CFSummit 2022 Recap

Well, that’s another CF Summit in the books, and the first in-person event in 2 years. It was an absolute joy and thrill to be able to see all of you that made it to the event this year in person. I just wanted to take a moment and re-live a bit of the fun, give thanks to folks and give some updates. We started things off on Monday morning, 9am, with a heck of a thing: me on stage, […]

ACF Builder Extension: Quick Fix

Adobe ColdFusion Builder Extension for Visual Studio Code “Quick Fix” Sometimes we all need a helping hand. Wait. Does an IDE even have a hand? Anyway, imagine if your VS Code was able to flag issues with your code, make suggestions, but then even make those suggestions come to life! The Builder extension for VS Code includes a “quick fix” capability. Let’s say you’re writing a bit of CF script, like so: Whoops! There’s a component name mismatch. Apparently, “mycfc1” […]

ACF Builder Extension: Code Refactoring

Adobe ColdFusion Builder Extension for Visual Studio Code “Code Refactoring” What is “code refactoring”? Is it a cool new UK reality show where you win prizes by changing up your applications to work better? No, but if any tv producers from the UK read this and are interested, call me. Code Refactoring, put simply, is improving your code by altering things like naming conventions, readability, and other factors that make maintainability of your code better over the long run. This […]

ACF Builder Extension: Code Assist

Adobe ColdFusion Builder Extension for Visual Studio Code “Code Assist” Often, the main reason we use a purpose-built IDE for our development work is for getting help with things like code completion, hinting, scaffolding and other similar features. This is often a big differentiator from more simplified editors such as, for example, Notepad. VS Code comes out of the box with many powerful features, but the CF extension adds specific code assist features for Adobe ColdFusion code. One of the […]

ACF Builder Extension: Security Analyzer

Adobe ColdFusion Builder Extension for Visual Studio Code “Security Code Analyzer” Security is a critical aspect of programming. The Security Analyzer is a powerful, useful tool for CFML developers to use to help prevent vulnerable code in their application. It can warn about potential threats, give you an idea on the level of the threat, and suggest potential solutions to the issues. As of CF2021, Security Analyzer functionality is available and valid for ALL licensed versions of ColdFusion (in the […]

ACF Builder Extension: PMT Code Profiler

Adobe ColdFusion Builder Extension for Visual Studio Code “PMT Code Profiler Report Integration” The Performance Monitoring Toolkit (PMT) provides critical performance data for your running Adobe ColdFusion servers. It monitors all transactions and captures a variety of data metrics including response and run times, errors, and other data. The Builder Extension provides the ability to view data from the PMT server in a report. * It should be noted, to get full functionality from the extension, a running Adobe ColdFusion […]

ACF Builder Extension: RDS Integration

Adobe ColdFusion Builder Extension for Visual Studio Code “RDS – Remote Development Server” RDS has helped ColdFusion developers with their development workflows for a very long time, and ever since Adobe ColdFusion Builder version 1.0 (code named “Bolt”) CF developers have been able to interact with various aspects of their development environment using RDS. In the ACF Builder Extension, this is also the case, with powerful capabilities that become available when using & logging the extension into RDS. * It […]

ACF Builder Extension: Server Panel

Adobe ColdFusion Builder Extension for Visual Studio Code “Adobe ColdFusion Server Panel” One of the incredible differentiating features of the Builder Extension is the ability to setup & control your servers directly from VS Code. This was a very popular feature in ColdFusion Builder (Eclipse) and provides nearly identical functionality here. * It should be noted, to get full functionality from the extension, a running Adobe ColdFusion server (2016,2018 or 2021+) is required. In the left-hand pane of the CF […]

CLI Installation of ColdFusion for lower memory use

One of the key feature updates of CF2021 was the addition of modularity to the server. No longer were you limited to just installing the “whole kit and caboodle”, now you could pick and choose your connectors and packages, allowing you a leaner installation. You could, of course, use the GUI installer to get everything in place, then remove the things you didn’t need. But the other way to get things in place is to use the Command Line Interface(CLI) […]

Code Snippet: Datatables from CFQuery JSON returntype

Hey fellow CF fans, it is Monday, and that means another blog entry. This time I’m throwing together a little code snippet that uses a little-known feature of CFQuery that was included in CF2021 but rarely talked about. As you might know, when Adobe ColdFusion returns a query, it returns it in a special style of struct, which you can iterate over and just generally use to display data, do calculations, the whole bit. But sometimes, you just want to […]

Using CFImage to create CAPTCHAS

Quick hit blog post here, did you know that ColdFusion can generate CAPTCHA images for you? While there are, of course, other CAPTCHA image generators & frameworks out there, if you’re just looking for a simple solution, you’ve already got one built in to CF. Consider the following code: <cfscript> cfimage(action=”captcha”, text=”OMGWHAT”, difficulty=”medium”, fontSize=”18″); </cfscript> This code would generate a randomly styled CAPTCHA image, similar to this: ColdFusion supports different difficulties, font-sizes and fonts, and of course you can dynamically […]

Comparing Adobe ColdFusion Enterprise API Manager to 3rd Party Options

One of the big myths about ColdFusion Enterprise is how “expensive” it is. Now, it could be argued that any programming language that costs more than $0 is “expensive”, as generally languages are free to use. But, of course, Adobe ColdFusion isn’t “just” a language. It is an entire ecosystem of functionality, including an incredibly useful administrator, performance monitoring toolkit and (if you use Enterprise), the API Manager. Many folks have covered the fantastic features of the API Manager, but […]