ColdFusion Roadshow Notes

Kishore and Elishia from the ColdFusion team came to San Francisco and shared a bunch of new info about the state of ColdFusion, upcoming plans from Adobe and other interesting goodies.

70% of fortune 100 cos are still using ColdFusion
it’s part of their tech stack

Fortune 500 - around 63% use CF

70% still us CF to build NEW apps
this number has gone UP!
was around 60% around 3 years ago
it’s higher now, with more data in the survey

revenue perspective
recorded the best launch quarter EVER in Q4 2018 and the highest revenue since 2008

Adobe is “still continuing to invest in this product”

every quarter we’ve been hitting the numbers for the last 25 quarters
we already hit this quarter’s numbers last week.

CF 2018 will have support until 2025

already working on CF2020

growing customer base -
in 2011 - close to 19,000 paying customers
that number has INCREASED
now we have around 35,000 paying customers
on CF 2016 or 2011 (the core supported platforms)

CF2016 is 30% faster than CF11
CF2018 is 45% faster than CF11
right out of the box, no code changes required

API Mgr can handle a BILLION API calls per day
Latency is less than 30ms

security —
last known 0 day vulnerability was in 2012!
PHP had 50+ within the same time frame

planning to make each release more secure
“auto lockdown” feature in current CF version
locks down server in 2 minutes
vs the 8+ hours of manual work it used to require

“How do you claim CF is the most secure?”
looked at # of vulnerabilities that were published in CVE Details
and National Vulnerability Database

ISV’s
independent software vendors
this is where we’re seeing a lot of growth in the platform
deploying something either on site or via cloud to sell to other businesses

TalentPulse
Employee Experience Platform
they make “lifecycle employee management” software
tracks an employee
job is to analyze data for HR and tries to make the companies a better place to work
if you want to retain top talent, need to analyze the data you keep that talent happy

in 10 years the app shifted from “nice to have” to “must have” competency

it automates things like recruitment, expectation surveys, exit interviews, etc

SQL Server 2014 and CF 2016 Server

Why Retensa chose CF for TalentPulse
- velocity of change
- interoperable future
- enterprise class architecture
- “thought to launch” time
they know/like Adobe as a roadmap which takes the plan out 10-ish years (this isn’t always available with other platforms)

(Judging by the URLs in the app, I don’t think they’re using an MVC framework to power this app). Nor does it appear to be a SPA powered by something like Angular

Training / Certification -

security / encryption
importing certificates
using the different encryption methods that CF provides baked-in
not a lot of docs on these and how they work in CF currently
lots of info for the Java layer but not doing it within CF

(API Mgr has certificate management baked in. maybe this can be moved to CF Admin?)

Performance improvements -
Perf Monitor
installed outside of CF, can be offloaded to a separate server

Administrator’s Needs
SysAdmin has different visibility/needs than developers

3 areas important for performance
Sys Admin
IT Managers
Develoeprs

(Perf Monitor demo)

Granular metrics -
Throughput
cluster and node overview and details
incoming and external services
database metrics
REST/SOAP/RPC
notification system

also includes a profiler (in combined w/ CF Builder) to see line of code that’s having a problem, debugging at line level, etc.

IT Managers -
typically involved in a set of code that they’re responsible for
lots of IT mgrs responsible for business logic apps that work together sometimes
may only want to see “application by application” level info
thread dumps, memory settings, etc.
easy way to generate G/C
also easy to get info on each different space in JVM - permGen, Eden, etc
easy visibility to this within a couple of clicks

developers -
monitor what they’re concerned with
usually: his/her specific code
memory profile you can run in CFBuilder
at the perf monitor toolset level, can turn on profiling
view detailed memory and page level data
can turn on monitoring at the app level (not entire server) or a specific page/URL
so monitor JUST /myapp/foo.cfm if you want
can export prof data, and put it in CFBuilder to look at the problems in more detail

works to fill in some gaps that Fusion Reactor doesn’t provide
built by CF/Adobe developers
tightly integrated w/ hooks into CF internals
has all the bells and whistles for monitoring CF environments w/ all the different roles in mind

kill a thread in this tool, it kills that request in the CF runtime
(this only kinda worked with the old CF monitor tools, this new rev is much better.)

can automatically tune the connector w/ this tool