078 Agile ColdFusion API Development (Amazing Postman, ColdBox and Agile secrets) with John Farrar

John Farrar talks about “Agile ColdFusion API Development (Amazing Postman, ColdBox and Agile secrets)” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light.

Episode Highlights

• Why build APIs in ColdFusion?
  • Built in
  • Works reliably
• Why APIs
  • Link to other apps
  • Separate data connector from biz logic
  • Microservices
  • Vue, Angular, React
• Why Build in APIs using ColdBox and Postman
• Why ColdBox for APIs
  • Why using ColdBox instead of Coop that you wrote
  • ColdBox 5 new features for APIs
  • RESTful principles work well with ColdBox
• Why Postman for API
  • Postman is used by 5 million developers and more than 100,000 companies to access 130 million APIs every month.
  • Free upto 1,000 calls/month
  • $8-21/user/mo beyond that depending on the version
    • Included: 10,000 monitored calls/month, 1 million regular calls
    • Pre-purchased: $200/month for a pack of 500,000 monitored calls
• Postman free is awesome at everything from manual to automated end to end API testing.
  • Fake out your API
  • Mock API
  • Share API calls, folders, workspaces and environments
  • Document API
  • Views
    • Pretty
    • Raw
    • HTML
  • Debug API
  • Replay an API call
  • Test API
    • Part of your CI script
      • Postman Travis
    • Newman automated API testing
    • Smart test sequences
  • Monitor API
  • Use the console
• What is Agile Dev?
  • Why should you care?
  • Regression testing
  • 2 week sprints with 12-20 new features
  • Git feature branch merge with master branch then run automated tests
  • Continuous small wins
  • Fast stakeholders engagement and feedback
  • Retrospect meeting
    • What went well
    • What could have gone better
      • Vs who messed up
    • If you are not having fun then something is wrong
      • Naming sprints with fun name named from Letter of alphabet and random category
        • Einsteinium (letter E and chemical element)
        • Frakta (letter F and Ikea item)
  • More traction
  • Work as a team, less supervision
  • Scrum master
  • Breaks
    • Fear of sharing problems
    • Fear of asking for help
  • Code review
  • Egoless programming
  • Remote team: Zoom and Slack video chat and
  • Live share in Visual Studio Code review
    • Keeps your own UI preferences
  • Remote Pair programming
• BDD style testing
  • Focus on critical tests > important tests > mundane tests
  • Writing a story vs check box testing
  • End to end integration test
  • Unit test
  • TestBox
• 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?

Mentioned in this episode

• ColdBox
• Postman 
• BDD – Behavior-Driven Development
• RESTful principles 
• Building REST APIs in ColdBox documentation 
• CI = Continuous Integration
• Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong
• BHAG = Big Hairy Audacious Goal
• Agile development
• Microsoft Visual Studio Code 
  • Has a CFML extension
  • TestBox and ColdBox extension
  • CFLint plug in
  • 30% of CFers use it 
• CommandBox
• Mark Drew Docker episode
• Into The Box

Session Description:

Agile API Dev

In this session, we will be taking a look at built in APIs using ColdBox and Postman. Yes, postman free is awesome at everything from manual to automated end to end API testing. If you think you know Postman, learn how to do BDD style testing, use the console and much more to build and maintain your APIs like never before.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist

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

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

√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading

√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF

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

 

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

Bio

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 websites.

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 a strategy that will bring impact without getting delayed by over-engineering.

Links:

• Twitter: www.twitter.com/@sosensible
• Sos Apps https://www.sosapps.com

Interview Transcript:

Michaela 0:01
Welcome back to the show today we're looking at agile cold fusion API development using the amazing postman and some behavior Driven Development secrets and co box with john far. And he's going to be talking on this at into the box in a few weeks time and we'll look at why you should be used building API's and cold fusion and why I'm particularly should be using the postman and co box for doing that and we'll look in detail of what cool things you can get with postman either in the free version or the paid version. So actually, you can get a long way with the paid the free version. And we'll also look at agile development and why you should be doing that. So welcome, john. Thank you. Good to be here. And in case you don't know, john has been in the cold fusion community for millennia, I think or possibly 20 years, one or the other two centuries. That was too

you cross the other century. And he's he's been involved with jQuery and knockout and view libraries. And he brought us cold fusion framework, which we'll talk about a little bit later. So first of all, what let's talk about API's, why should people listening be building their APIs using cold fusion?

John Farrar 1:21
Well, one of the reasons as it works, it's a lot of things we do, we jump in, we don't even know if it's going to work. And we find out there, there's all these, ah, I wish I would have known but in particularly when using cold fusion and called box that technologies, they're cold fusion effect has some API stuff in it, or Lucy that both variations, but call box adds a real mature system. And, and when I talk about that, and particular way to you guys, see, if you haven't started messing with it, bots, five should be out for the show. And it has some nice enhancements along the API line.

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