

 

Lucee keynote:

Join the CF Alive revolution

Discover how we can all make CF more alive, modern and secure this year. Join other ColdFusion developers and managers in the CF Alive Inner Circle today.

• Get early access to the CF Alive book and videos
• Be part of a new movement for improving CF's perception in the world.
• Contribute to the CF Alive revolution
• Connect with other CF developers and managers
• There is no cost to membership.