Brad Wood talks about “CommandBox Workflow magic (modules to speed up CF development)” in this episode of the CF Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.
Contents
Show notes
Why use Workflows in your CF coding?
- You probably already do use workflows if you don’t call them that
- Eg
- source control steps
- Bitbucket Pipelines
- Local dev → staging → production
- Ticketing system
- Shared tools for code formatting
- Scripts to automate common tasks
- Teams and Individual developers
What is CommandBox?
- CLI = Command Line Interface for CFML
- Lots of addons written in CFML
- Built in help
- Very colorful ASCII art too
- REPL
- Integrated shell
- Run multiple CF virtual server on one machine, different versions of ACF and Lucee
- Auto install
- Fast test of different versions
- Command line automation
- Task runners
- Batch Scripting in CFML! – more powerful than BASH
- Package management
- Libraries used in your app install and correct versioning
- ForgeBox integration
- Modern CFML more powerful ecosystem than Node, Pyphon etc
- Written in CFML, runs on top of JVM
- Open source
CommandBox Modules to improve workflow
- Bullet Train
- Saves time knowing what you are doing the CLI
- Fun too!
- Dotenv
- Makes personalizing passwords, databases, SMTP server etc for each dev easy
- Keeps passwords out of your CF code and source control – more secure
- Cfconfig
- Back up and restore CF Admin settings – even between different CF versions or ACF and Lucee
- CommandBox and Docker instances create settings automatically
- Disaster Recovery – easy restore of settings
- Save settings to source control (though careful about passwords for datasources)
- Dev vs production settings quick for locking down a server
- Diff of settings between two servers – diagnosis settings bugs
- Host updater
- Easy management of local host names vs IP addresses – a local DNS override in effect
- Keeps hosts file clean when you stop using that virtual server.
- FusionReactor
- Adds easy support to enable FusionReactor on the servers you start inside CommandBox.
- FR licensing covers multiple ComandBox CF servers on the same machine
- FR Cloud license counts the time used in containers dynamically
Other cool modules we didn’t cover in the episode that Brad loves
- CFFormat
- Cfdocs
- service manager (paid)
- $49 per server (lifetime license)
- Ngrok
What do CommandBox and these tools cost?
- Free. Professional Open source (with optional paid support and training)
Mentioned in this episode
- Bullet Train
- Dotenv
- Cfconfig
- Host updater
- FusionReactor
- ITB conference
- Modernize or Die podcast
- CommandBox
- All CommandBox modules on ForgeBox
- CommandBox 4 Deep Dive (new version revealed) with Brad Wood
- Box Patreon levels
- CFCasts
- Lucee Discourse Forum
- ColdFusion Programmers Facebook Group
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Bio
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. Teacher of the CommandBox Deep Dive full workshop at IntoTheBox ColdFusion conference.
Links
Interview Transcript
Michaela Light 0:03
Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Brad wood. And we're going to be talking about command box workflow magic and how you can speed up your ColdFusion development. And those of you don't know, Brad is I think he's the senior application architect or autists, or somesuch. fancy title. But he's an expert on command boxes. He actually wrote it
is an open source tool. We'll tell you more about that later in the show. He's from the Midwest. He's currently in Kansas City, grew up in Southern Missouri, and
as well as cold fusion programming for 20 years. He's also got three. I was gonna say three wives and one girl, but he's got three girls and one wife. Yes. Lexia. Reading.
Brad Wood 0:51
And it's really four girls total if you add them all up,
Michaela Light 0:54
but four girls complete? Yeah. My wife is yes. And he's a big contributor. The coefficient community has a very active blog, which I'll put in the show notes, and it's called coding revolution or code, coding. Coders revolute? Yes. With an S CODAs.
Brad Wood 1:16
Yes. It's our revolution. We own it.
Michaela Light 1:18
Yes, absolutely. And he's also a well known speaker at various ColdFusion conferences. Hopefully this year, there'll be some in person conferences. He can present tense but last year fully online, except for into the box. Oh, into the box was the brave conference.
Brad Wood 1:40
Yes. Crazy Ones who tried it?
Read more
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.
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