Into the Box 2018 - What a Time to Be a CFML Developer

April 8, 2018
CFML Into the Box

I'm home after attending Into the Box 2018 in Houston, Texas and what an awesome experience it was.

I want to start off by saying THANK YOU to Luis and the Ortus Solutions team who put together a wonderful event and, of course, the speakers who presented some cool and resourceful topics.

It's always nice to catch up with old friends and meet new ones but it's even better when the content is ridiculously good! This was an interesting event for me as it was quite refreshing to see modern content and immerse myself with people who worked and understood those standards. I'm sure we were all there to learn new things but the general level of knowledge was extremely welcoming.

Some Things That Stuck Out:

Relevance!

I write 12-year-old code by day and write/blog about [insert current year] code by night, so this conference was up my alley in all the right ways. I left with things to convince my boss to try and a better understanding of how to use some of the tools I've been wanting to implement in other ways.

  • Raymond Camden presented on Progressive Web Applications. I've been working on an application like this for about a year now and it was nice to receive some more centralized information on the topic.
  • Luis Majano presented on HMVC applications using ColdBox 5 and Brad Wood presented on moving legacy applications to ColdBox and on WireBox basics (among other topics). These are hot topics for me as I would love to see projects at work move in this direction. Specifically making use of the modularity and API features available in ColdBox 5. As someone who typically uses FW/1 to get the job done, this stuff is looking to be one hell of a feature-rich toolset.
  • Nolan Erck talked about Vue.js and I am now in love with the framework. I've been on the fence with the whole "should I use Angular/React/Vue/etc." debate and I now have a chosen path for a current project.

New Toys!

While they're not so new to me, I think Eric Peterson's qb and Quick libraries are the bee's knees. It was nice to see them get some well-deserved spotlight. qb is a query builder DSL that supports 4 major database grammars in one easy to use dialect and Quick is an ORM to kill all bad CF ORMs. I've blogged in the past about integrating qb with FW/1 and I've made attempts to wire up Quick in the same fashion but haven't had the best luck (so far). Since I intend to give ColdBox another go, I look forward to making use of both libraries. CF ORM has burned me so many times that I gave up on it long ago but Quick has rekindled my interest.

The Future:

While I've been a CommandBox user from day 1 and have made use of other *box libraries, I've never been a real fan of ColdBox. If anyone knows me, I'm a heavy FW/1 user. I code in it literally every day and blog fairly regularly on random gems about it, so maybe there is some bias :), but I've never had a reason not to like ColdBox. I just never had a need to use it. After attending this conference, I've gotta say, it really opened my mind to the wide potential that the ColdBox platform has evovled into and it's really exciting.

I'll be poking around and most likely blogging along the way so cheers to everyone involved and happy coding.

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