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019 A Whirlwind Tour of Preside Application Framework in the Wild, with Alex Skinner

By Michaela Light 3 Comments

Alex Skinner talks about “A whirlwind tour of Preside application framework in the Wild” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive Podcast with host Michaela Light.

Alex is one of the speakers of the upcoming Into The Box ColdFusion Conference, where he will talk about Preside Platform Deep Dive and Marketing Automation using the Preside Platform.

Episode topics

  • What the heck is Preside?
    • An open source application framework built on top of ColdBox and Lucee
  • Why it is more than a CMS
  • Why they moved from ACF to other CFML engines in 2005
    • The journey via BlueDragon, Railo to Lucee
    • 100% Lucee CFML shop now
    • Back porting issues with Elvis operator with Adobe ColdFusion 2016
    • All open source stack
      • Preside
      • ColdBox
      • Lucee CFML
      • Tomcat
      • MySQL with MariaDB Galera
      • Linux
  • Why they shifted Preside to an open source model in 2012
    • Formal bidding process competing with open source CMSs Django, Rails, CodeIgniter etc
    • So, in theory, you can take your app to another agency in the future in case of problems
    • Typical work is 30% CMS and 70% custom code
    • Still have maintenance deals and SLAs on the back end so it was revenue neutral overall
    • Building partnerships with other CF consulting shops
    • The Longevity of Preside and Lucee
    • Migrating from an expensive proprietary CMS to open source Preside/Lucee
  • Building complex business systems on top of Preside application
    • 5x faster custom build time
    • Certification systems
    • Online learning add-ons (like Moodle)
    • Membership associations
      • Join, renew, minutes, attending meetings
    • Data-driven applications
  • The Daredevil risk of live coding during your preso
  • The advantages of non-throwaway scaffolding
    • The “Quake key” to access the Preside console
  • How it accelerates your custom code development on top of Preside
    • Injecting custom functionality into the framework using full cascading inheritance
    • Blending your extension into the framework vs loose coupling of customizations
      • ColdBox Interception points
    • Better developer experience
    • Tagging into the data layer vs a rigid API
      • Funky stuff using the CF_Preside_Parm tag
      • No need for a middle service layer
    • Derivative eg auto image manipulation
  • Preside Extensions and Mashups
    • Elastic search
      • Search documents and data
    • Star wars mash up
    • Closed source extensions too
    • CRM
    • Task manager
  • Data tenancy in your ORM
    • Slicing the database between users so they only set their segment of the data
    • Supporting a SaaS business model
    • Versioning of data
    • Multilingual data
    • Multiple site hierarchy you only see the news data for your site
  • Easy document management portals for magazines and editorial processes
    • Versioning, rollback, tagging
    • Hierarchical model or content model (like Allaire Spectra)
  • Why are you proud to use CF?
  • WWIT to make CF more alive this year?
  • What are you looking forward to at Into The Box?

Join the Preside team in a deep exploration of what this powerful, Coldbox-based platform gives to the CFML development community. Witness how the platform can be used to rapidly develop custom web applications with seamlessly managed content tools and much more…

Mentioned in this episode

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist

ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist

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

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

√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading

√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF

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

 

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

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Speaker details

Alex Skinner is the managing director and co-founder of global digital agency Pixl8. Started with CF 4.  Providing strategic direction and consulting on the more advanced projects undertaken. In addition, he works with our platform team to deliver our Open Source CMS and MVC Framework Preside CMS.

Learn more from Alex Skinner at:

(* WWIT = What Would It Take)

Interview transcript

Michaela Light:               Welcome back to the show, I'm here with Alex Skinner, and he is one of the co-founders of Pixelate, a big agency in the United Kingdom that focuses on development using CFML and we're going to be talking today about a talk he's going to give at into the box, a whirlwind tour of preside application for framework in the wild. That's not the official title of it but that's what he decided to call this episode.

Alex Skinner:                   Can probably come up with a better title.

Michaela Light:               Well you still have a couple of days before the conference to change everything. So we're going to look at what the heck preside is and why it's more than just a CMS and we'll look at why Pixelate moved from Adobe ColdFusion to other ColdFusion engines back in 2005 and why they shifted preside itself from closed-source to open-source five years ago and how it lets you build complex business systems on top of the preside application framework. We'll also mention the daredevil risk he's going to take by doing live coding during his workshop, which is always dangerous.

                                            The advantage preside gives you of non-throwaway scaffolding when you're creating your applications and several of the cool features that let you accelerate custom code development on top of preside which are very different to the way other CMSs let you add custom coding, so it's kind of interesting stuff there. Then we'll look at … he's going to talk about some extensions with the elastic search and the star wars mashup and if we have time, we'll talk about data tendency and how it handles that and multi-lingual data and versioning and document management versioning, rollback and timing. So all kinds of interesting stuff there. So welcome Alex.

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