Following my previous post about setting up FusionReactor on Docker Swarm, we encountered an issue with deployments failing to report. After a dozen or so emails with the fantastic FusionReactor support team, everything is working again. Here's what I learned.

Moving a standard ColdFusion installation to Docker Swarm requires rethinking - and frequently rewiring - portions of our infrastructure. Today, that means reconfiguring how we deploy FusionReactor to monitor our applications.

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.