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131 Lucee 6 with Gert Franz, Charlie Arehart, Ben Nadel, Mark Drew, Zac Spitzer

By Michaela Light Leave a Comment

Gert Franz, Charlie Arehart, Ben Nadel, Mark Drew, and Zac Spitzer talk about “Lucee 6” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive Podcast with host Michaela Light.

“Welcome to the podcast. We’re coming here live from CF camp in Munich, Germany. And we are going to be talking about Lucee 6, the new release of Lucee CFML. And we’ve got some amazing experts here. Mark Drew who's done a lot of Lucee coding at distro kid. Then we’ve got Charlie Erehart, the ColdFusion troubleshooting expert giving an independent view on Lucee. Then we’ve got Ben Nadal all the way from New York City. And he's the top blogger among ColdFusion people according to our annual survey, and then we got good friends from Lucee Association, Switzerland, coming up at the end, but not least. And on the other screen, if you're watching on video, we have some of the attendees from Sierra camp when we open the set. Yay, go attendee. And we'll be opening up to audience questions later in the show. So why don't we just start by just going through each of the four panelists, and I'm just want to ask you, what are you most excited about in Lucee 6?”

Show notes

What are you most excited about the Lucee 6 release?

  • It is released! (after 2019 announcement at CFCamp 2019) and years of covid it is finally released 🙂 
  • Java integration, easier paths, tag islands
  • Listeners: query, email, HTTP progress etc
    • Do want we want to do and add to Lucee independent to ACF
  • CFconfig, container friendly, cloud friendly now
  • Fast startup (<1 second), warm up containers
    • Startup with only One Context halves the startup time
    • Removed old cruft for flash etc (see shrink label in Lucee jira)
    • Webinfo folder outside the webroot – more secure – smaller and faster
      • Pete Freitag Fuseless lamda helped on this
    • Warmenable = 1 to pre-load these folders
  • Dot CFS files – pure cf script

How is CFCamp?

Lucee 6 New features

  • Thread debugging
    • What does “thread debugging” mean?
  • Switch to Json configuration – Json config (moved from XML)
  • CFtimeout tag
    • Control how long a section of code runs before forced time out
  • Raffle Q: How long have each panelist being involved in web devel
    • Mark 1992 
    • Charlie 1995 mainframe web dev then CF 1.5
    • Ben 1999 summer intern CF
    • Gert 2000 with CF
    • Michaela 1994 Gopher, HTML, PERL 1997 CF
  • Raffle Q: What is the oldest domain you registered?
    • Mark markdrew.com – but no lost it and wants it back
      • Sold miny.com for much money
    • Charlie systemanage.com
    • Ben girls and many other domains
    • Gert gertfranz.com
    • Michaela teratech.com 1994
    • Audience 1995 free domain
  • Spaces and whitespace in code
    • Ben use lots
    • Mark loves spaces
    • Tabs vs spaces
    • CFlint on compile to reduce java byte code size
  • Smaller footprint on disk, less memory, faster startup
    • Removed unused old Java libraries from default 
    • Warm up  – expand library images
    • Performance improvements
  • DX – Developer experience 
    • Better error messages
    • Community driven project
      • for improving DX
      • For reporting and fixing issues
  • How to contribute to Lucee
    • contributing to the code and docs
    • Testing the new release
    • Support contracts to contribute money
    • Zac works for 80% for Pixl8, 20% for Rasia purely on Lucee 
    • UX on download page to ask for help
      • Patreon 
    • Share about how good Lucee is on your blog, social media
    • Comment on public forums so the question and answer are google
    • Dev bottom up, CTO top down (more expensive)
  • Raffle Q: What is older: CF, PHP, JS
    • PHP is 4 days older than CF and older than JS by several months
    • ASP is similar age
    • CGI and PERL are several years older
  • Single context mode
    • What does “single context” mean?
    • Vs current multi-context in Lucee (and one context in ACF)
    • Faster server startup
    • Web sites each have one
  • Fixing bad CFML defaults
    • Eg CFLocation AddToken = False is now default
    • Can set in application.cfc for any parameter eg CFMAIL, Datasource
  • Local mode
  • CFtimer tag – to time sections of code, returns the time taken
  • Favorite Lucee features
    • Cfscript islands
    • Pricing
    • Speed
  • To what level should Lucee diverge from ACF (if at all)?
    • Backwards compatibility
    • Both Lucee and ACF adding new features and learning from each other
    • Zac and Mart Takarta coordinate improvements
      • Community evangelists 
  • Audience comment – backwards compatibility is important 
    • Enterprise ACF vs open source Lucee
  • What was the first open source CFML engine
    • Early version of BlueDragon CFML? No
    • Smiths project from Switzerland

Mentioned in this episode

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Bios

Gert Franz

Gert was born in 1967 and lives in Switzerland since 1997. He is one of the key people behind Lucee. Back in the late eighties, he studied astrophysics in Munich but switched to later IT as a profession and programmed for several companies in the past as a database administrator and system analyst. Gert spoke a lot at all major conferences in the past and will for sure in the future. He is now a fellow at DistroKid.

Links

 

Charlie Arehart

A veteran server troubleshooter who’s worked in enterprise IT for more than three decades, Charlie Arehart (@carehart) is a longtime community contributor who as an independent consultant provides short-term, remote, on-demand troubleshooting/tuning assistance for organizations of all sizes and experience levels (carehart.org/consulting).

Links

 

Ben Nadel

Ben Nadel is the technical co-founder of InVision App, Inc – a digital product design platform used to make the world's best customer experiences. As the original CTO, Ben now spends his days as a Principal Engineer, leading maintenance and development efforts on InVision's legacy platform. This includes systems monitoring, database optimization, instrumentation, back-end work, front-end work, product ideation, and research-and-development. He envisions himself as a champion of the User Experience; and often advocates for the User even in the face of internal opposition.

Outside of work-hours, Ben wakes up at 5 am, seven days a week, so that he can attempt to stay on top of the rapidly changing world of web development. He uses these early-morning hours to read, conduct experiments, and write articles for his blog, BenNadel.com, which he has been running since 2006.

Links

 

Mark Drew

Mark Drew has been programming CFML since 1996, and even though he has had forays into Perl, ASP and PHP, he is still loving every line of code he has crafted with CFML. 

He has been a strong advocate for open source, having worked on CFEclipse, Railo and now Lucee, as well as a number of other projects. He tries to create a pull request a day, to keep the bugs at bay.

By day he helps other developers as the lead devops engineer at DistroKid, making sure that the carefully crafted artesanal code goes from laptop to server in the shortest time whilst keeping all its flavour. By night he develops games with CMD:Studio. 

He has been known to do a podcast too! called the Localhost Podcast in which we talk all about the web. He also talks about the process of making games on the Level Design Podcast

Links

 

Zac Spitzer

Senior Software Engineer @ Rasia

  • 80% Technical Lead  @ Pixl8
  • 20% Community Manager @ Lucee Association Switzerland

Originally from Melbourne, Australia

Lives in Berlin, Germany

CFML Developer since 1996, Allaire CF 2.0

Links

 

Interview transcript

Michaela Light  0:01

welcome to the podcast. We’re coming here live from CF camp in Munich, Germany. And we have going to be talking about Lucee 6 the new release of Lucee CFML. And we’ve got some amazing experts here. But Mark true. who’s done a lot of Lucee coding at distro kid. Then we’ve got Charlie Earhart, the ColdFusion troubleshooter shooting expert or giving an independent view on Lucee. Then we’ve got Ben Nadal all the way from New York City. And he’s the top blogger among ColdFusion people according to our annual survey, and then we got good friends from Lucee Association, Switzerland, coming up at the end, but not least. And on the other screen, if you’re watching on video, we have some of the attendees from Sierra camp when we open the set. Yay, go attendee. And we’ll be opening up to audience questions later in the show. So why don’t we just start by just going through each of the four panelists and I'm just want to ask you, what are you most excited about in Lucee 6?

Gert Franz  1:09

That it’s here.

Well, you know, it took us it took us really three long years. And we announced it actually at CF Camp 2019. And we even had a logo, we had all the features. We had everything. And then okay, I have the greatest excuse ever. COVID hips. So there goes, no, that slowed us a little down. And finally, we were able to release the release candidate yesterday. And the final release will come out after I suppose next week, just right before Misha goes on holiday. You know, he’s gonna go okay, this is live. I’m outta here. Right. Please comments to Zac. Right. And so that is really my highlight of it. I have lots of different highlights, which I can talk to about about later on as well. But anyway, passing on. What about you, Ben?

Michaela Light  2:09

What are you most excited about in the Lucee 6 release?

Ben Nadel 4  2:15

I think the Java integration looks super exciting. For me, so much of what makes Lucee so fun to work with is breaking down the barriers between the ColdFusion code and other code, whether it's very simple things like you don't have to expand paths to read files. And you can just do relative file paths or creating components by passing in jar libraries, tag islands for easy CF query stuff, obviously, I mean, it's a given. So the Java stuff is, to me has always been a huge black box that I've never really been able to break into. So I'm super excited to be able to now start to dribble in some Java code and interact with external Java libraries in much more advanced ways than just instantiating stuff. So that that to me is super exciting.

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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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