Modernize or Die® - CFML News for March 17th, 2020 - Episode 45

Watch the video version on YouTube at https://youtu.be/-dGwCug5yxY

Hosts:

Brad Wood - Senior Developer for Ortus Solutions
Gavin Pickin - Software Consultant for Ortus Solutions



Thanks to our Sponsor - Ortus Solutions

Get trained by the actual makers of the ColdBox Platform, CommandBox, TestBox and ContentBox Modular CMS. We offer on-site training, regional training seminars and virtual live training as well. We have several professional training courses from where to choose from and we can also cater to a-la-carte trainings as well.


Patreon Support

We are at the 39% mark for fully funding all of our Modernize or Die Podcasts via our Patreon site: patreon.com/ortussolutions . If you love our podcasts and all we do for the #coldfusion #cfml community consider chipping in, we are almost there!
https://www.ortussolutions.com/blog/we-need-your-help



News and Events



Adobe Updates - ColdFusion (2018 release) Update 8 and ColdFusion (2016 release) Update 14 released

These updates fix security vulnerabilities that are mentioned in the security bulletin,  APSB20-16.
The Docker images for these updates are also available.
Please update your ColdFusion versions today. Let us know if you face any issues while installing the updates. Your feedback is essential to further enhancing the product.
https://helpx.adobe.com/coldfusion/kb/coldfusion-11-mitigation-steps.html

https://coldfusion.adobe.com/2020/03/coldfusion-2018-release-update-8-coldfusion-2016-release-update-14-released/



Big News - CoronaVirus is affecting ColdFusion Conferences too.

Adobe CF Summit East has been cancelled, along with the Certification program and Ortus’s Pre Conference Workshop.
Into The Box is being re-evaluated - we will make an announcement soon with all the details you need to know.



John Farrar Webinar - ColdFusion Community Education 2020 and Beyond

Tuesday March 17th: 8pm EDT
https://sosensible.webinarninja.com/live-webinars/214200/register?fbclid=IwAR1ERsEU_zpu-i3dQ543ZlOv2I9AX4WyPhLVuysDpvAJ_wqQJD-dtuEIuYo



Seattle ColdFusion User Group Meeting

March 18th, 2020
6pm-7pm
The focus for this first of the year Seattle ColdFusion User Group Meeting is to define the goals and objectives in 2020 for our user group. We are looking for ideas, volunteers, and presenters for our future user group meetings, and are truly counting having you in attendance for your input.
https://www.meetup.com/Seattle-ColdFusion-User-Group/events/269314969/



Adobe Webinar - Adobe ColdFusion for the Next Decade: All About the Buzzworthy ColdFusion 2020

Hosted By: Adobe & Carahsoft
Date: Thursday, March 19, 2020
Time: 11:00am ET; 8:00am PT
Duration: 60 minutes
Location: Online

Right from its inception, Adobe ColdFusion has successfully pivoted and adapted at regular intervals – making it a progressive, reliable, and successful platform for the current and future landscape of the web application industry. With very few technologies managing to stay in the game for so long, there is plenty for the Adobe ColdFusion community to be proud of and look ahead to!

Join our complimentary webinar for a sneak peak of the much anticipated release of Adobe ColdFusion 2020 – slated for later this year! Rakshith Naresh, Adobe ColdFusion Product Manager, will unravel the overarching vision of the newest ColdFusion release as the industry’s modernized platform of choice for building cloud-native micro service applications, with optimal ease of use through multi-cloud compatibility features in efforts to avoid getting locked to a particular cloud vendor.

https://www.carahsoft.com/learn/event/22616-Adobe-ColdFusion-for-the-Next-Decade--All-About-the-Buzzworthy-ColdFusion-2020



Adobe Webinar - Microservices Architecture: Trends and Challenges

Presenter: Elishia Dvorak
March 25th, 9am PDT
In this session we’ll focus our discussion on microservices trends, architecture, and challenges. The reality for most of us is that our applications have organically grown over the years and exist today in different states. We typically inherit a hybrid of monolith with the addition of services and integrated disparate systems. Much of the time we do not have the opportunity to start from the ground up, rather build from a certain point for modernization and future growth. The ability to completely modernize and decouple the entire architecture is limited by resources and budget constraints among other factors. In this session we’ll review some of the current trends in microservices architecture with a focus on existing application transformation and challenges.
https://cfwebinar-trends.meetus.adobeevents.com/



Fusion Reactor Webinar - Installing FusionReactor in dynamic environments

This session will cover how to automate the installation of FusionReactor via Docker and CommandBox as well as answer any questions you may have related to the install of FusionReactor.

25 March - 3PM EST - 7PM UTC
Register now - https://www.fusion-reactor.com/news/installing-fusionreactor-in-dynamic-environments-live-stream-support/



Next Ortus Webinar - CBElasticSearch with Michael Born

March 27th at 11:00 AM EST (GMT -5:00)
with Michael Born
Register online: https://www.ortussolutions.com/events/webinars



Adobe Webinar - Journey through the Adobe ColdFusion Performance Monitoring Tool

Presenter: Elishia Dvorak
April 9th, 11am PDT
This session is all about demos, no slides! From start to finish, we’ll take you through the nitty gritty of troubleshooting and setting yourself up in Adobe’s ColdFusion Performance Monitoring Tool to troubleshoot the main issues that keep you awake at night. We’ll run through setting up different types of notifications, threshold settings, auto tuning, and even some simulations to give you a good sense of how the PMT can help you diagnose your craziest ColdFusion issues.
https://cfwebinar-journey-pmt.meetus.adobeevents.com/



Qb 7.5.0 released
https://github.com/coldbox-modules/qb/releases/tag/v7.5.0



ContentBox Docker Image 5.0.0 Released

We are pleased to announce a major release of the official ContentBox Docker image. It now ships with the latest CommandBox image as well and sports a much more detailed versioning strategy:
https://www.ortussolutions.com/blog/contentbox-docker-image-500-released



CommandBox 5.0.1 Released
No blog as of show time



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!
https://teratech.com/state-of-the-cf-union-2020/



Modernize or Die ® Podcast - Conference Edition - Now on Itunes

In this podcast we spotlight upcoming ColdFusion Conferences, and talk to organizers, workshop trainers and speakers to uncover all the information you and your company needs to decide what conferences and workshops to attend, and what sessions you need to see.

Several more workshop interviews were released, and more on the way, and speakers coming up after that.

Modernize or Die® Conference - Michael Born - CBElasticSearch Workshop - ITB2020 - Episode 8
https://youtu.be/6-Dmw8WR7Ng

Website: https://conference.modernizeordie.io/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNE-ZbNnndB9qkyJd6mHb8qrKp3Z5jDQU



Conferences

Adobe CF Summit East 2020 - Cancelled
https://carahevents.carahsoft.com/CFSummit2020/

Adobe - ColdFusion Specialist Certification POST Conference - CANCELLED
https://carahevents.carahsoft.com/CFSummit2020/Custom?id=3408

Ortus Solutions - Build Secure MVC ColdFusion Applications - Pre Conference - Cancelled
https://www.ortussolutions.com/blog/ortus-solutions-dc-workshop-is-cancelled-due-to-covid-19-concerns

Into the Box 2020
We are evaluating the situation and our options - we will make an announcement asap.
https://intothebox.org/

CF Summit West
Originally planned dates: Late October, October Wed and Thurs 28 & 29th.
Pre Conference Certification Tuesday October 27th.
More information coming soon.

CF Camp
Right now it's a very unclear and difficult situation how to go on. Last year we first had the idea of doing cfcamp in may. We're really glad this didn't work out. At the moment we have an option for Oct/Nov this year. But to be honest we have no idea right now if we can do it or not. Our biggest problem is, that we already have costs where we don't know if we are able to get them back. It is a big risk right now to make a decision. The next 3-4 weeks will show us what to do. So at the moment we can't say if it CFCamp will take place this year or not. As much as we'd like to make it happen, we have to wait and see what's going in the world the next weeks.
Michael Hnat - Via Slack



Blogs, Tweets and Videos of the Week


Blog - Ben Nadel - Retrofitting Markdown Onto 15-Years Of Articles Using htmlParse(), XPath, And Lucee CFML 5.3.4.80
In 2019, I finally dumped my Windows VirtualBox and XStandard ActiveX blog authoring and moved my content-creation workflow over to using Markdown in ColdFusion. Markdown has been a total joy to work with for new articles; however, I still have 15-years of old content that is hard-coded as HTML in my database. In order to make those old articles editable as Markdown, I wanted to see if I could programmatically convert the HTML content over to Markdown using Lucee CFML 5.3.4.80.
https://www.bennadel.com/blog/3788-retrofitting-markdown-onto-15-years-of-articles-using-htmlparse-xpath-and-lucee-cfml-5-3-4-80.htm


Blog - Charlie Arehart - Adobe CF Summit East 2020 cancelled due to Coronavirus concerns
Sad news to report: the annual CF Summit East (2020) conference has now been cancelled, due to concerns over the Corona virus.
In an abundance of caution for their customers, partners, and employees, Adobe has made the difficult but important decision to cancel the Adobe ColdFusion Summit East 2020 in Washington, D.C.
https://coldfusion.adobe.com/2020/03/adobe-cf-summit-east-2020-cancelled-due-corona-virus-concerns/


Blog / Video - Matthew Clemente - Passing Parameters to CommandBox Custom Commands
Building on my previous post, which covered writing a basic custom command for the CommandBox CLI, I put together another video, detailing how to pass parameters to your command.
https://blog.mattclemente.com/2020/03/14/passing-parameters-to-commandbox-custom-commands.html


Blog - Ben Nadel - Pixelating An Image Using GraphicsMagick And Lucee CFML 5.2.9.31
The other day, while searching for some GraphicsMagick information, I came across a Stack Overflow post that was discussing an approach to pixelating part of an image. I don't really have a need to pixelate images in my day-to-day work; however, it's Friday the 13th; and, pixelation sounds like a fun little distraction from the current COVID-19 pandemic. So, I wanted to have a look at pixelating an image using GraphicsMagick and Lucee CFML 5.2.9.31.
https://www.bennadel.com/blog/3787-pixelating-an-image-using-graphicsmagick-and-lucee-cfml-5-2-9-31.htm


Blog - Ortus Solutions - Meet the Amazing Women Who Code at Ortus Solutions
In honor of International’s Women’s Day, we wanted you all to meet our exceptional team of women coders. While we are grateful for them and their work every day, we wanted to highlight how essential they are for the success of our company.  We started by asking them a few questions. As I compiled their stories, a common theme emerged, that being how happy they are doing what they love.
https://www.ortussolutions.com/blog/meet-the-amazing-women-who-code-at-ortus-solutions


Blog - Ben Nadel - Exploring Color Histograms In GraphicsMagick And Lucee CFML 5.2.9.31
Within InVision, one of the interesting features of "Boards" is that, when you upload an image, the app shows you the "top colors" present in the image (which you can then re-add to the Board as a Swatch). I believe we use ColorThief to do this. This feature got me curious about what kind of color extraction features exist in GraphicsMagick. After doing some Googling, I came across the concept of a "histogram", which gives us the distribution of colors within an image. In an effort to recreate some of what ColorThief does, I wanted to look at how I can generate and inspect a histogram using GraphicsMagick and Lucee CFML 5.2.9.31.
https://www.bennadel.com/blog/3785-exploring-color-histograms-in-graphicsmagick-and-lucee-cfml-5-2-9-31.htm


Blog - Ben Nadel - Using Subtraction To Power The Array Sort Comparison Operator In Lucee CFML 5.2.9.31
Yesterday, while looking at generating color histograms using GraphicsMagick and Lucee CFML, I had to sort of an Array of colors based on their frequency distribution within an image. To do this, I created a sort operator that used a single Subtraction expression to calculate the comparison result. I'm not sure that I've ever done this before; so, I wanted to take a moment and document this maths-based approach using Lucee CFML 5.2.9.31.
https://www.bennadel.com/blog/3786-using-subtraction-to-power-the-array-sort-comparison-operator-in-lucee-cfml-5-2-9-31.htm


Blog - Charlie Arehart - Multiple upcoming CF webinars, and past recordings as well
There are many CF-oriented webinars, coming up or recorded in the past, as well as recorded live-streams, from Adobe and others in the CF community, as I point out here.
https://coldfusion.adobe.com/2020/03/multiple-upcoming-cf-webinars-past-recordings-well/


Blog - Brad Wood - Ortus Solutions - Lucee Server Snapshots and "Light" builds on ForgeBox
We've been publishing all stable Lucee builds and select release candidate builds to ForgeBox for some time now.  This allows you to use CommandBox CLI to start up a Lucee server running the version of your choice.
https://www.ortussolutions.com/blog/lucee-server-snapshots-and-light-builds-on-forgebox


Blog - James Moberg - Generating Color Palette Using ColdFusion & ImageMagick
I read Ben Nadel's recent ColdFusion post on Exploring Color Histograms In GraphicsMagick And Lucee CFML 5.2.9.31 and thought I'd compare it with ImageMagick.
https://dev.to/gamesover/generating-color-palette-using-coldfusion-imagemagick-25bp


Blog - Ray Camden - Tips for Giving Remote Presentations
As travel becomes more limited and conferences begin shutting down physical meetings, more and more presenters may find themselves switching to online platforms in order to deliver their talks. If you're an experienced presenter but have never given a presentation online, the change can be somewhat daunting. I thought I'd write up some tips to consider before giving your first remote presentation. And then I had an even better thought - why not ask people much smarter than myself for their advice. I reached out to friends and colleagues to get their advice for remote presentations and I've shared it below. I'll give my thoughts at the very end. (I did some minor editing on people's input for formatting.)
https://www.raymondcamden.com/2020/03/10/tips-for-giving-remote-presentations


Tweet - Ben Nadel - Liver is exciting
Liver is exciting! It’s reignited my love for #ColdFusion!
https://twitter.com/BenNadel/status/1238076292467228675
https://twitter.com/BenNadel


Blog - David Byers - ColdFusion Portal - Can’t find ColdFusion talent? It’s time to re-evaluate allowing remote work.
It’s time to re-evaluate remote work for ColdFusion Developers.  Employers would be able to tap into a much larger pool of talent, and more developers would be able to find jobs that fit their needs.  All of this could go a step further towards resolving a major issue with the ColdFusion community that has haunted us for years.
https://coldfusion.adobe.com/2020/03/cant-find-coldfusion-talent-time-re-evaluate-allowing-remote-work/



CFML Jobs

Several positions available on https://www.getcfmljobs.com/
Listing over 28 ColdFusion positions from 21 companies across 20 locations in 5 Countries

Only 1 new job this week.

Full-Time - ColdFusion Developer at Downers Grove, IL - United States
Posted Mar 16
https://www.getcfmljobs.com/jobs/index.cfm/united-states/ColdFusion-Developer-at-Downers-Grove-IL/11035



ForgeBox Module of the Week

commandbox-stackChecker by Gavin Pickin

CommandBox Task Runner that allows you to check your local docker compose against your portainer stack file and your .env.example

RunLocalCheck
Run the CheckStack function to verify and validate the Stack file in Portainer vs the Compose file in the repo and the env variables in the .env.example file.

checkRemoteStack
Run the CheckStack function to verify and validate the Stack file in Portainer vs the Compose file in the repo and the env variables in the .env.example file.

putStack
Run the putStack function to update Stack file in Portainer with the Compose file in the repo. This auto updates the service.

box install commandbox-stackChecker

https://www.forgebox.io/view/commandbox-stackChecker



VS Code Hint Tips and Tricks of the Week

Bookmarks by Alessandro Fragnani

alefragnani.Bookmarks - 749,669 installs - 5 stars

It helps you to navigate in your code, moving between important positions easily and quickly. No more need to search for code. It also supports a set of selection commands, which allows you to select bookmarked lines and regions between bookmarked lines. It's really useful for log file analysis.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=alefragnani.Bookmarks



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

Andrew  Davis
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John  Farrar
Jordan Clark
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Mingo Hagen
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VJ
Yogesh  Mathur

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