071 ContentBox in the Cloud (Docker Magic) with Gavin Pickin

Gavin Pickin talks about “ContentBox in the Cloud (Docker Magic)” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light.

He is one of the speakers at Into The Box 2018 conference.

Contents

Episode Highlights
ContentBox + Docker
Ortus Keynote
Alexa and ColdBox APIs
ColdBox Zero to Hero
Mentioned in this episode
Bio
Links
Interview Transcript:

Episode Highlights

What is ContentBox and why would you want to use it with Docker?
- ContentBox is a great Modular CMS built on top of ColdBox
- Using CommandBox and Forgebox you can install modules and extend your app in seconds.
- You can extend and build on top of ContentBox easily to mold it to your liking.
  - Interception points
  - CFCs
- It’s just ColdBox MVC under the hood.
- Big changes in 3.8 releasing any day now.
  - themes , modules and widgets now upgrade proof
  - Docker friendly
- Version 4 – maybe at ITB – come and find out.
- Env Variable support
- CFConfig for loading your CF Engine from scripts
ContentBox docker image
- Which has a few extra ContentBox goodies added on top of the usual CommandBox docker image.
  - File mounts
  - Special settings
- Old School servers vs Docker and CI
- Painful to think about old school server
  - 10 page documents of the setup
Using a Docker file mount to be able to share Media files between 2 instances
- For images and documents
- Persistent storage
- A bit a CDN
How to cluster sessions so your ContentBox site can run in the cloud, on more than one instance.
- More speed
- More reliability
- Separated from other sites
- Horizontal scale vs vertical scale
- Auto scaling with Docker Swarm
- Portainer
- Couchbase / Redis Extension for Clustered Caching
- Elastic Search
- ColdBox APIs
Scaling
- 4 servers high traffic
  - Travel sites
Why are you proud to use CF?
WWIT for you to make CF more alive this year?
What are you looking forward to at Into the Box this year?
- What other conferences are you going to attend?
  - Speaking at CF Summit West again – if they pick me – speaker deadline April 15th.
  - CF Objective on hiatus this year so first time in 6 years I won’t be speaking there
  - MuraCon in Sacramento early in April.
  - Waiting for dates NCDevCon – would love to attend this one.
  - CFCamp – I wish… maybe next year. Brad and Luis will probably be there.
  - Ortus Developer Week
  - Ortus Roadshow

ContentBox + Docker

Start to finish, launch your ContentBox site in the cloud with Docker. We will look at the ContentBox docker image, which has a few extra ContentBox goodies added on top of the usual CommandBox docker image. We will learn how to use a file mount to be able to share Media files between 2 instances, and how to cluster sessions so your ContentBox site can run in the cloud, on more than one instance.

Ortus Keynote

The Ortus Keynote gives you insight into Ortus Solutions, the past, present and future.

You'll meet the members of Team Ortus, community members, speakers and sponsors.

We'll tell you a story about CFML, which we think you will want to hear, and learn what Ortus and the community is doing for CFML and the future of CFML.

You will get updates on an array of Ortus *Box products, including recent releases & upcoming plans and features in our roadmaps.

We will finish with Ortus's plans for the future… as well as remind you of a driving force behind all things Ortus.

Alexa and ColdBox APIs

Alexa from Amazon powers the Amazon Echo, Amazon Fire TV and is Amazon's answer to Siri, Cortana and Google home.

Amazon's Alexa Skills Kit allows developers to build their own set of abilities that can be published to the Alexa App Store for consumers to use.

This Session will walk through the pros and cons of voice, how to design a voice user interface, how to get started with ColdBox, and how to design Alexa Commands that integrate with your ColdBox API.

ColdBox Zero to Hero

Full day workshop – sold out

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

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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Bio

Gavin Pickin – Software Consultant for Ortus Solutions

Gavin started using ColdFusion in 1999 when working for the university of Auckland in New Zealand before moving to California. He has lead teams, trained new developers and worked the full stack from graphic design, HTML CSS JavaScript through to ColdFusion MySQL and server administration.

Gavin has a passion for learning and cannot understand why the 9-5ers aren't listening to podcasts while changing diapers, watching video tutorials while cleaning baby bottles and folding clothes, or putting the kids to sleep with soothing phone gap mobile application cookbook recipes.

You will find him blogging at gpickin.com and on twitter @gpickin and occasionally being mocked on cfhour's podcast.

Interview Transcript:

Michaela 0:01
Welcome back to the show. Today we're going to be looking at using content box in the cloud. And we're going to do some Docker magic with it. And I'm here with Gavin picking. And he is the software consultant for all the solutions. And he's also the guy behind a lot of the content box. Cool stuff. And I think he's been working away on a new release. But we'll ask him about that later in the episode. But first of all, we're going to talk about what content boxes and why you'd want to use it with Docker. And we'll talk about some of the cool new stuff that he's been putting out with the content box Docker image, and using a file mount in order to share media files between multiple instances and how clustering sessions can give you a lot more speed and reliability. We also touch on us support painter and couch based and Elastic Search. So lots of cool stuff in today's episode. So welcome, Gavin. Thank you appreciate having me. So for those people who don't know what is content box,

Gavin Pickin 1:02
so content box is order solutions, very own CMS. So it's a content management system. And we built it on top of CO box. So it's a whole box app and does a lot of the great things you expect from content management systems. And we try to make it bigger and better all the time. The beauty of it is, is that it's modular. And if you've used man box, forge box, and everything else, just like have a co box apps, you can install modules and extending your app, and seconds, you want it to us, you know, be crib free passwords or what not just install the modular if you want to use you know, any other modules, install them in a way you go. They're up and running. And you can use them in seconds. So it builds on top of all the great building blocks that call box and forge box and command box gives you