Into the Box 2018 Impressions and Presentations

Into The Box 2018 conference was a huge success. And not just for the organizers. Each year attendees can take even more knowledge, new acquaintances and positive vibes back home. Big thanks to the guys from Ortus Solutions and congrats on a job well done!

Pre-conference WORKSHOPS

Right away it was obvious that this year will be even better than the last one. More attendees, more workshops, more ColdFusion!

John Clausen opened the first session.

Containerizing CFML Apps

In this workshop, John introduced Docker containers and how to deploy your ColdFusion (CFML) apps to docker swarms and other orchestration services.

Presentation highlights:

• Overview of containerization principles
• Introduction to Docker
  • Virtualization vs Containerization
  • Docker Networking Principles
  • Runtime environments and memory usage
• Deployment tools and options overview

The full preview is available here

Jon hails from Grand Rapids, Michigan and has been developing CFML applications for over a decade. He was born and raised in South Dakota and attended SDSU and DePaul University. 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.

Jon has developed and written applications in CFML, Javascript, PHP, and Ruby in addition to dabbling in Java, Python, Bash, Scala and Clojure. He keeps current with both old and new database technologies including SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Couchbase, and – his personal NoSQL favorite – MongoDB.

 

• Twitter

The full presentation and the slides aren't available yet. We'll update you once they're out.

TestBox BDD by Luis Majano

The goal of this course was to understand the theory and principles behind software testing. Understand all types of testing and know when to apply them. Review tools of the trade. Implement TDD, BDD and CI (Continuous Integration). Everything you wanted to know about the TestBox Framework. Understand Mocking/Stubbing and its applications via MockBox. Apply testing to your ColdBox Applications (Optional).

Objectives

• Understand the theory and principles behind software testing
• Understand all types of testing and know when to apply them
• Review tools of the trade
• Implement TDD, BDD and CI (Continuous Integration)
• Everything you wanted to know about the TestBox Framework
• Understand Mocking/Stubbing and its applications via MockBox
• Apply testing to your ColdBox Applications (Optional)

Nolan Erck even said that this course was very interesting and he was able to “fill in some gaps in my knowledge about what all is capable with TestBox, as well as to get a better understanding of BDD. “

 Luis Majano is a Computer Engineer born in El Salvador and is the president of Ortus Solutions (www.ortussolutions.com), 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 (www.coldbox.org), CommandBox CLI (www.ortussolutions.com/products/commandbox), ContentBox Modular CMS (www.ortussolutions.com/products/contentbox) and is an Adobe Community Professional.

• Twitter

The full presentation and the slides aren't available yet. We'll update you once they're out.

CommandBox Workshop by Brad Wood

This workshop started with the basics of using CommandBox CLI in your everyday workflow. Brad focused on
topics like managing servers, package management, and scripting command line tasks using CFML and Task
Runners, and he covered extending the CommandBox core with modules to add your own behaviors.

 Brad has been programming ColdFusion for 12 years 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.

• Twitter

 

Image by Eric Peterson twitter

ColdBox from Zero to Hero by Gavin Pickin

Gavin has introduced everyone to the latest version of the most popular CFML MVC framework;
ColdBox 5.

• The basics of installation,
• templating and
• configuration to the most advanced features like HMVC development with modules, RESTFul APIs, interception points and much more.

 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 at gpickin.com and on twitter @gpickin and occasionally being mocked on cfhour's podcast.

 

 

 

Day 2 at Into The Box 2018

The second day started with the Ortus keynote speakers talking about the past, present and the future of the company and their vision of the products.

Building Progressive Web Apps by Raymond Camden

Ray is well known for very clear and concise presentations. The room was packed and the plenty of information was given by this speaker. Thanks Ray!

You can find the presentation  here

 Raymond Camden is a senior developer advocate for Auth0 Extend. His work focuses on Extend, serverless, and the web in general. He's a published author and presents at conferences and user groups on a variety of topics. Raymond can be reached at his blog (www.raymondcamden.com), @raymondcamden on Twitter, or via email at [email protected]

 

 

 

Thinking Modularly by Brad Wood

What it looks like to set up your code, source control, and 3rd party files for the best workflow and deployment strategies. Basics of package management were covered and Brad also explained how to dial in exact package versions by getting the most out of semantic versioning. The topics discussed weren't limited to only those who are using ColdBox apps.

Download the full presentation here

Using Portainer.io for Docker Container Management by Neil Creswell

Download the full presentation here

Neil's CF Alive Podcast was also very informative. Download it here

 

CBT – ColdBox Templating Language by Luis Majano

CBT = ColdBox Templating Language; A templating language based on the famous twig templating language for CFML engines. You were able to learn how to build your UI front ends using a templating approach instead of raw CFML.

Step into serverless with AWS + CFMl by Brian Klaas

CFML is a great language for web apps, even if it's not the right tool for every job. It's not easy to do machine learning, video compression, and computer vision from within CFML, for example. Who wants to set up servers or Docker clusters for those tasks that CFML isn't the best fit? In this session, Brian talked about getting started in a serverless environment with Amazon Web Services' Step Functions – a powerful, visual way to orchestrate cloud functions as microservices. Along the way, Brian also explained about AWS services like Lambda, S3, Rekognition, and CloudWatch. How you can invoke and track serverless workflows from within your CFML apps, and how to harness the vast array of AI and computational power that AWS provides with a simple “embrace and extend with CFML” approach.

Download the full presentation here

 Brian Klaas is the Senior Technology Officer at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's Center for Teaching and Learning. As the architect for eLearning technology at the School, he leads a team that designs and delivers custom online courseware to students and members of the public health workforce around the globe. In addition to designing software and delivering courses, Brian heads up University technology accessibility initiatives, teaches “Introduction to Online Learning,” and leads faculty training and development courses. Brian has presented on software development and eLearning at conferences throughout the country, including jQuery US, dev.Objective(), CF Summit, NCDevCon, and Adobe MAX.

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Meet qb, a Query Builder for the rest of us by Eric Peterson

Stop worrying about concatenating SQL strings together in the right order. Create object-oriented abstractions around SQL patterns. Compose your SQL queries in a grammar agnostic, fluent builder.

Download the full presentation here

Eric Peterson (@_elpete) is a cfml and javascript developer at O.C. Tanner in Salt Lake City, Utah. He attended the University of Utah and received a degree in Information Systems thinking he would hate programming as a career. He started programming in cfml (and in general) in 2012 and has never been more happy to be proved wrong. What he lacks in experience, he makes up for by demos and blogging. A beginner himself, he blogs about many beginner topics at http://dev.elpete.com.

Oh my GAD (General Anxiety Disorder) by Jeffrey Kunkel

Jeffrey also talked about this issue in the CF Alive Podcast episode.

Jeffrey focused on his perspective of being a web developer with anxiety in today's web development world. He talked about using “Fake it 'till you make it” philosophy to help combat the anxiety of keeping up with the ever evolving web. He also talked about “Impostor Syndrome,” and more specifically how to foster self confidence in your ability without cultivating an ego. His main goal was for people to leave with the stress management skills and frame of mind to increase their productivity and overall job satisfaction.

This talk is ideal for developers feeling the weight of career and having stress and anxiety productivity issues.QB

Download the full presentation here

For more info and to reach out to Jeffrey go to his Twitter page @nerdtastic91686.

WireBox Basics by Brad Wood

If you are interested in learning how to use WireBox but just don't know where to start, this was a session to see. The focus was on WireBox outside of ColdBox apps even though any of the content will be applicable to ColdBox as well. More advanced topics weren't covered, but  the basics on how to get up and running as quickly and easily as possible were discussed. Once you familiarize yourself with the basics of WireBox you'll be hungry for more.

Download the full presentation here

GET /cfml by Matthew Clemente

Nearly everything has an API. With a simple HTTP call, you can process a payment, send a text, and yes, even return random cat pictures. But while many API providers have official libraries, it's not common for CFML to be one of the supported languages. In this session, Matthew showed how to craft your own coherent wrapper for APIs that don't already have CFML support. Code from real-world examples were available, to learn practical design strategies, as well as the theory behind them. After all, while every API is different, the underlying RESTful principles are the same.

Download the full presentation here

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.

Day 3 at Into The Box

The third day started with Adobe Keynote by Rakshith Naresh. He gave a presentation about Adobe ColdFusion for 2018.

More about Rakshith and his talk is available here

ColdBox HMVC 5 by Luis Majano

Don't get stuck back in 2005!

10 years ago, MVC was all the rage in web apps. It taught us to take our mountain of spaghetti code and start to call forth layers; separating the responsibilities of our code. This was great, but the way we should build apps is evolving again and this time it's away from monolithic app design and into modularity. Instead of having one giant custom-built application, there are huge advantages to separating the functional pieces of your code as well to break large applications down into many smaller pieces. This can make for easier maintenance on a large codebase — even across multiple teams and repos. It can help you focus on microservices of isolated functionality. And most importantly, it really opens up the door for code reuse– especially other people's code from the community that has drop-in value for your application. Let's dive into what a modular MVC architecture looks like in CFML using ColdBox 5.0, how to break apart large applications, write reusable libraries with hassle-free installation, and track our dependencies from the CLI for easy management and automation. This is the future of modern app development. The power of modularity will keep your skills relevant and your architecture extensible.

Intro to Unit Testing, BDD and Mocking using TestBox & MockBox by Uma Ghotikar

This session covered the basics such as what is unit testing, why to do unit testing and guidelines to write the unit tests. It also covered xUnit and BDD styles of testing in TestBox, Given – When – Then syntax and the general structure for writing unit tests.

“It was a great experience at Into The Box 2018 conference! It had remarkable sessions and workshops. It was truly a modern, cutting-edge CFML conference!”

 Uma Ghotikar has more than 6 years of experience in web application development, database design and development. She has a technical educational background. She did Master of Science in Information Systems from George Mason University, USA and Bachelor of Engineering in Information Technology from University of Mumbai, India. She enjoys coding especially the back-end development and learning new technical skills.

Download the full presentation here

 

 

 

Integrating MVC into legacy by Brad Wood

The good news is you can make this transition slowly and at your own pace by embedding the new with the old. ColdBox's conventions are simple and easy to learn so you can convert the basics at first and implement more complex features down the road. Several methods of integrating ColdBox MVC into a legacy application were covered at this presentation.

Download it in full here

CommandBox Migrations by Eric Peterson

Introducing CommandBox Migrations, a framework-agnostic way to take control of your database schema changes versioned inside your application. Powered by qb.

Download the full presentation here

The Great Entrepreneurial Adventure by Samuel Knowlton

Building and managing your own enterprise: Infrastructure, Support, Payroll, Taxes and Toolsets. This was an introduction to your own business from the founder of inLeague (15+ years in the market) with an emphasis on how ordinary developers can manage a shop, grow a team, and still write code. Topics will not include Getting Rich Quick or Venture Capital.

Download the full presentation here

Learn more about Samuel Knowlton here

 

 

Take your CF apps from local dev to production with CommandBox and CFConfig and Docker by Brad Wood

Take your CF apps from local dev to production with CommandBox and CFConfig and Docker!

How to standardize your server infrastructure from development to production using CommandBox, CFConfig, and Docker. These powerful tools help simplify the number of servers you have to keep track of and help you keep consistent settings and behavior across the board– a must for a team of people all doing local development.

Download the full presentation here

Connecting Vue.js and CFML with ColdBox by Nolan Erck

Nolan's presentation was very interesting.

“This was the first appearance for this particular preso, but I received some good feedback afterwards, so I know at least a few people in the audience liked it. :)”

Vue.js is quickly becoming one of the more popular JavaScript frameworks. It provides a lot of the same benefits of Angular and React, but with a less intense learning curve, and more flexibility. Nolan started at the very beginning, showing how to install and begin using Vue and some of the basic features it provides. Then comes the server part. How do we send data from the Vue.js app to a server in the cloud? That’s were our CFML code comes into play. In this session it was discussed about how to get started with Vue.js and how to start building a simple JSON API using CFML. And a lot more!

Download it in full here

Into The Box 2018 was a huge success for the organizers, but as I said at the beginning of this blog post, it was also fruitful for the attendees. Popcorn, milk and cookies, siesta and lots of ColdFusion talk.

I am looking forward to the next year already!

CF Rocks 🙂

PS Stay tuned for more fresh information and slides from the speakers' presentations.

And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.

What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.

And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.

You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.

All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.

Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.

No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens Next

ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist

Modern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.

√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production

√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading

√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF

√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free!

 

Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.