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Michaela Light 0:01
Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Mike Chaya tech are gonna total balls up your name there. So how do you pronounce it? It's a Triassic. SCI Triassic. It's like a silent that sounds so sci fi and modern.
Yeah, that's how you pronounce it here wouldn't be how do you pronounce it or my grandparents pronounced it? Oh, so we'll talk about that a little later where it comes from. But this episode, we're going to be talking about Lucy migration and the adventures you had when you migrated a whole bunch of apps from Adobe ColdFusion, to Lucy, and lots of tips and tricks for people who are thinking of doing that. And some tools you can use to make your life easier for some of the challenges that come with it. And we'll we'll talk about why you migrated and the benefits you got from it. So welcome, Mike. Thanks for having me. And Mike has been doing cold fusion for more or less forever.
He got started programming on a Commodore 64. I don't think they've ever had ColdFusion run on a Commodore 64. But they probably should do. I'm sure. Brad would would be keen to get it running there. He's got it running on a Raspberry Pi.
Mike Chytráček 1:12
Well, if you can get it running on 64k A memory, I'd be really asked, I'd be impressed to well, you know, they've been making the Lucy, you know, install smaller, and it's down to about 50 megabytes. So yeah, 64k might be a bit of a challenge. But maybe someone listening is up for that challenge. But you now have a cold fusion consulting company calls ignite solutions, and you help our clients with their cold fusion apps. And you've also got two children and you enjoy playing. Do you play music? Or you listen to music? I wasn't quite sure from your bio. I'm not most of us music, mostly. But I'm not very good. Oh, well, maybe maybe 2024 Is the you will become better guitar you never know.
Michaela Light 2:05
And you're based in the Outer Banks, North Carolina, which is a beautiful beach area. And you spend a lot of time fishing in the surf, which sounds very meditative and restful. Get away from the IT stress. So maybe we should start out before we talk about lucid migration. Some people listening may not really be totally clear what Lucy is, what would you what's your like? Elevator speech as to what Lucy is, you know, what in
Mike Chytráček 2:34
Will the clients we would say it is a Java based application server. And in this case, it runs CFML, which is a language I guess to other people that are familiar with ColdFusion. It's just a cold fusion engine. That is an alternative to Adobe that's been around since I think 2015. And I think it's a merging of, I think the other one at a time was Railo. Um, and I think they bought Railo. And then the 2015 or so and then merged together and then got rid of it. And there was another one called Blue Dragon, which I think people might have also heard of, and I'm not even sure that's around anymore.
Michaela Light 3:16
It is around but it's not really maintained or supported. But Lucia is definitely maintained and supported as of course is Adobe ColdFusion. And I think Railo or Rylo. I'm never sure how you're supposed to pronounce it. People will probably message me after this episode comes out giving me the full correct pronunciation of all the things I messed up. And I think that came out in 22,000 or three ish been out for a really long time. Yeah. And Lucy was a fork of that they're both open source. So there's no cost. Nani as Lucy pretty compatible with Adobe ColdFusion and vice versa. And they're both like adding new features. They're in kind of friendly competition, adding features and seeing what they can do. But Lucy is totally open source. Do you want to see how they coded it? You can if you want to fix bugs yourself or help out you can. And of course being open source, there's no cost to download and use it. So though you can optionally pay money to the Lucy association for support if you need no higher level higher level of support than just posting onto a forum and praying. So tell us why didn't you had some apps in Adobe ColdFusion why I knew this was about five years ago you started switching them. Why is that?
Mike Chytráček 4:40
Yeah, I mean, we've been running Adobe ColdFusion since 2000. I mean, I've always used OB Well back when it was a layer I think was 3.5 in time. And then in 2005 when we started ignite we exclusively used Adobe ColdFusion I think at the time, maybe four or five went through every version, every new version that came out, we were buying licenses and then 2000 and maybe 16, or 17, we got the call a random somebody from Adobe randomly reached out to us and says, hey, we'd love to talk with you about your business and about some opportunities. And you guys have been a long term client. And that was eager to take the call, which turned out it was really just a fishing expedition to figure out how many clients we had how many applications we had running on it, because they were coming out with new licensing model. And the next call that we had was about, hey, the new version that you guys just bought. You know, we're aware that maybe you aren't don't your arm, maybe they were coming out with a new version, and we needed to be informed about to have a licensing work. And they wanted a treat at the time, I think each application or each website that we were running on one of our servers as as an application and license it appropriately. And it kind of freaked us out. I mean, we were a small shop, we couldn't, we could afford, you know, maybe five to $10,000 of licensing costs every couple years. But I mean, we were facing 10s of 1000s of dollars of immediate costs. I think they've backed off that model since then. But I mean, it was enough for us to start looking like hey, we knew this, he was out to let's take a look at it. And we spun up an instance, in AWS installed Luciana and then took kind of maybe three of our clients that we thought would be sort of the larger applications and just deploy them. And within that day, I mean, we had had them running seemingly had no problems. And we noticed that some of the functionality was actually faster. We tested it out with MS SQL and MySQL, kind of do some due diligence. And within like I'd say, 30 days, we had decided, like, Okay, well, we're not going to migrate to the new version of ColdFusion. We'll run it out until it's no longer supported. I think we're on 11. We've got a couple of elevens at the time. But we had migrated everything over and all new clients went to Lucy all new applications went to Lucy. And within I'd say maybe two years, we had probably 95% of our clients might get it off, some clients still required it. Some clients were still a little sketchy about the whole open source like they'd rather have. You know, Adobe is a big company, they'd rather have the idea of like, oh, this giant company is behind the application server. And if we ever run in any trouble, we can call them in, which is sort of an inside joke if you've ever tried to get support from them. And maybe it's better at this time. So for us, I mean, I can't even tell you how many what the licensing costs that we've saved in the last five years. But we have not had any problems with it. We've deployed, maybe a dozen different instances of it, we had seen maybe 40 or 50 applications are running some in a shared environment, some standalone dedicated to the entire application. Yeah, we love it. I mean, I don't know if there would be a reason why we would switch back other than if we had a client that requested it specifically.
Michaela Light 8:27
Who so yeah, I think that licensing thing you're referring to, we've talked about that on the show a few times. And it's quite a, a lightning rod type discussion on occasion. We had a roundtable a few months back where we that came up. But basically the licensing was not just licensing per server. But there was also costs involved per CPU, I think was one of the issues. And then also, if you had a SaaS application, there was some that was
Mike Chytráček 9:02
This. That was what that was the SAS was the thing that caught us. So they were trying to count. They were trying to count individual API's websites or applications and say no your SaaS, you need to license them individually or like the way that it was. Yeah. And it was outrageous. Then we tried to say, Well, what happens if, you know, there are multiple applications, but they're the same client? Because we had a client where maybe we had five different websites. And I can't remember maybe they're on the same server right now. They're on the same server. And that was the catch. You know, they tried to say, Well, you were your it was it was the SAS part of it that the per CPU thing I think it always been there I think since version maybe. That had gone back quite a ways where I think you only get two cores that well, that was another thing. You know, and I think even now, I think he has a two cores on standard and if you want more cores, you have to go to enterprise. So I mean four core are easy to instance at AWS is pretty small. I mean, most of the stuff that we run on is four core 16 gig. So, you know, if we would hate we need enterprise licenses technically, where Lucy, I don't think.
Michaela Light 10:13
You can just buy two standard licenses to get.
Mike Chytráček 10:16
Right, you get two standards, and that would be good.
Michaela Light 10:19
And that are less than the enterprise benefits. The point behind this is, you know, 20 years ago, two cores was a beefy server. But right nowadays, you know, you can have 16 cores, I don't know what limit is on cores on architecture. But is it 64 cores are 32 cores. And it's a lot of course.
Mike Chytráček 10:38
I think AWS has a few that are 32 We've played around with and just for fun, just to see, just to see what would you know what would happen? Just to throw a couple applications at it and play with the only to pay by the time the hour spun up. So I think that largest machine that we have loosely deployed on as an E core, n equals 64 gig I think.
Michaela Light 11:02
Think I think the fundament what I put I don't know, because I don't have secret information to Adobe, I just think about these things. Talk with people and CIOs are the cold fusion folks. I just think the licensing was created by League, you know, by lawyers. And they're kind of out of touch with what modern technology is doing in the cloud and with cores. And you know, how people use application servers like cold fusion, and what you were doing, where you have a similar code base between different clients is not that unusual. I've met quite a few people who have that. And I wouldn't call that a SAS because you don't have like a website can buy it, right. It's not like you have like, here are different options, you know, pay so much per month.
Mike Chytráček 11:50
Right? And that was our argument was that we weren't, we weren't to SAS. But here's the one of the catches we, we were using Mira. So they said, well, then you're basically redeploying this for multiple clients. So I think they were trying to use that as the Well, you're a SaaS technically because this is stuff, you're just redeploying and reselling. So you're selling an IT service. Unfortunately, the subscription models have changed drastically for a lot of companies. Yes, they're trying to get that monthly subscription rather than the perpetuals. So it's an unfortunate shift. There's no There's some kickback. I know that time and how much of the you pay attention to but there's a application called the unity, which is a game engine. And they just tried to recently shifted to a pay per download. Oh, I like we use it for mobile apps. So they tried to switch it to a pay per download model. And the course the user base blew up, and they backed off on that. But that's unfortunately, it's a it's a trend in the industry.
Michaela Light 12:56
Yeah, and I understand the trend. And if if it's not too expensive, like, for example, Adobe Creative Suite, you used to buy a perpetual license, but now it's a SaaS model, we use pay per year. And I, as you probably are aware, Adobe ColdFusion has gone to an annual upgrade cycle. They announced that last year, and so yeah, so the current version that's available is Adobe ColdFusion 2023. But the next version will not be 2025. It'll be 2024. And they'll come out with a new release every year. And I think my suspicion is, they're probably going to go to a to an annual, you know, kind of whatever you want to call it pricing model and, and they also have that ally pricing model on AWS and Google. So I think a lot of the software industry has moved in that direction, as has Microsoft drive with Office 365.
Mike Chytráček 13:51
Yeah, they've been on that model for at least four or five years now.
Michaela Light 13:54
So and then even the quotes free software, like, you know, Google Docs, well, first of all, you can pay per month for a Google Docs license. But if you're on the free version of stuff like that, guess what? You're the product and they're reselling your data, right. You know, someone's got to pay for software somehow. But I think it sounds like they they went too crazy. And you decided to try out Lucy, and I'm glad it worked out for
Mike Chytráček 14:25
Him on a podcast that's live. Could you please go? Oh, like, the sorry.
Michaela Light 14:32
No worries. That's just like that guy on the BBC News where his toddler came in, you know, where the telecoil sound?
Mike Chytráček 14:37
Yeah, my children are a little older than that, unfortunately.
Michaela Light 14:40
Oh, no worries. And so it's real, real life conversation. So you migrated some of your clients easily. But then, you know, with all these apps, I'm sure you had a few challenges came up with, you know, different code you had that let's talk about some of the different challenges you you overcame with migrating All these apps to Lucy.
Mike Chytráček 15:02
Yeah, I mean, also in pretty simple ones that most people run into, see a file upload to an older tag, but it's still using legacy applications. PDF functionality has changed, you have to use a third party plugin to do it. So that is going to break a lot of that functionality. If you rely on the Adobe functions. WebSockets do not work the same way. None of that functionality exists natively, you can add on stuff to it. And then the other big one is spreadsheets, although there is a loose module to replace a lot of that functionality. But those things, if you leverage with Adobe ColdFusion, you will need to figure out how to get around that. They're not difficult. But it is something that's gonna break as soon as you try to run it. Those are the things the biggest things. As far as like native functionality, I think those are the things that we had to deal with. And then there's some code level things. arrays and Structs are handled differently. If you pass arrays into functions, they're going to be references, rather than duplicates.
Michaela Light 16:23
So let's spell that out. For people who haven't really understood that there's two ways to pass an array or stripe to a function.
Mike Chytráček 16:32
Normally, if you were to pass, so if you define an array or in a struct, or struct, and you want to pass it into a function, a UDF, user defined function, if you manipulate in ColdFusion, in ACF, if you manipulate the array or the struct inside of the function, you're not manipulating the the original array that you've passed. In Lucia, you will see you have to be careful. And sometimes there'd be a reason why you would manipulate the array that gets passed in, just because maybe you're sorting it, but you just for purposes of of the function, and then you're passing back a different value that might not be the array. And Lucy, if you manipulate the the array or the struct, you're manipulating the, the one that you passed into it, it's not a duplicate, it's, it's a, it's a reference to the original. Anybody who's ever used, you know, like C or C++ or, or Java, you know, might run it might understand that, and I don't know why Adobe doesn't treat them that way. I guess it's a it's the idea of like a, like a function, like a variable that's scoped to the function. Just like if you've defined a variable inside of a, of a function or a method in a CFC, it keeps it local to the function. So it's not it's not a component property, but it's a local variable. It's kind of the same way. I don't think, well, we had too much problems with that. That was something we knew going in. And I think we tried to, I don't think we had to deal with it.
Michaela Light 18:11
Or correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that for non or non struct array or structure variables, things do you get passed by value? unless you explicitly say to pass the by reference,
Mike Chytráček 18:23
In Lucier, in a scene, Adobe,
Michaela Light 18:25
Adobe ColdFusion.
Mike Chytráček 18:27
Yeah, that was a later I think that was like a 2016.
Michaela Light 18:31
Okay, change.
Mike Chytráček 18:33
I know they changed, changed how it's done. I might be wrong, but I know that they changed.
Michaela Light 18:42
And if the question is not that you can't do it either way, and Lucy or Adobe ColdFusion as to what the default is, right? You've written code that's destructive to the array copy.
Mike Chytráček 18:52
Right now. It's
Michaela Light 18:53
Destroying the original binary. That's
Mike Chytráček 18:55
Exactly right.
Michaela Light 18:56
Yeah.
Mike Chytráček 18:57
The other thing that we ran into was, how it dealt to how it deals with scoped variables, or how it deals with variables inside of the native scopes, like URL session client. So if you have, like URL, for example, is it's a pretty common thing, you may have a variable called url. However, if you don't scope that variable, it's going to assume that you're talking about the scope. So for example, if you try to call query if you if you create a query and you call query URL, it's it's going to it's going to think you're talking about the URL scope. If you have a query called user, or let's like website is the query and one of the fields is URL, and then inside of that, like a CFL put you you just said URL, because if you if you loop over a query, you technically don't have to scope it to the query but If you have a conflict there, and we had a bunch of those, because really, why is it saying that that variable is not defined? And it was because it was trying to access or it was saying that it was an object? It wasn't a variable? It was because we thought we were referencing the URL scope. Oh, we're in ColdFusion. It doesn't care, it actually looks at the query. First, rather than hitting the scope first, we had a bunch of those we had to fix. There was 1/3 party app that used ORM that we ran into problems with. We fixed it by just removing all the ORM code. Not a big
Michaela Light 20:39
Fan of which o RM, was it using the one built into ColdFusion hibernate?
Mike Chytráček 20:45
Is it is I think it uses I think, in with Lucia, I'm not really sure. We don't, I would imagine it probably is hibernate. I mean, that's the big one. That's Adobe ColdFusion uses. We had an application that we inherited, that used ORM. And it was running on Adobe. And when we deployed it on our Lucy machine, it all choked. So we just fixed it by ripping out all the haram. Well, I solved the problem. Yeah, that solved it was brute force. We're not a big fan of our own. Object Relational Mapping database, it's like basically and turning your it's so it's a middleware, it's basically meant for programmers who aren't really familiar with database architecture, it's a abstraction layer. I mean, in theory, it's cool. Mira uses it, which is now masa. We don't have any problems there with it. But if we develop, we just write our own SQL code, rather than get our M involved. The other thing that's going to be different is how Java libraries in instantiated Java libraries are handled inside of Lucy. Lucy uses the OSGi architecture, which is the Java to the J to E, architecture that they've used. It's actually superior, I think, the nice thing about it is you don't if you want to add a library, you don't have to install it server wide. So traditionally, if you wanted to add, like an encryption library, or the PGP library or AWS library, you'd have to install it at a way where all of the at the server level with Lucy, you can install it on a virtual site level. So if you just have one site that's going to use that library, you can just use it on that site, few have the same library that's using different versions for maybe some compatibility. You can install different libraries and different virtual sites and maintain them separately. So we do like that. And there were several that we used for different clients. And it was nice to see that we didn't have to expose them, you know, server wide. The other thing right out of the gate, if you install a brand new Lucy server is caching either eh cache or RAM cache that is not set up, or there is one it's, I think it's because you can even set up differently to have an object cache file cache, session cache, and you can set them up separately and to be treated differently. In Lucy, you'd be better at something you have to do after you install this. It isn't something that is fully configured. PDFs we talked about, we actually use a third party tool called Wk HTML to PDF. We actually switched over, started using that before we switched over to Lucy. Because he wanted to create pixel perfect PDS for like custom invoices or custom flyers or custom PDF generation. It's unfortunately it's a little maybe turn some folks off that it's a command line tool that gets installed. So it's we UCF execute. But it's fast. I mean, we have clients that are doing 20 and 30,000, custom PTSD on it. For years have any problems with it. And then the other thing that we immediately ran into was sometimes you would have some case issues with Jason ACF were were willing to convey configuration we were running converted all your JSON keys to uppercase, where Lucy was keeping the original case of, of the keys. So you're running an environment that's case sensitive, you might run into issue there. But again, that's something that was difficult to fix, and we didn't have too many cases of it. The nice thing was we were using at the time, a lot of Have our sights for running Muira. Well, that'll learn a lot, I'd say have at that time you 15 Have a marine mere 50 and 20. The nice thing was the bureau folks develop the CMS and have Alyse so absolutely no problem. running those things right out of the gate, moved them over, spun them up. They were absolutely perfect.
Michaela Light 25:22
That's great to hear.
Mike Chytráček 25:24
And that's a good thing. There's a lot of open source and a lot of third party apps that are actually built on top of leucine. So run getting them through run out of the gate are not a problem.
Michaela Light 25:36
Well, I think a fair number the the autists tools, they I don't know if they build them on Lucy or they just make sure they run there. But I know they will work fine with them, like command box and content box and cold box and so on.
Mike Chytráček 25:52
Think those guys, I think those guys think all their stuff is pretty much based on Lucy who would bet I haven't used a bunch of stuff. And but I'm betting that it all is I mean, it looks like it is the stuff that he I think I've used as FanBox. But yeah, it's extremely popular, because of the cost I would imagine is one of the big things. Well,
Michaela Light 26:13
It's even if it cost money, it does so many cool things, letting you spin up servers and you know, write batch files in CFML. And yeah, Heinz stuff. preside CMS was the other one that sort of non Lucy, they're out of the UK. I interviewed them on the podcast many years ago. So So I think that is true, you know, a lot of open source ColdFusion libraries or tools are going to be initially written on Lucy, just for philosophical reasons that they they align with other open source tools. As a good point. You mentioned Mirror Mirror, I think, you know, mirror change from open source, the closed source, and that's where the master fork came in.
Mike Chytráček 27:04
But 7.1 Or two? Yeah, they were open source for years, and then made a pretty short announcement that they were going to close it up and go to a license bottle. And yeah, thankfully, somebody forked it off, and turned it into masa. And they did a pretty good job. They've had several releases now. Yeah, they've done a good job. But I think so far.
Michaela Light 27:29
I did an interview with ghost from masa. And we talked about that whole fork and what their plans are for the future. So I'll stick the list. They'll stick me that episode in the show [email protected]. What benefits have you seen from migrating? Now you you're past the you know, having done the migration now you're running on Lucy, have you seen any other benefits?
Mike Chytráček 27:59
I'm happy to show additional benefit is obviously the cost if you're running multiple machines. If you have applications that you need to scale.
Horizontally and spin up additional machines. That cost is obviously a big benefit. The speed of of getting something up and production ready is another benefit.
In every time that we've bought a license seems like it takes a few days to get that license from Adobe for it to show up inside of the Licensing Portal. With Lucy, we can we once we have a machine configured and we we image it off in in AWS, you know, you can spin up a copy of that machine that's licensed, it's fully ready to go within minutes. Throw behind a load balancer, and you don't have to worry about the licensing costs, which is a great benefit speeds. Another one we noticed real quick that a lot of the applications ran faster on the exact same hardware. And Lucien I think loose even says on their site that they had it they point out that they have tried to make a point of it being a faster platform.
Michaela Light 29:27
Well, they worked a lot on optimizing the install size and the load size so and Adobe ColdFusion have duplicated. That way you don't have to load or if you're not using every single feature in your application. You don't have to load all the whole gigabyte of install on on on a cloud where it's spinning up a new instance. If you're using orchestration, then that is important to how quickly it all deploys.
Mike Chytráček 29:56
Yeah, we haven't really had we haven't really had any any negatives I mean Most of the time. You know, maybe there's like I said, there's a few cases where clients would want. Were really concerned about the application server and would want to know, well, oh, I went out and I looked it up. And it turns out that it's like, you know, some who, what, when were clients, like, you know, just seems like it's like a couple of guys. And I don't know, what are they in a garage? You know, they go, Well, we know who Adobe is like, that's, you know, we, we'd rather we feel better paying that license. And that's fine. I mean, it's absolutely fine. And we have a couple big applications that a couple of small applications that are running on dedicated acfw machines, absolutely fine. I mean, we have no problem with the most clients, ultimately, they don't care. You know, they want to make sure that, you know, as far as I can stay up, is it going to be reliable? Is it going to be fast? And it's not a problem.
Michaela Light 31:00
So what about support? Have you found that with Lucy, because it isn't open source?
Mike Chytráček 31:05
Yeah, you know, most of the time, it's either on Slack, or it's on the Lucy forums. And honestly, we haven't been required a lot of it.
Michaela Light 31:18
You have any clients who pay for the new see Association support? Model, or
Mike Chytráček 31:24
No, no, but we offer it and say, like the folks that have, maybe they'll say, Oh, I'd rather you know, do the cults usually say, Well, you can, you know, there is an option, and you can do paid support. But now, they, you know, most of the time where the for the support, you know, we do, we do offer hosting or management of hosting for most clients, we only have a few clients that actually manage their own or gone off and done their own. Most of them are either hosted with us managed by us, or even clients that do have their own AWS account, it's pretty much here, we open an account, here's our login, or we create a user for you go in and configure the environment, however you need to configure it. And we, that's how it's done.
Michaela Light 32:14
Very cool. Well, I'm very exciting to hear about your experience migrating to Lucy, and lots of great tips there for things to look out for in your ColdFusion code folks who are thinking of trying that. If anyone listening is kind of on the fence about should they you know, migrate from Adobe ColdFusion. Lucy, what would you say to them?
Mike Chytráček 32:40
Yeah, I would say that there's I can't imagine there would be a reason not to. We've deployed you know, probably over 100 applications, websites, standalone applications, web based applications, API's. We have clients that are mom and pops, and we have clients that are doing you know, probably, you know, 40 50,000 unique users per day, doing 10s of millions of dollars of transactions. We've never had a problem implementing code we've never had a problem integrating it with third party applications or API's. That I mean it's it's a solid product. It's it's as an fact, we've had to be honest with you. We've had less problems running Lucey servers and we have running ACF, we have ACF servers that for whatever reason, services die. I mean, they're exactly the same machine. We run everything in AWS cmec twos, you see two configurations. The only difference between the two would be one to Lucy box and ones nacf 2021 backs and the Lucia box might be running 40 applications and the ECF box is running too. We've had more issues in the past six months with esgf machines, random lockups bottlenecks can't figure out why data sources die. And we've had very, very few with Lucy. We've had far fewer issues, upgrading Lucy to newer versions. And that's another nice thing about Lucy is when a new version comes out, you can update it, you can actually fall back many versions inside of the admin, you can upgrade to the new version when it comes out in the admin. It takes on our machines to upgrade to a new version of Lucy and that then that jokin within 30 seconds the services backup running the new version. And if you need to fall back or for whatever reason, the same thing, and even if you don't, it's very easy to go grab a version drop it into the into the install. It's essentially like one zip file that you can switch between versions of loosely very easily. So it makes testing things very easy on like a stage or a test environment. If you need to jump between two different versions. I mean, how when's the last time? How difficult would it be to jump between like 2016 2021 2023? Of ColdFusion? You can using? I guess, with command box, you could, but as far as like full installs go, how easy could you do that? It's very difficult, you jump between losing four and five and undo it on the same machine. And that's a, that's a huge benefit. So it does give the ability like we there's been a case, we have an issue with.
With the
ODBC driver, the Microsoft SQL driver. And it's a problem that we just found maybe two, three weeks was before Christmas, where we were having issues between two different machines. Where we were having SQL, a certain SQL command that normally used to take under a second was taking like 30 seconds. And it turned out there was a problem with the SQL driver, very simple to go in to Lucy admin, and just roll back the driver, run the test, within a minute or two, find out that it was a driver issue. So it was very simple. It's not as simple on Adobe ColdFusion. So it's called visionary lets you be nimble. I think, Lucy, this helps with that. For development and deployment, I really do.
Michaela Light 37:01
It's great to hear. So let's just talk in general, what makes you proud to use ColdFusion? Whether it's Adobe ColdFusion, or Lucy, or even Blue Dragon if you hadn't?
Mike Chytráček 37:14
Yeah, I mean more about the language than the server, that server that runs on. I love the fact that you have multiple options. I love the fact that it runs anywhere. Like the fact that it's based on top of the technology. It's been around. No, Jeff has gotta be what, at least 20 years old. It's funny, we had a client that gets close to 30. I think you're right. Yeah. It's because it was in the 90s. I think I was learning Java and like 93 or 94. So yeah, that's almost 30 years, it's 30 years. It's funny, we had a client that they were coming from WordPress. So they had an application that was built on top of WordPress that should have never been built on top of WordPress, because they didn't really use WordPress for much of anything other than a couple pages of content. The rest of it was all application. And we rebuilt it we rebuilt it in Santa Lucia. And so I had never heard of it, you know, so it's based on top of, you know, Java runs on the JVM. And he's a go, boy, that that's pretty old technology. And I said, Yeah, it's like, I don't know, four or 5 billion devices run it should be pretty robust. Like, if you have a refrigerator at your house. That's smart. It's probably running job. I mean, if you have an Android, that's everything runs Java. So I mean, as far as you know, it's built on tried and true technology. I have no problematic, you know, every all of us have to deal with. Oh, you're still using ColdFusion? Like, isn't that isn't that? Isn't that dead? And I'm proud to say now. We use all different sorts of technologies, JavaScript, it's the right tool for the job. And we're pretty agnostic about it. I mean, we have clients that use WordPress, or we do PHP and node or maybe even straight up Java. It's right tool for the job. And it's almost always the right tool for the job as far as we're concerned. I mean, it's fast, it deploys fast. We can make changes to it quickly. It's extensible. I know there's, there's people that that mean, I remember when Ruby on Rails was supposed to replace everything. And it seems like there's a lot of developers out there that they kind of run to the shiny new thing that shows up. And I mean, I can probably make I'll write a book and the things that have come and gone, you know, and since cold fusion was was created, and we don't see it going anywhere, and it'd be nice if it was I'd like to see more people get excited. out it and, and learn about it. And I think that you know, I think everybody would would agree that Adobe has kind of fallen down on that. It seems like maybe they've changed the vision of what their perfect client looks like. But I think our community can probably do more for the language than then than Adobe good. It's getting the younger folks excited about it as excited about us old folks are.
Michaela Light 40:32
You don't look that old Mike.
Mike Chytráček 40:35
No, I'm not neither to you. I mean, we're not I mean, we're not old. We're old in the, in the grand scheme of this industry. But I think that's a that's an asset. You know, so I think
Michaela Light 40:50
Maybe Lucy has a role to play in that as does the free version of Adobe ColdFusion. They give out to students at high school? Absolutely. St.
Mike Chytráček 40:58
I think that's where they need to get in is with those younger folks. I mean, we've encountered a few kids in there. When I say kids at the end people in their 20s. Who I've tried to get them excited about like, oh, look, this is what I use. Well, you know, I help somebody with some code or something. And then the code I give no, like, what is that? Is that JavaScript? Like, oh, no, that's the script. And try to get some and I've got a few people excited to look at it, which is a good thing. I'm like, it's totally free to grab the server, you can have a thing up and running, it doesn't matter what you're running, throwing the machine and play around with it. So I tried to
Michaela Light 41:32
Be an event, maybe people listening to, you know, consider doing that with other younger programmers they know. And I know that last year, both Adobe and autists invited students high school or college come for free to the either the into the box conference or the CF Summit Conference. That's great. That was Yeah, so that is
Mike Chytráček 41:57
Exactly what they should be doing is trying to get them. Get them while they're young. Because unfortunately, some people do get into a rut.
Michaela Light 42:04
Yes, we don't want that. Anyone else we want you to get you out
Mike Chytráček 42:08
Of your rut. Yeah, no, you have to, and I have no problem with I love the new stuff. That's the new technologies and the new architectures and the new platforms. And you got to take a look at them and see at least what they're doing. Like I said, we're pretty agnostic between will tell people we're like why we're technology agnostic. We don't want to be we're not experts in everything. And we don't want to try to be. So we pick a few things that that we are experts in in and but we do try to direct as many of our clients as possible to our cold fusion.
Michaela Light 42:39
Is there anything else that would make cold fusion more alive this year?
Mike Chytráček 42:46
Wow. No, I mean, I think that one thing that I one thing that Dobby that has the half done that I think they should continue to do is that tight integration with AWS and probably Azure, and maybe even Google Cloud. The recent additions, you know, we used to have to use the third party, AWS library, the Java library, to do a lot of those AWS things. And now natively, you can set those keys inside of ColdFusion admin, on the ACF version, I think, and Lucy has done they were actually ahead of the curve on that the s3 functionality was ahead of the curve. They had that a little more robust functionality before Adobe did. But I think those type of integrations with these cloud services are extremely important. They're late to the game when it comes to deploy using ColdFusion to write lambda functions, and serverless. And I know the Lucy folks or people in the Lucy camp that have made I think better have made better headway into that. But I think the Adobe folks should try to get a tighter integration and they should work with AWS. I mean, I know that there's there's already got ColdFusion images out there. I'm not sure if there's a new one. I'm not sure if you can spin up an EC two with 2023. Last time I checked right when 2023 came out I didn't think there was an image out there but then need I think that was that's something that's important is both camps, I think both should try to unfortunately, Adobe's probably has a better chance of, of working with AWS. But they should, they should, they should they should try to do very tightly integrate their application with Windows services. Absolutely. That was a great.
Michaela Light 44:54
Suggestions there. And you know, A lot of people are moving to the cloud and want to integrate easier. And then also they also want to write their code in ColdFusion. So it can work with the any of the main cloud providers, right? Because every now and again, one of these cloud providers goes down. I know AWS went down. Last year for a few hours. It was a little upsetting.
Mike Chytráček 45:22
Yeah, luckily, we were not in that availability. So we were not affected by that. Thankfully.
Michaela Light 45:28
Now, you you mentioned before we got on the recording that you you're thinking of going to CF Summit. What do you what are you looking forward to have you when you next go to CF Summit?
Mike Chytráček 45:40
You know, we went to summit from probably 13 or 14 up until 19. I think 19 was the last but before COVID head.
We haven't gone since they restarted not because we migrated to Lucy. The first year they think they started back we just were we were just too busy. We had we're in rebuild mode after after COVID. Still, and we just couldn't get away. We couldn't spend the time, we had some things that we're launching at the time, we just couldn't push around. We would like to go back this year. One thing that we did notice was a lot of the a lot of the sessions were a little stale. And maybe they would be different now because we haven't been there a few years.
Michaela Light 46:34
I know for me changed up some sessions. And there's a whole bunch of AI sessions that
Mike Chytráček 46:39
I was just, I was just about to say if I go back this year, I'd like to see some talk about the AI. Just because they have
Michaela Light 46:46
they have a new Evangelist Mark tech Connor. Two, three years ago. Yeah, that's great guy. But he gave a talk on you, you know, ColdFusion and AI and it was very inspiring.
Mike Chytráček 46:57
Yeah, that's going to be a big thing. Because that's changing. That's the fastest part of our industry that's changing. It is. It's exciting and horrifying. At the same time. It's only going to change briefly.
Michaela Light 47:15
Maybe that should be a whole separate episode we oh, you should
Mike Chytráček 47:18
That could be that could be an absolute episode on AI and where it's going and the things that have changed the tools that have changed and come out the integrations I'm not sure if you've looked at like, GitHub has a new one. Well, it's like six months old. It was called Code pilot or something or code
Michaela Light 47:38
Pilot. Yeah. Last year, I had an interview on the podcast with Monty Chan. I don't know if you know him. But now another thing. Yeah, he was talking about all the cool things he's doing with copilot and and also some of the concerns. I'll put that in the show notes if people are interested.
Mike Chytráček 47:55
And that kind of leads into something else I think that the community needs is there is a terrible lack of modules plugins. For ColdFusion, there are ones out there I use VS code if you have used sublime, and the Mac, there's coda. And there are a few plugins that are decent as far as like for code completion. I don't know if code pilot. I haven't tried it. I haven't purchased that. I've bought it. I don't know how well
Michaela Light 48:34
If at all. It's really expensive for 10 bucks a month. Yes.
Mike Chytráček 48:38
Yeah, I was gonna say it's only 10 bucks for the student or for the individual. And I think it's not much more if you're a 20. Maybe he if your company. But I mean, what will keep me away from it is I spend 90% of my day in ColdFusion. Yes, I already have really good tools for code completion and linting for other technologies that we use. Yeah. Adobe should build a right and of course, they have ColdFusion Builder. So I know they're not their motivations are not such. But we need an extension for VS code. That is absolutely just top notch. The ones that are out there, okay. But they are falling behind.
Michaela Light 49:22
CF, the new CF builder is built on C it isn't extension.
Mike Chytráček 49:27
It's doesn't it doesn't do some of the things that it needs to do. One of the things that, and I know this is because maybe because I'm too old, is even though we work in a multi development, a developer environment, we don't all run things locally. There are things and pieces of functionality inside of those extensions that require you to maintain all of the code base locally. So we pull it down and we run it locally, and we do it that way. But we have environments where that's not always the case. Maybe we're not in them all that time or it would be nice if it had some introspection. And I don't care if there's a server plugin, I don't care if there's a component that would sort of bridge that gap of functionality. And well, this is actually I guess, ColdFusion. Builder. I haven't, I haven't looked at it since I know you get a license now with builder, which is cool with every license that you purchase. So I did just get a new license for 23 reasons I have asked to see what version of the builder they up to now, when's the last time they released one?
Michaela Light 50:33
Last one I heard about was the beginning of last year when they did the release. I don't know if they've done a point release. Yeah, I use VS code myself.
Mike Chytráček 50:44
Yeah, yeah, sort of I it's just, you know, it's a better product.
Michaela Light 50:48
Well, I think it's a great product. Sometimes. It's not, it's an amazing product. It's you know, Quasar open source in there is an open source version, but the one that you get by default is sending telemetry back to the Microsoft mothership, which always makes me a bit nervous. And that's one of the things I'm always nervous about with these AI tools, you know, the copilot chat, GPT, you feed it some proprietary code, it's just going to regurgitate you that code to someone else, you just have to pray that they don't, ya know, associated, particularly if that someone else was a hacker who was trying to hack into your code now, because now they've got a copy of all your code.
Mike Chytráček 51:30
We were concerned about that. But we've never I don't think I've ever seen it, expose anything. Um, you know,
Michaela Light 51:38
People have found that does, you know, you feed if one person feeds data into chat GPT someone else get that data back? It learns from it?
Mike Chytráček 51:47
Yeah. And I have heard somebody I don't know, if it was ever confirmed, somebody complained that they had inadvertently exposed some AWS keys. Yeah. And or swords, because they had actually had code that was generated by Chet GPT. And had a had a secret had the public and secret SAP and the secret keys and went ahead and threw it into an application and were able to connect to an s3 bucket. And instead of wow, that pretty much shut down our company use of GPT. I have not seen if that's actually true. Is Is that okay? I've heard I've heard multiple people claim that they've received confidential information, because somebody said somebody, oh, I
Michaela Light 52:25
Don't think it's happening all the time. But if you feed it confidential information, you're taking a risk that somewhere else and I would highly recommend not putting a non confidential keys or other stuff into code, you feed into co pilot or or GPT, or Bard or any of these new things. On the other hand, the plus side using these tools as it does speed up coding. So you know.
Mike Chytráček 52:50
Well, like I said, it's, it's exciting, and it's horrifying. At the same.
Michaela Light 52:54
While we'll have a separate episode on that, yeah. If people want to reach you online, what are good ways to do that?
Mike Chytráček 53:03
The best way is probably our website, magnate solutions.com. I do have a LinkedIn profile. I admit I haven't done.
Michaela Light 53:12
How do you spell your last name for people listening?
Mike Chytráček 53:15
It is c h, y, t. R A. C CK?
Michaela Light 53:20
Yeah. And I can't imagine there are many people who share the exact same name as you.
Mike Chytráček 53:25
Now and everybody that I have found, like, I don't know, say back in like, early 2000s, when. When it was easier to search, everybody was search, oh, search. If I'm out there, and I ran into people, every single person I have found, we've been able to connect back together. So if you see someone with my name, they're very likely as far as I've been able to prove they're related to me. And if you type out my last name, and one of those like surname services, there's only like 150 of us in the world supposedly, was interesting. So I've never been able to figure out if it was if it had been a derivative of something else. I don't think it was just spontaneously created. But maybe it is maybe there. Maybe we really are that unique.
Michaela Light 54:12
Could be. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show and telling us all about your Lucy migration experiences.
Mike Chytráček 54:18
Yeah, thanks for having me. It was great.