Into The Box 2021 conference starts today! Even better, it is happening LIVE, at Houston, Texas. All ye who are not able to make it there, ZOOM is the way to go.

So, do not wait, and go the conference!

Register here

About the event

“Your mission, if you choose to accept it, will be to conquer planets BoxTrek and BoxWars. Throughout this journey you will surpass challenges, gain knowledge, and achieve the unimaginable.
Do not fret, Pioneers will guide you on this trek and they’ll be by your side.”

The event goes for two days, and on both days you get to choose between two rooms: BoxTrek and BoxWars. Yes, it is hard to choose, but do not despair, since there will be recordings for all attendees.

The official website for Into The Box

Speakers and agenda

Day 1, Thursday, September 23rd

09:00 AM – 09:50 AM
Ortus Keynote 2021

The Ortus Keynote gives you insight into Ortus Solutions, the past, present and future. You'll meet the members of Team Ortus, community members, speakers and sponsors. We'll tell you a story about CFML, which we think you will want to hear, and learn what Ortus and the community is doing for CFML and the future of CFML. You will get updates on an array of Ortus *Box products, including recent releases & upcoming plans and features in our roadmaps. We will finish with Ortus's plans for the future… as well as remind you of a driving force behind all things Ortus.

 

10:00 AM – 10:50 PM

cbwire: ColdBox + Livewire, by Grant Copley

Introducing cbwire: a ColdBox module that makes building reactive, dynamic, and modern interfaces delightfully easy without leaving the comfort of CFML and with little-to-no JavaScript.

Room: BoxTrek

Up with ContentBox 5 to the cloud, by George Murphy

We will show you how to bring up ContentBox 5 multi-site on Windows & Linux. You can literally be up and running with a few clicks. Have you ever felt that this just takes too long? Come to this session and we will show you how to get going very quickly. target audience: Beginner to intermediate.

Room: BoxWars

11:00 AM – 11:50 AM

Reducing the Carbon Footprint of your Website, by Bill Garoutte

We'll take a look at how they do and explore some techniques to get on the path to carbon neutrality. On the way we'll explore alternate formats for images and icons, optimized CSS resources and reigning in bandwidth usage. It turns out that going green also results in more performant websites with faster load times!

Room: BoxTrek

WebSockets 201 : A Deep Dive on Design and Debugging Techniques, by Giancarlo Gomez

So you know what WebSockets are and how to configure them for your application, but now what? Building on the foundation of WebSockets 101, I will take a deep dive into designing and debugging a WebSocket application. You will learn how to leverage listeners for your channels, handle authentication and how to view all your connections. I will review how to use browser Web Developer Tools as well as a simple drop in WebSocket Console App to debug your apps. We will discuss how to keep your connections alive thru various states of your app using AdvancedSocket and how you can connect to your ColdFusion WebSocket server from other client apps. Follow me on this live coding adventure, as we further our knowledge of what we can do with WebSockets!

Room: BoxWars

01:00 PM – 01:50 PM

Scheduling Tasks The Human Way!, by Brad Wood

We'll learning about the new features of the AsyncManager for scheduling thread executions. You can use this feature in ColdBox apps as well as standalone CacheBox, WireBox, and LogBox use cases.

Room: BoxTrek

Telling Stories with Data, by Edgardo Cabezas

Practical Introduction on Data Analytics and how it can transform your company (or your client's company) having a better look on historic data using PowerBi

Room: BoxWars

02:00 PM – 02:50 PM

Tame your Logs and Error Reporting with Stachebox, by Jon Clausen

Ditch high-priced SaaS options or complex standalone applications and take control of your error logging. New to the Ortus stack in 2020, StacheBox integrates with and harnesses the power of the ELK ( Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana ) stack to simplify and consolidate logging for CFML back-ends and Javascript UIs.

Room: BoxTrek

Systems Thinking for Software Developers, by Seth Stone

In this talk we'll examine how Systems Thinking principles can be used to evaluate our own mental models and ultimately increase our ability to solve complex problems. By thinking more systematically we can uncover innovative solutions that add real value to the organizations we're a part of.

Room: BoxWars

03:00 PM – 03:50 PM

It's Alive! Giving life to static UI, by Sonia Menendez and Esme Acevedo

In this session we will discuss different type of animation patterns and how to implement those in an application, to give it life. We will demonstrate how small touches of animation, with the use of CSS and SVG graphics, can enhance the user experience.

Room: BoxTrek

Testing A to Z, by John Farrar

Testing is not everything. We will not be able to foresee every challenge or prevent every issue. Certainly it should be more than nothing. It should be more than a feeling. Steve Blank says, “There are no facts inside the building so get outside.” This principle should be practiced in testing. It worked on my machine is not sufficient. We will be discussing many testing mindsets, the tools that help us put those mindsets into action, the types of testing, and how to choose testing balance that works for your team, company and project. We will briefly touch on TestBox… but that is only a small part of testing options. Here are the tools we will present during our talk.

• Cypress
• Jest
• Lighthouse
• Postman ( Newman )
• TestBox

The types of testing we will be discussing during the talk:

• A/B Testing
• End to End Testing
• Integration Testing
• Load Testing
• Performance Testing
• Test Driven Development
• Unit Testing
• User Acceptance Testing

Room: BoxWars

04:05 PM – 04:55 PM

Using Testbox to refactor old code, by Dan Card

As much as the need for full code coverage and writing your code a certain way to make it testable is discussed, if you have thousands of lines of code in dozens or hundreds of files, the idea of having any code coverage at all might seem daunting and beyond feasibility. In this session, we will start with a page of code that needs to be refactored how we can use Testbox to simply run functions in isolation. This has the immediate benefit of being able to test whether a function is working as expected without having to navigate through the front end of your app to get to a particular state. After running the function in isolation, we will write a few tests on the code “as is” and then start to refactor it using Testbox to slowly build up our code coverage. Along the way, we will look at some refactoring techniques and also concept of mocking.

Room: BoxTrek

Migrating from Docker to Kubernetes, by Adolfo Delorenzo

Most of the ColdFusion people are likely still using Docker or Swarm, however the market has made a wholesale shift to Kubernetes, which can be a daunting change. With Portainer we make the transition far simpler, and allow for any existing people/technology investment in Docker to be reused against Kubernetes. I will demo how to deploy the Ortus Solutions software, which is designed for Docker, in a Kubernetes environment, and I will also show how easy it is to get a production-grade Kubernetes environment setup with Ubuntu MicroK8s. This wont be a 101 presentation, it will be more a 201 type of demo, designed for people that want to make the switch to Kubernetes.

Room: BoxWars

05:05 PM – 05:55 PM

PostgreSQL – the db you didn’t know you needed, by Scott Steinbeck

In this session, we will go over all the amazing possibilities possible with postgres, from joins, partitions, JSONB, partial indexes, CTE’s, lateral joins, spatial queries with PostGIS, automatic REST API's, various extensions, and more. Postgres has adapted itself to have many of the great features included in competing database solutions all while staying free and open source.

Room: BoxTrek

What's in your Dev Backpack (Postman, Webhook.site, ngrok), by Daniel Garcia

I will give an overview of each of the three items, talk about how you can get started using them and why they are useful, show examples, and then open the discussion to see if anyone has other tools they can recommend.

Room: BoxWars

Day 2, Friday, September 24th

09:00 AM – 09:50 AM

Ortus Keynote 2021 Day 2

The Ortus Keynote gives you insight into Ortus Solutions, the past, present and future. You'll meet the members of Team Ortus, community members, speakers and sponsors. We'll tell you a story about CFML, which we think you will want to hear, and learn what Ortus and the community is doing for CFML and the future of CFML. You will get updates on an array of Ortus *Box products, including recent releases & upcoming plans and features in our roadmaps. We will finish with Ortus's plans for the future… as well as remind you of a driving force behind all things Ortus.

10:00 AM – 10:50 PM

GeoSpatial Made Easy with MapBox and cbElasticsearch, by Jon Clausen

Mapping and Geospatial reporting is becoming an essential component of contemporary applications. Get your map geek on by using freely available spatial data, Elasticsearch, and Mapbox to create customized maps and reporting for your data. We'll also show you how to leverage the speed and flexibility of Elasticsearch to provide form validation and auto-completion for Geographic (e.g. address ) data.

Room: BoxTrek

Using Commandbox to optimize your daily workflow, by Scott Steinbeck

CommandBox is a full-featured CLI tool written in CFML that streamlines your workflow. We will be navigating through many of the features included out of the box such as: command aliases, environment variables, enhanced terminal commands, JSON/File search & filter, watch tasks, as well as other Box product built in commands. Then we will explore extended features provided by published CommandBox modules and your own custom modules and task runners.

Room: BoxWars

11:00 AM – 11:50 AM

Automate All Things With Github Actions, by Michael Born

Learn how to automate your CFML build process with Github Actions, the Continuous Integration tool built in to github.com. This session will cover auto-formatting your code with CFFormat, running a TestBox test suite, and auto-pushing new releases to ForgeBox via Semantic Release.

Room: BoxTrek

How to create high-performance teams, by Stephanie Monge

There is no secret recipe to create high-performance teams, however, we will share some valuable tips that will help you look over yourself and your team to find improvement opportunities that will boost your team performance and growth.

Room: BoxWars

01:00 PM – 01:50 PM

ContentBox 5: Headless, Multi-Site, Modular, Hierarchical CMS Oh My!, by Luis Majano

Room: BoxTrek

Don't Go Breakin' My Heart: Trust, But Verify, by Shawn Oden

September is Insider Threat Awareness Month. So let's talk a little cybersecurity. Insider threats are a problem that every business should watch out for. To function, any business must trust their employees. But, sometimes, that trust can be abused to disastrous ends. In this talk, I'll go over some of the basics of Insider Threat Awareness, and I'll show some examples of real Insider Threats and how they could have been seen coming.

Room: BoxWars

02:00 PM – 02:50 PM

Building Quick APIs, by Gavin Pickin

In this session we will use ColdBox’s built in REST BaseHandler, and with CBSecurity and Quick ORM we will setup a secure API using fluent query language – and you’ll see how Quick Quick development can be!

Room: BoxTrek

Considering Monitoring Solutions for CF and Lucee, by Charlie Arehart

There may be some monitoring features built-into your CFML engine (and free), which perhaps you didn't even know about–or it may depend on which version of the engine you're running. There are also commercial third-party monitoring tools, built for CF and Lucee. And there are still other Java monitoring tools (some free, some commercial), which can be used readily with CF and Lucee. So many choices, but which is best for you? In this session, we'll review several of these monitoring alternatives, and which are available for various releases of CF and Lucee. We'll identify several goals (problems to be solved or features one may seek). With this information, one can better determine if a built-in tool may suffice, or better choose among other options that would best meet their specific needs, including whether having more than one tool (yes, more than monitor against a single instance) may be the best way to satisfy different needs.

Room: BoxWars

03:05 PM – 03:55 PM

Testing APIs with TestBox, by Javier Quintero

Ready to start testing your CFML apps but not sure how to do it right? In this session, you will learn how to test your app whether is a ColdBox app or not. I will guide you and show you the benefits of using TestBox when writing API tests. Remember, writing tests is a vital part of the development process, make sure you write tests for your existing and new apps. Do it often and take advantage of the features and benefits that TestBox has in the store for you.

Room: BoxTrek

Extending PDF Capabilities With Adobe Document Services, by Raymond Camden

ColdFusion ships with some pretty impressive document features, but you can extend them even further using Adobe Document Services. In this talk, I'll discuss how the free PDF Embed API can be used in your ColdFusion site to provide better control over the PDF experience in the browser. I'll then talk about our API offerings: Adobe PDF Services API, Adobe Document Generation API, and Adobe PDF Extract API.

Room: BoxWars

04:05 PM – 04:55 PM

Quick – Scopes, Relationships, and Patterns, by Eric Peterson

Come learn how Quick can help you improve the readability of your code, not just represent SQL as Objects. 1. Give relevant names to important collections of SQL code. (scopes, relationships, etc.) 2. Make queries easy to compose at runtime to get the exact data you want in the most efficient way (subselects, eager loading, etc.) 3. Get out of your way when you need or want to write barebones SQL.

Room: BoxTrek

Add ColdBox and a REST API to an existing codebase, by Dan Card

Good news, the “R” in REST does not stand for rebuild. It is possible to start creating an API for your code that might not require huge rewrites or even large changes. First, we will use CommandBox and Host Updater to build a local environment where you can run multiple sites on your local machine – one “front end” and the other our API. We’ll briefly look at some existing code to get our bearings, install ColdBox and then “connect” it to our code. Concepts covered will primarily consist of routes, handlers and to a lesser extent, modules.

Room: BoxWars

That's all folks!

This year's Into The Box promising as always, so let's dive in and we'll talk and share thoughts afterward.

Enjoy!