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058 Progressive Web Apps Building – Amazing Lucee CFML and ColdBox Tricks with Miles Rausch

By Michaela Light 1 Comment

Miles Rausch talks about “Progressive Web Apps Building – Amazing Lucee CFML and ColdBox Tricks” in this episode of the CF Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

Show notes

What a Progressive Web App? (PWA)

  • Eg google docs
  • A web app that gives you a native app experience (including offline use)
  • Content cache
  • Background working so UI stays as single page
  • Install icon to your homepage

Why the heck should make your web apps Progressive?

  • Better user engagement
  • More responsive UI and better user experience

Why should your trust your users’ network connectivity 100% of the time?

  • Emerging markets in China, India and Africa

What support is there for Progressive Web Apps?

  • Who is leading the charge and
    • Google
      • Creators of Chrome browser
      • Creators of many Progressive web apps
      • Android browser support
    • Firefox browser
    • Microsoft
      • Windows 10 support
      • IE
    • Standards groups for Progressive APIs
    • Lucee
    • Adobe
  • Who is left behind
    • Apple Safari browser

How the the Offline First movement related to this

What if the client device crashes while they are editing offline?

How to easily implement Progressive Web apps using ColdBox and Lucee (and a bit of CommandBox too!)

  • Demo where he pulls his network connection live

Your move to Lucee CFML

Why are you proud to use CFML?

WWIT for you to make CF more alive this year?

What are you looking forward to at CFObjective?

Progressive Web Apps are more than just a UI fad, like parallax or scroll-triggered animations. PWAs are quickly becoming the best practice for creating reliable, fast and engaging user experiences. Like progressive enhancement, which treated JavaScript as an optional enhancement for a website, progressive web apps treat the network itself as an optional enhancement. By treating the network as untrustworthy, developers are forced to create better web apps that capitalize on modern browser features when they exist and fallback to traditional client-server communication when they don't.

This talk builds the most cutting-edge client technologies upon the solid foundations of ColdBox, giving CFML developers a helpful path into the future. Google has been a strong supporter and proponent of PWAs and the Offline First movement, but their examples and toolkits make too many or too few assumptions about the reader's server technology. This talk will use ColdBox and Lucee (through CommandBox) as the server language, allowing CFML developers to wrap their heads about this new movement and hopefully incorporate its philosophy and techniques into their existing and upcoming projects.

Mentioned in this episode

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Miles Rausch

Miles Rausch is a web developer from Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

He is a writer for people, and a writer for computers. He believes that he is destined to spend his time at a keyboard.

During his work time, he develops for both server (in CFML using the Lucee engine) and client (where he tries to be unobtrusive, semantic and responsibly future-facing). At the same time, Miles have been having a flirty affair with Node.js and React.

In his personal time, he writes short stories and novels. Fiction is as strong a passion for Miles as programming, and he has published in some online publications and some print magazines. 

Miles is self-motivated and self-disciplined. His goal with every project is producing the best product for the end user. He tries to achieve this by writing his own code, adhering to HTML standards and best practices, and constantly and tirelessly learning and growing my craft.

Links

Interview Transcript

Michaela:        Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Miles Rausch and that name is somewhat dramatic or Luxembourg and we'll talk about that in the moment but Miles is talking of CF objective on Progressive Web App building and he's doing it using Lucee, CFML, and Coal box and a bit of Command box and we'll talk about that in the episode. But we'll look at what a Progressive Web app is and why you want to be doing that with your apps. And why you shouldn't be trust in your client's network connection to be always on. And who's leading the charge in this Progressive Web App Movement. And who's a bit left behind and how it relates the offline burst and he said online there is offline burst movement that Google has championed over the years. So welcome Miles.

Miles:              Thank you Michael. Thanks for having me.

Michael:          So I think the question here for people who haven't created a Progressive Web App is what on earth is a Progressive Web App and have they ever used one without knowing it?

Miles:              Well if you are a fan or user of Google products chances are you come across at least one or more of their Progressive Web Apps. What a Progressive Web App loosely is, is a set of web technologies designed to give users more of a Native Application Experience. You know we get this promise when the iPhone came out from Steve Jobs who said that they would need an app store because your websites would be your apps and Apple kind of failed to deliver on that promise at that moment.

But now others and especially Google have taken up the mantle of how do we give users the experience that they've really come to expect and enjoy using native apps but do it in open way by getting Developers, Browser manufacturers and Standards bodies to kind of agree on some technologies that can be created out in the open to deliver on those promises. So it kind of combines things like, caching an offline first experience that caches content for you.

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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.

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

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.