Into The Box 2022 (ColdFusion Development Conference)

Into The Box conference is one that I truly enjoy being a programmer and CFer.

2022 has finally brought us back to “old reality” and let's keep it that way. The event was at Houston, TX.

What is it?

Into The Box conference is for all ColdFusion developers, and while it focuses on the Box CF products and tools, it also covers other topics.

I like it because it promotes modern ColdFusion and modern best practices. While some still see it as a legacy code, and the old, spaghetti code, I will repeat it again; it is FAR FROM IT. ColdFusion is a modern and vibrant language. Adobe's latest version 2021 is out of this world, and the only thing that might still keep you in the legacy land is yourself… update, and modernize 🙂

I have to mention a CF expert, Charlie Arehart and his talk at the CF dev week 2022, about how ColdFusion is more modern than most realize. Check it out, it will make your day.

Gavin Pickin talks about “Into The Box ColdFusion Conference 2022 (new details revealed) ” in the episode of ColdFusion Alive Podcast with host Michaela Light.

“…with the [ITB] conference, it's a great way to look at a lot of different things. …usually people have heard of ColdBox, it's the biggest of the three MVC frameworks still left in ColdFusion, (according to the … state of the CF Union survey). Framework One is still up there, but it doesn't have the same support now that Sean Corefield moved on, and then CFwheels has been revived in that doing well, too…”

When was it and can I see any recordings?

Into The Box 2022 Conference went from Tuesday, September 6, to Thursday, September 8, 2022. at Houston CityPlace Marriott at Springwoods Village.

Here's the agenda by day:

• September 6th -Choose 1 of the 5 full-day Hands-on workshops
• September 7th – Conference Day + Happy Box Mariachi Party
• September 8th – Conference Day

Into The Box 2022 Speakers

Abram Adams

Abram has a long history with CFML and has spent the majority of the past 22 years building and supporting solutions built with the stuff. As a father of 7 children, he wanted to teach his kids how to develop software at a young age, however he found that the conceptual knowledge required to set up a working CFML environment was too steep a curve for the average 14 year old. That's when he developed TryCF.com as a way to effortlessly write code in a browser and watch it work (or fail miserably). That project is still helping many CFMLers today – over 10 years later! So far, two of his 7 have followed in his footsteps to become accomplished software developers in their own right. The others are a work in progress 🙂

Though nowadays he works primarily as a Senior DevOps Engineer, his love for the CFML platform and its usefulness in so many areas keeps him bound to this awesome community.

Brad Wood

Brad grew up in southern Missouri and after high school majored in Computer Science with a music minor at MidAmerica Nazarene University (Olathe, KS). Today he lives in Kansas City with his wife and three girls. Brad enjoys all sorts of international food and the great outdoors. Brad has been programming ColdFusion since around 2002 and has used every version of CF since 4.5. He first fell in love with ColdFusion as a way to easily connect a database to his website for dynamic pages. He enjoys configuring and performance tuning high-availability Windows and Linux ColdFusion environments as well as SQL Server.

Brian Rinaldi

Brian Rinaldi is a Developer Experience Engineer at LaunchDarkly with over 20 years experience as a developer for the web. Brian is actively involved in the community running developer meetups via CFE.dev and Orlando Devs. He's the editor of the Jamstacked newsletter and co-author of The Jamstack Book from Manning.

Charlie Arehart

A veteran server troubleshooter who's worked in enterprise IT for more than three decades, Charlie Arehart (@carehart) 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 (carehart.org/consulting).

Dan Card

Dan Card has been using CFML for nearly 20 years in a variety of settings including the education, non-profit and for-profit sectors. His current project specializes in developing interactive, collaborative and educational online experiences. He lives north of Boston and is an educator at UMass Lowell in the Division of Online and Continuing Education.

Daniel García

Daniel Garcia lives in Plainfield, IL, has been working with ColdFusion since 1999, and is passionate about the language. He founded and managed the Chicagoland ColdFusion User Group starting in 2012 and most recently joined Ortus Solutions. He is a husband, father, cinefile, regaler of useless knowledge, smoker of meats, Taekwondo practioner, barbershopper, part time college student (go Hawkeyes!), and has an irreverent sense of humor. His mantra is “work smarter, not harder” and “KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid)”.

Eric Peterson

Eric Peterson (@_elpete) 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.
In his spare time, he enjoys spending time with his family, playing geeky card and board games, and participating in theatre.

Esmeralda Acevedo

I am a Software Consultant for Ortus Solutions, Corp. My professional journey began about 17 years ago as a graphic/web designer, in the time of tables and frames. After graduating from California State University with a major in Art and a minor in Computer Science, I was hired to work along CFML developers. Although I was mainly involved in the design aspect of the projects, I gradually became more involved in assisting the programming team.

Eventually, I returned to school to complete a technical degree, with an emphasis in software development. Now, in addition to my experience with graphic design tools, such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, Indesign, etc., I have added application development tools, which include CFML, MySQL, Javascript, CSS, Bootstrap, Coldfusion, Coldbox, ContentBox to the list.

Away from the computer, I have a love for the outdoors. As John Muir said, “ Keep close to Nature’s heart… and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.” Besides washing the spirit clean, nature clears my mind to solve programming issues or inspires me to create designs.

Gavin Pickin

Gavin started using ColdFusion in 1999 when working for the university of Auckland in New Zealand before moving to California. He has lead teams, trained new developers and worked the full stack from graphic design, HTML CSS JavaScript through to ColdFusion MySQL and server administration.

Gavin has a passion for learning and cannot understand why the 9-5ers aren't listening to podcasts while changing diapers, watching video tutorials while cleaning baby bottles and folding clothes, or putting the kids to sleep with soothing phone gap mobile application cookbook recipes. You will find him blogging atgavinpickin.com and on twitter @gpickin and occasionally being mocked on cfhour's podcast.

George Murphy

I am a Christian, husband, father and software design engineer. Client Relationship Management, Development Methodologies, Customer Requirement Analysis, Full-Lifecycle Management, Team Leadership, Conformity Assessment Specialist, Specification Development, Object-Oriented Design, Process Improvement, Web/Graphic Design, Visual Information Specialist, Webmaster, Social Media Expert, Scripting Specialist.

Grant Copley

Grant grew up in western Kentucky and began creating websites for local events at 14 years old. Those early experiences quickly developed into a life-long passion for web development and computer programming. Grant has been slinging CFML for 22 years, starting with Allaire ColdFusion 3.1. He lives with his wife and daughter in Nashville, TN, and their two fur babies and turtles. When he isn't at the computer, you can find Grant outdoors enjoying the sun or inside pretending he can shred on the guitar.

Javier Quintero

A systems engineer born in Colombia has developed software since 2010 mainly in languages ​​such as Java and Coldfusion. He currently works for Ortus Solutions Corp, as a web developer and aims to explore and learn all areas of software development in order to become a Full Stack Developer in the near future. He is passionate about technology and in his spare time he likes to listen to music, go to the beach and play tennis.

John Farrar

John Farrar started programming in the late 70's on a Commodore PET. He served in the U.S.Navy and then met his wife during his reservist years. This was when the Amiga drove his computer interest for several years. Eventually he became a web developer and in the later 90's he started using ColdFusion building dynamic web sites.

With about twenty years of web development John has become known for his work with jQuery, Knockout and Vue AJAX libraries. Sustainable and profitable come together when the right technology is applied to the correct challenges. John enjoys focusing on strategy that will bring impact without getting delayed by over engineering.

Jon Clausen

Jon hails from Grand Rapids, Michigan and has been developing CFML applications for almost 20 years. He was born and raised in South Dakota and attended SDSU, DePaul University and Aquinas College. In 2004, after 14 years with a Fortune 100 company, he founded Silo, a full-stack development and technology consulting firm in Grand Rapids, Michigan, before coming to work full-time for Ortus in 2018. Jon has developed and written applications in CFML, Javascript, PHP, and Ruby in addition to dabbling in Java, Python, Bash, Scala, Clojure as the need warrants. He keeps current with both old and new database technologies including SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Couchbase, and – his personal NoSQL favorite – MongoDB. Elasticsearch and the ELK stack, along with containerization are his current “shiny new pennies”.
After hours, Jon enjoys theatre, fishing for smallmouth bass on the Great Lakes, and being a “horse show Dad” to his 17 year-old.
He is currently a Senior Software Developer at Ortus Solutions, after many years as a “box aficionado” and is eternally grateful for tools like Coldbox, CommandBox, and Testbox, which continue to evolve and demonstrate a bright future for CFML development.

Kai Koenig

I am a Software Solutions Architect specialised in web and mobile technologies using client-side platforms such as Flutter and Android.

Another focus of my work is building and the integration with JVM-backend platforms such as Java, Kotlin, CFML, Lucee and others like Go and Python.

I spend most of my work time contributing to projects of various clients and sizes, fulfilling the role of an architect, principal developer, consultant or mentor/instructor.

Luis Majano

Luis Majano is a Computer Engineer born in El Salvador and is the president of Ortus Solutions, a consulting firm specializing in web development, architecture and professional open source support and services. His background includes over 16 years of software development experience, architecture and system design. He is the creator of the ColdBox Platform, CommandBox CLI, ContentBox Modular CMS and is an Adobe Community Professional.

Mark Takata

Mark Takata is a 20+ year veteran of application development with professional experience in more than a dozen languages & frameworks. He is a multi-time speaker at CFSummit & other events. He currently serves as Adobe’s Technical Evangelist for ColdFusion.

Matthew Clemente

Matthew is a Founding Partner of Season 4, LLC, a team of designers, programmers, and writers working in the legal industry. After studying English, he took the road less traveled and one day realized, much to his own surprise, that he had become a developer. Perhaps because code can be poetry and applications are the built on creativity, logic, and language, he, like Alice, decided to keep going down the rabbit hole, to see where it would take him. He's been building with ColdFusion since MX 7.

He's a husband, father, and always trying to be better. You can find him on Twitter (@mjclemente84), Github (@mjclemente) and he blogs, time permitting, at the cleverly named blog.mattclemente.com.

Michael Born

Michael Born is a serial web developer from Central New York, where he spent eight years writing vanilla CFML at a web design agency before branching into ColdBox in 2018. Michael and his wife Kira live in a fixer-upper in the country, and when Michael is not writing code or renovating his home he enjoys road cycling and making music.

Nolan Erck

Nolan Erck has been developing software professionally for more than 19 years, starting in the video game industry as a Tools Programmer advancing to web development in 1999. He has worked on high profile projects for LucasArts, Maxis, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, Schools Credit Union, and Alive N Kicking Magazine among others. His list of credits includes Grim Fandango, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, SimPark, and SimSafari, as well as high-traffic websites for a variety of technology based companies.

Nolan currently co-manages the SacInteractive User Group and is an active member of the Web Developer community, giving presentations on Object-Oriented Programming and Web Development for groups across Northern California. Nolan is also certified in Adobe ColdFusion, and is an in-demand consultant, providing training and development experience for a variety of companies.

When he's not consulting or talking about himself in the third person, Nolan can usually be found working on one of several music projects.

Raymon Camden

Raymond Camden is a Senior Developer Evangelist for Adobe. He works on the Document Services APIs to build powerful (and typically cat-related) PDF demos. He is the author of multiple books on web development and has been actively blogging and presenting for almost twenty years. Raymond can be reached at his blog raymondcamden.com, @raymondcamden on Twitter, or via email at [email protected]

Scott Steinbeck

Software engineer specializing in web and mobile application development. Over the last 10 years I have produced 100+ websites including site for: Company Storefronts, Online Shopping, Customer Relationship Management, Content Management Systems, Engineering Plan Rooms, Educational Testing, Learning Information Systems, Agricultural Tracking & Analysis, Automated Billing, Report Forecasting, Agricultural Scouting, GIS Mapping Solutions, Irrigation Management, just to name a few. I enjoy working with ColdFusion, and all sorts of JavaScript Frameworks like: ReactJS, Angular JS, ExtJS, Ionic Framework, jQuery, etc. When I'm not programming you will most likely find me tinkering with electronics or woodworking.

Seth Stone

I’m a native Texan who got started in web development in the 90’s by checking out books on Perl and “CGI Programming” from the public library. Now days I get to apply my passion for technology and software development at Pine Cove – a non-profit Summer Camp ministry. And by night I run Flintex Data Studio – my cloud strategy and development LLC. When not playing with cloud services I enjoy traveling the USA with my wife and collecting retro video game “stuff”. Still trying to figure out how to build Gameboy games with CFML…

Shawn Oden

Back in the olden days, before that thing we call Y2K, I was a pilot, but then I accidentally became a programmer. And now I'm a data monkey. Nearly all of my career has been spent working in Background Screening, Healthcare, Insurance, Government or Military, where cybersecurity has played a fairly heavy role. I've learned quite a bit about quite a lot, and my interest has been piqued in more topics than I can ever hope to master.

On the current step of my adventure, I find myself on the path as a DBA for the U.S. Army.

And I'm still more curious than is probably good for me.

Zac Spitzer

CFML Developer since 1996, Allaire CF 2.0 * Senior Software Engineer @ Rasia * 80% Senior Software Engineer @ Distrokid * 20% Community Manager @ Lucee Association Switzerland Originally from Melbourne, Australia. Lives in Berlin, Germany

Into the Box 2022 Pre- Conference

If you went online you could attend bonus Pre-Conference Sessions. The access was included in the conference ticket. It went from Mon Aug 29th – Friday, Sept 2nd.

Each day had 2 x 50 minute Online Sessions.

Monday – August 29th

Meilisearch: A Search Platform for the Rest of Us, by Michael Born.

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

Tuesday – August 30th

Lucee – Behind the Scenes, by Zac Spitzer,

Modern ways to keep on top of crashes and errors in your applications, by Kai Koenig.

Wednesday – August 31st

CFScribe – Rules and Filtering for your Logging, by Dan Card.

Feature Flagging is Just Simple Booleans: False, by Brian Rinaldi.

Thursday – Sept 1st

Comparing and contrasting Docker images from Ortus, Adobe, and Lucee, by Charlie Arehart.

cbValidation: Validate all things!, by Javier Quintero.

Friday – Sept 2nd

Advanced Manipulation of PDF Documents using Adobe ColdFusion DDX, by Mark Takata,

Extending PDF Capabilities With Adobe Document Services, by Raymond Camden.

Into the Box 2022 Workshops

Luis Majano & Eric Peterson | Async Programming & Scheduling

Jon Clausen & Grant Copley | Containerizing & Scaling Your Applications

Dan Card & Alan Quinlan | Legacy Code Conversion To The Modern World!

Brad Wood & Javi Quintero | TestBox: Getting started with BDD-TDD Oh My!

Gavin Pickin & Daniel Garcia | VueJs SPA and Mobile App with Rest APIs

Into The Box 2022 Conference Agenda

Day one of the conference, September 7, 2022 .

Ortus Keynote 2022

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.

BoxTrek

cbCommerce – A flexible, modular e-commerce solution by Jon Clausen

In this session, you'll learn about a full featured e-commerce module from Ortus Solutions, cbCommerce. **cbCommerce** is built with Enterprise e-Commerce in mind and it uses ContentBox modularity to allow non-technical users to manage inventory and pricing. Additionally, it has built-in support for shipping, sales tax/VAT, event and inventory lifecycle pricing and multiple payment processor support.

cbfs: Abstract, Extend, Integrate Any File System by Luis Majano and Grant Copley

cbfs is short for ColdBox File System. It is an abstraction API to help you integrate with any file system, from S3, Local, SFTP, Ram, Mocks, and much more. Built to be fluent and human friendly, working with file systems via cbfs will give your applications the ability to abstract, extend and integrate with ANY file system.

advanced pdf generation + Building a gitbook markdown conversion process by Scott Steinbeck

advanced pdf generation + Building a gitbook markdown conversion process

Alpine.js : Declare and React! by Gavin Pickin

Alpine.js : Declare and React!

Sublime Reactivity with CBWIRE by Grant Copley

CBWIRE is a ColdBox module that makes building reactive, dynamic, and modern web applications a joy without leaving the comfort of CFML. Join us as we review how to add reactivity to your apps with almost no JavaScript, as well as look at the new features included in CBWIRE’s latest release.

Unpacking The Box – Why so many boxes and what do they do????? by Dan Card

Coldbox, TestBox, Wirebox, Rulebox, CommandBox, Forgebox, CBElixer, CBSwagger, Colbox MVC, Coldbox HMVC, Coldbox Relax, ContentBox, CacheBox, MessageBox, CFConfig, Quick, CBORM, QB, CBAuth, CBSecurity, CBLivewire, Codechecker, DocBox, DotENV, CB HostUpdater, CFMigrations, CFMongo, CFRedis, Cors, ColdBox Mail Services, CB Validation, CBStreams, CBCollection, Hyper, CB Elastisearch, LogBox, Mementifier, …….you get the idea. There are a lot of “boxes”. What are they and what do they all do???? Are they all necessary??? Do I need to learn all of them???? This session will “tell the story” of all the boxes based on the problems they are trying to solve. We’ll start from the metaphorical “blank sheet of paper” at the beginning of a web project and we walk and talk through its planning and development, we’ll anticipate the real world snag and difficulties that we and the team will go hit and show how “there’s a box for that”.

How to Debug Your CF Apps by Daniel García

How to debug your CF Apps. Using cbDebugger, Fusion Reactor, bundled Lucee and Adobe ColdFusion debugging, as well as good old fashioned writedumps and emails to figure out what is going on.

BoxWars

CommandBox Hidden Gems/Top Modules by Brad Wood

CommandBox has a lot of features out of the box so to speak, but it can also be extended via a modular architecture. In this session, we'll cover the best features, and top modules you need to be using in order to increase your productivity and get the most out of CommandBox.

Web Components in Your CFML Application by Nolan Erck

Web Components provide a modular way to build a consistent design system and user experience across your entire application. Instead of copy/pasting the same chunks of coded into various places, you can have a JavaScript/HTML expert focus on getting the UX correct, without them needing to worry about what's happening in the CFML layer at all. Web Components offer reusable functionality on the front-end, with native JavaScript. They are a great middle-ground between standard request/response based CFML applications, and apps that aren't quite ready to move to a full-on JavaScript SPA framework. Web Components themselves are 100% native JavaScript – no new libraries required! Let's learn how Web Components work, then look at integrating them into a CFML application — I promise it's easier than you think! Target Audience: Developers looking to learn more about writing reusable JavaScript and UI components that are platform independent. This talk will spend a little time going over connecting the front-end code to a CFML application, but attendees should already be well versed in CFML and understand how to build a JSON API endpoint. Main Takeaways: – Creating your first Web Component – Interactivity with Web Components – Connecting to a CFML back-end – A quick look at using Lit to build things – Pros and Cons – Next steps and other resources.

Securing and Tuning CommandBox Servers for production by Brad Wood

Securing and Tuning CommandBox Servers for production

Writing Command Line Utilities With CommandBox Modules by Abram Adams

Quick Start for CI/CD Automation on AWS by Seth Stone

Day 2 of the conference, September 8, 2022

Ortus Keynote 2022 Day 2

BoxTrek

cbq — Jobs and Tasks in the Background by Eric Peterson

Building a CFML API powered Quiz Game with VueJS and deployed with SPA and Android + more by Gavin Pickin

I'm Still Scared of Aspect Oriented Programming! by Nolan Erck

BoxWars

ContentBox 101 by Daniel García

Configure ContentBox 5 In the Cloud the easy way by George Murphy

What I learned about Mental Health from my computer and its network. by Dan Card

With all the conversations about self-care, self-help, counseling, higher powers, identity, defining ourselves, being defined, alone time, group time, isolation, introversion extroversion, no-traversions and so on, I found myself more and more thinking that it was just as easy to get lost and stressed by all the things you “should” be doing as it was to get lost in the “life stuff” that was causing issues in the first place. As I tried to untangle some of these things, I found myself wishing there was a framework or “meta” framework where I could start attaching concepts so I could at least have a starting point to think about them. Then I found one right in front of me that I used every day.

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

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