Wonderful experience at CFCamp in Munich (15+ useful resources and slides)

CFCamp in Munich is done for 2017. 150 people came, which is a record for the organizers, liters of coffee drank, and an ice cream machine!

This was a 2-day full-on conference with 5 official coffee brakes, and with a great quiz at the end of day 1 with Mark Drew and Rob Dudley from Localhost Podcast. We have had a pleasure of listening 25 presentations with 20+ speakers. Very impressive.

Here is the list of the topics and slides from the presentations (stay tuned for updates as we post new material)

1. Tools for improving your CFML code quality by Kai Konig

This talk has provided an introduction to code quality. We found out about the different ways how to perform code analysis. This will help you measure and understand code quality. There is a range of categories of tools available, some of which also support CFML.

In the second part of the talk, we've heard about the details and usage of CFLint. CFLint is a static code analyser for CFML that is based on the CFParser project.

You will find a full presentation here

2. OAuth 2 for me and you by Mat Gifford

In this session, Matt talked about the OAuth 2 protocol, what it means to be a consumer or provider, and how to navigate the handshake communications between the service. At the end of this session, you should feel safer in the fact that you are filled with the knowledge of OAuth 2, how to use it and how to build your own service.

Matt's presentation is available here

3. Clojure: Manipulating the Immutable

Andrew Jackson has provided a brief intro into Clojure with some examples of how to efficiently manipulate data structures.

4. How to migrate 400.000 webpages with ColdFusion – an adventure story by Jonathan Winter

We're talking about 300 websites covering 98 countries in 64 languages, maintained by 700 content editors from all over the world. All in all the impressive amount of 400.000 static webpages as well as a couple of web applications.

We took a look at the landscape how it looks today, including a MariaDB cluster, dedicated mobile applications, an Akamai CDN and a couple of new highly complex dynamic application including a social network for 500.000 users. And – you already guessed it – it's all done with ColdFusion.

 

5. CFCouchbase 2.0 and N1QL by Aaron Benton

A glance at several example applications and N1QL queries that you can start using today in your ColdFusion development.

• New features in the SDK
• Deprecated features in the SDK
• Example Applications
• N1QL Queries
• Locking / Unlocking Documents
• New SubDoc API

 

6. Scaling the web – a field guide for normal software teams by Rob Dudley

This talk was aimed at smaller development teams likely to be found in earlier stage companies but relevant to all, and presented some of the common pitfalls and pain points in managing application growth while offering simple solutions based on experience, study and industry best practice.

From the importance of being stateless, through caching, queueing, database specific scaling, right up to SOA 101 this presentation has something to offer developers of all levels.

Here's the full presentation of Rob's talk at the conference.

7. Gert Franz gave talks on several topics

1. Caching strategies in Lucee – with or without help
2. Lucee Keynote
3. Debugging Templates in CFML – write your own cool one

It is always very interesting to hear what guys from Lucee have for us, and Gert did just that!

 

8. FW1 – Don't do spaghetti code, Use ultra-light MVC framework by Saravanamuthu Aka CF Mitrah

Legacy spaghetti code sucks, If your avg. LOC of your CFML file is high, then you are going to spent half of your life time in scrolling & debugging that monolithic code. FW1 will help to start with baby steps to organize your code in to MVC design patterned codebase. In this session, Mitrah has covered the basics of MVC, FW1 basics, commonly used functions, REST support and subsystems, DI/1 & AOP/1.

 

9. Building Apps for Amazon Alexa by Evagoras Charalambous

In this presentation, we have learned the foundations of developing voice-enabled apps for Amazon Alexa-enabled devices, and building your own custom Alexa Skill in ColdFusion. Evagoras went through the creation of an app, learning by example, focusing on first creating and defining your app on the Amazon Developer portal, then how to make it talk to your ColdFusion code, and lastly how to test things even if you don't have a device. A sample CF project was supplied, to be used as a base for a user to take away and start your own app.

 

10. Plumbing with Bitbucket Pipelines by Guust Nieuwenhuis

How to configure your Bitbucket repository, define your pipelines, use your own docker containers and deploy directly to your environments

You can view the full presentation here

11. Getting Stuff Done the Agile Way by Richard Herbert

Everyone is talking about Agile and Scrum these days but do you really know what it means?

In this presentation Richard talked about what it means to be Agile and how starting with a framework like Scrum can help you, your Team and your organization benefit from this collaborative and humanist approach to modern application development.

Here is Richard's presentation link

12. GraphQL – A query language for your API by Mark Drew

Everything you wanted to know about GraphQL but was afraid to ask.

 

13. A Tale of Legacy To Modernization by Luis Majano

Evolve or Die! How many times have they told you, „You still coding in that?“. This was a talk about the infamous land of legacy ColdFusion applications, their why and existence motivations. How to finally evolve them and take them to the wonderful land of Modern ColdFusion.

Take a look at Luis' post here

14. IoT – And how it works for you

Allnet – Dorian Schneltzer talked about IoT and what are the prognosis in the next 5-10 years. Why we will “need more power!” = more internet!

 

15. PresideCMS

Dom Watson talked about Preside CMS. Here is the full presentation.

 

16. Cyber-Security seen by an IT-Manager

Dr. Robert Reinermann talked about this interesting topic in the main room. Interesting to hear someone who is using CFML and what are possible threats.

 17. ColdBox 5: Hierarchical MVC -Transform Your Monolith by Luis Majano

The ColdBox Platform was the first conventions based MVC framework for ColdFusion. It has evolved and become the de-facto standard for building scalable and modern ColdFusion applications. What is a hierarchical MVC and modularization to scale your applications to a new modern era. Learn about all the tools to help you architect, document and scale your RESTFul and Web applications.

Follow this link for a full presentation.

18. Apache Kafka: Intro and use in CFML by David Sedeno Fernandez

In this session, David has introduced Apache Kafka, the distributed streaming platform, the key concepts that distinguish this software from other traditional “queue” systems.

In the second part, he showed how they use it in production, how you can scale producers and consumers easily.

19. Mura and Vue.js by Grant Shepert

 

20. Database Security for Developers by Ilya Verbitsky

An introduction to SQL Server security system. The talk was about authentication, authorization, roles, permissions and data encryption and about database security best practices which can help you to protect data even when your application has been compromised. The ideas from the session might be applicable to other database management systems.

 

21. Solving problems in ways never before possible, with FusionReactor 7 by Charlie Arehart

Charlie’s talk introduce the many new and improved things in FR7. Ever need to solve jvm memory leaks? FusionReactor 7 now includes heap analysis. Wish you could understand the Tomcat web connector better? FR 7 now includes JMX metrics. Want to watch your server's performance via AWS CloudWatch? FR 7 lets you export over 150 metrics to that service. Come learn about these new and many enhanced features to help solve problems in ways never before possible.

Charlie's presentation is available on this link

 

Stay tuned for the updates folks. More links coming soon!

 

Big thanks to Michael Hnat, the organizer of CFCamp! We hear that this venue might be too small for the next year because it has reached its maximum capacity!

Big thanks to all the speakers and see you next year!

And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.

What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.

And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.

You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.

All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.

Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.

No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens Next

ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist

Modern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.

√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production

√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading

√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF

√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free!

 

Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.