What is Into The Box conference?

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 is out of this world, and the only thing that might still keep you in the legacy land is yourself… update, and modernize 🙂

What is Into The Box conference in detail?

• Started with ColdBox Developer Week, then Ortus Developer Week.
• This year is the 13th edition.
• Started as a pre-conference before CFObjective
• Houston 2016 was the first ITB standing on it’s own legs without piggy backing onto another Conference.
• 1 day before a 3-day conference was tough, Ortus moved so we could get 2 days.
• The speakers have PLENTY to TALK ABOUT – so didn’t take us long to need more than 2 days in its own conference.
• Box products and general CF topics

Why did ITB need its own conference?

• Ortus started with with Documentation, and now through tools, a conference was natural next step
• Great way to network as a Professional Open Source company, meeting clients and our contributors.
• ColdFusion as a whole, likes to keep most talks framework agnostic, so we needed our own conference to show all of the content we get demands for.
• Every year of ITB is improving.
• Great response when we offered one-day workshops, and in the past, even 2 days of workshops, plus 2 days of the conference, 4 great days of content, and the attendees loved it.
• And ITBs GROWN AND GROWN until this year’s conference, and it looks like the best one yet!

Into The Box 2025: Captured Moments from the Conference (Photo Edition)

Into the Box 2025! The future is dynamic!

Join us in Shaping the Dynamic Future of Modern Software Development alongside industry experts and leading innovation companies. Collaborate on open-source projects, contribute to cutting-edge technologies, and be part of a community that's driving the evolution of the Web. Let's innovate together!

Into the Box never seems to fail, we're excited to release our 2025 event tickets! 🚀

Join us as we embark on an exciting Dynamic Future of Modern Web Development, promising even more content, an expanded array of tools, and enhanced networking opportunities for everyone!

Last year's event was a success everyone loved with exciting news and the release of our most awaited product BoxLang our modular dynamic language for the JVM that aims to make development more productive, expressive, functional, and available everywhere.

We loved DC so much that we're returning for our 2025 event! This vibrant venue offers fun, fantastic food, incredible history, and the perfect opportunity to connect with local tech enthusiasts, startups, and established tech companies. Washington, D.C., is renowned for its thriving tech industry, excelling in government technology, cybersecurity, data analytics, health tech, civic tech, and social impact tech. It fosters a dynamic startup ecosystem and smart city innovations, making it an exciting destination for attendees from around the globe.

Join us at Into the Box 2025 for an unforgettable experience as we shape the future of web development together. Secure your tickets now and be a part of this exciting journey

When is it?

• April 30th – May 2nd, 2025 –Washington, DC
• April 30th (Workshop Day) – May 1st to 2nd (Conference Days)

Where is it?

• 2010 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington, DC 20036, USA

Costs

• Early Bird – Only Conference – $349.50
• Early Bird – (Workshop + Conference) – $449.50
• General Admission – Only Conference – $499.00  (Sales start on May 1, 2025)
• General Admission – (Workshop + Conference) – $699.00 (Sales start on Apr 1, 2025)
• Buy 1, Get 1 at 50% Off – Bring a colleague and save big! Purchase one ticket at full price and get the second at half off. (Starting around $233 for each ticket with Early Team Pack) Ending March 15th, 2025
• Buy 2, Get 1 Free – The more, the better! Buy two tickets and get a third one completely FREE—perfect for teams looking to learn and grow together. (Starting around $262 for each ticket with Early Duo Pack) Ending March 15th, 2025
• Don't forget your extra TeraTech CF Alive 25% discount code on top: CFAlive_25

Agenda

• April 30th, 2025

1. Registration and Breakfast 07:30 – 09:00

2. Workshop Time 09:00 – 10:50

3. AM Coffee Break 10:50 – 11:10

4. Workshop Time 11:15 – 01:00

5. Lunch 01:05 – 02:05

6. Workshop Time 02:10 – 03:30

7. PM Coffee Break 03:35 – 03:55

8. Workshop Time 04:00 – 05:45

• May 1st, 2025

Orange room

1. Registration and Breakfast 07:30-09:00

2. Keynote 09:00-10:00

3. Sponsors – Networking 10:00-10:15

4. CMS Switch-a-Rooney! Converting Your Mura/Masa Sites to ContentBox 10:15-11:00

5. AM Coffee Break 11:00-11:20

6. What's New with BoxLang? 11:20-12:05

7. Integrating the OpenAI API in Your Coldfusion Apps 12:15-13:00

8. Lunch 13:00-14:00

9. Legacy Code: Nightmares , Hellscapes, and Lessons Learned 14:05-14:50

10. to be announced 15:00-15:45

11. PM Coffee Break 15:45-16:30

12. to be announced 16:30-17:15

13. to be announced 17:25-18:10

14. Happy Box 18:30-21:00

Blue room

1. Build a IoT Hardware Integration with BoxLang and MQTT 10:15-11:00

2. Passkeys and cbSecurity 11:20-12:05

3. BoxLang IDE 12:15-13:00

4. CommandBox WebSockets and SocketBox 14:05-14:50

5. to be announced 15:00-15:45

6. to be announced 16:30-17:15

7. to be announced 17:25-18:10

• May 2nd, 2025

1. Registration and Breakfast 07:30-09:00

2. Keynote 09:00-10:00

3. Sponsors – Networking 10:00-10:15

4. Customize your Runtime: Creating your first BoxLang Module 10:15-11:00

5. AM Coffee Break 11:00-11:20

6. Catching Wire; An introduction to CBWire 4 11:20-00:05

7. Supercharging CommandBox with Let's Encrypt 12:25-13:10

8. Lunch 13:10-14:10

9. Schedule tasks with → BoxLang and ColdBox 14:15-15:00

10. to be announced 15:10-15:55

11. to be announced 16:10-16:55

12. Closing Raffle 18:30-21:00

Register here

Get a Free BoxLang+ License with Your ITB 2025 Ticket!

At Ortus Solutions, we are dedicated to delivering the best experience for our Into the Box attendees. This year’s event will be an exciting opportunity to explore BoxLang and modern CFML development, and we want to ensure that attending in person is even more rewarding.

Team Plans and Exclusive Deals: Into the Box 2025!

Thinking about attending Into the Box 2025 but don’t want to go alone? Or are you looking to train your team with the latest modern software development tools? We’ve got you covered. Take advantage of our exclusive team deals and bring your team for an even better experience.

Speakers

Alex Ventura

Software Developer

Alexander is a Software Developer at Ortus Solutions, Corp., with a passion for building scalable and organized web applications. He began his programming journey working with Laravel, PHP, and JavaScript, and has since expanded his toolkit to include ColdFusion, making use of frameworks such as ColdBox after joining his current role in 2023. His work spans both backend and frontend, with experience in Vue and interest in clean, maintainable code.

A longtime tech enthusiast, Alexander has loved computers since he was a kid. When he’s not coding, you’ll probably find him enjoying good music, playing video games, or out hiking in the beauty of nature.

Annette Liskey

Web Developer

Annette began using ColdFusion when working for a startup company in the early 2000s. Since then, her career path has integrated business, technology and education. Her current role merges her rekindled ColdFusion skills with project management and business process analysis in support of research compliance at the University of Virginia.

Bill Reese

Senior Developer

Bill is a Senior Developer at Ortus Solutions with over 25 years of experience in full-stack application and web development. Based near Orlando Florida, he lives with his wife and three children. Bill has been using ColdFusion since version 4, appreciating its ability to rapidly integrate data into Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), which shaped his early focus on multimedia development, Flash animation, and graphic design. He has proven expertise in leading teams to deliver scalable, SEO-optimized, high-performance web applications, with a specialization in application refactoring and data layer optimization. Outside of work, Bill is passionate about film, music, social networking, and e-commerce, and enjoys personal pursuits like concert photography, nature photography, and exploring theme parks.

Brad Wood

Senior Developer

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 Klass

Assistant Director for Technology

Brian Klaas is the Assistant Director for Technology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's Center for Teaching and Learning. As the architect for online learning 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 teaches graduate courses on communication design and online learning, and leads faculty training and development.

Brian talks a lot about serverless development and AWS, as it's a liberating approach to the art of building applications. Brian has presented on software development and learning at conferences throughout the country, including jQuery US, Into the Box, CF Summit, dev.Objective(), NCDevCon, and Adobe MAX.

Charlie Arehart

Server troubleshooting consultatnt

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.

Curt Gratz

System Architect/OwnerComputer Know How

Dan Card

Senior DeveloperAt Ortus Solutions

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 Garcia

Senior Developer

Daniel Garcia lives in Plainfield, IL, has been working with web technologies since 1997, and is passionate about what he does. He is a husband, father, cinephile, regaler of useless knowledge, smoker of meats, part-time radio DJ, grad student, and has an irreverent sense of humor. His mantras are “work smarter, not harder” and “KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid)”.

Eric Peterson

Senior Developer

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.

Esme Acevedo

Senior Developer

I am a Senior Developer at 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

Senior Developer

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 and now Docker too.

Gavin is active in the Ortus Community, working for Ortus for 7 years, being a regular speaker on webinars, trainings, and speaks at Into the Box, CF Summit and other CFML Conferences in the past.

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 at Waterpolo Practice, or reading blogs while in line at the Gas Station. You will find him on the CFML News Podcast or on slack and twitter @gpickin.

George Murphy

Senior webapp developer

Accomplished senior-level web applications developer and project manager with extensive leadership and solutions design experience, successfully managing people, processes and technology to implement critical enterprise solutions on time.

Exemplary team leader and mentor with excellent communication skills in managing website/multimedia projects from design stage through final implementation in a structured system development lifecycle environment along with in-depth knowledge of Internet policies, procedures and standards.

Experience in design and support for back-office and front-end applications for clients.

Giancarlo Gomez

Owner

Giancarlo is a full-stack developer with over 24 years of experience with various languages and a passion for continuing to learn. He is the owner/lead developer of Fuse Developments, Inc., established in 2004, his consulting business specializing in web and mobile development, and senior web developer at WebListers, Inc., a full service multifamily marketing platform.

He is also the co-manager of the South Florida Adobe ColdFusion Users Group. You can find him on Twitter and GitHub @GiancarloGomez and read his occasional ramblings at giancarlogomez.dev.

In his spare time, he plays with his kids and occasionally stares at his wall of guitars remembering the good old days of traveling and playing music on stages.

Grant Copley

Senior Developer

Grant grew up in western Kentucky and began creating websites for local events at 14 years old. Those early experiences quickly became a life-long passion for web development and computer programming. Grant has been slinging CFML for 23 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.

Jacob Beers

Senior Developer

Jacob is a Senior Developer at Ortus Solutions, Corp. While he has been working as a programmer for the past 10 years he never intended to make a career out of it. His professional journey thus far has been marked by a diverse set of pursuits including 3d animation, game design, fine art, special education, and operating a survival swim school. He likes to think his unusual combination of experiences provides him with a unique and pragmatic approach to software development.

Javier Quintero

Senior Developer

Systems engineer born in Colombia, he 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.

Jon Clausen

Senior Developer

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.

Jona Lainez

UI/UX Design

Kevin Wright

Senior Developer

I am a skilled full stack application developer specializing in using a variety of technologies to create mobile-friendly and feature rich websites and custom applications. I have over 20 years of experience in developing and deploying enterprise level web applications.

My specialty is building applications with Adobe ColdFusion, Java, VB.Net, HTML5/CSS3, BootStrap, object-oriented design, MVC frameworks and multiple JavaScript libraries among other technologies.

I have a strong background in database architecture using Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle and MySQL. I also have extensive experience with Web API integrations.

Through my own consulting company, Kinetic InterActive, I provide businesses insight into the use of technology to solve a variety of business challenges. Providing business workflow analysis, user experience design, website usability and custom software, I help organizations understand the importance of technology in today’s business environment. Past projects have included work for VirginMobile, NBC Universal, Fox Home Entertainment in addition to many local small businesses and startups.

I live in Orange County (Southern California) with my wife and enjoy spending time with my daughter and grandchildren.

In my spare time I am heavily into organic gardening and travel photography.

Luis Majano

CEO

Luis Majano is a Computer Engineer and author who has been creating software since the year 2000. He was born in San Salvador, El Salvador in the late 1970s, during a period of economic instability and civil war. He lived in El Salvador until 1995 and then moved to Miami, Florida where he studied and completed his Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering at Florida International University.

He is the founder and CEO of Ortus Solutions, a consulting firm specializing in web development, ColdFusion (CFML), Java development and all open source professional services under the ColdBox and ContentBox stack. He is the creator of ColdBox, ContentBox, WireBox, MockBox, LogBox and anything BOX, and contributes to many open source ColdFusion/Java projects. You can read his blog at www.luismajano.com.

Luis has a passion for Jesus, tennis, golf, volleyball and anything electronic. Random Author Facts:

• He played volleyball in the Salvadorean National Team at the tender age of 17.
• The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit is something he reads every 5 years. (Geek!)
• His first ever computer was a Texas Instruments TI-86 that his parents gave him in 1986. After some time digesting his very first BASIC book, he had written his own tic-tac-toe game at the age of 9. (Extra geek!)
• He has a geek love for circuits, micro-controllers and overall embedded systems.
• He has of late (during old age) become a fan of organic gardening.

“Keep Jesus number one in your life and in your heart. I did and it changed my life from desolation, defeat and failure to an abundant life full of love, thankfulness, joy and overwhelming peace. As this world breathes failure and fear upon any life, Jesus brings power, love and a sound mind to everybody!”

“Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.” Proverbs 3:5

Michael Rigsby

CF Developer

Michael Rigsby has been a CF developer for over 25 years, dedicating the majority of his career to helping small and medium-sized businesses establish and enhance their online presence and services. With a deep passion for innovation and modern web development, Michael brings a wealth of experience and expertise to the ITB community.

Nolan Erck

Director/Owner

Nolan has been developing software for over 20 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. Nolan manages the SacInteractive User Group, teaches classes on aspects of software development, and regularly gives presentations at conferences and user groups across the US and Europe.

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.

Raymond Camden

Senior Developer

Raymond Camden is a developer evangelist, married father of eight, and passionate about making web development more accessible to developers of all levels. He lives in Lafayette, Louisiana, and spends much of his time writing, researching, and presenting. With over 6,600 blog posts and numerous conference speaking engagements under his belt, Raymond has become a wellknown and trusted voice in the developer world.

When Raymond isn’t behind a computer, you’ll find him enjoying Xbox/ PlayStation games, watching movies, and reading. He’s also a Star Wars nerd — but that’s a secret he’s not too keen on sharing publicly!

Raymond’s dedication to learning and sharing his knowledge has made him an invaluable resource to developers, particularly in the CFML ecosystem. His passion for technology and his ability to simplify complex topics has earned him invitations to speak at conferences worldwide, and now, he’s bringing that same energy and expertise to BoxLang.

Saeed Bawaney

Full stack Developer

Saeed is a CF Developer for over 20 years. Love to learn and embrace modernization.

Scott Steinbeck

Lead Software Engineer

Scott Steinbeck is a Software Architect and Data Scientist who partners with Growers & Ag Professionals to bring innovative solutions to difficult problems in Agriculture. After spending nearly a decade working in the Ag Tech industry creating solutions for multimillion-dollar farming operations, Scott knows what truly drives efficient farming practices, data-driven decision-making, and streamlined operations — and it’s not overly complicated software and spreadsheets. It's creating intuitive easy-to-use solutions, that simplify and speed up the collection of decision-critical information.

Scott Steinbeck has created software solutions for many aspects of agriculture including: Agri Tracking Systems, Agri Mapping, Rec Tracker, ATS Irrigation, and Crop Cast. These solutions provide strategies for managing: crop tracking, irrigation tracking, ag mapping, weather forecasting, location tracking, sample management, field scouting, cost forecasting, harvest tracking, and compliance reporting.

Scott Steinbeck holds a Masters Degree in Business Administration and a Bachelors degree in Management Information Systems from California State University Bakersfield.

Into The Box 2024: Key Takeaways and Highlights from the Latest Conference

• Writing The Code That Stands the Test of Time with Jacob Beers. “Software development is hard,” said Jacob Beers in his IntoTheBox workshop. But with coding principles, Jacob lectured about writing durable & maintainable code!
  Some principles were explored:

  – Avoiding ‘clever code' for debuggability

  – Inversion of Control & Composition over Inheritance for flexibility

  – Self-documenting code for clear communication ️

  …and more!
  
• “Building Reactive Web Applications with CFML and CBWIRE” – workshop with Grant Copley demonstrated how to create modern web applications using CFML, ColdBox CBWIRE, and AlpineJS.
  In this session, attendees were learning:

  – How CBWIRE Wired HTML Technology Simplifies Development

  – Creating reactive user interfaces with minimal JavaScript

  – Boost productivity and optimize web applications
  
• LIVE workshop – Unleash the power of ColdBox 7 with Luis Majano´s and build a dynamic HCMS & master cutting-edge featured:
  “This immersive workshop dives deep into ColdBox 7, from its new CFML engine to asynchronous programming,” said Luis. “You'll build a real HCMS, leveraging APIs, robust security (cbsecurity), & more!” See How It All Unfolded:

  

Into The Box 2024 – The New Era Of Modern Development

When is it?

• Wed May 15th to Fri May 17th 2024

Where is it this year?

• New location 
• Washington DC
• Optica conference center, 2010 Massachusetts Ave NW, near Dupont Circle metro

What is the agenda?

• May 15th – pre-conference show; activities and workshops
• May 18th – Conference Day + coding
• May 19th – Conference Day

Sponsors

• Platinum – Ortus Solutions (A Software Revolution)
• Silver – TeraTech (The ColdFusion Experts)
• Bronze – Computer Know How

Costs

• Early bird $349 conf only, $449 workshop + conf 
• Early bird ends March 30th
• Bilbo's Bonus Pass: Get a 10% discount because you’re a part of our CF Fellowship community: ITBTERA24.

Register here

Into The Box 2024 Speakers

 

 

Into The Box 2023 – Modernize (ColdFusion) or Die

When is it?

Into The Box 2023 Conference goes from May 17th – 19th of 2023, in Houston, TX.

Here’s the agenda by day:

• May 17th – pre-conference show; make sure not to miss it!
• May 18th – Conference Day + Happy Box Mariachi Party
• May 19th – Conference Day

How was last year at ITB?

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…”

Don’t miss the opportunity to attend Into The Box 10th edition for Free!

If you are a student interested in learning about the latest Web and Mobile Development Innovations and Tools and you want to network with like-minded professionals to expand your knowledge in the field; Then you don’t want to miss our upcoming Leading Web Development Conference in Modern CFML, Into the Box 2023!

How to win a Free Ticket?

As a student, you can win one of five free tickets to the conference; join us at Into the Box 10th edition for free by following the two steps mentioned on ITB website 

Into The Box 2023 Speakers

Ortus Solutions is a multinational company based in the US, Europe, and LATAM. As a leading provider of open-source products, tooling, and training, they are passionate about training, mentoring, modernizing the CFML language, and growing their community of amazing developers.

Ortus' website

 

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 in Houston, TX.

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, cinephile, regaler of useless knowledge, smoker of meats, Taekwondo practitioner, 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 are 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 allow your applications 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.

 

 

Into The Box 2021, Web Development Conference

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

So, do not wait, and go to 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!

 

Into The Box LatAm 2020 Virtual Conference – Free to Register!

IntoTheBox/LatAm is for all ColdFusion developers and while it focuses on the Box CF products and tools it does cover other topics too. It is December 3rd and 4th 2020. As you would expect for a conference targeting CFers in Latin America, most of the talks are in Spanish, but there are 2 in English and 1 in Portuguese.The event is free this year and via Zoom, so no reason not to pop into some of the talks.

I am happy to be attending one more CF conference this (virtual) year. Just a few days after CF Summit 2020 virtual event is over, ITB Latin America 2020 starts. To be more precise, the conference will be held on Thu, Dec 3, 2020, 4:00 PM – Sat, Dec 5, 2020, 12:00 AM CET.

Big ups to the Ortus team for making this conference happen!

Zoom seems to be platform of choice. After the event is over, all participants will have access to recordings via the CFCasts site.

IntoTheBox Latam, usually brings together developers, designers, entrepreneurs, government agencies, and professionals seeking to modernize their techniques and tools.

About ITB LatAm

The organizer is Ortus Solutions Corp. They were founded in 2006 with the vision of empowering developers with excellent open-source tools and empowering customers with scalable applications.

Luis Majano, one of the founders of the company said that the online conference brings so many possibilities to the attendees. Us, the attendees, are able to attend the conference without the hassle of having a trip, booking a hotel,  and doing many other things that may prevent so many of the usually interested people to attend! El dinero is one of the reasons for sure!

This time it is free 😉

A conference like ITB offers the possibility to acquire expert knowledge in open-source software which was, still is, and will be more and more, an essential part of the business technology strategy in the future.

Here is what I learned about the conference directly from one of the organizers, Jorge Reyes

First in English:

And second interview in Spanish:

How to Register for the Conference?

Two days before the event each participant will receive a link to access the event. You should go to Eventbrite and register for FREE ASAP. 

Follow the link and register now.

You will receive a confirmation link and complete the registration easily. 

Other tools you need are:

1. Comfortable chair
2. I like to wear blue light blocking glasses so I can easily spend more time in front of the screen,
3. Lots of coffee! (I don’t drink coffee anymore, but it is still a vibe for me to have a few coffee stains after two days of conferencing 😉
4. Reliable WiFi connection. 

And enjoy!

Speakers 

1. Abilio Posada

2. Brad Wood

3. Davis Vega

4. Edgardo Cabezas

5. Esmeralda Acevedo

6. Jaime Ramirez

7. Javier Quintero

8. Jon Clausen

9. Luis Majano

10. Miguel Mathus

11. Sonia Menendez

12. Stephany Monge

13. John Guzman

14. Patrick Leal

Sessions

Schedule and the sessions are announced!

ITB Latam 2020 Sessions, Day 1

Welcome to the Conference by Luis Majano, 8:45 – 9:00 AM CST

A warm welcome to the conference from the CEO of Ortus Solutions, Corp. Sessions are in Spanish.

CommandBox by Brad Wood, 9:00 – 9:50 AM CST

HMVC for everyone with ColdBox by Luis Majano, 10:00 – 10:50 AM CST

Test / Behavior Driven development by Abilio Posada, 11:00 – 11:50 AM CST

ORM with quick, by Davis Vega, 1:00 – 1:50 PM CST

Deployment with Containers, by Javier Quintero, 2:00 – 2:50 PM CST

ITB Latam 2020 Sessions, Day 2

quasar by Jaime Ramirez, 9:00 – 9:50 AM CST

Multi-language applications by Stephany Monge, 2:00 – 2:50 PM CST

“The greatest lessons in life are learned from losses” Every negative event or loss that we go through can become a great opportunity to learn, to take us to new and higher levels in our lives. This talk is a lamp on the path to a more rewarding life, where we will examine our losses, not measuring what we do not have, but understanding how loss can bring us abundance. This session is in Spanish.

 Learn more

You can also check them out here: Into The Box Latin America 2020 Sessions and Schedule

Sponsors 

1. Adobe is the main sponsor of the event.
   
2. Ortus Solutions corp. They are bringing speakers from Brazil, El Salvador, and the United States.
3. TeraTech is helping promote the event.
4. Modernize or Die, podcast about CFML news 

Comprehensive list of ColdFusion Conferences

That's pretty much what happened with conferences in 2020, too. CF community however didn't wait too long and we adapted to the situation. Without further ado, here's the full list of the 2020 CF conferences and webinars.

Related: Adobe ColdFusion Conferences (Comprehensive list)

So, that's 2020 in a sense…

Let's see what happens next. CF Rocks!

 

Into The Box 2020 Conference – Welcome to the Virtual

This year brings new kind of “normal” and Into The Box conference is no different. Covid 19 world pandemic has forced us to distance ourselves from all sorts of things. Conferences were canceled and so many businesses (and lives) changed. 

ITB adapted. It tends to show that they can successfully do a virtual conference. On May 7. and 8. 2020. Into The Box is set to be held in your home. Bedroom. Dorm room. Home office. You choose. 

While many say that this is not something they got used to, to us, the programmers can easily say that working from home has been normal for a few years now. Yes, maybe equally cool parts such as hanging out in the venue and in the after- parties is missing out this year, still there’s plenty of awesome things to learn at the conference. And that’s what this article is about. The next one might be, on the options of how we can hang around at the virtual conference and have fun. 😉

Into the Box 2020

Into the Box 2020 was awesome!

The conference was held in just inside the Houston, TX region at The Woodlands. It went for two exciting days, May 7th and May 8th.

Into The Box 2020 Conference (Slides and Presentations)

Register for Into The Box Conference 

You have a few more days to register for the conference, so do it now. The conference pass gives you access to the conference sessions in two simultaneous tracks and the access to recordings of each session. The price is $199.00

Register here

Into The Box Conference 2020 Sessions

Since you’re not going to the conference, make sure you set your clock to the Central Daylight Saving Time Zone. 

There are two rooms: Box room and Ortus room. 

Thursday, May 07, 2020. 

Ortus Keynote 2020

The conference will start with the keynote from organizers- Ortus Solutions. It 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.

Starts at 09.00

Speakers: Jorge Reyes, Jon Clausen, Luis Majano, Gavin Pickin, Brad Wood, Eric Peterson

Streams to rule the world By Gavin Pickin

In this session, Gavin discusses what Java streams are, each of the available methods and options, and how to implement cbStreams into your applications. With real-world examples of stream implementations, this session will also show how using streams can enhance the performance of your application and reduce latency.

Time 10:00 AM – 10:50 AM

Room: Box

Migrating The Legacy Out of your Applications! By Brad Wood

Everyone has legacy applications they have to work on and not everyone has the time to rewrite them from scratch. In this session, Brad covers easy ways to get started on your migrations one piece at a time without losing productivity. Expect to learn tips on how to get ColdBox running alongside your existing code so you can start cutting over your app one piece at a time.

Time 10:00 AM – 10:50 AM

Room: Ortus

Continuous Integration: Zero to Infinity By Pete Freitag

Maybe you've heard the buzz about Continuous Integration (CI) or Continuous Delivery (CD), but what does this look like for a CFML developer? What tools should I look at? How do I start? You will leave this session with an understanding of CI/CD and how you can recharge your team with CI in place.

Time 11:00 AM – 11:50 AM

Room: Box

Get up and Running in the Cloud with Ortus' Lucee Hardened AMI's By George Murphy

Are you thinking of moving to the cloud but just did not know how? Are you running your legacy application but you are not in a position to convert to containers? We will show you how to bring up a Lucee hardened AMI image and be able to run multiple sites from this Ubuntu Lucee AMI with Ngnix.

Time 11:00 AM – 11:50 AM

Room: Ortus

Sponsor's Session @Lunch Time 12:00 PM – 01:00 PM

Do It with CFML: Building Your Own Tools with CommandBox By Matthew Clemente

Matthew explores a completely different use for CommandBox – building custom tooling. The goal is to use your existing knowledge of CFML, along with CommandBox, to automate, extend, and enhance your development workflows, servers, and environment. He will begin by examining the code, structure, and functionality of existing CommandBox custom commands (say that three times fast and Brad Wood will appear). Some of these commands you may be familiar with – others may be new to you. You’ll see how the helper components, convenience methods, and available utilities within CommandBox all come together to make custom commands and task runners possible. CommandBox makes it trivial to harness all the functionality of CFML (think PDF generation, emails, and more), as well as provide commandline interactivity. This is all put together with an intuitive DSL and conventions that make creating your own shareable, reusable command modules straightforward and accessible. So, you will build on what you’ve learned from existing CommandBox modules, and it further walks you through the process of crafting your own commands and task runners. By the end, you’ll be ready to take full advantage of the power of CommandBox to automate all-the-things. You’ll have a deeper understanding of CommandBox, its inner-workings, and how you can tap into them for your own applications, projects, and day-to-day tasks.

Time 01:00 PM – 01:50 PM

Room: Box

QB For the Rest Of Us: 1.21 Gigawatts of Fluent and Functional by Sam Knowlton

If you develop with CFML, sooner or later you're writing queries. Whether you've never used QB or you want to pick up a few new tips and tricks, you'll barely touch queryExecute() again with Eric Peterson's fantastic QueryBuilder library, inspired by Laravel.

No previous experience with QB? Don't use Coldbox? No problem: you will be introduced to the power of builder objects, the benefits of SchemaBuilder and migrations, and also show off some new features in the recent release of QB version 7.

Finally, learn how Sam went from being QB neophytes (‘that's one of those tools the Ortus guys use, right?') to making QB (and Quick) a cornerstone of their development process.

Time 01:00 PM – 01:50 PM

Room: Ortus

Serverless Container Deployments on AWS by Seth Stone

If you've experienced the power of running Commandbox servers in Docker for development, you'll love being able to deploy the same setup to production. Using CodePipeline and AWS Fargate you can be up and running in minutes with a fully-automated production pipeline for your containerized CFML app.

Time 02:00 PM – 02:50 PM

Room: Box

Power up your search with cbElasticSearch by Michael Born

If you think database full-text search is slow and bare-bones, you're right. ElasticSearch is becoming the de-facto standard for lightning-fast search, and with cbElasticSearch, the Ortus-built ElasticSearch API client, you can easily integrate with ElasticSearch in your ColdBox application to provide your users with fast and powerful search. This session will cover ElasticSearch usage from installation and configuration to indexing documents, searching using cbElasticSearch's intuitive API and returning “Did you mean?” suggestions for a fantastic user experience.

Time 02:00 PM – 02:50 PM

Room: Ortus

Siesta Time 02:50 PM – 03:10 PM

Just Do It! ColdBox Integration Testing by Javier Quintero

Whether it is a full-on MVC application producing HTML or a full-on HMVC RESTFul application producing JSON. By the end of the session, you will be able to easily get up and running with integration testing in any ColdBox app.

Time 03:10 PM – 04:00 PM

Room: Box

Validate! (or fail…..) by Wil de Bruin

Validation is boring, writing the same logic again and again. Save yourself some trouble and use coldbox validation. With cbvalidation you can validate all incoming request sata or populated objects. Create your own custom validators to use cbvalidation to the max!

Time 03:10 PM – 04:00 PM

Room: Ortus

5 CommandBox Modules you should be using 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. Brad covers the top 5 modules you need to be using in order to increase your productivity and get the most out of CommandBox. Most of these you can install while you watch the session to start playing with.

Time 04:10 PM – 05:00 PM

Room: Box

10 in 50 : ColdBox Modules you should be using by Jon Clausen

In this 50-minute session, Jon takes a fast-paced look at 10 Coldbox modules you owe it to yourself to be using in every application you develop. These modules run the gamut from security and authenticatiom to data serialization, but they all have one thing in common: they will save you hours of repetitive coding and make your life easier!

Time 04:10 PM – 05:00 PM

Room: Ortus

What if no one is monitoring your DB server? By Charlie Arehart

Are you having problems with your web app, which you think might be due to your database? Are you able to monitor what's going on in the DB? Is anyone doing that? Often, no one is. Or you or the DBA are watching the wrong metrics. There are many tools that can help, some better than others.

Time 05:10 PM – 06:00 PM

Room: Box

I Didn't Know S3 Could Do That! By Brian Klaas

Millions of developers know Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) as the file system for the Internet: it's fast, cheap, and super durable. CFML developers can go beyond built-in access to S3 and unlock its true power by tapping into the AWS Java SDK. That's exactly what Brian Klass covers in this session.

Time 05:10 PM – 06:00 PM

Room: Ortus

Friday, May 08, 2020. 

Ortus Keynote 2020 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. They will tell you a story about CFML, which I 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. At the end, hear about Ortus's plans for the future… as well as remind you of a driving force behind all things Ortus.

Time 09:00 AM – 09:50 AM

Speakers: Luis Majano, Pete Freitag, Jorge Reyes, Jon Clausen, Brad Wood, Gavin Pickin, Eric Peterson

Get your Front End Rolling with Vue and InertiaJS by Eric Peterson

Using Inertia.js is like using your favorite MVC server-side framework (ColdBox, of course) with Vue as the templating language – no need to build a separate API. In this session, we will take a look at what apps Inertia is a good fit for, go through setup and usage, and take a look at a demo application to get a feel for the framework. This session will explore the cbInertia module, which provides the needed lifecycle and ajax responses to integrate Inertia.js into a ColdBox app on the server. We will show how to render Inertia responses, both for the initial page visit and subsequent client-side transitions, as well as share data on every Inertia request.

Time 10:00 AM – 10:50 AM

Room: Box

To the future with CBPromises by Luis Majano

Luis will review the asynchronous and parallel programming SDK built into the core to support not only asynchronous and parallel programming in the framework, but also leverage it for your own applications. To the future!

Time 10:00 AM – 10:50 AM

Room: Ortus

The Golden Hammer: Confessions of a Recovering Database Abuser by Shawn Oden

Early in my dev career, I often (unwittingly) abused my systems. My code didn't care about things like databases or networks, as long as the results were right. I had a cfHammer, and I needed to pound out a solution. I never knew I was an anti-pattern.

Time 11:00 AM – 11:50 AM

Room: Box

Modern Functional & Fluent CFML REST APIs by Gavin Pickin

DRY Programming can be more fun than you think, in this session, Gavin will show you how a few helper methods can give you a functional, fluent, stylish and clean way to write code for your REST API. Not writing an API, this can help traditional Applications too.

Time 11:00 AM – 11:50 AM

Room: Ortus

Special Guest Session @Lunch Time 12:00 PM – 01:00 PM

End To End Test Automation using TestCafè by Francisco Mancardi

No matter if you have a big product developed on more that 20 year or a small new app you need to reduce your testing costs and increase the quality for your customers. Use Page Object Model and Test Cafe to build an exciting Testing Platform. Use your own CF code and skills to create your POM.

Time 01:00 PM – 01:50 PM

Room: Box

Bake shop: Build lightweight, ultra-fast containers with v3 CommandBox Docker images by Jon Clausen

Ready to build fast, lightweight CFML containers that are online and serving your app within 4 seconds or less? In this session, Jon will show you how, using the latest features in the CommandBox Docker images.

Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned Docker pro, in this session, you get an intro to the features of CommandBox docker images and show you how to use their built in goodness to create custom deployment images that start in seconds and can be deployed anywhere. 

Time 01:00 PM – 01:50 PM

Room: Ortus

Mental Helpers by Jeffrey Kunkel

Mental health is an ever-increasing concern today. As leaders and teammates, we can feel powerless to help those around us suffering from mental health issues like depression and anxiety. Navigating the world of mental health is a treacherous path that can lead you to accomplish the opposite of your goals, or even ending up with issues of your own. This talk will focus on summarizing a few common mental health issues in the tech/office environment. Giving attendees some tools for recognizing signs, understanding what's going on in their coworker’s heads, and being supportive without being intrusive or overbearing. I will also focus heavily on making sure to maintain your own mental health while trying to help others, by including helpful resources and advice for seeking professional assistance or helping someone else do so. I end the talk with a short round table discussion to brainstorm and share ways attendees have personally dealt with these issues. This talk is for leaders and coworkers that want to be resources for their teams to help them with their mental health and get them up and running again.

Time 02:00 PM – 02:50 PM

Room: Box

Kube Kitchen by Joel Lord

You will deploy some pods that do specific things and set the rules that dictate how they talk to each other. By expanding on the idea of a restaurant, the speaker will slowly introduce those concepts in a fun and simple way.

Time 02:00 PM – 02:50 PM

Room: Ortus

02:50 PM – 03:10 PM, the nap time

cbSecurity – secure all things box! By Javier Quintero and Brad Wood

Security is paramount in all of our web applications. Especially now in the age of APIs. But how do we accomplish consistency and efficiency? In this session, we will review cbSecurity a module for ColdBox applications that will provide you with consistent and modular security rules, security annotations, visualizer and JWT token support

Time 03:10 PM – 04:00 PM

Room: Box

Build your own Raspberry Pi powered Server Status monitor with LEDs! By Scott Steinbeck

Never be in the dark when it comes to the status of your builds and servers, with this awesome Raspberry Pi LED Server Status Monitor. Whatever you want to know the status of can be sent directly to an LED Light strip so you know the moment there is a problem or a successful build.

Time 03:10 PM – 04:00 PM

Room: Ortus

Build A Desktop Application Powered By Electron, VueJS & CFML by Tony Junkes

As a web developer, building desktop applications might not have ever been a thought a few years ago. Learn how modern tooling allows you to build a fully functional desktop app using what you're probably already familiar with: HTML, CSS, JavaScript and a server-side language of your choosing.

Time 04:10 PM – 05:00 PM

Room: Box

Testing My Non-ColdBox Site With TestBox by Nolan Erck

Ever thought? “TestBox looks great, but I have a bunch of web apps that aren’t ColdBox. How do I test those?” Answer: The same way! TestBox is an entirely stand-alone product! It isn no way requires that your apps be ColdBox based — TestBox really is a tool available for all CFML developers!

Time 04:10 PM – 05:00 PM

Room: Ortus

Deploying CommandBox Containers to the Cloud by Gavin Pickin

To be Announced

Time 05:10 PM – 06:00 PM

Room: Box

Build a blog in 30 minutes with ColdBox and Quick by Eric Peterson

Quick is a library for interacting with your database in an object-oriented way. Based on Eloquent from Laravel PHP and built entirely in CFML, Quick is a performant and expressive alternative to CF ORM (Hibernate) or rolling your own data access layer. In this session, you will see how Quick can help you create a fully functioning blog in 30 minutes. You will see all the basic building blocks of Quick (and a few advanced ones) and get a feel for how this library can speed up your development.

Time 05:10 PM – 06:00 PM

Room: Ortus

Into The Box 2020 Speakers

I am sure you already know all of the CF veterans and experts, but in case you want to know more, follow this link

See you soon!

CF Rocks!

 

Into The Box 2020 Conference (Slides and Presentations)

 

Into The Box 2020 First Impressions

The Into The Box ColdFusion virtual conference this year was epic! Your creativity is out of this world – you might say it was out of the box. JaJaJa!

And congrats on getting the videos published so fast and releasing the new CFCasts ColdFusion training site too. Looking forward to more CF goodness on there soon 🙂

This year showed us a new kind of “normal” and Into The Box 2020 conference proved that it is possible to have a successful online- virtual event. Covid 19 world pandemic has forced us to distance ourselves from all sorts of things. Conferences were canceled and so many businesses (and lives) changed. 

ITB adapted. On May 7. and 8. 2020. Into The Box 2020 was set to be virtual, and it was actually held in your home. Bedroom. Dorm room. Home office. You chose. 

While many say that this is not something they got used to, to us, the programmers can easily say that working from home has been normal for a few years now. Yes, maybe equally cool parts such as hanging out in the venue and in the after- parties are missing out this year, still there’s plenty of awesome things to learn at the conference. And that’s what this article is about. The next one might be, on the options of how we can hang around at the virtual conferences and have fun. 😉

Into The Box Conference 2020 Sessions, Slides and Presentations 

Two rooms were “booked” for the event: Box room and Ortus room. 

A similar problem occurred: having a multi-track conference made it hard for everyone to be in both sessions. On the other hand, everything I missed will be available soon because Ortus team will provide recordings like they did the last year.

The second thing is that some of the people looked a lot more fresh than usual. That might be due to a lack of the party on night 1 of the event… 😀

The lack of coffee during the conference is then probably a reason why some seemed so tired…

I will list the speakers and their presentations and slides that you can download and see what you can find interesting.

Ortus Keynote Into The Box 2020 Day 1 

The conference started with the keynote from organizers- Ortus Solutions. It gave us an insight into Ortus Solutions, the past, present and future. The members of Team Ortus have addressed to attendees, community members, speakers and sponsors. 

After that we've heard a story about CFML,  and learned what Ortus and the community are doing for CFML and the future of CFML. Followed by updates on an array of Ortus *Box products, including recent releases & upcoming plans and features in our roadmaps. 

Speakers: Jorge Reyes, Jon Clausen, Luis Majano, Gavin Pickin, Brad Wood, Eric Peterson

We are happy to announce a free open source eCommerce solution for #coldfusion #cfml => cbCommerce! At #itb2020 pic.twitter.com/fnMz1nCRMG

— Luis Majano (@lmajano) May 8, 2020

Better Box

Streams to rule the world By Gavin Pickin

In this session, Gavin discussed what Java streams are, each of the available methods and options, and how to implement cbStreams into your applications. With real-world examples of stream implementations, this session has also shown how using streams can enhance the performance of your application and reduce latency.

Do It with CFML: Building Your Own Tools with CommandBox By Matthew Clemente

Matthew explores a completely different use for CommandBox – building custom tooling. The goal is to use your existing knowledge of CFML, along with CommandBox, to automate, extend, and enhance your development workflows, servers, and environment. He started by examining the code, structure, and functionality of existing CommandBox custom commands (say that three times fast and Brad Wood will appear). Some of these commands you may be familiar with – others may be new to you. You we enabled to see how the helper components, convenience methods, and available utilities within CommandBox all come together to make custom commands and task runners possible. CommandBox makes it trivial to harness all the functionality of CFML (think PDF generation, emails, and more), as well as provide commandline interactivity. This is all put together with an intuitive DSL and conventions that make creating your own shareable, reusable command modules straightforward and accessible. So, you built on what you’ve learned from existing CommandBox modules, and it further walked us through the process of crafting your own commands and task runners. By the end, you were ready to take full advantage of the power of CommandBox to automate all-the-things. You should now have a deeper understanding of CommandBox, its inner-workings, and how you can tap into them for your own applications, projects, and day-to-day tasks.

Download the full presentation here

5 CommandBox Modules you should be using 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. Brad covers the top 5 modules you need to be using in order to increase your productivity and get the most out of CommandBox. Most of these you can install while you watch the session to start playing with.

Download the full presentation here

This is not your father's CommandBox – writing custom tools in #CFML with @mjclemente84 at #ITB2020 virtual #ColdFusion Conference today.#IntoTheBox pic.twitter.com/wZDsxnDOwq

— Michaela Light (@TeraTechCF) May 7, 2020

Power up your search with cbElasticSearch by Michael Born

If you think database full-text search is slow and bare-bones, you're right. ElasticSearch is becoming the de-facto standard for lightning-fast search, and with cbElasticSearch, the Ortus-built ElasticSearch API client, you can easily integrate with ElasticSearch in your ColdBox application to provide your users with fast and powerful search. This session covered ElasticSearch usage from installation and configuration to indexing documents, searching using cbElasticSearch's intuitive API and returning “Did you mean?” suggestions for fantastic user experience.

Download the full presentation here

Michael Born Website

Michael Born Twitter

10 in 50 : ColdBox Modules you should be using by Jon Clausen

In this 50-minute session, Jon took a fast-paced look at 10 Coldbox modules you owe it to yourself to be using in every application you develop. These modules run the gamut from security and authentication to data serialization, but they all have one thing in common: they will save you hours of repetitive coding and make your life easier!

Ortus Keynote Into The Box 2020 Day 2

The Ortus Keynote gave an insight into Ortus Solutions, the past, present, and future. We've met the members of Team Ortus, community members, speakers and sponsors. They told a story about CFML, and about what Ortus and the community are doing for CFML and the future of CFML. Got the updates on an array of Ortus *Box products, including recent releases & upcoming plans and features in our roadmaps. At the end, we heard about Ortus's plans for the future… as well as remind you of a driving force behind all things Ortus.

Speakers: Luis Majano, Pete Freitag, Jorge Reyes, Jon Clausen, Brad Wood, Gavin Pickin, Eric Peterson

MoD Conference Edition – Live from ITB2020

Why does @southofshasta have pink headphones? Learn more here… :)))) https://t.co/W4wr6AcnKo pic.twitter.com/lVlqsW7eEK

— Michaela Light (@TeraTechCF) May 7, 2020

To the future with CBPromises by Luis Majano

Luis reviewed the asynchronous and parallel programming SDK built into the core to support not only asynchronous and parallel programming in the framework, but also leverage it for your own applications. To the future!

Download the full presentation here

cbSecurity – secure all things box! By Javier Quintero and Brad Wood

Security is paramount in all of our web applications. Especially now in the age of APIs. But how do we accomplish consistency and efficiency? In this session, speakers reviewed cbSecurity a module for ColdBox applications that will provide you with consistent and modular security rules, security annotations, visualizer and JWT token support

Build a blog in 30 minutes with ColdBox and Quick by Eric Peterson

Quick is a library for interacting with your database in an object-oriented way. Based on Eloquent from Laravel PHP and built entirely in CFML, Quick is a performant and expressive alternative to CF ORM (Hibernate) or rolling your own data access layer. In this session, you could see how Quick can help you create a fully functioning blog in 30 minutes. You could also see all the basic building blocks of Quick (and a few advanced ones) and get a feel for how this library can speed up your development.

Modern CFML

Migrating The Legacy Out of your Applications! By Brad Wood

Everyone has legacy applications they have to work on and not everyone has the time to rewrite them from scratch. In this session, Brad covered easy ways to get started on your migrations one piece at a time without losing productivity. He gave plenty of tips on how to get ColdBox running alongside your existing code so you can start cutting over your app one piece at a time.

Continuous Integration: Zero to Infinity By Pete Freitag

Maybe you've heard the buzz about Continuous Integration (CI) or Continuous Delivery (CD), but what does this look like for a CFML developer? What tools should I look at? How do I start? This session helped us with an understanding of CI/CD and how we can recharge our team with CI in place.

 

Download the full presentation here

Get your Front End Rolling with Vue and InertiaJS by Eric Peterson

Using Inertia.js is like using your favorite MVC server-side framework (ColdBox, of course) with Vue as the templating language – no need to build a separate API. In this session, Eric took a look at what apps Inertia is a good fit for, go through setup and usage, and take a look at a demo application to get a feel for the framework. This session explored the cbInertia module, which provides the needed lifecycle and ajax responses to integrate Inertia.js into a ColdBox app on the server. How to render Inertia responses, both for the initial page visit and subsequent client-side transitions, as well as share data on every Inertia request.

Build A Desktop Application Powered By Electron, VueJS & CFML by Tony Junkes

As a web developer, building desktop applications might not have ever been a thought a few years ago. Learn how modern tooling allows you to build a fully functional desktop app using what you're probably already familiar with: HTML, CSS, JavaScript and a server-side language of your choosing.

Download the full presentation here

Modern Functional & Fluent CFML REST APIs by Gavin Pickin

DRY Programming can be more fun than you think, in this session, Gavin showed us how a few helper methods can give you a functional, fluent, stylish and clean way to write code for your REST API. Not writing an API, this can help traditional Applications too.

Build your own Raspberry Pi powered Server Status monitor with LEDs! By Scott Steinbeck

Never be in the dark when it comes to the status of your builds and servers, with this awesome Raspberry Pi LED Server Status Monitor. Whatever you want to know the status of can be sent directly to an LED Light strip so you know the moment there is a problem or a successful build.

Mental Helpers by Jeffrey Kunkel

Mental health is an ever-increasing concern today. As leaders and teammates, we can feel powerless to help those around us suffering from mental health issues like depression and anxiety. Navigating the world of mental health is a treacherous path that can lead you to accomplish the opposite of your goals, or even ending up with issues of your own. This talk will focus on summarizing a few common mental health issues in the tech/office environment. Giving attendees some tools for recognizing signs, understanding what's going on in their coworker’s heads, and being supportive without being intrusive or overbearing. I will also focus heavily on making sure to maintain your own mental health while trying to help others, by including helpful resources and advice for seeking professional assistance or helping someone else do so. I end the talk with a short round table discussion to brainstorm and share ways attendees have personally dealt with these issues. This talk is for leaders and coworkers that want to be resources for their teams to help them with their mental health and get them up and running again.

Download the full presentation here

Cloud Deployment

Get up and Running in the Cloud with Ortus' Lucee Hardened AMI's By George Murphy

Are you thinking of moving to the cloud but just did not know how? Are you running your legacy application but you are not in a position to convert to containers? George has shown how to bring up a Lucee hardened AMI image and be able to run multiple sites from this Ubuntu Lucee AMI with Ngnix.

Serverless Container Deployments on AWS by Seth Stone

If you've experienced the power of running Commandbox servers in Docker for development, you'll love being able to deploy the same setup to production. Using CodePipeline and AWS Fargate you can be up and running in minutes with a fully-automated production pipeline for your containerized CFML app.

Download the full presentation here

I Didn't Know S3 Could Do That! By Brian Klaas

Millions of developers know Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) as the file system for the Internet: it's fast, cheap, and super durable. CFML developers can go beyond built-in access to S3 and unlock its true power by tapping into the AWS Java SDK. That's exactly what Brian Klass covered in his session.

Download the full presentation here

Bake shop: Build lightweight, ultra-fast containers with v3 CommandBox Docker images by Jon Clausen

Ready to build fast, lightweight CFML containers that are online and serving your app within 4 seconds or less? In this session, Jon showed us how, using the latest features in the CommandBox Docker images.

Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned Docker pro, in this session, you get an intro to the features of CommandBox docker images and show you how to use their built in goodness to create custom deployment images that start in seconds and can be deployed anywhere. 

Kube Kitchen by Joel Lord

You will deploy some pods that do specific things and set the rules that dictate how they talk to each other. By expanding on the idea of a restaurant, Joel has slowly introduced those concepts in a fun and simple way.

There were no slides per se, it was a React application that Joel ran. The source code can be found (along with additional resources) here

Deploying CommandBox Containers to the Cloud by Gavin Pickin

Database

QB For the Rest Of Us: 1.21 Gigawatts of Fluent and Functional by Sam Knowlton

If you develop with CFML, sooner or later you're writing queries. Whether you've never used QB or you want to pick up a few new tips and tricks, you'll barely touch queryExecute() again with Eric Peterson's fantastic QueryBuilder library, inspired by Laravel.

No previous experience with QB? Don't use Coldbox? No problem: Sam has introduced us to the power of builder objects, the benefits of SchemaBuilder and migrations, and also has shown some new features in the recent release of QB version 7.

In the end, we learned how Sam went from being QB neophytes (‘that's one of those tools the Ortus guys use, right?') to making QB (and Quick) a cornerstone of their development process.

Download the full presentation here

What if no one is monitoring your DB server? By Charlie Arehart

Are you having problems with your web app, which you think might be due to your database? Are you able to monitor what's going on in the DB? Is anyone doing that? Often, no one is. Or you or the DBA are watching the wrong metrics. There are many tools that can help, some better than others.

The Golden Hammer: Confessions of a Recovering Database Abuser by Shawn Oden

Early in my dev career, I often (unwittingly) abused my systems. My code didn't care about things like databases or networks, as long as the results were right. I had a cfHammer, and I needed to pound out a solution. I never knew I was an anti-pattern.

Visit Shawn's website, or find him on Twitter at @codefumonkey or reached through email at [email protected]

Download the slides here

Modern Testing

Just Do It! ColdBox Integration Testing by Javier Quintero

Whether it is a full-on MVC application producing HTML or a full-on HMVC RESTFul application producing JSON. By covering this session, you will be able to easily get up and running with integration testing in any ColdBox app.

Validate! (or fail…..) by Wil de Bruin

Validation is boring, writing the same logic again and again. Save yourself some trouble and use ColdBox validation. With cbvalidation you can validate all incoming request sata or populated objects. Create your own custom validators to use cbvalidation to the max!

Download the full presentation here

End To End Test Automation using TestCafè by Francisco Mancardi

No matter if you have a big product developed on more that 20 year or a small new app you need to reduce your testing costs and increase the quality for your customers. Use Page Object Model and Test Cafe to build an exciting Testing Platform. Use your own CF code and skills to create your POM.

Download the full presentation here

Testing My Non-ColdBox Site With TestBox by Nolan Erck

Ever thought? “TestBox looks great, but I have a bunch of web apps that aren’t 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!

Download the full presentation here

Into The Box 2020 Speakers

I am sure you already know all of the CF veterans and experts, but in case you want to know more, follow this link

More cool news from ITB 2020

You can find the new CF training site here 

You can get ALL the videos from the conference which covers both new Ortus Solutions, Corp *Box products and general CFML, Docker and SQL  programming in 30 high-quality sessions for just $10 total at this link until the end of June. I have already got them and I recommend for all modern CF developers and managers.

Into the Box 2019

Into the Box 2019 Full Review (+ Complete List of Slides and Presentations)

CF Rocks!

 

Into the Box 2019 – All set up! and waiting for you

 

After the success at the CF Summit East in Washington DC, it seems that the spring conference season is fully underway.

Our next major upcoming conference is the much anticipated Into the Box 2019.

The conference will be held in just inside the Houston, TX region at The Woodlands. It will run for three exciting days starting on the May 1st with pre-conference workshops and culminating on May 3rd with Closing remarks and a raffle.

Related: Five Reasons to Attend Into The Box 2019

Pre-Conference Workshops- Into the Box 2019

Much like last year’s Into the Box, Ortus will offer an awesome selection of pre-conference workshops. This is a great hands-on experience and training that will prove invaluable to your CFML and Box needs.

The Workshops available are:

• Containerizing CFML Apps with Jon Clausen
• BDD with TestBox with Luis Majano
• CommandBox Deep Dive with Brad Wood
• ColdBox from Zero to Hero with Eric Petersen
• ContentBox from Zero to Hero with Gavin Pickin
• Hands-On CFML Security Workshop with Pete Freitag

It may seem that Into the Box 2019 is conducting the same great workshops they held in 2018. And that’s true to an extent. They are providing the same great content, but with more information due to major CF events. (Like the release of CF2018.)

Not only is there great, fresh info, but Ortus has tacked on two other workshops to choose from. (ContentBox and CFML Security)

These workshops alone are well worth the time spent at Into the Box 2019. Each workshop costs $499. However, you can get one paid workshop and general admission with the All Access Pass for $699.

Sessions for Into the Box 2019

Following the good practice established in the previous years, there will be two separate tracks running on each day of the conference. All of this after the hour and a half breakfast of course.

Sessions will be provided on many different areas of CFML, programming, and Box tools. Let’s take a look at just some of what waits in store.

• CBStreams : Accelerate your Functional Programming with the power of Java Streams with Matt Gifford

• Cloud Viral with TerraForm with George Murphy

• Beyond “Read All”: Build Fine-Grained Control of Amazon Web Services in Your CFML App with Brian Klaas

• Multi-Language / Multi-OS Communication using RabbitMQ with Wil de Bruin

• Voulez-vous… add another spoken language to your app? with David Belanger

• Migrate yourself with cfMigrations with Eric Petersen

• ColdBox Elixir v3: What's New and Improved with Jon Clausen

• Faster DB Development with QB with Andrew Davis

• And Much Much More! 

Here's the complete list of the sessions at ITB 2019

Into the Box is going to be chock full of killer sessions and top rate speakers. This is one conference you don’t want to miss out on.

Big Discounts for Into the Box 2019

Some might say that the most frustrating part about going to a conference isn’t the conference. It’s everything else. The flight and hotel arrangements particularly … They can add up to equal a huge headache and lack of motivation.

That’s why the folks over at Ortus came together to make your life easier when it comes to those arrangements.

Hotel Accommodation

Please call Hyatt Place Reservations at 855-312-7268 and request the group code G-ORTU to receive a discounted group rate. You can also go online at houstonthewoodlands.place.hyatt.com and enter the group rate shown above in the Corporate or Group Code box. Reservations with this code must be made by 03/24/2019.

 

Additional Info

Check-in time: 3:00 pm

Check-out time: 12:00 pm

United Airlines

To receive your 3% – 10% Discount on United Airlines flights to Houston for intothebox.org, you can book online at united.com/meetingtravel and provide discount code ZGHR181193 in the Offer Code box, under Promotions and certificates. Or, for a $25 service fee you can call United Meetings at (800) 426-1122 where a ticketing agent can help you by phone using the discount code and agreement code: 181193

So in short….

I would love to encourage everybody with the means available to head over to Houston and check out this year’s Into the Box conference. Let’s show our support for each other, our platform, and people at Ortus who do so much for us.

Are you an introvert? Worried about missing out on what could be the greatest ITB ever? Check out these tips on how to conquer conferences and properly network!

Do you have any other great conference tips? Let us know in the comments below. If you like what you see, go ahead and follow us on Twitter at TeraTechCF and never miss an update.

Cheers!

Into the Box 2019 Full Review (+ Complete List of Slides and Presentations)

 

After the success at the CF Summit East in Washington DC, the spring conference season is over.

Into the Box 2019 was awesome!

The conference was held in just inside the Houston, TX region at The Woodlands. It went for three exciting days starting on May 1st with pre-conference workshops and culminating on May 3rd with Closing remarks and a raffle. It had 50% (!) more attendees than last year! Wow!

Pre-Conference Workshops- What You Might've Missed

Much like last year’s Into the Box, Ortus had a great selection of pre-conference workshops. 

The Workshops list:

• Containerizing CFML Apps with Jon Clausen
• BDD with TestBox with Luis Majano
• CommandBox Deep Dive with Brad Wood
• ColdBox from Zero to Hero with Eric Petersen
• ContentBox from Zero to Hero with Gavin Pickin
• Hands-On CFML Security Workshop with Pete Freitag

Complete List of Sessions for Into the Box 2019

The list of the speakers speaks for itself. CF experts on all kinds of ColdFusion fields held presentations during those 3 days. Here are the full list and the presentation slides.

Into The Box 2019 official day one

Ortus Keynote

The Ortus Keynote gives you insight into Ortus Solutions, the past, present and future.

Slides available here

Serverless CFML on AWS Lambda by Pete Freitag

Do you want to run serverless CFML on AWS Lambda?

Slides available here

Beyond “Read All”: Build Fine-Grained Control of Amazon Web Services in Your CFML App by Brian Klaas

Developers across the world look to cloud providers like AWS, Google, and Microsoft to expand the capabilities of their applications.

Slides available here

Cloud Viral with TerraForm by George Murphy

Learn how to create a CommandBox image of Lucee 5.X on LightSail

Slides available here

ColdBox APIs + VueJS – powering Mobile, Desktop and Web Apps with 1 VueJS codebase by Gavin Pickin

Interact with your database with ease using Quick.

Slides available here

Intro to Quick: a ColdBox ORM Engine by Eric Peterson

Interact with your database with ease using Quick.

Slides available here

CBStreams : Accelerate your Functional Programming with the power of Java Streams by Luis Majano

A beginners guide to cbStreams.

Slides available here

ColdBox Elixir v3: What's New and Improved by Jon Clausen

Coldbox Elixir v3 represents a major upgrade from v2 in compiling and managing your static and dynamic Javascript assets. Join us and see what's hot in the world of static asset compilation and development!

Slides available here

CacheBox + LogBox 101 by Brad Wood

Two of the most underused libraries are LogBox and CacheBox. The biggest feature they offer is abstraction. You can decouple your app's code from a specific logging or caching mechanism so you can change it out in the future with no big changes to your app.

Slides available here

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

Learn how they tried to automate the various workflows by using a messaging system such as RabbitMQ.

Slides available here

RuleBox : The natural rule engine for CFML by Luis Majano

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

RuleBox is a modern intuitive and natural language rule engine based upon the great work of RuleBook: https://github.com/rulebook-rules/rulebook ported over to ColdFusion (CFML).

slides available here

The many facets of CommandBox by Dan Card

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is for beginning to moderate users of CommandBox who are interested in an overview of techniques made possible by the CommandBox system can help with their personal or corporate workflow from simple server management to Devops.

Slides available here

CommandBox vs Node.js by Nolan Erck

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Did you know that all the core features of Node now exist in a pure CFML workflow?

Slides available here

Mental Helpers by Jeffrey Kunkel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How to support your team's mental health without losing yours.

Slides available here

Into The Box 2019 official day two

Ortus Day 2 Keynote

The Ortus Keynote gave us an insight into Ortus Solutions, the past, present, and future.

Slides available here

Come cover your *** with some TestBox Coverage! by Brad Wood

Slides available here

10 in 50: Ten Coldbox Modules You Should be Using in Every App by Jon Clausen

In this 50-minute session, Jon gave us a fast-paced look at 10 Coldbox modules you should be using in every application you develop.

Slides available here

Try This At Home: Building a Personal Docker Swarm by Matthew Clemente

Learn about containerizing and deploying a personal CFML project to Swarm. The best way to learn is by doing, and it’s also the most fun.

Slides available here.

Real World CFML by Nolan Erck

The recent versions of ColdFusion have added many new language features. We’ve now got closures, functional programming constructs, QueryExecute, the safe navigation operator, the Elvis operator, and even more coming in future releases. For people new to functional programming or object-oriented programming, it can be hard to see where these features can be beneficial.

Slides available here.

NGINX Overview and Technical Aspects by Kevin Jones

Learn about the history of NGINX and NGINX Plus and the role it has played in the development of the internet.

Slides available here.

ForgeBox Enterprise : Private Software Directory by Javier Quintero and Brad Wood

ForgeBox Enterprise is a private version of the ColdFusion (CFML) software directory.

Slides available here.

Migrate yourself with cfMigrations  by Eric Peterson

cfMigrations is a library to handle creating, applying, and storing small incremental changes to your database schema in code.

Slides available here.

Easily Build Amazon Alexa skills with ColdFusion by Mike Callahan

Join the explosive growing market of voice controlled solutions.

Slides available here.

Easy ElasticSearch with cbElasticSearch by Jon Clausen

Break free of cfcollection and cfsearch, along with their server-side limitations, and join the multitudes of Elasticsearch fans, worldwide!

Slides available here.

Containerizing ContentBox CMS by Gavin Pickin

ContentBox is Ortus Solution's very own Open Source Content Management System (CMS) built on top of ColdFusion's most actively supported framework, Coldbox.

Slides available here.

Scaling with CommandBox in Production! by Brad Wood

There are a lot of new trends when it comes to how you can deploy your servers. From AWS, to Docker, or perhaps you just want a faster way to stand up new VMs.

Slides available here.

Lessons Learned from 250+ Legacy Apps by Jorge Reyes and Esmeralda Acevedo

What are the lessons learned from Legacy CFML projects that we have lead and implemented so you can learn from both our mistakes and our success.

Slides available here.

Faster DB Development with QB bt Andrew Davis

Stop worrying about concatenating SQL strings together in the right order.

Slides Available here.

 

 

So in short….

I would love to encourage everybody with the means available to go ahead and start planning your next conference already. Let’s show our support for each other, our platform, and everyone that keeps ColdFusion alive.

PS Are you an introvert?

Worried about missing out on what could be the greatest ITB ever? Check out these tips on how to conquer conferences and properly network!

Do you have any other great conference tips? Let us know in the comments below. If you like what you see, go ahead and follow us on Twitter at TeraTechCF and never miss an update.

Cheers!

 

Into The Box 2018 News and Early-Bird Discounts

 

Are you ready for Into The Box 2018 conference?

Some good news for everyone- for all of you non-early birds, guys from Ortus Solutions are offering you a late bird discount for the tickets.

You can grab 'em here

Only 28 days are left to the conference and we have heard that almost all the tickets are gone. Not too many rooms left in the hotel either.

Workshops

Workshop Coldbox 0-Hero has officially been filled. In this workshop by Gavin Pickin you will be introduced to the latest version of the most popular CFML MVC framework;

ColdBox 5. Learn more about the basics of installation, templating and configuration to the most advanced features like HMVC development with modules, RESTFul APIs, interception points and much more.

You still have time to make it to the other 3 workshops. Hurry up!

CommandBox DeepDive

Mr. Brad Wood will take you through the basics of using CommandBox CLI in your everyday workflow. Also, the focus will be on topics like managing servers, package management, and scripting command line tasks using CFML and Task Runners. Brad will cover extending the CommandBox core with modules to add your own behaviours.

More about the workshop here

BDD with TestBox

Luis Majano  will help you nderstand 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).

Wow. See you there with Luis! You can learn more about the workshop here

Containerizing CFML Apps

Did anyone say containers?

Jon Clause will introduce you to the magical work of Docker containers and how to deploy your

ColdFusion (CFML) apps to docker swarms and or many orchestration services. Get ready to take your applications to Container Land!

Want to know more about this workshop?

 

Foundeo will be giving a lunchtime session that you won't want to miss on April 27th!

See you at Into The Box 2018!

 

Into The Box 2018 Awesome Updates

 

We are now just 3 weeks away from the conference in Texas. Here are the updates and news for this week.

 

Late Bird discount ended on March 31st

For those of you who still don't know if you'll be able to come, or haven't had time to purchase the ticket, the Late Bird discount has ended. The standard pricing is back in the game, and you can see the prices here

Speakers updates and highlights

Eric Peterson

Eric has been programming in CFML and Javascript since 2012. He will be leading multiple sessions at Into The Box! Check them out below!

• CFFractal + APIs
• qb
• CommandBox Migrations
• Eric Peterson ColdFusion Alive Podcast Episode

Neil Cresswell

Neil is the founder of Portainer.io, which is an open-source “human friendly” Management UI for Docker; the founder of CloudInovasi.id, which is a Indonesia-centric Docker Container as a Service Provider (and which provided the initial inspiration for Portainer), and is the co-founder of a NZ company called Emerging Technology Partners, which specialises in Docker consulting. We are excited to hear his expert talk on Portainer!

• Using Portainer.io for Docker Container Management
• Neil's CF Alive Podcast Episode

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. He is an Ortus Keynote and you won't want to miss his sessions!

• Ortus Keynote
• Alexa and ColdBox APIs
• ContentBox + Docker
• Gavin's CF Alive Podcast Episode

Take a more detailed look at all of the sessions and workshops. 

Into The Box 2018 Sponsors

 

Only 3 Weeks and 15 Tickets Left for Into The Box 2018 Conference

 

Did you reserve your seat? Now would be a good time to do that because there are only 15 tickets left, and you might stay outside (Hyatt hotel in Houston, Texas).

Hurry up and reserve the tickets here

You can take a more detailed look at all of the #sessions and workshops. For more information on event details view the Into the Box webpage

 

Speaker Highlights

Jon Clausen

Jon Clausen founded Silo, a full-stack development and technology consulting firm and has prolific career in CFML programming.

• cbElasticSearch
• CFFractal + APIs
• CI With CFML Deep Dive

Brad Wood

Brad Wood has been programming ColdFusion for 12 years and has 5 sessions at this years Into The Box!

• All 5 of Brad's Awesome Sessions!

Raymond Camden

Raymond Camden is a senior developer advocate for Auth0 Extend. His work focuses on Extend, serverless, and the web in general.

• Building Progressive Web Apps

See you at Into The Box 2018!

Into The Box 2018 Sponsors

 

 

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.

• Twitter

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.

 

IntoTheBox ColdFusion Conference (6 reasons you got to come)

 

I interviewed three key people behind the Into The Box ColdFusion Conference, Luis Majano, Brad Wood and Gavin Pickin on what it is all about, why you should come and exciting new conference details.

 

Video summary

• Who‘s it for? CF developers that want to take their developer skills to another level and earn more
  • Not just about Box CFML products – sessions on ColdFusion and development best practices
  • 2 simultaneous tracks per day plus some keynotes
• When – Wed, Thurs, Friday April 26-28, 2017
• Where – Hotel in Houston, about 30 mins from the airport.
  • There is a special package with United airlines (who hubs there for US flights), lots of Intl flights too.
• Why – It's about empowering CF developers to modernize themselves
  • We will be talking a lot about how we want to inspire CF developers
  • Letting go of CF Language-shaming – ColdFusion developers need to be proud of their line of work, because you are doing modern stuff
  • Bust the CF myths that drag us down
• You can call this conference the Face of Modern ColdFusion Development
  • Nowadays everything is about micro-services; we will showcase to see how easy would to use ColdFusion for micro-services
  • Showcase of how you can bring your ColdFusion code into modern times
• CF Community
  • Launching a new initiative to help the ColdFusion community to grow
  • Espresso machines available! 😉
  • Networking- plenty of time left for this in the conference
• Sponsors – Another big difference from the last year's event is – a huge area for sponsors; awesome companies presenting their stuff, where you can mingle and get even more knowledge from these conversations
• Details at the Into The Box conference website https://www.intothebox.org/ and have a great event!

 

Awesome Experience at IntoTheBox 2017 Conference

 

 

The latest conference about ColdFusion was IntoTheBox Conference, held on April 26-28, 2017 in Texas. On the official website it says:

ColdFusion (CFML) Java, Redefined

Indeed it was. If you are highly versed in CFML or not familiar with it, you could find something interesting there, and even to start learning about it. The guys from Ortus Solutions chose excellent speakers and even better mariachi band 🙂

ColdFusion Community

ColdFusion software engineers, developers, and designers from all over the world came to share their experiences, to learn something new, and to offer their knowledge to their fellow CF-ers.

Why ColdFusion is not dead?

I talked with Teddie Tapawan about his experience with ColdFusion. He almost excluded CFML from his CV! But, before he decided to do that, a job offer came to him to do just that. How great is that guys…

Here are some photos from the Conference:

The coolest CF podcast is ColdFusion Alive!

With CF guru John Farrar

With IBM evangelist Ray Camden

Charlie at the Fusion Reactor booth

With the guys from Pixel8 and their Preside Puffin

Learning about Box Minions

Amazing new CommandBox features announced

The Mexican hats come out at the HappyBox party

The CommandBox raffle program

 

Featured Technologies

• ColdBox
• CommandBox
• ContentBox
• DataBoss
• TestBox
• MockBox
• LogBox
• CF Couchbase
• ProfileBox
• CacheBox
• WireBox
• FuseGuard
• ColdFusion
• Lucee
• Java
• CouchBase
• NGINX
• NodeJS
• Angular JS
• Ionic
• Preside Platform
• Rabbit MQ
• Vagrant
• Fusion Reactor
• Heroku
• Docker
• Dokku

That's it, folks! It was a pleasure being there.

A BIG thanks to all the speakers for the CF_Alive Podcast.

 

 

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.