It's not difficult to use ColdFusion spreadsheet functions (e.g. spreadsheetNew() and cfspreadsheet) in Lucee. Nevertheless, I managed to make a handful of mistakes while implementing them. I've catalogued my missteps here, along with the approach that actually worked.
This will be old news - very old news - for some people. Today I learned the "other" way to add images to a Markdown document; instead of writing them inline, you can embed images reference-style.
I was very fortunate to attend my second Adobe ColdFusion Summit this year. Prep for speaking at the conference is one of the reasons I haven't been able to blog recently - I presented an updated version of a previous talk: send.Better() - Giving Email a REST (slides here).
One of the issues you need to tackle when deploying Lucee containers is automating the installation of server extensions; there are a few methods, each with its own tradeoffs. To the current list of approaches, I'm adding docker-lex-install, a CommandBox module I wrote to handle this process.
This post started as an investigation of how best to extract text from a PDF; it then turned into an exploration of PDFBox, lead me down the rabbit hole of PDF sanitization, and ultimately resulted in developing pdfbox.cfc.
This is the first post in a series about setting up and deploying Docker Swarm for production. We'll lay the foundation for future work by using a simple shell script to set up our servers on DigitalOcean.
I haven't had a lot of time to blog recently. Why? In a word: Docker. At work we're moving toward a fully containerized stack, from development to production, so I've needed to spend every free minute trying to learn the ins-and-outs of container orchestration. Two initial takeaways: 1) it's still not as easy as it could be, and 2) it's not as hard as some make it out to be.
Ok, the title isn't entirely accurate. The process discussed here isn't so much "building" a module as "adding ColdBox functionality" to an existing ForgeBox package - boxifying it, one might say. I've never built a ColdBox application, but I've been increasingly interested in the framework, so this was a helpful and straightfoward first step toward better understanding it.
I was lucky enough to attend (and speak) at this year's Into the Box conference in Houston, TX. The event is organized by Ortus Solutions, the team that created CommandBox, TestBox, and all other manner of Box products. Ortus is undeniably the leader in creating cutting edge CFML tooling and features, and I left the conference incredibly impressed at the work they're doing.
ForgeBox.io, in case you didn't know, is directory of CFML packages - bits of code both large and small - written and shared by the developer community to make all of our lives easier. I've written a number of open source projects hosted on Github, so I figured it was time that I began adding them to ForgeBox. For posterity (or just my own reference), here's the process.
