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Michaela Light: 00:00:00 Welcome back to the show today. We're here with Brad wood from Ortus Solutions and we're going to be looking in detail at the results from the state of the ColdFusion Union survey 2019. So welcome Brad.
Brad Wood: 00:00:34 Hello. Thank you. Good to be here.
Michaela Light: 00:00:35 And Yeah, good to have you here again. And for those of you don't know, Brad is like the chief, uh, intelligent, a ColdFusion cold, CommandBox and other…
Brad Wood: 00:00:47 I thought you were gonna say chief monkey there for a second.
Michaela Light: 00:00:51 Well maybe you do a bit of a chief monkey on occasion. He gave an amazing number of talks into the box. He gave so many talks. I think he had to be split into parallel versions to be able to give the same talk, same time in different rooms, firms almost.
Michaela Light: 00:01:05 Um, so anyway, good guy to check out. And his a blog is a coders revolution, if I remember right.
Brad Wood: 00:01:15 That's my personal blog codersrevolution.com I typically blog stuff on the ortussolutions.com blog as well if it's box related, so.
Michaela Light: 00:01:24 and occasionally he's seen on the a CF slack channel as well. Occasionally like every five minutes.
Brad Wood: 00:01:31 You know, I actually, I just hit my 7000th message in the general channel just a few minutes ago. There's a little optic, there's a little Bot that keeps track of how much you talk and if you, if you blabber too much, they'll pop up and give you a little kind of anniversary notices like, Hey, you're 10000th the message, you know?
Michaela Light: 00:01:50 Wow. Well, I think everyone listening appreciate all the support you give in the CF slack channel and all over the interwebs, so I appreciate you doing that.
Michaela Light: 00:02:01 Anyway, today we're going to look at the results of the ColdFusion union survey. This is an annual survey that TeraTech runs for the ColdFusion community and it's a about 46 questions in it about all different aspects of ColdFusion tools. People use frameworks, uh, you know, what people think about ColdFusion and where it's going.
Brad Wood: 00:02:20 So the survey orders order gives us a good kind of barometer of where the community is at. Um, you know, a lot of our open source libraries like ColdBox and ContentBox, you know, we're at, we're asking ourselves questions like, you know, what versions of ColdFusion do we need to be supporting? What versions of ColdFusion do we need to be supporting, what data bases are the most popular? So the state of the CF Union survey gives us a good kind of the, uh, know indicator where people are at, what they're interested in and, uh, and we kind of know what to focus on. So I always look forward to a survey every year.
Michaela Light: 00:02:50 Yeah. I mean, I was talking to the guys at learn CF in a week yesterday on the podcast and they were saying they use it also for the same kind of reason. Like, you know, what should they be covering in that training material? So, um, yeah. Very interesting. All right, well let's go to the first question, which is, what version of ColdFusion are people using? So A, and for folks who want to see this home , you just go to terra tech.com and I'll read the URL, but you can file, put it in the show notes for the thing. It's a https://teratech.com/state-of-the-CF-Union-2019-Final-Results with a bunch of hyphens thrown in between every word, but I'll stick that URL in the show notes for this episode as well. Um, yeah, so it looks like the most popular version of cold fusion is a CF 2016.
Brad Wood: 00:03:40 Uh, it is. Yeah, it came out on top. I was, uh, just looking at this the other week. Um, and Lucyee five is actually number two. So CF 11 is still very popular. Um, which is interesting since ColdFusion 11 is now officially out of, uh, core support. That was at the end of April, I believe. Uh, so there's a lot of people still on ColdFusion 11 and there are no more security patches. There's no more fixes, there's no more bug updates to CF 11. Um, so there's a lot of people with some upgrading to do, um, the 20 [inaudible].
Michaela Light: 00:04:14 and look at the number of people on ColdFusion 10 and ColdFusion nine.
Brad Wood: 00:04:20 Honestly, I mean, that's over over 40% still on cold fusion a 10. Now. I mean, this is a multiple choice question. So presumably some people, you know, uh, have some service in 2018 and maybe some servers left on 10.
Brad Wood: 00:04:33 Uh, but yeah, it's still a significant number. Um, you know, we dropped support, uh, like in the |ColdBox framework for ColdFusion 10 and prior with, with cold box five, in fact, we asked nine and 10 at the same time. Um, even even with, you know, a large number of people still using it, uh, you know, the world has moved on so people still stuck on, some of those older versions are going to find it, uh, harder to keep up to date on some of those frameworks and things in the community as well. They're using the newer few newer features.
Michaela Light: 00:05:02 I guess the good news is people using CF 8, seven, six, five or even earlier versions back into the pre history of time. Um, uh, have pretty minimal numbers of folks still using those solutions. At least two who answered the survey.
Brad Wood: 00:05:17 I mean, the Lucee 4 is now just about on par with ColdFusion nine at this point. Um, so I mean, I can't see the exact number and just use the, tell me if I hover 36%.
Michaela Light: 00:05:29 I think that is our absolute numbers rather than percentages. Oh, that's 36 respondents. Okay. Yeah, I think we about that
Speaker 2: 00:05:37 55 total. So quick. Better math says it's just over 10%.
Brad Wood: 00:05:42 Okay. Got It. Um,
Speaker 2: 00:05:45 the Jager, the calculations and the survey to do percentages next year.
Michaela Light: 00:05:49 Right, right. Um, somebody, I think it's good to see that most, most Lucee people have moved to Lucee five. Obviously if there's no licensing barrier there, it's just a, you know, potential compatibility barriers. Uh, Adobe always seems to have a bit more of a spread. Um, what would be interesting actually in future years, uh, would be to break out the Lucee versions by a minor version. Um, cause Lucee tends to stay in like the five x series for quite a few years and they really do treat minor releases almost as major releases. In fact, uh, they'll put, you know, breaking changes in a minor release. No, five. Dot three was a big jump over five. Dot. Two. Um, maybe next year we can break out some of those, uh, those Lucee five releases just since, you know, Lucee five has been out for like, what, three years or so now it's been quite awhile. Um, so that, that's a fairly big bucket, whereas Adobe will have a new major release, but every two years, so they usually have,
Michaela Light: 00:06:45 That and next one up is 20 CF 2020. It's coming out. Yeah, I guess I'll be the end of the year. We're going to see some Alpha versions of that out there and an in Beta.
Brad Wood: 00:06:56 Yeah. So I mean, I'll be interested in seeing the trajectory of 2018 next year. I mean, we're really kind of just a year into 2018. I don't even know that we're that far. Um, so I mean there's, there's a decent amount of pickup, uh, already 64 respondents, uh, using it. But you know, 2018 is still only about halfway as far as 2016 still has. So, um, it's a decent jump in the first year. It'll be interesting to see next year of 2018 is still continuing to be picked up. Uh, or if it stalls out at all.
Michaela Light: 00:07:25 I think, my guess is it all a pickup because they, it seems to be a reliable release. I haven't heard of any major screw ups.
Brad Wood: 00:07:33 Got a couple updates in. Yes, it's been pretty good. Um, I talked to a lot of people who have a 2018 upgrade in progress. I have several clients in that exact same boat. Um, I did actually talk to someone this week whose company was upgraded to 2016 which seems like a, a pretty big waste of time. I see, you know, to go through the upgrade process and not get all the way on the latest and greatest. Um, but you know,
Michaela Light: 00:07:56 well sometimes people only go to third base, can't get any farther,
Michaela Light: 00:08:02 can't go any further. You know, they have restrictions, you know.
Brad Wood: 00:08:06 Yeah. I think a lot of it is just red tape, you know. Um, sometimes, uh, people, there's, there's actually several people, there's some conversations in slack this week, uh, that want to go to 2018 but they can't because there's no one outstanding, uh, bug here or there that that's a blocker for them. Um, so I do expect that, you know, the next few updaters from Adobe will probably, um, address some of those, uh, some of those bugs and things that had been blocking people and hopefully by next year that we'll have, you know, remove some of those barriers for a few of the people that are still waiting for that upgrade.
Michaela Light: 00:08:41 Yeah. Now for those following us on a youtube, I shared the s the screen of where it is and I'm hoping you will seeing it at your end.
Michaela Light: 00:08:56 I minimize that one there. There we go. Yeah. And maybe I'll see if I can bump up the resolution on this so we can actually, there we go. That's a bit better. So I know people on audio can't see that. So that's why we're going to describe what the results are. But for those on Youtube, uh, you can see what we're talking about too.
Brad Wood: 00:09:19 So that's what we have to use. Very descriptive words may describe them like, like when people describe cheeses and wines, you know, this graph is very earthy with overtones of flowers or something, you know,
Michaela Light: 00:09:33 there we go. I think with that thought we better move on to whether people are using enterprise or standard.
Brad Wood: 00:09:40 Now this graph only applies to Adobe ColdFusion. Of course, Lucee only has one version so I assume most of the non applicable answers for Lucee users. This is right about half and half. It says enterprise and standard.
Michaela Light: 00:09:53 A lot of people do use enterprise. I mean, you know, has my, you know, you got those unlimited instances and I think some other features in there that they,
Brad Wood: 00:10:02 yeah, Adobe is never has never had features unique to enterprise, but they've always throttled things. So you can create ads in standard, but it's limited to one thread at a time. Uh, which I liked that model cause at least you can, you know, any apple work on either version, you just can't scale it as much. Now, one of the big issues we've had, the standard is you can't use an Adobe ColdFusion standard license on CommanBox because it tactically registers as a j two ee installation. It's a war deployment. Um, and they only allowed that on enterprise, uh, which has been an issue for several of our clients. Um, supposedly Adobe's looking to change that. So command box servers can run a standard license even though it was totally a war behind the scenes. Uh, but that's still, we haven't seen that materialize yet. Alright.
Michaela Light: 00:10:46 I would encourage you to ob to support, Command Box in this. I mean, uh, I also, I just wanna do a shout out to integral and fusion reactor who now have a CommandBox image out there. So, and anyone else listening who has a third party tool for cold fusion, you should be talking to Brad together. Get that image together.
Brad Wood: 00:11:07 Yeah, there's a lot of people, he brought up people moving to Docker guys, a lot of people moving to docker. And I guess that's another good thing. So forget CommandBox for a minute, even though I don't like to do that. Um, if you're, uh, if you're looking at at dockerizing, uh, the version, the license you have for Adobe ColdFusion makes a big difference because that's another one of the big changes in the Eula, uh, is, uh, how the license works with regard to Docker. So if you have a Adobe ColdFusion standard license, uh, my understanding if I'm reading this correctly, but the, the typical audience, not a lawyer, right. You know, disclaimer, um, you can, you would have to have a separate standard license for every instance of a, of a docker container you're wanting to spin up. Whereas, uh, with the enterprise license, uh, you have more freedom to use that same license to cover, uh, multiple containers on the, uh, the same VM or the same server with the typical CPU restrictions in place eight cores. So if you're looking into moving to docker, or at Adobe ColdFusion, you definitely want to be on the enterprise license or it's, uh, it wouldn't really be tenable from a licensing standpoint.
Michaela Light: 00:12:09 Yeah. I mean, I'm hoping with the, you know, the announcement that ColdFusion 2020 is going for more cloud support and microservices and things. I'm hoping they're going to rationalize their licensing for the cloud. [inaudible]
Brad Wood: 00:12:24 well, yeah, and that's a good direction to see Adobe moving in. They've always catered towards the traditional kind of model servers. I mean that, cause that was the web right, for, for decades. Um, you know, and there's stuff now like a fuse list, which was Pete fry tags library to run CFML on the AWS lambda. You know, and it only supports Lucee because honestly there isn't even licensing in place to allow that kind of thing with Adobe. And I'd love to see Adobe, you know, be able to get into that market for sure. So I'm glad to hear them say things like that.
Michaela Light: 00:12:53 Absolutely. So let's look at what operating systems people are running. They're ColdFusion server on, uh, question three [inaudible].
Brad Wood: 00:13:00 Now is this server, does this question specify if it's a server or just development? This is specifically your production servers, right. Okay.
Michaela Light: 00:13:07 Yup. Production. Well it doesn't say production just says called fusion server. So, um, anyway, most people are running on windows. Um,
Brad Wood: 00:13:15 and that's no surprise. That's typically been about 70% in the past is where that number's fallen. I do think Linux has come up a bit to be honest.
Michaela Light: 00:13:24 Yeah. I won't have to compare the numbers to see if that's true, but I think you can be curious. Yeah.
Brad Wood: 00:13:28 I'm curious how much docker has played into Linux taking a larger role. Um, you know, I, when you're running,
Michaela Light: 00:13:35 do you care? I mean, I understand Linux, but like so, so what,
Michaela Light: 00:13:43 I don't care outside of case sensitivity and if your application is hard-coded to have windows file paths in it. But I've worked with quite a few people online switching to docker and that at the same time we have clients in the same boat at the same time make a move from windows to Linux just because it kind of comes with the docker package. You can do docker on windows almost nobody does it. Nobody really supports it with official images. So most people moving to docker also making an a Linux transition as well. So that's why I'm curious, um, if docker has helped push that Linux number a little higher.
Brad Wood: 00:14:16 Yeah, that's a good theory. And Mac I think still chugging along that uh, whatever number that is less than 10% 27,
Brad Wood: 00:14:24 I'm really curious who those people are actually using MACs, further servers. I know people do it. It's out there. I've only actually talked to maybe one person I think of, I know for certain used macs for their actual production servers,
Michaela Light: 00:14:41 but we did have a separate question, which was what Ios do you run on your laptop? PC? Exactly. And there are many more people are running matters still. Windows is the dominant, uh, OSP.
Brad Wood: 00:14:52 Yes. That's almost a little unique to ColdFusion. It seems like Macs or are so prevalent for just developers in general. You know, you go to a developer conference, especially in non ColdFusion fusion one, you know, and you look out at the crowd and you just see like thousands of little apples symbols, you know, all taunting you from the, from the tables. Um, but windows has always been very high, uh, for ColdFusion developers. And I'm curious how much of that is maybe just uh, the effects of government and larger corporate stuff, which tend to be just all windows managed by corporate it, you know, and that sort of element machines. Um, there's not that many people developing on Linux. What's, what's the number there?
Michaela Light: 00:15:33 Um, about 10% on that and 30% in Mac and then 70% windows.
Brad Wood: 00:15:43 Something like that. Sounds about right.
Michaela Light: 00:15:45 I mean maybe, maybe one day you'll be taunted by penguins out in the crowds.
Brad Wood: 00:15:50 I wouldn't mind that. I do run across ColdFusion developers on Linux somewhat regularly, typically. Cause they had the weirdest problems with CommandBox on their machines, the versions of Java they have. So I I hear from them, but.
Michaela Light: 00:16:05 all right, very interesting. Well let's move on to question five, which is what browser client platforms do you support in your apps? So all kinds of possibilities here. Uh, chrome of course is the one that nearly everyone supports and Firefox is not far behind. I E is actually a fair chunk. Uh, behind.
Brad Wood: 00:16:27 we have edge as a separate question though. It's nearly as high as I e.
Michaela Light: 00:16:31 well edge and I e a sort of, you know, is an edge quite a bit different from legacy and I e.
Brad Wood: 00:16:36 I believe it is underneath. Um, what's interesting about this question is a lot of people there are, there are companies that explicitly say like, we don't support x.
Brad Wood: 00:16:48 If you use a B, you don't typically see that. A lot of times, most companies with a web based application out there, um, we know we're going to support in general whatever their users are using it, as long as it's not something totally from underneath the rock. Um, so, you know, we buddy onto the rock. Yeah. Well none of them really. Uh, I don't, of course, the other option, I don't know what that is. Um, I'm curious, anybody who didn't check opera or didn't check safari or didn't check edge, oh, that the, didn't he write four seasons? Yeah. Well, great. I'm curious if people who didn't check some of these options, like actually refuse to support it. Like, you know, user calls in, Hey, I'm trying to give you my money and I'm trying to go through a shopping cart, but you know, opera isn't working.
Brad Wood: 00:17:36 I mean, do they really say, well, screw you, go on. You know, I'm going to sell chrome if you want to buy my products. Um, I, I know it's out there. It probably doesn't play out with those exact words, but I'm curious about that. But typically when you're working in, at least when I've worked at companies who sell, yeah. You know, if a customer calls in and they're like, shut up and take my money, I'm using random browser, one, two, three. You know, the couple of the businesses, like we've got to support this browser and we gotta get this money. So it's interesting to see this graph.
Michaela Light: 00:18:03 Well, and I think that's the difference between would you accept someone running Oprah on your website and do you bother to test for it?
Brad Wood: 00:18:10 That's a very good point. Yeah. Do you bother to test for it? I mean, it might be like chrome 99%. The only thing we bother testing. Right, right. I've definitely seen that where it's like, yeah, we'll support whatever. But if it works in chrome, I assume it works everywhere. I mean, I've been amazed by that. Yeah, I've definitely run into that issue myself.
Michaela Light: 00:18:30 And then a fair chunk of people, uh, supporting Ios or android mobile browses.
Michaela Light: 00:18:36 So see, I use chrome on my android phone and from what I've seen, it always seems to behave at decent amount like chrome on my desktop. I don't know what I hit all the edge cases. But something interesting is,
Michaela Light: 00:18:50 well, let's go down to databases and another controversial question. People are always happy to give, argue about what database they use. Um, looks like the winner is Microsoft Sequel Server.
Brad Wood: 00:19:02 That's not surprising.
Michaela Light: 00:19:04 It isn't particularly, as I say, you can basically use it for free now, you know, on the lower end.
Brad Wood: 00:19:09 So yeah. And you can run it on, on docker as well.
Brad Wood: 00:19:14 Hmm. For free on Docker? Really.
Brad Wood: 00:19:17 Um, I don't know but yeah, I think you can run express cause we uh, we have some clients that use sequel server and we use docker compose so we can sum that up in the last a search and in Adobe cold fusion and sequel server. Um, and you can spin it up on Linux as part of a docker container. Um, it was pretty nice. Now it's interesting. I mean access, bless his heart. It's still just hanging on. How many, how many people, what's the number it's about incorporates souls. Yeah. You portray nails, you can, we'll still get a drive up for it if you try. I mean it doesn't [inaudible] what's the Internet meme? You know, the rent is too dang high wind to have one that's like, you know, the number of access users is too dang high.
Michaela Light: 00:19:57 People already has issues. If you want to have high number of people coming to the site, but you know, if it's this small size you can still work. Um, but you know, why not use my sequel, which is free, much more scalable, you know, which is the second.
Brad Wood: 00:20:14 Oracle's coming in third. And obviously nobody's running their blog on oracle.
Michaela Light: 00:20:19 Um, I hope not. Oracle doesn't have a f does oracle have a free version? And I can't.
Brad Wood: 00:20:24 No, I don't think so. I don't think so. Last time I looked at oracle costs like 40 grand per CPUor does something ridiculous. But, um, when I work with it, it's always usually a government client. Um, so.
Michaela Light: 00:20:38 a lot of other, all the databases, Maria DB and Mongo DB Prospress yeah.
Brad Wood: 00:20:44 And Marissa DB of course being a fork of my sequel. Um,
Brad Wood: 00:20:48 yeah, almost. We'll surprise merga didn't catch up as much. A lot of times. Sometimes in the, in the open source community you have a, you know, you have a product, it gets bought out by some on the original developers like [inaudible] crap, us for can do around thing. And a lot of times the fork will kind of take off and everybody will forget about the original one. Like Jenkins said that it used to be called Hudson, you know, um, in this case, no, my sequel being bought up by, uh, by the Oracle Corporation, they still seem to manage to, uh, to keep a lot of, uh, a lot of market share. Even though the original, my SQL developers all moved over to American, it'd be, um, [inaudible] it's interesting to see,
Michaela Light: 00:21:22 well maybe when Oracle started challenging for my SQL out will suddenly change. So now
Brad Wood: 00:21:29 I see progress. At first I thought that said Postgres QL, but it actually says progress. I'd never heard that.
Michaela Light: 00:21:37 Yeah. I wonder if that's a typo or if there really is one like that. No, very few. 1% of people,
Brad Wood: 00:21:43 which are they using it on that? So is postgres skew all third? No, I think it's coming in behind Mario DB. I think it's slightly less, you know, people that use postgres QL always seem to love it. I mean, anybody ever I ever talked to it uses postgres, just absolutely adores that. I'm almost will surprise it doesn't have more usage, but um, it's interesting.
Michaela Light: 00:22:08 Yeah. I'm just speaking of her, I can't read if we have a question on what a Java engine people are running, but you know, Oracle's been messing around with, you know, the licensing on that jar of raw engine, um, you know, have to like buy a license and then they wouldn't for a long time, for like six months. It was really hard to even buy it from them. It's kind of the opposite JDK. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. You can phone out. You'd, we'd have customers phone them up and they couldn't even buy the thing that they said that you had.
Brad Wood: 00:22:40 Really. I'm gonna, I'm, I'm, I'm, well, I'm very aware of the licensed changes that happen there, but I haven't actually worked with anybody who actually tried to purchase the support for JDK. So That's interesting.
Michaela Light: 00:22:52 I think Larry Ellison must spin it out for a Sushi lunch or something. And just wasn't,
Brad Wood: 00:22:57 I spent all my time diving into the, uh, the open JDK variants. So, oh, here we go. Somebody says want to use Mongo DB, but not sure how yet.
Michaela Light: 00:23:07 Hmm. Interesting. All right. And then a bunch of other things like terra data and s I don't want cool solar database. Whoever filled that in. FoxPro is clearly a database. Oh, as you're a sequel database that's kind of a cloud scalable will server
Brad Wood: 00:23:24 I run, I run across a few people using the shore.
Michaela Light: 00:23:27 Yeah. All right. I think we should move on to question seven on MVC frameworks in which ones do people use or if they use a framework at all. All right,
Brad Wood: 00:23:37 so custom home grown is still on top, uh, which has always been very typical for a, for ColdFusion. Um,
Michaela Light: 00:23:45 well just a word to the people who have a custom home grown model view controller framework, you know, time to smell the uh, cold coffee and get cold box or framework on. We'll CF wheels, you know, I mean that's another good frame.
Brad Wood: 00:24:01 CF wheels is good. Um, I'll be saying I'm a, I have a dog in this race since I'm part of team cold box. Um, I mean there are solid numbers. We'll flip. Uh, there are solid numbers using frameworks. We know other languages like, Ya know, like ruby was around this longest cold fusion, but it didn't really have its no surgeons resurgence until ruby on rails came out. You know, a lot of other languages kind of grow up from the beginning with frameworks that are sort of pushed onto people. You know, cold fusion was around in the, in the wild west days of the web before frameworks were a thing and a lot of code got written. A lot of people got, you know, indoctrinated into ColdFusion without frameworks. And there's just a lot of that around. So I mean, Paul Cox, if you ignore the, the custom option ColdBox on top, but FuseBox, it's actually still edged out framework one. I mean, a fuse box obviously hasn't been updated in many years now, but there's a lot of, you know, legacy code out there using it. So that code doesn't usually go away very quickly.
Michaela Light: 00:25:00 And I haven't checked recently, but like, uh, five months ago I had a customer who was a, they went to the fusebox website and a website and disappeared. I did reach out to the folks saying, Hey, do you want some help with a website and never heard back. So I kind of, um,
Brad Wood: 00:25:17 yeah, once a framework kind of dies, um, that, that's the, the, the issue that can happen is, you know, the resources and the docs, the website, you know, it doesn't really always have someone to look after it. Um, wow.
Michaela Light: 00:25:29 I think, but somewhere, somewhere in the ColdFusion community, we can find someone to resurrect back because there is a lot of legacy pieces
Brad Wood: 00:25:34 use code. Well, I mean, honestly, if someone doesn't want to manage, you know, a site you can get, you know, get hub page and get hub Wiki to put your content on and you don't have to even, you know, pay for it. Uh, so I mean there, there are a lot of just completely free options out there for you know, an open source project to live and no one really has to worry about keeping a domain registered. Um, I don't know. I mean the takeaway from me is, is avoid frameworks that are, that are dead, are not actively developed, you know, in a and you know, work on the, on using frameworks that have an active community around them.
Michaela Light: 00:26:11 A bit more effort on migration guide from fuse box to code box or to framework one or to CF wheels. Yeah, I
Brad Wood: 00:26:17 wrote a blog post on migrating fusebox to ColdBox.
Michaela Light: 00:26:22 If you give us the link later we'll stick it into the show notes.
Brad Wood: 00:26:25 Yeah, it was actually a whole series I blogged a couple of years ago. I think the big thing that keeps people away is just the enormity of the task. You know, people have very large sites, heavily invested into something like fusebox and it's just not something that, that they wanted to get into.
Michaela Light: 00:26:40 Yeah. What ColdFusion CMS content management system do you use?
Brad Wood: 00:26:46 So most popular ones ever responded saying, no, don't use one,
Michaela Light: 00:26:51 don't use a CMS well and that quickly. Or it could be, they haven't thought about it,
Michaela Light: 00:26:58 but custom are the popular one and then a Miura is the top.
Brad Wood: 00:27:02 Um, it's open source. So, um, Yep. Yeah. I mean actually several of these, I think I'll have professional support. Um, you know, content box does PR pretty certain contents does I want to say common spot?
Michaela Light: 00:27:20 absolutely does because he's a paid commercial CMS.
Brad Wood: 00:27:24 Yeah, man. And then probably yes. And that's professionally supported as well through pixelate. Um, and that's actually actively developed as well. Uh, I mean pre-sign has written in ColdBox, so I have a soft spot for it. Even though ContentBox, obviously, um, you know, one of the products I worked with, um, the, the preside guys are super active on that. They do a lot of work on it. Now. I do believe it only runs on Lucy. It takes advantage of a lot of underlying Lucee things for performance, for special features so that that may, uh, be one thing that kind of limits, uh, the uptake of preside. But I've seen a lot of custom built CMS is in ColdFusion just in general. I always kind of joke that I think no other language in the, in the world has as many custom CMS limitations is as I've seen in ColdFusion. But
Michaela Light: 00:28:12 well, you know, if someone's looking to have content on the site, I think it makes sense to use a third party.
Brad Wood: 00:28:19 Okay. And a lot of them, a lot of the CMS has, I've seen are fairly simple. You know, it made us be a database table called, you know, content and they have some basic credit editor and an admin and some marketing person stick stuff in if throw it in the home page, you know, that's, that's the minimum CMS right there.
Michaela Light: 00:28:36 Nice. And a few other unusual CMS is listed in all the,
Brad Wood: 00:28:40 not all those are even ColdFusion.
Michaela Light: 00:28:42 I know. That's why I skipped over them. Uh, all right. Question nine. What Java script libraries do use. So cleo winner here is j query just about Ni. Everyone on the planet uses jquery.
Brad Wood: 00:28:55 Yeah. And this, this question is difficult cause there's only about eight point 7 trillion java script libraries in the world. So we kind of pick a handful of them here. It's hard to do about anything without jquery, but Angular's very high followed by view and then react.
Michaela Light: 00:29:13 Yeah, they're the top three. Right. And then everything else is a, you know, also ran really,
Brad Wood: 00:29:18 you want to see backbone and they're really small. I remember when backbone first came out and at first it seemed like it was going to be just about as popular as everything else, but then it didn't quite catch on.
Michaela Light: 00:29:28 It's a, it's a awesome eScience science as to what makes a framework or a programming language catch on. And maybe that's a,
Brad Wood: 00:29:34 I thought it was Voodoo. It's, it could be food too. Maybe if it was a science, we'd know, we'd know how it worked.
Michaela Light: 00:29:44 I think we should have a separate episode to go into that. I was actually talking with them, talking Bonnie Adobe managers earlier this week about a and, m, you know, it is a bit of a [inaudible]. It's not, not just a science. Uh, I was talking with that [inaudible] issues that, you know, I guess he's VP of engineering for ColdFusion spacing out on his title. Um, so, whoops, I shouldn't be showing that thing on the thing. Should I, how does this thing work? Yes. But I can't get to it because the zoom share button was over the tab. You can just grab the zoom thing and pull it. It, it does that to me. Yeah. [inaudible] moving sideways. How clemency I learned something new. I always happen. Um, thank you.
Brad Wood: 00:30:40 It's always sort of the holy grail as far as, I mean, if we could tell what frameworks would be the popular ones, we'd be able to tell what videos will go viral and what marketing campaigns will work.
Michaela Light: 00:30:50 Hmm. Well, maybe that's what the AI Revolution will give us, Brad, you know.
Brad Wood: 00:30:55 Oh Geez. Don't start me on that.
Michaela Light: 00:30:58 We better do a separate episode on AI Revolution as well. Um,
Brad Wood: 00:31:03 we'll have to ask AI would've thinks, can you get a quote from AI for the, for the podcast?
Michaela Light: 00:31:08 I think we can. Yeah. Um, let's move quickly on to CSS frameworks or I think is a little less controversial and uh, that's most [inaudible] that's what I think. Well, 80% of people use bootstrap. How can it be controversial?
Brad Wood: 00:31:24 You see, I'm, I'm not a front end guy really. I'm, I'm happy to avoid the, the front end and focus on back in and just rest API APIs and stuff. So I don't have any dog in this, you know, on this fight. I just kind of sit back and watch people, you know, a fight about it. Uh, okay.
Brad Wood: 00:31:41 But yeah, bootstrap, uh, it's definitely a clear winner followed only by none, right?
Michaela Light: 00:31:47 None. Yeah, I haven't heard of that. She's on framework, you know? Yeah. Is used by the Catholic church.
Brad Wood: 00:31:53 Apparently we should create a framework called nun js or something, you know, and then whenever people answer we're like, yeah, they're using us. You know,
Michaela Light: 00:32:04 we could out a way in second place is foundation and then, and then I guess the results are still small once you get down there, it's almost on truant. All the unusual fi tailwind. Semantic UI actually several semantic UI ones. Yeah. But you know, it's still less than 1%. Um, co CFC dependency injection. I think that none framework is gonna win again as.
Brad Wood: 00:32:35 I'm gonna fork wire box, rename it none. And then it'll be on top every year. A yes. Why box is the winner of the frameworks that are used. It is a DUI one, which most people using framework one are going to be using dei one. Yeah. I'm curious about the hustle, the custom home grown ones.
Michaela Light: 00:32:56 Yeah. I don't know quite well that calculating to figure out dependency injection and why they both are, you know, why if you're going to do dependency injection and why not use it,
Brad Wood: 00:33:05 it's one thing to create an object factory, you know, like it's not that factory. It as simple as just as a CFC that crates ever CFCs are a class, the crates are the classes. Um, I don't know that I've ever really seen a code base on a client or out there where somebody actually did some sort of like actual dependency injection. Uh, you know, and for, if anyone's, you know, not using dependency injection, which maybe it's not so silly looking at the size of the non-bar, you know, this is for any application that uses new, substantial amount of CFCs, you know, and your CFCs need to reference other CFCs, you know, in the sort of dirty way. It's just to create them on thrilled I'm in the application scope or just create fresh instances every time you want them. But you know, your, your dependency injection framework, like wire box or [inaudible], you know, abstracts the work of creating those for you. Uh, as well as passing references around so they can kind of build out your CFC instances with all the other services or videos they need.
Michaela Light: 00:33:58 Um, definitely makes life easier as you, oh, absolutely. I couldn't and I could write why both costs alone.
Brad Wood: 00:34:08 Now it's free if I couldn't imagine writing a, an app of any of any relative size without dependency injection. And when you get into like the cold box space, you know, dependency injection and wire box is absolutely integral to how things like modules work. Uh, you know, you install a module, you just drop it in the modules folder and then you can just magically ask wirebox for things from that module and it just goes and finds them automatically. Hey, wire box, give me the x, Y, z service for my module. Um, you can't do that with, in a world without dependency injections. So make sense? Wire box, wire box is honestly probably one of the most important, I should say, dependency injection in general. But in box world where I box was probably one of the most pivotal libraries. I mean it's use, it's kind of the core of everything. Even command box uses wire box internally. Um, anyway,
Michaela Light: 00:34:59 I think to be fair to the nuns, maybe they're not even doing object oriented programming.
Brad Wood: 00:35:04 So that's a good, that's a good question. Our people in an uncategorized and not really utilized in the CFCs. Um, cause if not there might be a need.
Michaela Light: 00:35:13 They might be using CFCs but not as objects. You know, they kind of use it as a fancy function container.
Brad Wood: 00:35:18 or they may just be using them just as always. Transients with no real references. I've, I've seen a fair amount of code customer code that just use kind of like, you know, CF and vote calls everywhere and every time they ever referenced a CFC it's always just kind of a on the fly, you know, transitioned creation as part of a CF invoke. So you know, there's, there's no like persistent, uh, persistence of CFC objects that are being passed around. And so they, you know, they get away without using any of that.
Michaela Light: 00:35:46 Well, let's move on to persistent for frameworks, talking about assistance. And again, none is the winner because maybe they're just not doing persistence, but uh, second is, uh, hibernate. Uh, and then some people have a homegrown thing and uh, Kobach Seabourn, module, CF reels all around.
Brad Wood: 00:36:08 Persistence is, it seems to vary greatly kind of based on the language. Um, I know I mentioned some, some languages kind of grow up with frameworks that were just always pushed from the beginning. Uh, like Ruby for instance, almost, you know, every Ruby app, do you come across ruby on rails is going to be using, you know, old rim cause it's kind of just like an inherent baked in part of what everybody uses. Um, you know, in the ColdFusion space we didn't see, uh, you know, hibernate until ColdFusion nine. Uh, so, you know, there was a lot of applications that got their start before or was ever a thing. And it definitely has a bit of a bad name, uh, with some people, you know, dislike for ORM either on a philosophical level, if you will, to just dislike for the number of bugs or the performance of it. Um, so over him has always lag. Now we didn't, we don't have quick on here, but depending on quickest, fairly new, uh, quick, quick as a, as a new, oh, there we go. Send to people use quick. Yeah. Quick as a, as a new project that Eric Peterson, who's part of Ortus has been working on for ob, not gonna throw a date out cause I'll be wrong, but it, it's still fairly new. It is built on top of QB or query builder. Um, and it's just a pure ColdFusion based or m a, it's very functional as far as using closures and things. Uh, but you know, it's, it's not at the level of, um, functionality of say, hibernate, which is just a, you know, a behemoth. I'm written in Java. But anyway, interesting to see that.
Michaela Light: 00:37:37 Well, let's move on to question 13. Lucky for some, uh, testing and mocking frameworks. And yes, none is winning again. But all of those who do use one TestBox is the winner.
Brad Wood: 00:37:51 Right. And I assume that the people say none probably aren't just aren't doing any testing, which, I mean, there's a very large number of, of people, and Luis always likes to say that, you know, half the half the people in Coldfusion aren't testing and the other half are lying. They say they're using test box,
Michaela Light: 00:38:08 get a million monkeys to try out your app. Eventually they'll find the box, right?
Brad Wood: 00:38:12 [inaudible] just a million users. Heck, a hundred users will find the bugs. Um, so I mean, it's interesting, this graph, first of all, everything isn't necessarily in direct competition with each other. So letting him for instance, is a, is not, it doesn't really do the same thing test box does. So there's probably a fair amount of overlap. People using slimming and more likely using test box. You know, mock box is more of a, a subset of test box, right? Use mock box alongside test box. Now EMX unit is specifically as sort of a, an alternative to test box, if you will,
Michaela Light: 00:38:43 right?
Brad Wood: 00:38:45 Yeah. MX unit hasn't been maintained for a while. If you look at the repo, there's a handful of pull requests that will come in. But you know, the last several years there's just been a few pull requests here and there. A test box 3.0 actually came out last month, the end of the box. Uh, so it's a very active uh, framework.
Michaela Light: 00:39:01 I remember someone gave a detailed talk on that. I forget his name now.
Brad Wood: 00:39:06 some ugly guy?
Michaela Light: 00:39:09 Brad. Yeah.
Brad Wood: 00:39:11 Uh, I think rocket unit, uh, isn't that the one that comes with CF wheels? Is that right? Yeah, there we go. CF wheels was built in. So presumably those users are on CF wheels naturally.
Michaela Light: 00:39:21 Well, anyone listening who isn't doing a writing test cases and check out test box because again, it's not expensive.
Brad Wood: 00:39:31 We should, I just recorded a screencast on this this week will be published soon. Test box 3.0 also has code coverage functionality, which is really brand new in the ColdFusion space. Um,
Michaela Light: 00:39:42 yeah, that's what you gave the tool con, right? We're using the [inaudible].
Michaela Light: 00:39:46 We worked with the fusion reactor. Uh, so it works in conjunction with a fusion reactor, a licensed fusion reactor installation on your server. And what code coverage means is you run your test or unit test or integration test and then test box actually generate a report that tells you every single file in your application, um, at a line by line basis, what lines were executed as part of your tests and what lines were not executed. And you can see where those missing gaps are and in unit tests. So that's, that's a super fun, uh, function
Michaela Light: 00:40:15 . That's a great do so you can find out where you need to add tests or
Brad Wood: 00:40:20 sort of addicting. Yeah. You, you, you turn that puppy on and you're like, aw man, I didn't even call this function. And you're like, I'm going to go write a test now so I can so I can test this untested functions. That's good.
Michaela Light: 00:40:30 You know, I, I was talking to, I'm Suresh, Adobe. And do you know how many tests cases they have in their test suite for Vertel 40,000 tests that a lot of tests apparently every time they get a bug they have to write a new test to like prove that bug really has been squashed.
Brad Wood: 00:40:52 Well that's exactly how you should do it. Uh, Lucee server does the same thing except for, it's all just visible on good hub. Every single bug that comes into Jira as it's triaged a failing test cases written that demonstrates the bug and then the ticket doesn't pass until the, until the test passes. Uh, so I would, I would hope Adobe does the same thing obviously that way you don't, you know, have a regression in the future where the bug pops back.
Michaela Light: 00:41:16 Yeah. You don't want to play whack-a-mole with your boat. So yeah, foam gap is the one we didn't have none here. We had not doing mobile.
Brad Wood: 00:41:27 Yeah. So we didn't even include CF client did we? No. Scroll down. Anybody write it in?
Michaela Light: 00:41:37 People wrote in and quite a few things, but no. Yeah.
Brad Wood: 00:41:40 React native rec native app. We should, we should include that. It looks like next year. Yeah. Where are we going to sleeping instead of a, there's not, there's not a huge amount of spread. I'm so PWA, progressive web apps. I mean that's the way you can make your website behave. Like you have a mobile app but it's really just a website, you know, perfect example of ice gap in do that for the ads. So in the end of the box, if you went to schedule dot into the box.org it's just a webpage but it has that special manifest file that makes it a progressive web app as they say. And so your, your phone browser sees that and it gives you a little option to add it to your home screen. So you get an icon in your home screen that when you tap will open up inside of kind of a headless web browser with fully cashed data. Uh, it's just basically a webpage. And so that saved us a ton of time cause we didn't have to compile actual native mobile apps for android and for Ios and for windows and get those approved and on to the app stores. We just, Gavin literally made our progressive web app front of the box like two days before the conference threw it out there on the Internet. And it's just a website.
Brad Wood: 00:42:49 But you know, it has caching capabilities as offline capabilities. And I see a lot of people moving to that. W We know when mobile phones first came out, browsers were crappy, right? You didn't have offline storage and everybody ran to make apps. And now it's Kinda like the browsers and the progressive web apps caught up. If all your app is a mobile version of your website, you can make it progressive web apps. So it's very interesting. But other than that, there's not a huge spread here as far as a, a super clear winner. Other than that, the nun, you know, phone gambles on top followed by Cordova, but it's still not a massive, you know, nobody's really out in the, in the lead. Yeah. Honestly, I'm surprised. Yeah. I'm honestly surprised to still see as much native android and native ios. Um,
Michaela Light: 00:43:34 some people think it gives you performance edge or maybe a features edge.
Brad Wood: 00:43:38 It might, I suppose it depends on the app you're riding, right. If I was to write a game, sure. If I'm going to ride an app that's basically just lets you, you know, file an insurance claim just like your website does. I don't know if that matters. But anyway, that's probably more of a religious war there, but a still interesting.
Michaela Light: 00:43:57 All right, well let's a features do you use for Code Reuse? All right, well clear winner here is CFCs. Basically everyone used the CFCs well.
Brad Wood: 00:44:06 So what about those people not using dependency injection? No excuse.
Michaela Light: 00:44:10 Well like we said, oh yeah, they probably know writing a brief for orientated code that just you sticking common code into CFCs cause it's convenient. I agree. Yes. More like a glorified CF include file, which I mean, if it works, yeah, there's nothing wrong with that, you know, uh,
Michaela Light: 00:44:26 speaking of CF includes the second most popular custom tags is still being by a lot of people, surprisingly long time. I mean, I think every kind of clever, it's kind of cute to have a new tag that you just stick into the page and does useful things.
Brad Wood: 00:44:41 It's kind of cute. The one thing I liked about custom tags is how easily you could nest, um, things inside of itself. You know, if you had a, some sort of like hierarchy and her face needed to kind of recursively work, um, you know, in the cold box world I would just use a render view, which is essentially a CF included at the end of the day. Um, custom tags were nice though in that they encapsulated the variable scope inside of them. Uh, which, you know, pre CFCs was one of the only way she could get something reusable that didn't kind of just spill all its variables out into the main page. Um, anyway.
Michaela Light: 00:45:18 Yeah. I'm kind of curious why, you know, why people are using user defined functions versus just sticking their functions in CFCs. Maybe, maybe that's confusion on the answers. I mean, is there any benefit to doing it the old way that I'm missing here?
Brad Wood: 00:45:33 I don't know. I have to see what people meant by that. Um,
Michaela Light: 00:45:36 yeah, they maybe they sort of men, they were using functions in CFCs cause isn't there another way you can do UDFs you stick them somewhere else?
Brad Wood: 00:45:44 Well, yeah, I mean you could just, if you could just stick a UTF anywhere on the page and call it. Um, you know, a lot of apps that I see that are older, they use application dot CFM, right? You know, they would just have like a big old fat CF include an application that cfm that would just include a giant file full of just all sort of utility functions. And then those would just live in the variable scope. It would just flow through just the entire app and they would just kind of call them from everywhere. Um, I will say to bugging applications like that gets incredibly tricky because there's like zero encapsulation. Everything just kind of floats around the variable scope. But that is at, is pretty common. Um, you know, I mean it's the, it's quick and dirty for sure.
Michaela Light: 00:46:22 It's sort of like a ColdFusion function orgy really, if you say so. Yeah. Instead of having a private room for every function, you've just stick them all into the same room and hope that they don't, you know, pass each other off
Brad Wood: 00:46:37 if they're all sort of quote unquote static incense and don't need to, you know, mutate state, they all just do something. I mean, I suppose that works, but yeah, that's um, it's definitely not very organized though, that's for sure.
Michaela Light: 00:46:49 Yeah. All right. We should go on to source code control a controversial question in previous years. Um, but hopefully by now most people are doing source control
Brad Wood: 00:47:01 and where is worse than none.
Michaela Light: 00:47:04 None don't is the sense. And I think also, to be honest, a zip up folders and, um, was another one. Copy directories is sort of very, they're the kissing cousins of non,
Brad Wood: 00:47:18 yeah. Yeah. That's not source control. Now there can be value in it and heck, I've done those right in the past. Um, that's more of a backup strategy. Um, you know, when you think of source control, think of like automated disc between two versions. Blame, who touched this line on what date with what? Commit message. Revert my change, you know, with a single line of command line, you know, switch between branches. You know, these are features of source controls. So zipping up your files will let you go. Oh crap, what was this file last week? Manual. Manual. Manual, right. Um, but it's, it's definitely not really full on source control.
Michaela Light: 00:47:54 Um, but the winner winner on this is a git hub as the most popular one.
Brad Wood: 00:48:00 Let's see, why don't we have, don't we have get us an option outside of git hub?
Michaela Light: 00:48:04 Where do we know, oh wait, what's selfie hub?
Brad Wood: 00:48:09 What's the first option that says self hosted but a stop.dot. Yeah. Self host. There we go. Self host that get repo, like get, see even so bitbucket can be good or material. But honestly self hosted bit bucket get lab and get hub are really all probably get in general using, you know, git source control. It's just different ways you can do it. Git hub obviously is, you know, a specific website that offers get repose, get lab, you know, this is still using git but the a different sort of product I think git is definitely on top. I mean bit bucket. We don't know how many those people use the mercurial but most people I know of on bitbucket are using git um,
Michaela Light: 00:48:49 yeah. And then really fashions this pretty far in the behind of git I would stay at this point.
Brad Wood: 00:48:55 I mean some version was on top back in the day before get CAC Kinda came out. So I mean I, I I work with a couple of clients that still use a version. I mean I don't mind it, it does what I need. Obviously it has some significant architectural differences between git. Um, I really, really prefer get anything I'm publishing to the world, you know, with git hub, the idea of forking remotes. I think as far as superior 'em as far as clients, I work with the, just have a local subversion repo and it's just an internal website. I mean I don't mind, so version one bit it does everything I need. Um, but yeah, a lot of, a lot of writings here as your repositories every year. Dropbox is another kissing cousin, I think of zip folders.
Michaela Light: 00:49:47 Well as someone, some people list Google drive as a source code control thing. I guess it does keep a history, but it doesn't let you merge things and see what's changed. So
Brad Wood: 00:49:57 yeah, it's, it's more of a backup strategy I think, which has value, but it's not, it's not true source control.
Brad Wood: 00:50:03 All right, let's go to the tools ides, something that people always like to argue about it seems and looks like we have a, uh, upset new winner. Last year the blind text was the winner, but now visual studio code
Brad Wood: 00:50:19 vs code is really picked up quickly. It's been around longer than I thought it had. I just didn't really hear it. But once I first heard about the vs code, it like, it really skyrocketed. But I don't, I mean people, there's a lot of this people who wrote plugins for sublime, for ColdFusion in CFML. We had cold box plugins and things like that. I believe it was written in python. Um, but the s code really seemed to just have a, a bunch of people that jumped on it writing CFML and ColdFusion extensions for it. Um, which I think is pretty cool and I think help contribute to it too. It taken off, you know, uh, vs code has a pretty good CFML support. There's cold box extensions, there's command box extensions, there's test box extensions, there's CF lent extensions. There's CF actually I don't think, I don't know if you have to see a format baked in or not. Uh, but there's, there's quite a bit of stuff there. Um, it, it's really taken off a notepad plus plus plus hearts in third place.
Michaela Light: 00:51:17 Yes. Nice text editor. You know, a lot of these other things like BB at it ultra at, at Textpad, they're all nice text editors. They.
Brad Wood: 00:51:23 is Nano on the list. I don't see nano here. Maybe
Brad Wood: 00:51:28 you know, if I, if I ssh and do a production, you know, docker container, I gotta to book something on the fly. It's nano all the way, man.
Michaela Light: 00:51:37 And then, you know, we've got ColdFusion Builder a CF eclipse CFC.
Brad Wood: 00:51:41 Yeah. ColdFusion builder's beneath dream weaver. Yeah. So I heard some very interesting rumors recently. Uh, I think Andrew Davis was talking about it on the modernize or die podcast. Um, one of the road shows. I thought there was some, some rumblings or grumblings, uh, of potentially Adobe, maybe doing some official support for vs code. You know, they've always kind of hunkered down behind ColdFusion builder. Um, and I know it has a decent amount of usage, but it's, it's really, there's not that many people that use ColdFusion builder. Uh, I mean I still use it fairly regularly, but it's cause I'm a bump on a log and I hate to change stuff. I've been forced to myself over to vs code. Um, but I would love to be to see Adobe puts some official work into things like vs code, you know, uh, like ColdFusion builders kinda big. Well, I mean there's a bunch of stuff in ColdFusion builder, right? You know, some of the security scanning is in there. The CF client was baked in, which I don't really think was for the better. Um, you know, they had the whole extension capability, which is a cool idea. Um, I, I think Cli has have largely replaced that. Um, but you know, there's a lot of ColdFusion developers not using ColdFusion builder. Um, you know, in the communities send a good job of filling in the gaps there. But I'd love just to get Doby have some semblance of an official module, you know, that does or extension that does proper code formatting and stuff. So I think that's, that's a good thing.
Michaela Light: 00:53:01 Yeah. Well, you know, people have written ColdFusion support for visual, uh, uh, studio code. So maybe the Lucy folks or do more on it. And that'll encourage Adobe to do the same.
Brad Wood: 00:53:16 I'll hold your breath for that, but please, please not Lucy proper. Um, yeah, definitely loosen.
Michaela Light: 00:53:26 I have heard from some people, people who do more design stuff as well as cold fusion. They still like using Dreamweaver for the design stuff and um, yeah, you know, you can still add ColdFusion support into Dreamweaver if you try hard enough.
Brad Wood: 00:53:36 I used to dream veaver for awhile. Oh, between s between cs studio, ColdFusion studio and builder. I use string mover for for a few years isn't brackets and Adobe product. I've always wondered why the ColdFusion team didn't work something with brackets to get, you know, really good ColdFusion support.
Michaela Light: 00:53:54 Um, yeah and mystery to me. Um, okay. Browse or development tools. Um,
Brad Wood: 00:54:03 I think this, I think this question is probably more of an artifact of what browser do developing cause whatever browser people developing. Uh, I assume they probably use whatever the developer tools are on that browser. I developed in chrome typically, so I use the chrome developer tools cause that's what's sitting there in front of me. Um, firebug is interesting. Um,
Brad Wood: 00:54:23 okay
Brad Wood: 00:54:24 cause firebug was like a separate sort of extension for Firefox. If I ever call back before Firefox kind of got, you know, its own built into bugging stuff kind of as a first class citizen. So it's interesting to see if people are still out there using firebug and that's actually really like a, a third party thing they're installing or if by fire but fuck firebug they just potentially meant, you know, the built in Firefox to bugging.
Michaela Light: 00:54:46 Yeah. Some is a mystery. Um, All right. Rest API is question 19 the nearly halfway through at this point I finally get into the good stuff. Yeah. Rest homegrown is the most popular one. Closely followed by. I don't use rests well I do respite. I don't use ColdFusion to do it in.
Brad Wood: 00:55:09 18 people. So the winner followed by, I don't use rest. So it looks like it's Taffy on top or is it cold box? I looked pretty neck and neck. Pretty neck and neck. cold box with photo finish. Yeah. So taffy is a, is a very good library, but I mean this obviously very targeted, that does just rest. Um, there's a lot of people that use that, you know, coal box does rest like, you know, in addition to the other, you know, 500 things that provides. So I think some people looking just to add rest into legacy. Um, definitely are, it looks easier just to drop in Taffy. It's not quite as much of a commitment. Um, you'll see if wheels has a sale on the rest. Um, now the CF built in rest, what's the number on that? That's actually higher than I expected. Uh, bout 15%. Wow. It gets a a decently bad rap in some of the community stuff. Um, I've used the built in CFRs and both Adobe and Lucy and generally hated it the entire time I had to touch it. Um, but I mean, I'm also coming, you know, with a, a bit of a biased opinion, you know, being a part of the cold box project, you know, and we had this very full featured rest implementation that's been out there for years that does everything is modular logging, you know, and then Adobe comes along and they kind of do their own rests, but it's like a small subset of functionality of what you get, like a full MVC framework, you know? And I'm kind of like, why? Like why do you even bother? Just like, you know, let the community projects that are like super mature, you know, be the solution for this. But I don't, I don't necessarily think the vendors should try to do everything sometimes. I know that's a big feature ColdFusion, which I love, but sometimes I kind of wish they wouldn't, I kinda wish they wouldn't try to do everything. And sometimes, you know, like they, they make, they make hard things easy, but sometimes there's already like amazingly easy community libraries and I think they should just get behind those.
Michaela Light: 00:57:02 Um, well now it just creates more fragmentation. Yeah, I'd agree with that from a different point of view, which is for language to be strong, you need a strong ecosystem of third party add ends. And if you're always kind of copying the features of third party add and sticking them into the main product, it, it's basically screwing around with the third party market.
Brad Wood: 00:57:22 Yeah. So one of the great things about the community at least is if a project is actually maintained, if you find a bug in a built in feature in cold fusion, um, how long will it take to get a patch for that if it's not a high priority? I mean, bugs can sit around for years before they see a patch and if you're on an older version of, you know, of cold fusion that may never get fixed. You know, if, if I fix a bug in cold box today, there'll be a snapshot build out their few install via command box and as long as it takes Travis CIO to run. So about 10 minutes later you can install the bleeding edge, a cold box, and you can get that patch. So you know, the community ecosystem, whether it's Taffy or framework one or cold box, you know, had the ability to iterate patches and new fixes on a very fast timetable without adding an even entire core, any update for it.
Michaela Light: 00:58:09 If for any reason you were busy doing something else, it's open source. So lady could fix the code themselves. They really have to.
Brad Wood: 00:58:16 Absolutely. And I mean there's a lot of pull requests that happen with Taffy and cold box and framework one. I'm going to, I love that. That really helps stretch the community. So anyway, preside I see presides several in the right ends. Preside has a certain kind of rest framework that's built on top of the, the, the cold box rest. Um, this is pretty cool.
Michaela Light: 00:58:35 It is a right question. 20 which caching solutions are you using? And I think none is wins. Again,
Brad Wood: 00:58:45 not everybody uses caching, but no [inaudible]
Michaela Light: 00:58:50 yeah. H Cash, the builtin cold ColdFusion cash.
Brad Wood: 00:58:53 That's not too surprising. I mean, cause it's downright easy and it works. Um, you know, you have Adobe ColdFusion, you want to cash something, you just use cash, put cash, get Bada Bing, Bada boom, you know, you're cashing and stuff. Um, you know, obviously the built in the ace cash is and process, uh, which I think is the biggest problem with it. Meaning you restart your server, you wipe it all out, you know, it's not distributed across the cluster. Uh, but it is to super easy to work, uh, to use for sure.
Michaela Light: 00:59:20 And then, uh, looks like a cash box.
Brad Wood: 00:59:25 Yeah. Yeah. So I'm, I'm curious about cash box cause you know, cash box has a builtin in memory cache, but it's also a cash aggregator which has providers that can point anywhere. So you could be using cash box to point to memcache to your, to point to couchbase. So I'm curious how many of those cashbox respondents are also using cashbox as a gateway, if you will, to some external cashing provider. Um, yeah, gratis Retis has a decent groups. I mean the same, the same thing I just said about cashbox is true of the Riley and Lucy cashes. Uh, Lucy has a built in memory ram cash, which is really not recommended for production in my opinion. Um, but for the most part, the Lucy caching thing is very much like cashbox. It's just an a, an aggregator. We've got these pluggable providers that point to some external caching engines such as memcached tea or couchbase or reddish reddis. So a lot of people using the Lucy cash checkbox are probably using some thing like memcached d, You know, behind it that it connects to. Um, and that's an amazing feature in my opinion of Lucy that you'd don't get an Adobe ColdFusion is the ability to, uh, to have that built in engine level kind of providers. The point to those external caches and you can funnel your cash gate, your cash put functions, your query caching, all to that external external resource.
Michaela Light: 01:00:47 All right, let's look at how much experience ColdFusion developers have. How many years have they been using it? Question 21. And uh
Brad Wood: 01:00:57 hmm.
Michaela Light: 01:00:57 Biggest one is 15 years or more followed, not very closely by 10 to 15. And then it's brought a few folks coming in new. But, um,
Brad Wood: 01:01:08 yeah and I'm always interested in those, those recent groups, one to two years, three to five years. Cause that's really where the ColdFusion community struggles, um, is getting, you know, fresh people. Then, uh, there was a guy I met at the end of the box conference who, uh, from Canada is a ColdFusion developer and he came down and he had just started in the last year or two. You know, he got a job somewhere. They're using cold fusion and learned it. Um, and I think it's great to see people like that and talk to them. Um, cause typically speaking you have a bunch of, you know, old farts like myself, you know, they've been doing this forever and we don't get a lot of new people in. So this is always one of the most, you know, troubling graphs, if you will in that regard.
Michaela Light: 01:01:46 Well, I think we need to do more work as a community to, to get ColdFusion out in high schools. And then, uh, universities. Um, you know, I was looking through a college, uh, you know, a two year college, uh, what have I syllabus and they list all these other languages, PHP, Ruby, Java, you know, you know, they'd be happy to teach cold fusion if someone had a course and just came in and taught it, you know.
Brad Wood: 01:02:14 Yeah.
Michaela Light: 01:02:16 And there are materials out there. I mean, learn CF in a week. Open source. You can use that anywhere you want. Uh, there's an Adobe syllabus that's a little outdated but still, you know, works. Um, so, um, and you know, if you're in an education thing, you can get free copies of Adobe ColdFusion for all the students and the teacher will, you can use Lucy. So,
Brad Wood: 01:02:39 uh, Michael Borden has also been putting out some good training stuff, um, in the community as well in the last month or so. Uh, trying to get more, you know, modern, uh, modern, um, guides and things for people to learn cold fusion, which is good as well.
Michaela Light: 01:02:54 I'll have to ask him about that. I saw he did a blog post recently about popularity of programming languages. Yeah. Um,
Brad Wood: 01:03:01 yeah, he has a whole a series. Um, he's doing right now on continuous integration, which was chosen as the result of a poll he put out saying what would you guys like to learn? Uh, learn the most.
Michaela Light: 01:03:13 Right. Let's look how many years people used object orientation. So chunk of people have been using it for 10 plus years. Um, not many nuns here. Um, and people have started picking it up in the last five years, I guess.
Brad Wood: 01:03:29 Yeah. And this seems to mirror the previous graph just slightly as smaller bars.
Michaela Light: 01:03:36 Yeah, I think so. I think most people starting with cold fusion now probably pick up some low stuff.
Brad Wood: 01:03:42 I think so. And if you're using any kind of framework, it's typically something you have to do. Um,
Michaela Light: 01:03:49 speaking of other languages, what other languages [inaudible] is an environments to people use. And this is an incredibly long set of answers cause there's so many languages out there. I don't know how many programming languages there are these days. Is it 200 or, oh, I don't even know.
Brad Wood: 01:04:04 I do [inaudible] this is sort of like a bucket list question or kitchen sink question kind of just throws everything [inaudible]
Michaela Light: 01:04:12 obviously the most popular answer is Java script, which you know, many full stack developers.
Speaker 3: 01:04:18 Yeah. I mean as web developers I don't think that should be surprising at all. It looks like, I mean Ajax is in there, but I mean Ajax is just using, you know, Java script to make http calls. That's really hardly even a technology. It looks like Java I think is really the next closest followed by node. No, no PHP I think.
Michaela Light: 01:04:37 Yeah. PHP then node js, python,
Brad Wood: 01:04:41 decent amount of python, c sharp. Uh, those are people coming from Donald Net. Yeah, no super big surprises. I mean there's, yeah, I see, you know, people out there doing cold ball go groovy, rails. Wow. 2% of people doing Kobo and say it was a lot bigger than it was you get than clock chair. So CGI is actually higher than the Clo Ball. Yeah. I'm almost surprised. I don't see more closure, um, uh, grails. Groovy. Just being, or even Caitlyn, you know, being other JVM languages. You would think they would be more a more natural to people already on a JVM language. But yeah,
Michaela Light: 01:05:26 and I don't want to see scalar listed at all here. Maybe got listed down in the writings. No,
Brad Wood: 01:05:32 no. Power builder where I go, Oh yeah. I used to work at a company with a power builder app. [inaudible] yum. Yum.
Michaela Light: 01:05:43 All right, let's look at how many ColdFusion developers are in different people's organizations. Mo, most people answering how two to five blog posts, which is nice. It means you go to team. Um, second number is with just one developer, which
Brad Wood: 01:05:55 wow. You know what it means. So what percentage is that? A 20% was saying five ColdFusion developers basically work by themselves.
Michaela Light: 01:06:05 Yeah. Well not necessarily by themselves. They may be in a company, but no one else does. Cold fusion.
Brad Wood: 01:06:11 Yeah, they're, they're the, the lone developers should, I think that's where some of these community resources like CFML, slack and stuff have really been good for people because I see people come on there and say, Oh wow, it was great to be able to bounce ideas off people and ask questions. Because, you know, I'm the only ColdFusion person in my job and I don't have people to, to discuss these things with. So [inaudible]
Michaela Light: 01:06:32 yeah, definitely valuable to be able to share questions and things.
Brad Wood: 01:06:36 So what's the, let me have 30 plus. So what percentage of people work with 30 or more ColdFusion developer even? Oh, 5%. Alright. Even if you take, um, those two graphs, I mean, that's a decent chunk work at some pretty big places.
Michaela Light: 01:06:54 Oh yeah. there's big companies using ColdFusion. I mean, basically the whole u s government, 70% of fortune 1000 companies. You know, a lot of big companies, you see, I mean, I was [inaudible] who's the user group manager at Boeing. Um, is it Leon? I think I get it.
Brad Wood: 01:07:10 Oh, um, I'm not, I'm not sure, but I know what you're talking about.
Michaela Light: 01:07:15 He said they've got 200 and something about ColdFusion developed those at Boeing. So
Brad Wood: 01:07:19 yeah, I know they have a really big, uh, group there. They're also, I believe, unfortunately in the process of leaving ColdFusion is decided from a very high up management perspective, which is fairly recent.
Michaela Light: 01:07:31 We need to get a mole into the company to kind of change that.
Brad Wood: 01:07:35 Yeah.
Michaela Light: 01:07:37 I mean, maybe they have a valid reason, but I'm writing a book about,
Brad Wood: 01:07:40 no, I don't let people I've talked to, I don't believe there's a valid reason. Um,
Michaela Light: 01:07:44 no I don't either, but I don't know the exact spelling.
Brad Wood: 01:07:48 I believe it's, I believe it may have started when the Gartner report came out several years ago claiming that ColdFusion was in the dawn of obsolescence, which I believe they amended after the fact. But, uh, I think that started some high level managers saying, Oh, we should move away from this. Um,
Michaela Light: 01:08:04 well that back Gardner report didn't wait. If you look at the methodology they use to calculate where on a programming language, Michael clock language goes using own hours, the more method they gave the wrong scoring to cold fusion, it should have been in the middle adult phase, not in the old age phase.
Brad Wood: 01:08:24 Yeah. In Adobe. Adobe told me that they weren't even consulted on that beforehand, you know.
Michaela Light: 01:08:29 No, they didn't even talk. They did some cleanup off to woods. But, um, yeah, well hopefully the next one they'll get it better. So I mean, that's a whole other topic of conversation to have I think.
Brad Wood: 01:08:41 All right, so let's get through these last questions. I only have a few minutes here. So how large is your organization? Looks like a lot of people work in small businesses. One to 20 employees.
Michaela Light: 01:08:52 Well, this graph is a little distorting because you've got a yes, the, the most popular place developers work is the small business, one to 20 employees. But you don't need many businesses that are, I'm, I don't see it, but somewhere we should have the one to 10,000 or the 10,000 plus thing. Uh, I think our labels got screwed up here. But anyway, you don't need many companies that have 10,000 employees to outweigh a whole lot of small businesses. So I'm not sure how to represent the data better. Um, ColdFusion iser groups. Wow. Most people have never been. Uh, and the next most popular is once a year. I think something that we need to rectify. And I, I just did an episode with a couple of ColdFusion media group managers. Uh, if anyone listening is interested in starting a used group in their town, let me know.
Brad Wood: 01:09:41 Well yeah cause I'm curious how much that never line a are people who it's not an option because there is no local user group for them. Maybe next year we can add an option that's, you know, never and I would, but there's nothing local or something. Can I have a feeling a lot of people not going, uh, might not have the option to go.
Michaela Light: 01:10:00 Right. Which is sad. Let's see if we can change that. Conferences. Another big topic. Unfortunately none is the, we need to have a conference called nun. Yep. It'll be a whole suite, but Adobe CF summit is the most,
Brad Wood: 01:10:15 yeah. And that's not surprising cause it is the most attended conference. There's, there's regularly around 500 people. Um,
Michaela Light: 01:10:22 I think we should try and bump that up this year. It's only $99 early bird price to go. So yeah.
Brad Wood: 01:10:28 Yeah. Adobe subsidizes the cost of their conference cause it's not cheap to put a conference on in Vegas, but they make it cheap, which, which I mean, I, it's an amazing conference. I, if I'd had to submitted all my talks submissions for it
Michaela Light: 01:10:39 this week. Yeah. Yeah. I submitted a talk to it too. Um, I didn't, um, I don't know the Adobe budget numbers, you know, I don't have access to that, but just looking, having run a conference in Las Vegas, they gotta be dumping a half a million dollars of marketing funding into that conference.
Brad Wood: 01:10:55 Yeah. Yeah. Subsidize it. And then I'm really happy that Adobe does that because they put on a really great conference and it's really cheap. Yeah.
Michaela Light: 01:11:03 Yup. It's first class anyway, other top conferences, CF camp in Europe and into the box in Houston, Texas, which
Brad Wood: 01:11:12 into the box. We, our biggest year this year, um, [inaudible] nearly a hundred people. So it's, it's growing every year. So I'm excited to see that that bar is slowly increasing. Yeah.
Michaela Light: 01:11:23 And cf summit east does bumped up a lot in recent years to.
Brad Wood: 01:11:27 Adobe is, has, has had the CF summit in Vegas for awhile, but they've started to do the CF summit east and they also have CF summit India this year, which I think is Henry again happening again. I love seeing Adobe do, doing that, kind of spreading the love around because I mean, everybody's not kind of traveled to Vegas. That's, you know, so I love seeing them doing more localized stuff.
Michaela Light: 01:11:46 Some people's bosses are allergic to Vegas and we'll let them travel away just in case they get up to naughty behavior.
Brad Wood: 01:11:53 Yeah, I, I've definitely, I've seen that be an issue soldier. We have your always this question,
Michaela Light: 01:11:59 ColdFusion online communities mass. So CF slack channel is the most popular community. 1,000 people now, 50,000. I mean, not all online the same time, but some more formatting there with the,
Michaela Light: 01:12:17 yeah, so I'm formatting issue, um, and then stack overflow. Now the only thing I will say CF slack is wonderful, very responsive, lots of smart people, pretty well behaved, I would say at this point. Um, the only thing is it's totally invisible to the outside world. And when got Gartner or Forrester, look at how popular is ColdFusion and they're like, oh well no one ever posts about ColdFusion and I've seen it somewhere else.
Brad Wood: 01:12:47 Yeah, I've seen the reduction in traffic and like the cold box mailing list with the either of the CFML slack cause people can get you know, faster conversational answers. But you're right, when you Google for just content on the Internet related to cold fusion, uh, slack is a black hole in that regard. And it's not persistent. You know, within a month or two you're probably sooner, your messages are gone. So it's a bit of a double edged sword. Um, this a very good and fast active community, but it's also not visible to the outside world.
Michaela Light: 01:13:16 I think we need to come up with some solution for that though.
Brad Wood: 01:13:19 Lucee discourse is a, is really a great uh, community. They use discourse obviously in the name, uh, which the an off the shelf third party kind of forum software. Uh, that's a really pretty good forum software. You can have wiki entries, you can, you know, have accepted answers. Um, and it has a lot better visibility on the internet as well. So I think more, uh, more conversations should happen in discourse. Um, even though obviously it's specific to Lucee.
Michaela Light: 01:13:44 Yeah. Well we can have a whole discussion about this, but let's move on to a CF Alive podcasts. Most people have never listened to this book on desk out there that I chew them out, but they're not here to hear me. Now you go, it's [inaudible]. But you know, plenty of people do listen to it at least once a year or more than once a year. And I've certainly talked to people who basically just have it get we episode.
Brad Wood: 01:14:09 Yeah. I mean I think I, even if you just listen occasionally, you know, the podcasts are a great source for information just to find out what's going on. Oh Man. And that's why we have the modernize or die podcast as well, just to, you know, hopefully people will hear things and they'll, you know, hear about new happenings or conferences. Cause a lot of times people just don't know. They don't even know that into the box to thing. They don't know that a training's happening and they don't know the command box exists, you know, whatever it is. They don't have their ear to the ground and podcasts like, uh, like CF alive and modernize or die or just a great way for people to kind of keep up with everything going on. If they don't have time to read every single, you know, tweet that flows across the tweety pages. So I'm hoping that
Michaela Light: 01:14:48 to a, I mean Adobe have been putting third party things into their, um, you know, a ColdFusion newsletter. Uh, I've seen stuff from integral and Charlie Earhart and few other folks. Maybe we need to get some of these other things like these podcasts, you know, the CF alive one and modernize or die one, um, and smallest third party stuff into their newsletters so it gets out to other people, you know?
Brad Wood: 01:15:14 Yeah. Okay. Just a couple of minutes here. Let's get these last ones.
Michaela Light: 01:15:17 All right. Developments set up. Uh, most people using a local instance of ColdFusion or shared development center come on. Box is movement up. You want me to come back to that? Oh No, I'm just, I'm just going by command box. We were, okay. I put my foot on the gas so we can get that wrapped up. Uh, production deployments, mostly on their own server. They build a next popular is managed server containers. This come up since last year, I think definitely increasing containers. Yes. Um, hosting services in house is the most popular. And then Amazon is, uh, next most popular.
Brad Wood: 01:16:00 Yeah. And Ami is w was ranked very highly in the previous question, so that's not incredibly surprising.
Michaela Light: 01:16:06 And then have the hosts, it looks like hostech may be the thing as eos app. Yeah.
Michaela Light: 01:16:15 Uh, we host our stuff on digital ocean question of digital ocean doesn't provide a ColdFusion hosting specifically, but we don't care. We just run our docker swarms there. Yeah. We run a docker swarm when somebody asked about ColdFusion hosting the other day and we'll loosely discourse forum and am I told them, you know, don't, don't look for ColdFusion hosting specifically. Just look for a vps or you know, or a digital ocean droplet. And you can put whatever you want on there.
Michaela Light: 01:16:39 And then speaking of Docker, docker images, uh, I don't know, what other is, we'll see what they have to say, but um, made a custom image and then official Lucee made sure.
Brad Wood: 01:16:49 Yeah, come on. There's a lot of people that kind of surprises me to be honest, making custom images and I would be interested to know why they're doing that and if it's something that, if they're missing a feature that could just be easily added. The, you know, the command box based image, the Ortus makes us incredibly flexible and powerful. Um, I think people could probably save a lot of time if they were to piggyback on some of the existing
Michaela Light: 01:17:10 things out there. All right. Deployment and build tools. Well, most people don't automate their deployments, which I think is probably a mistake, but if you are not doing it, Jenkins is the most popular one. And then this is widespread between ad bamboo, grand box task runners. Yeah. Yeah. Go get that. Drive it all out of there. Okay. Who names these products?
Brad Wood: 01:17:38 You know, you know the joke is the Java script libraries. You can take any noun in the dictionary and put dot js and you have a library sows none. Don't jazz.
Michaela Light: 01:17:47 Yeah. Um, monitoring tools. Another important thing, um, fusion reactot is the clear winner on this. Half of people using that ColdFusion Monitor is picking up in the coolest cold fusion 2018 they put a whole performance monitoring that's really powerful. That ticked off the integral guys. I think maybe we should not dig into that too much, but if you're not doing monitoring, do some monitoring.
Michaela Light: 01:18:15 Yeah. Uh, lockdown, uh, Mo, half people use the lockdown guides, uh, next most popular as your own security protocols. Uh, letting other people deal with it like Dev ops and uh, and of course there's a new automatic lock down, uh, stuff you can do to Pete. Exactly. Yeah. With Adobe. Yeah.
Brad Wood: 01:18:39 Alright. I think we might have to come back and grab some of these later cause I am at a hard stop now.
Michaela Light: 01:18:44 So we will stop the screen share. We will thank Brad for being here and uh, we will catch up with this a nother time. I'm going to stop recording. Thank you.