2020-10-13 Weekly News - Episode 74

Watch the video version on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1q3akEgHAA


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 ColdBox Virtual Workshops coming in October and November
CFCasts is releasing new Free and Paid content every week


Patreon Support

We are at the 57% 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


LATAM Dates announced

December 3-4th
Live Virtual Conference in Spanish
Price: $7.00
https://latam.intothebox.org/



CouchBase - Adds Third Day

October 14-16, 2020
Couchbase has virtualized our annual developer conference, Couchbase Connect. For Connect.ONLINE, we’ve designed three intensive days of Couchbase content for developers and fans. We’ll announce new product capabilities, showcase best practices, and offer countless opportunities to learn Couchbase. We have over 100 sessions planned that cover topics such as Couchbase Server, mobile, Kubernetes, query and indexing, analytics, development tips, and cloud deployment. It will also be interactive, allowing attendees to engage with presenters, Couchbase engineers and technical staff, and fellow attendees.
https://www.couchbase.com/press-releases/couchbase-adds-third-day-to-connect.online-developer-conference
Register for Free: https://connect.couchbase.com/



Getting started with Adobe CF Next - Project Stratus - Beta - Comprehensive Guide

My focus here is not on "what's new" (I'll offer a brief list here, and more in a later post), but really just "how to get started", especially during the beta (or "prerelease") as some things are not as obvious as they perhaps should be. In fact, I make some pointed suggestions that I hope Adobe will consider, as well as share tips for you in the meantime.
https://www.carehart.org/blog/client/index.cfm/2020/10/12/getting_started_with_CF2021_public_beta



HacktoberFest 2020

Support open source and pick a limited edition T-shirt or plant a tree.
Hacktoberfest® is open to everyone in our global community. Whether you’re a developer, student learning to code, event host, or company of any size, you can help drive growth of open source and make positive contributions to an ever-growing community. All backgrounds and skill levels are encouraged to complete the challenge.
Hacktoberfest is a celebration open to everyone in our global community.
Pull requests can be made in participating GitHub-hosted repositories/projects, classified with the Hacktoberfest topic.
You can sign up anytime between October 1 and October 31.
https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/
https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/hacktoberfest-update



Mid-Michigan CFUG is going virtual - Nick Kwiatkowski will be speaking on Code Workflow

Tuesday, Oct 13th at 7 pm eastern
Learn about building dev, test and production environments.  He will show using this workflow to deploy an app to AWS container services.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/CFprogrammers/permalink/10157815289600036/



Seattle CFUG - Leon O'Daniel on Integrating Your ColdFusion App with the Thinkific Platform.

Wednesday, October 14, 2020 - 6:00 PM to 7:30 PM PDT
Online via Zoom
Thinkific is one of the top platforms for online course delivery. Learn how to integrate your ColdFusion application with Thinkific's API.
https://www.meetup.com/Seattle-ColdFusion-User-Group/events/273472016/



Online CF Meetup - "Building APIs with ColdFusion, Part 1: Start coding APIs today" w/ Gavin Pickin

Thursday Oct 15th at 12pm US Eastern Time, UTC-4.
As in recent weeks, this session will be held via a Youtube livestream (and streamed to it via Streamyard
ColdFusion, the powerful language we love, is still relevant in the world of single page apps and mobile apps, because we can power them with ColdFusion APIs.
In this session ( Part 1 ) we'll look at how you can easily add some API goodness into your existing app, even if it is legacy. We'll look at different approaches, and give you a way to start building your API today.
https://www.meetup.com/coldfusionmeetup/events/273813364/



CFCasts Content Updates

Configure your CFML Servers with CFConfig
    - DIFF Command

Send your suggestions at https://cfcasts.com/support



Conferences and Training



CouchBase - Connect

October 14-16, 2020
Couchbase has virtualized our annual developer conference, Couchbase Connect. For Connect.ONLINE, we’ve designed three intensive days of Couchbase content for developers and fans. We’ll announce new product capabilities, showcase best practices, and offer countless opportunities to learn Couchbase. We have over 100 sessions planned that cover topics such as Couchbase Server, mobile, Kubernetes, query and indexing, analytics, development tips, and cloud deployment. It will also be interactive, allowing attendees to engage with presenters, Couchbase engineers and technical staff, and fellow attendees.
https://www.couchbase.com/press-releases/couchbase-adds-third-day-to-connect.online-developer-conference
Register for Free: https://connect.couchbase.com/



Ortus Workshops - Virtual Live training

October
- 2 day Workshop - October 22 - 23, 2020 - ColdBox 6 - Hero to Superhero - lead by Luis Majano
November
- 2 day Workshop - November 5-6, 2020 - Quick Workshop lead by Eric Peterson
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/up-and-running-with-quick-tickets-124157021995?aff=ebdssbonlinesearch

https://www.ortussolutions.com/events

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 Summit 2020 - Replaces CF Summit West

Date: November 17-19
Location: Online
https://cfsummit.adobeevents.com/
Admission: Free
Some Speakers now listed: https://cfsummit.adobeevents.com/speakers/



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 advanced 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.

Introductory Offer: $499

Blog: https://coldfusion.adobe.com/2020/07/coldfusion-certification-online-now/
Register: https://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion-family/certificate.html



ITB Latam

December 3-4th
Live Virtual Conference in Spanish
Price: $7.00
https://latam.intothebox.org/



CF Camp - Not happening in 2020 :(
https://www.cfcamp.org/


More conferences: https://confs.tech/



Blogs, Tweets and Videos of the Week


Blog - Wil De Bruin - CbSecurity: a custom validator for fine-grained permissions
CbSecurity has some fine mechanisms to work with user permissions (the CbAuth validator) or user roles (CFML Security validator). The cbauth validator is really flexible, but sometimes you still need more options. In one of our projects our users can have one or more fixed roles and we assigned several permissions to each role. Our rules looked like this:
https://shiftinsert.nl/cbsecurity-a-custom-validator-for-fine-grained-permissions/


Blog - Charlie Arehart - Getting started with "Project Stratus" public beta, aka CF2021
Did you know that the public beta for CF2020 (or "CF2021", as I think the name will be) is now open, since August 2020? It's formally known by its code-name, "Project Stratus", or as some call it, "CF Next".
What matters most is that it's one of the boldest new versions of CF in quite some time. In this post, I want to share some tips about getting started with the beta, as I have seen many in the community left wondering about some things.
My focus here is not on "what's new" (I'll offer a brief list here, and more in a later post), but really just "how to get started", especially during the beta (or "prerelease") as some things are not as obvious as they perhaps should be. In fact, I make some pointed suggestions that I hope Adobe will consider, as well as share tips for you in the meantime.
https://www.carehart.org/blog/client/index.cfm/2020/10/12/getting_started_with_CF2021_public_beta


Blog - Wil De Bruin - List all foreign keys in SQL server
This post is not very cfml specific, but I am using this a lot with cfmigrations, so it might be worthwhile sharing. Recently I was doing some major restructuring of a database, and most of the time I try to script this using cfmigrations or commandbox-migrations. Recently I had to drop some tables and thought this would be easy with cfmigrations. So I fired up commandbox, and executed…
https://shiftinsert.nl/list-all-foreign-keys-in-sql-server/


Blog - David Byers - Framework Training – Part 1 – Learning How to develop using the ColdBox Framework
This is intended to be a three part series on my experience with ColdBox training from Ortus Solutions.
The first part of this series will be my history and thoughts on frameworks in general.
The second part will be my experience in attending Ortus Solutions “ColdBox, Zero to Hero” training as instructed by Gavin Pickin.
The third part of the series will be written after the training itself as a follow up to changes in my impressions of ColdBox and frameworks in general.
https://coldfusion.adobe.com/2020/10/framework-training-part-1-learning-develop-using-coldbox-framework/


Blog - David Byers - Framework Training – Part 2 – Learning How to develop using the ColdBox Framework
On October 8 and 9, 2020, I attended Ortus Solutions “Coldbox, Zero to Hero” training as instructed by Gavin Pickin.  I’ve seen this course offered around CF Summit in Las Vegas, and I’ve been wanting to attend, but frankly the $900 price tag stopped me for a while.  It wasn’t until lately that I decided to bite the bullet and pay the cost.  I’m a contractor, so my jobs don’t offer to send me to training.  It comes out of pocket.  I sucked it up… told the wife not to get me anything for Christmas, and bought my ticket.
https://coldfusion.adobe.com/2020/10/framework-training-part-2-learning-develop-using-coldbox-framework/


Blog - Ben Nadel - Using SMTP Headers To Send Custom MetaData Through Postmark In Lucee CFML 5.3.6.61
The other day, I took a look at using CFMailParam / custom SMTP headers to include debug data in outbound emails in ColdFusion. In the comments to that post, Aaron Terry mentioned that my approach was fine from a "generic" standpoint; but, that most of the Email SaaS (Software as a Service) providers include special functionality for this very purpose. And, in fact, he pointed me to Postmark's metadata documentation. It turns out, if I include SMTP headers with the prefix, X-PM-Metadata-, Postmark will parse and remove those headers before the email reaches the end-user. This is an awesome feature! And, one I wanted to try for myself in Lucee CFML 5.3.6.61.
https://www.bennadel.com/blog/3906-using-smtp-headers-to-send-custom-metadata-through-postmark-in-lucee-cfml-5-3-6-61.htm


Live Stream - Matthew Clemente - Adding a CFML Language Definition to Prism.js (Learning by Trial and Error) [Part 1]
Prism.js provides syntax highlighting for a lot of languages(234!), but somehow, CFML is not one of them. I'm going to try to add CFML support by setting up a new language definition. So tag along and let's see how far I get, having never worked with Prism.js before!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UriELwrCdM&feature=youtu.be


Blog - Ben Nadel - Getting MongoDB Database And Collection Names From The Connection String In Lucee CFML 5.3.6.61
At InVision, I'm working with Boaz Ruck on a little experiment: whereas our ColdFusion application would normally construct a MongoDB connection using a variety of individual values, the Data Services team would like to try providing the entire MongoDB connection configuration as a single environment variable. This way, the Data Service team could tweak the settings without having to touch the application code. This posed an interesting problem because the ColdFusion application is generally tightly coupled to the MongoDB implementation. As such, I needed to figure out how to access a MongoDB Collection using the Java driver without being able to hard-code the database name or the collection name. After some trial-and-error, I figured out how to extract this information from the ConnectionString object in Lucee CFML 5.3.6.61.
https://www.bennadel.com/blog/3905-getting-mongodb-database-and-collection-names-from-the-connection-string-in-lucee-cfml-5-3-6-61.htm


Tweet - Brad Wood - Richard Herbert suggestion makes it into CommandBox VNext
Thanks to a suggestion by @richardherbert CommandBox vNext will allow you to pipe into the stdin of native binaries so you can do tricks like
// Windows
#createguid | !clip
// Mac
#createguid | !pbcopy
Which would, of course, create a GUID & place it on your clipboard. #CFML
https://twitter.com/bdw429s/status/1314316638666330115
https://twitter.com/bdw429s


Blog - Steve Bryant - Thoughts on Caching Strategies
I've been thinking about caching strategies for different scenarios lately. I wanted to write down a some thoughts on what seem to have been working for me. Hopefully this will help me organize my thoughts and maybe others can help tell me if my thinking makes sense or if I am missing something.
http://www.bryantwebconsulting.com/blog/index.cfm/2020/10/7/caching-strategies


Blog - Ben Nadel - Including Custom SMTP Headers For Debugging Using CFMailParam In Lucee CFML 5.3.6.61
Recently at InVision, I've been digging into the new Message Streams / Broadcast Streams feature that Postmark is currently rolling-out. This feature allows Postmark to serve both Transactional emails as well as list-serve emails; and, might help me cater to a few needs of InVision's Enterprise customers. According to the Postmark documentation, you can choose the desired "message stream" by including the custom SMTP / Mail header, X-PM-Message-Stream. This got me thinking about custom email headers - a feature of the ColdFusion CFMail tag that I've never used before. It got me wondering if I could use the CFMailParam tag to inject debugging information right in my outbound emails in Lucee CFML 5.3.6.61.
https://www.bennadel.com/blog/3904-including-custom-smtp-headers-for-debugging-using-cfmailparam-in-lucee-cfml-5-3-6-61.htm


Video - Philippe Sambor - Building modern ColdFusion apps with Coldbox CFML framework
Free!
https://www.udemy.com/course/building-modern-coldfusion-apps-with-coldbox-cfml-framework/



CFML Jobs

Several positions available on https://www.getcfmljobs.com/
Listing over 24 ColdFusion positions from 15 companies across 12 locations in 5 Countries,since July 1st

8 new jobs this week.


Full-Time - ColdFusion Developer at Remote - United States
Posted Oct 10
https://www.getcfmljobs.com/jobs/index.cfm/united-states/ColdFusion-Developer-at-Remote/11122

Full-Time - ColdFusion Developer at Remote - United States
Posted Oct 10
https://www.getcfmljobs.com/jobs/index.cfm/united-states/ColdFusion-Developer-at-Remote/11124

Full-Time - Software Engineer - ColdFusion at Reno, NV - United States
Posted Oct 08
https://www.getcfmljobs.com/jobs/index.cfm/united-states/Software-Engineer-ColdFusion-at-Reno-NV/11120

Full-Time - Software Engineer - ColdFusion at Roseville, CA - United States
Posted Oct 08
https://www.getcfmljobs.com/jobs/index.cfm/united-states/Software-Engineer-ColdFusion-at-Roseville-CA/11121

Full-Time - Software Engineer - ColdFusion at Reno, NV - United States
Posted Oct 08
https://www.getcfmljobs.com/jobs/index.cfm/united-states/Software-Engineer-ColdFusion-at-Reno-NV/11123

Full-Time - Systems Analyst (Level-3) ColdFusion at Toronto, ON - Canada
Posted Oct 07
https://www.getcfmljobs.com/jobs/index.cfm/canada/Systems-Analyst-Level3-ColdFusion-at-Toronto-ON/11119

Full-Time - ColdFusion Developer - Contract at Toronto, ON - Canada
Posted Oct 06
https://www.getcfmljobs.com/jobs/index.cfm/canada/ColdFusion-Developer-Contract-at-Toronto-ON/11118

Full-Time - Coldfusion / Lucee Developer at London - United Kingdom
Posted Oct 06
https://www.getcfmljobs.com/jobs/index.cfm/united-kingdom/Coldfusion-Lucee-Developer-at-London/11117

Ortus is hiring:Senior ColdFusion CFML Developer

At Ortus you will be:
- Modernizing web applications and helping companies move out of legacy hell
- Teaming up with ColdFusion Experts in order to solve complex web development problems.
- Testing and integrating new web technologies in order to create custom business implementations
- Pushed to innovate constantly and create new solutions to web development problems
- Leading project teams that deliver software that matters

- US Timezone availability is a must
- US Citizen or Resident or Work Visa is a must
https://www.ortussolutions.com/about-us/careers


ForgeBox Module of the Week

OSGi bundle installer/loader for Lucee

By Julian Halliwell
A simple tool for installing OSGi bundles dynamically in Lucee Server (NB: version 5+ only)

This CFML component allows java libraries that have been packaged as OSGi bundles to be easily installed dynamically in Lucee 5+, avoiding the need to manually deploy them in your Lucee server before they can be used.

You can use it to load a class directly from a given local bundle without worrying about whether the bundle has been installed.

https://www.forgebox.io/view/lucee-osgiloader




VS Code Hint Tips and Tricks of the Week

Visual Code Release Parties

Join the VS Code team for the latest release

With the launch of v1.50 of Visual Studio Code, we want to celebrate with you! Join our team for a virtual release party, where we'll share our favorite features and answer your questions in a live Q&A.

https://code.visualstudio.com/events

Missed the last events? Catch the highlights on the YouTube channel.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLj6YeMhvp2S72rNFDW_b4W63qyKBBQ_JA



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


Newest supporters: Edgardo Cabezas, Jonas Erickson, Matthew Darby & Ross Phillips

Ben Nadel
Brett DeLine
Carl Von Stetten
Charlie Arehart
Da Li
Dan Card
Daniel Garcia
David Belanger
Didier Lesnicki
Don Bellamy
Edgardo Cabezas
Erick Hoffman
Gary Knight
Giancarlo Gomez
Jan Jannek
Jason Daiger
Jeff McClain
Jeremy Adams
Jonas Erickson
Jordan Clark
Joseph Lamoree
Kai Koenig
Laksma Tirtohadi
Mario Rodrigues
Matthew Darby
Matthew Clemente
Mingo Hagen
Ross Phillips
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