Blog

Sixteen hours in planes. Twenty-two hours of overall travel. And a 14-hour nap. I’m now back in Sacramento and somewhat right-side up after CFCamp 2019, the quintessential CFML / ColdFusion conference for Europe!

Gert and Micha kicked off day 1 of CFCamp with several demos of new things planned for Lucee. We saw code, we heard plans. There were demos, there were jokes, and there was lots of entertainment watching people try to use a German keyboard. :)

Greetings from Munich! I’m in town for CFCamp 2019.  This is the tenth anniversary of the conference and should be an amazing event. I was lucky and they selected my talk “Testing My Non-ColdBox Site With TestBox”; this talk was given once for Ortus Developer Week well over a year ago and has been changed quite a bit in the interim; lots more new content for everyone!

Last week was the 2019 ColdFusion Summit in Las Vegas. This year brought the conference back to The Mirage (last year’s event was at The Hard Rock Cafe). and by all accounts was a big success!

Who are these jokers that keep spouting off about how “ColdFusion is dead”? Clearly they’ve never been to the ColdFusion Summit (or any recent CF conference for that matter).

Pro tip: when Brad Wood is giving a talk at a conference, make attending said talk a priority -- you'll learn a lot. But also take notes, because he'll throw a ton of info at you in rapid fire succession interspersed with jokes, delivered just as quickly. I think it's all the Mountain Dew. ;)

SQL performance is important regardless of what type of application you're building. Whether it's written in legacy CFML, ColdBox 5, Framework-1, or even some other stack entirely, every tip Dave mentioned in this talk can be put to good use on your project.

Matt gave this talk at Into The Box a year or two back, and it was one of the stand-out sessions for me. So much so, that I had to attend it again this year and see what new information he'd added to the preso.

Uma has given her talks on testing at several conferences recently, and I've never been able to catch it until now. There's  a reason she continues to get asked to give this presentation: it's packed full of useful info about testing your web applications. FYI, none of the info is ColdBox specific (despite her mentioning TestBox and MockBox in the examples). And several bits of info (such as the portion about JMeter) could be used to test any web application, even if it's not written in CFML.

Modules are one of those ColdFusion things that often get interpreted as ColdBox-specific. While there are advantages to using them with ColdBox, you can build and use modules without having ColdBox anywhere on your server. Eric Peterson did a great job of explaining both scenarios and the pros and cons of each.

Rakshith showed a taste of what's being planned for ColdFusion 2020 and the version coming after that (I'm guessing it will be called ColdFusion 2022). Additionally, new features were added in the Update 5 that recently got released for version 2018, which Rakshith explained as well. There are some nice looking new features coming to the language!

Fresh off a 20+ hour journey from Europe, Matt Gifford gave an excellent presentation on using Vue.js with ColdFusion. Had he not mentioned it, you'd never have guessed he was extremely jet-lagged. Matt is is as professional of a speaker as they come, and a dear friend to boot. It was great having him join us this year.

Next week is the ColdFusion Summit 2019. As always it’s being held in Las Vegas. New this year is the location (The Mirage) and the previously mentioned new ColdFusion Certification Training! And of course a ton of new sessions from a variety of speakers. Way too much variety. Seriously, picking what sessions to attend took more brainpower than I was prepared for.

Now that the videos are live, people have signed up, and all the wheels are in motion, I’m officially allowed to talk about it:

There is a new Adobe ColdFusion Certification program available!

This weekend I’ll be at WordCamp Sacramento 2019.

“Hey Nolan, I didn’t know you’re a WordPress developer?!”.

While we’ve done some WordPress and PHP apps for clients over the years, that’s not really the reason I’ll be at this conference. Take a look at their schedule: 3 tracks, only one of which is WordPress specific. Nearly everything else is pretty general, modern web development. Plus it’s over a weekend so no time off work, and tickets were a mere 40 bucks. Also, it’s local — no hotels, no flights.

The sessions have been announced, I’m officially allowed to talk about it now: I’ll be speaking at CF Camp 2019 in Munich Germany later this year!

This is the tenth CF Camp and the plan is to make this the best CF Camp yet, and celebrating the 10th anniversary. Based on the session list, I think they’ve succeeded!  My biggest challenge will be figuring out which sessions to attend — there are a bunch of excellent speakers and topics to pick from!

It’s Friday morning, time for a more light hearted blog entry. Plus, it’s been ages since I’ve blogged anything except conference related things. :) Several folks lately have been discussing what they listen to while coding, I thought I’d jump into the fun.

Last week was the Into The Box 2019 conference in Houston TX. Did you miss it? Do you write CFML for a living? Big mistake! ;)

Docs for anything are here:
cachebox.ortusbooks.com
logbox.ortusbooks.com

Both are part of ColdBox AND ALSO BOTH STANDALONE PRODUCTS!
Can still apply /most/ of this to anything CFML, not just ColdBox apps