2020-07-07 Weekly News - Episode 60

Watch the video version on YouTube at https://youtu.be/KXEyFarwIKQ

Hosts:

Gavin Pickin - Software Consultant for Ortus Solutions
Eric Peterson - Software Consultant for Ortus Solutions


Thanks to our Sponsor - Ortus Solutions

Get live training from the makers of your favorite Box Product.
2 live workshops this month - ColdBox Zero to Hero July 9 & 10, and ColdBox Hero to Superhero API Edition July 23 & 24
CFCasts Subscriptions are now available

Patreon Support

We are at the 47% mark for fully funding all of our Modernize or Die Podcasts via our Patreon site: https://www.patreon.com/ortussolutions . If you love our podcasts and all we do for the #coldfusion #cfml community considers chipping in, we are almost there!
https://www.ortussolutions.com/blog/we-need-your-help



News and Events



Happy 25th Birthday #ColdFusion!!

It was released on July 2nd, 1995
After defining rapid web application development in 1995, CF is still kicking butt and taking names. I'm proud to be a part of CF's legacy and looking forward to more years of success. #CFML #ColdFusion #Allaire



CFCasts tech stack revealed

CFCasts launched at the beginning of this month on the tails of Into the Box 2020. We wanted a way to share all of the great content from Into the Box with those that attended with a great experience that matched the content. Additionally, we wanted to offer our training and experience to the CFML community going forward. Over the past month, we've added over 10 hours of free videos to CFCasts. More will be coming every month. Yesterday, subscriptions were made available allowing access to even more content, including the ColdBox Master Class. New content will be coming out every week. It truly is the premier learning resource for modern CFML developers.
Being a new platform from Ortus, I wanted to take some time to dive into the tech stack we are using. Many people ask us how we would build a modern CFML site. Well, here's at least one answer
https://www.ortussolutions.com/blog/cfcasts-a-peek-inside-the-tech-stack


Russ Michael - CFMLDeveloper.com is shutting down after 20 years of service

This free ColdFusion developer hosting service was setup back in 1999 by me (Russ Michaels) as a resource for developers to learn and use CFML (aka ColdFusion)  without the hassle of having to setup a local development environment and with a live dev/staging URL that can be shared with peers and clients.
So after more than 20 years I have decided it is finally time to retire cfmldeveloper, so I bid you all farewell and hope that cfmldeveloper has been useful to you over the years.
https://cfmldeveloper.com/farewell/


Did you know that ColdFusion Standard is available free for use in education?

While most may know that CF has always been free for development use, did you know that folks in education (students, teachers, and staff) can obtain CF Standard licenses, for use in learning (though not production)?
This topic is covered in a section in the available ColdFusion FAQ. There’s an FAQ for CF Standard and one for CF Enterprise, and both say the same thing about this matter, in their section of questions on “Complimentary ColdFusion Standard for education“.
https://coldfusion.adobe.com/2020/07/know-coldfusion-standard-available-free-use-education/


ColdFusion Meetup - "Your best options to build modern front-ends with JavaScript", with Dan Wilson

Thursday July 9 at 12pm US Eastern Time, UTC-4.
The JavaScript ecosystem moves fast. In the last few years, the ecosystem has consolidated into several dominant choices like React, Angular, and Vue.js. Picking the right frameworks means you will be able to efficiently build apps your users will love. The right choice depends a lot on philosophy and your circumstances. In this presentation we’ll go over the major frameworks and discuss the pros and cons to each. We’ll also look at sample code and the overall developer experience. At the end of this talk, you’ll be better prepared to make the best choice for your company.
Meeting URL: https://experts.adobeconnect.com/cfmeetup/
Meetup Group: https://www.meetup.com/coldfusionmeetup/


ColdFusion Meetup - "How Native Mobile Development Changed the Way I Write Web Apps", w/ TJ VanToll

Thursday July 16 at 12pm US Eastern Time, UTC-4
Web developers tend to be unabashed defenders of the web platform, and tend to view native mobile platforms as proprietary, gated and bloated.
As a long-time web developer I felt this way too, but then something unexpected happened: I joined the dark side, and spent five years of my career working on—*gasp*—iOS and Android applications.
Now, like an explorer returning from a multi-year safari—I have so much to share! In this talk I’ll discuss how native development has improved the way I write code for the web, and how you can incorporate the best native app performance and testing tips into your web workflows.
Meeting URL: https://experts.adobeconnect.com/cfmeetup/
Meetup Group: https://www.meetup.com/coldfusionmeetup/


Adobe Webinar - Understanding the what, when and how of API Manager architecture and its various components with Kailash Bihani

July 23, 2020
10 am PT
Dive right into API Manager architecture and learn about its various components including datastore, server and elastic search. Find out how to install API Manager and the myriad of settings you can play with to ensure the best performance!
https://cfwebinar-apim.meetus.adobeevents.com/


Adobe Webinar - A bird's-eye view of PMT architecture and how to harness it's true potential with Nimit Sharma

July 30, 2020
10 am PT
This session will walk you through everything there is to know about PMT architecture and the configurations to look out for when installing PMT on your systems. Get a deeper look at how data flows in the system and the configuration files where the data is stored. Explore the common customer issues and find out how using archiving can reduce the disk consumption.
https://cfwebinar-pmt-architecture.meetus.adobeevents.com/


Reminder: State of the CF Union 2020 Survey

VOTE FOR OUR PODCASTS

Help us find out the state of the CF Union – what versions of CFML Engine do people use, what frameworks, tools etc. We will share the summary results with everyone who completes the survey so that you can see how you compare with other CF developers.
Most questions are multiple choice checkboxes that are fast to answer. Thanks for your time completing this survey!
484 respondents so far.
https://teratech.com/state-of-the-cf-union-2020/
Partial Results: https://teratech.com/state-of-the-CF-Union-2020-partial-Results



Conferences

Into the Box 2020 - Workshops - Virtual Live training

Gavin leading ColdBox Zero to Hero - July 9 - 10 - A few spots left!!!
Luis leading ColdBox Hero to Superhero API Edition July 23-24

2 x 6 hour days
9am-12pm Central
1 hour lunch
1pm to 4pm central

Tickets available: $899
https://www.ortussolutions.com/events
https://www.ortussolutions.com/blog/new-zero-to-hero-workshop-dates-announced-and-important-updates

Podcast Code:
PODCAST10 - 10% off
There is a code for ITB attendees to save 15% - If you didn’t get the email contact us.


Adobe ColdFusion Certification now available Online

Adobe Certified Professional: Adobe ColdFusion is an industry-leading certification program from Adobe, for ColdFusion developers. The course consists of 50+ online videos and is designed for professionals who have basic to advance level proficiency in any computer language and basic understanding of how web pages work. Successfully passing an assessment test at the end of the program will reward participants with a badge and certificate from Adobe.
https://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion-family/certificate.html


Adobe ColdFusion Summit 2020 - Replaces CF Summit West
Date: November
Location: Online
https://cfsummit.adobeevents.com/
Admission: Free
No blog post or official announcement made


CF Camp
TBA

More conferences: https://confs.tech/



Blogs, Tweets and Videos of the Week


Blog - Charlie Arehart - Did you know that ColdFusion Standard is available free for use in education?
While most may know that CF has always been free for development use, did you know that folks in education (students, teachers, and staff) can obtain CF Standard licenses, for use in learning (though not production)?
This topic is covered in a section in the available ColdFusion FAQ. There’s an FAQ for CF Standard and one for CF Enterprise, and both say the same thing about this matter, in their section of questions on “Complimentary ColdFusion Standard for education“
https://coldfusion.adobe.com/2020/07/know-coldfusion-standard-available-free-use-education/


Blog - Ben Nadel - CFDocument Intelligently Reuses Repeated Image Objects In Lucee CFML 5.3.4.80
The other day, I experimented with saving InVision prototypes as interactive PDFs in Lucee CFML. And, while very few people will have an interest in such a technique, it's gotten me thinking a lot about how I might use PDFs more effectively. One thing I started to wonder about is how CFDocument handles repeated Image URLs. The answer to this would certainly influence how I would implement different types of PDF content: whether I crop images in a pre-processing step, generating unique image URLs per cropping; or, whether I should just use overflow:hidden in order to simulate cropping on a repeated image URL. To explore this, I created a simple demo in which I can dynamically repeat an image in a CFDocument tag using Lucee CFML 5.3.4.80.
https://www.bennadel.com/blog/3860-cfdocument-intelligently-reuses-repeated-image-objects-in-lucee-cfml-5-3-4-80.htm


Blog - Teratech - ColdFusion Community Guidelines
In the spirit of cooperation and communication, there’s a handful of guidelines that help provide an environment where we can all learn and grow together.
They apply to the entire CF community. They apply everywhere you communicate with other CFers: in the forums, Slack, social media, at events, CF groups and masterminds.
https://teratech.com/coldfusion-community-guidelines/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=coldfusion-community-guidelines


Blog & Video  - Ben Nadel - ColdFusion Components (CFC) vs. ColdFusion Closures Performance Exploration In Lucee CFML 5.3.4.80
In the early days of ColdFusion, instantiating ColdFusion Components - CFCs - was pretty expensive. This was due, in part, to the highly dynamic nature of ColdFusion Components which has to be facilitated on top of Java, a significantly less dynamic language. With Lucee CFML, this cost was been lowered. However, due to my history with ColdFusion, I still have a [?mostly irrational?] fear of creating a lot of CFCs. As such, I thought it would be a fun experiment to compare the cost of CFC instantiation to the cost of Closure creation as a means to create small, simple APIs in Lucee CFML 5.3.4.80.
https://www.bennadel.com/blog/3859-coldfusion-components-cfc-vs-coldfusion-closures-performance-exploration-in-lucee-cfml-5-3-4-80.htm


Tweet - James Moberg - Encode For HTML() issues with emojis
#ColdFusion EncodeForHTML() fails when the string argument contains emoji character combinations.
SOLUTION: Use cf-emoji-java to replace emojis with sanitized aliases or convert symbols to decimal or hexadecimal stackoverflow.com/a/62722959/693… and then use EncodeForHTML(). #cfml
https://twitter.com/gamesover/status/1279168454046756869
https://twitter.com/gamesover


Blog - Eric Peterson - Ortus Solutions - CFCasts tech stack revealed
CFCasts launched at the beginning of this month on the tails of Into the Box 2020. We wanted a way to share all of the great content from Into the Box with those that attended with a great experience that matched the content. Additionally, we wanted to offer our training and experience to the CFML community going forward. Over the past month, we've added over 10 hours of free videos to CFCasts. More will be coming every month. Yesterday, subscriptions were made available allowing access to even more content, including the ColdBox Master Class. New content will be coming out every week. It truly is the premier learning resource for modern CFML developers.
Being a new platform from Ortus, I wanted to take some time to dive into the tech stack we are using. Many people ask us how we would build a modern CFML site. Well, here's at least one answer
https://www.ortussolutions.com/blog/cfcasts-a-peek-inside-the-tech-stack


Blog - Ben Nadel - The Double-Bang (!!) Operator And A Misunderstanding Of How JavaScript Handles Truthy / Falsy Values
Strictly speaking, there is no "double-bang" operator (or the "double-not" operator) in JavaScript; the (!!) notation is really just two "Not Operators" in a row. In languages, like JavaScript, that support Truthy / Falsy values, the double-bang operator can be used for Boolean type-casting. But, I've noticed a lot of developers using the double-bang operator even when it serves no purpose. I believe this represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how JavaScript handles Truthy / Falsy values. As such, I thought it would be worthwhile to showcase some misuses of the double-bang operator so that we can simplify our JavaScript code and remove the unnecessary noise.
https://www.bennadel.com/blog/3858-the-double-bang-operator-and-a-misunderstanding-of-how-javascript-handles-truthy-falsy-values.htm


Blog - Ben Nadel - Using CFDocument To Save InVision Prototypes As Interactive PDFs In Lucee CFML 5.3.4.80
As I talked about in my post yesterday regarding "Dark Matter Designers", I've been playing around with some more advanced ways to generate PDFs at InVision. One idea that I had recently was to try and save one of our interactive prototypes as an interactive PDF. Meaning, a PDF in which the embedded screens had "hotspots" that would actually link to other pages (ie, screens) within the PDF. To explore this idea, I hard-coded some JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) and spun-up a Docker instance using CommandBox, Lucee CFML 5.3.4.80, and the PDF Extension version 1.0.0.75-SNAPSHOT that uses the Flying Saucer PDF rendering engine.
https://www.bennadel.com/blog/3856-using-cfdocument-to-save-invision-prototypes-as-interactive-pdfs-in-lucee-cfml-5-3-4-80.htm


Blog - James Moberg - Response to isDate() Blog Post
My response to this blog post ( https://www.lucee.nl/post.cfm/the-horror-of-isdate-in-coldfusion-and-lucee ) was detected as spam, so I'm responding here.
The recommendation from Adobe has been to use isValid("date") instead of isDate(). If isDate() returns TRUE, you should also test using isValid("date") and use parseDateTime (with try/catch) to see what ColdFusion actually evaluates as the date. In my opinion, a value isn't a valid date until it can be correctly parsed and then sent to third-parties and also be parsed as a date (ie, SQL).
https://dev.to/gamesover/response-to-isdate-blog-post-396i


Russ Michael - CFMLDeveloper.com is shutting down after 20 years of service
This free ColdFusion developer hosting service was setup back in 1999 by me (Russ Michaels) as a resource for developers to learn and use CFML (aka ColdFusion)  without the hassle of having to setup a local development environment and with a live dev/staging URL that can be shared with peers and clients.
So after more than 20 years I have decided it is finally time to retire cfmldeveloper, so I bid you all farewell and hope that cfmldeveloper has been useful to you over the years.
https://cfmldeveloper.com/farewell/


TeraTech - Introducing Swansea Jack Lucee CFML 6 Announced
During the 2018 CFCamp in Munich, a bombshell was dropped.
That bombshell, of course, is the announcement of Lucee 6. I know this will come as surprise to some, but most Lucee users probably have been excited for the past few weeks.
Lucee 6 in true Lucee fashion is being named after another famous dog who has helped mankind. Following Lucee Kabang now comes Lucee Swansea Jack.
Lucee users should be really excited about what’s going to be released with this new version. Although the info is limited at this time, we do have a sneak peek at what to look forward to.
https://teratech.com/introducing-swansea-jack-lucee-cfml-6-announced/


Tweet - Ryan Anklam - Throwback to when he was a hardcore ColdFusion Developer
#tbt to when I was a hardcore #coldfusion developer
Picture in link
https://twitter.com/bittersweetryan/status/1278880199518515200
https://twitter.com/bittersweetryan
 


CFML Jobs

Several positions available on https://www.getcfmljobs.com/
Listing over 47 ColdFusion positions from 35 companies across 23 locations in 5 Countries

2 new jobs this week.

Full-Time - Coldfusion Developer - Freelancer or Contractor at Remote - Other Countries
Posted Jul 01
https://www.getcfmljobs.com/jobs/index.cfm/india/Coldfusion-Developer-Freelancer-or-Contractor-at-Remote/11093

Full-Time - Coldfusion Developer - Freelancer or Contractor at Remote - India
Posted Jul 01
https://www.getcfmljobs.com/jobs/index.cfm/india/Coldfusion-Developer-Freelancer-or-Contractor-at-Remote/11094


ForgeBox Module of the Week

Stripe CFML by John Berquist

stripe-cfml is a CFML (Lucee and ColdFusion) library for interacting with the Stripe API.

stripe-cfml is modeled after the official Stripe SDKs. In particular it copies the class and method names used in the Node SDK. The Node examples given in the official Stripe documentation are simply able to be copied and used (with the notable difference that this library does not make use of callbacks - everything is done synchronously). However, since CFML supports named arguments, you can also use named arguments instead of passing the arguments in a single struct.

box install stripecfml

https://www.forgebox.io/view/stripecfml



VS Code Hint Tips and Tricks of the Week

GitHub Pull Requests and Issues by Github

GitHub.vscode-pull-request-github  - 569,734 installs

This extension allows you to review and manage GitHub pull requests and issues in Visual Studio Code. The support includes:

- Authenticating and connecting VS Code to GitHub.
- Listing and browsing PRs from within VS Code.
- Reviewing PRs from within VS Code with in-editor commenting.
- Validating PRs from within VS Code with easy checkouts.
- Terminal integration that enables UI and CLIs to co-exist.
- Listing and browsing issues from within VS Code.
- Hover cards for "@" mentioned users and for issues.
- Completion suggestions for users and issues.
- A "Start working on issue" action which can create a branch for you.
- Code actions to create issues from "todo" comments.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=GitHub.vscode-pull-request-github



Thank you to all of our Patreon Supporters

These individuals are personally supporting our open source initiatives to ensure the great toolings like CommandBox, ForgeBox, ColdBox, ContentBox, TestBox and all the other boxes keep getting the continuous development they need, and funds the cloud infrastructure at our community relies on like ForgeBox for our Package Management with CommandBox.

You can support us on Patreon here https://www.patreon.com/ortussolutions


Ben Nadel
Brett DeLine
Carl Von Stetten
Charlie Arehart
Da Li
Dan Card
Daniel Garcia
David Belanger
Didier Lesnicki
Don Bellamy
Erick Hoffman
Gary Knight
Jan Jannek
Jeremy Adams
Jordan Clark
Joseph Lamoree
Kai Koenig
Laksma Tirtohadi
Matthew Clemente
Mingo Hagen
Ryan Hughes
Scott Steinbeck
Shawn Oden
Steven Klotz
Synaptrix
Yogesh Mathur

You can see an up to date list of all sponsors on Ortus Solutions' Website
https://ortussolutions.com/about-us/sponsors