Patrick Quinn talks about “CFML Secrets (AWS, Lucee and SeeFusion” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light. He is the CoFounder, CEO and CTO of Webapper and Global Product manager at LAS.
“We think doing more of what we’ve been doing would be the best way to make CFML a more “alive” community. For Webapper’s part, we’ve updated our offerings to include Amazon cloud hosting, released 3 new versions of our SeeFusion product in the past year (including with AWS integrations), and, most importantly, we’ve put our financial and technical backing behind Lucee, the F/OSS CFML platform. In our opinion, Lucee is the most exciting and energetic force in the CFML world. We think it’s the future of CFML, and we’re excited to watch it grow, and to be a part of that growth with our Lucee-centered products and services.” Patrick Quinn
Show notes
- The Challenges of AWS managed Lucee hosting
- What is new at Webapper
- AWS
- “Infrastructure as code”
- The move from Adobe ColdFusion to Lucee CFML
- ACF cloud pricing model and Adobe EULA – pay per server virtual instance
- Joined LAS
- On the Board of Directors
- Global Product Manager of LAS
- Monthly release cycle / sprint
- More transparency
- Build automation
- Test driven development
- What is exciting about Lucee in the coming year
- Same day/hour Security hotfixes
- More releases and smoother regressions/fewer bugs
- Test coverage checking
- The Lucee Roadmap for Lucee 5.3 and 6.0
- Approx 12-18 months away (not official date)
- Feature voting in Lucee JIRA ticketing system
- Sponsored fixes
- Backwards compatibility of X.0 releases
- Commercial software vs open source software
- Supporting the last two prior major releases. 5-10 year support window
- Lightweight install and small footprint
- Faster start up
- Official Lucee AWS server gold image in the cloud (AWS marketplace) AMI (Amazon Machine Image)
- Pre-installed, pre-optimized
- Contributor paid cloud version
- SeeFusion Secrets for CF high performance
- CF Cloud monitoring support
- Amazon cloudwatch integration
- Been available for 13 years
- SeeFusion 5.2 due in August
- Cloud licensing by server per hour
- Why are you proud to use CFML?
- We’ve always loved CFML as a core tool of ours because of its combined simplicity and power. It has also acted as a great technical “glue” for us over the years, connecting systems, marshaling different technologies together into one stack, etc. Beyond its usefulness, we’re also proud of its history, in particular of its status as the first application server to market in 1995. Since most of us at Webapper worked at Allaire Corporation, we’ve always been proud of being part of that technical and corporate history.
- Best of breed tool
- WWIT for you to make CF more alive this year?
- We think doing more of what we’ve been doing would be the best way to make CFML a more “alive” community. For Webapper’s part, we’ve updated our offerings to include Amazon cloud hosting, released 3 new versions of our SeeFusion product in the past year (including with AWS integrations), and, most importantly, we’ve put our financial and technical backing behind Lucee, the F/OSS CFML platform. In our opinion, Lucee is the most exciting and energetic force in the CFML world. We think it’s the future of CFML, and we’re excited to watch it grow, and to be a part of that growth with our Lucee-centered products and services.
- Adobe CF 10 year roadmap, CF Summit support
- What are you looking forward to / did you enjoy at CFObjective?
- Looking forward to more of the defining characteristic of cf.Objective()–namely, that it’s the most advanced CFML conference in existence. In-depth sessions about the latest topics, trends and tooling in web software development. It’s also a great time for the worldwide Lucee team to spend some in-person time together
Mentioned in this episode
- Mike Brunt
- Daryl Banttari
- Allaire
- Amazon AWS partner program
- Cloud design pattern applications vs monolith apps
- Docker containers
- AWS Autoscaling
- Clone server to a new big virtual server
- Amazon cloudfront a global content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to your viewers with low latency and high transfer speeds.
- AWS Geo-distributed systems
- AWS Availability zones
- Replicated database servers
- Lucee
- Jeff Bower
- Build automation
- Test-driven development
- Test coverage
- Pete Freitag
- HackMyCF
- Ant
- Maven
- ORM
- Flex
- Angular
- Lucee JIRA ticket system
- Lucee TAG (Technical Advisory Group)
- AWS marketplace
- Ortus Solutions
- CommandBox
- AWS CloudWatch
Listen to the Audio
Bio
Patrick Quinn
CoFounder, CEO and CTO of Webapper. Global Product manager at LAS.
I'm the Co-Founder and CEO/CTO of Webapper Services. Since 2001, we've been providing a true one-stop-shop consulting experience for customers with CFML-based web applications (ColdFusion or Lucee). We've worked on many of the largest, highest-traffic systems in this space. In recent years, with the advent of cloud technology, we've been able to transform into a new kind of hosting company, where we combine AWS's leading cloud technology with our extensive web application engineering expertise. The result is an even better experience for our customers, who benefit not only from a 21st-century “true cloud” hosting infrastructure, but also from dramatically improved tech support that's delivered by engineers who are not only well-versed (and certified) in AWS technology, but who are also experienced application engineers.
My strongest professional interest at this juncture of my career lies at the locus of culture, process, and code. In short, I thrive on the alchemy of combining these 3 key ingredients for creating high-performing technology organizations. Pragmatically speaking, if you’re achieving sub-optimal results, and aren’t sure if your code, process or culture are the problem, I can help. Or, if you are tackling a particularly challenging IT project, and have concerns about strategy, or execution, or both, I can help. Or, if you have an organizational/technical mess on your hands, I’m especially good at cleaning up.
I have personally delivered over 500 successful engagements, to hundreds of customers all over the world.
I was born and raised in Chicago, received my bachelor’s and master’s degrees at The University of Chicago in the 1990s, and have been solving technology problems ever since.
Links
Interview transcript
Michael: Welcome back to the show. I am here with Patrick Quinn from WebApper and the Lucee Association of Switzerland and we're going to be looking at the challenges AWS managed Lucee C.F.M.L. hosting doing things in the cloud that you used to do on a server and all the clever stuff he's been doing a web app with that. Also, how they have moved their focus from Adobe ColdFusion to Lucee C.F.M.L. and why they did that.
And as he's the product manager global product manager. I'm sorry Patrick. I'm going to get your title right there because I know it's far more important being a global project manager for Lucee.
Patrick: of course
Michael: What's exciting about Lucee coming up in the coming year? And we'll also briefly mention some C. Fusion secrets you can use for high performance on the cloud. Because ColdFusion has been upgraded now, works on the cloud versions of ColdFusion so, we'll mention that as well. So, welcome Patrick.
Patrick: Thank you Michael great to be with you as always.
Michael: Yes good seeing you so, you've moved to doing AWS managed Lucee hosting. What are the challenges you had to deal with in doing that because it could be quite complicated to get it right?
Patrick: Right so, the first challenge was just picking that meaning I managed hosting in the Amazon cloud, or we also offer consulting and support services to customers who are already in the Amazon cloud. But we've been doing ColdFusion consulting since the very beginning. Our co-founder Mike [inaudible] 01:34 has support emails from 01:37 on our hard drive somewhere. He was with the platform before is was even called C.F.M.L. back when it was called D.B.M.L. – Data Base Markup Language.
And then of course you know all of us here at WebApper we all work to deliver together that's where you met myself, our co-founder Mike, Darryl, the chief executive C. Fusion [inaudible] and lots of other people who [inaudible] over the years. So, we did that consulting work for a lair that was really the first ColdFusion consulting in the world continued under Macromedia and then we started WebApper after the Macromedia days and it's been since 2001 we've been doing this. So, we were just doing hundreds and hundreds of ColdFusion consulting support and development agency and that was great. And then, around about the time that I personally had completed my five hundred ColdFusion product projects under the WebApper Bella 02:28, I started thinking more seriously about that C.E.O. title I have instead of just being the developer who happens to sign paychecks.
And so, we started thinking about what's next, what would be the next generation move [inaudible] 2:41 move for our company. And so, we've been partnered with a lot of traditional hosting companies over the years. We brought in professional services for a lot of the ColdFusion hosting companies. And we started looking more and more at the Amazon cloud first for a machinery and then, just maybe provide this as an offering. And then, that's when the label went off and realized wow, we can actually be able to manage those the provider, we can control the entire system; no middleman at all.
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