Articles
Sometimes, I write about ColdFusion.
ColdFusion has been a huge part of my career, so I occasionally write about the parts that interest me, confuse me, annoy me, or save me from yelling into the void. These articles cover real-world development, practical implementation notes, platform features, and the occasional hard-earned lesson from building things with CFML.
Building a Guardrailed AI Translation Pipeline with ColdFusion’s Native AI APIs
5 October 2026
Translate One Field
Before we build a translation pipeline, we need one reliable model call, and somewhere sensible to put it.
8 Oct 2026
Deciding What Needs Translation
The model can translate a field. Now I need to stop asking it to translate the same field every time somebody changes a comma.
12 Oct 2026
Making the Model Return Data I Can Trust
Use ColdFusion’s native schema guardrails to get structured translations, then check that every field and placeholder survived the trip.
15 Oct 2026
Translating Long Content Without Losing the Plot
Split long content into manageable pieces, validate each translation, and keep incomplete results out of the database.
19 Oct 2026
The Model Doesn’t Get a Publish Button
Draft, review, and publish AI translations without letting the model decide what goes live.
22 Oct 2026
Take the Translation Job Out of the Browser
Run translation in the background, retry it without a stampede, and find failures without putting page content in a log.
Calling AWS SDK v2 Directly from CFML
21 Sep 2026
Loading Java Without Setting Fire to the Classloader
Load the AWS SDK for Java into ColdFusion and build the shared foundation for direct browser uploads, image moderation, and domain management.
24 Sep 2026
Moving Files Through Amazon S3 Directly from CFML
Let ColdFusion authorize the upload while the browser sends the file directly to a private Amazon S3 bucket without it touching your CF Server.
28 Sep 2026
Moderating Uploaded Images with Amazon Rekognition
Keep newly uploaded images private until Amazon Rekognition and our application agree that they should be published.
1 Oct 2026
Managing DNS Records
Create, track, and remove application-owned domain records without giving visitors unrestricted control over the internet.
Native Passkeys in Adobe ColdFusion 2025 Series
4 September, 2026
Part 1: Registering Your First Passkey
Register your first passkey with Adobe ColdFusion 2025, connect it to an existing user, and avoid several security mistakes waiting patiently in the shadows.
8 September 2026
Part 2: Authenticating Users with Passkeys
Turn a stored passkey into a real sign-in flow with safe session creation, useful failure handling, and a way for users to manage their credentials.
11 September 2026
Part 3: Moving Passkeys to a Central Authentication Origin
Move passkeys to a central authentication origin without confusing browsers, breaking relying party rules, or accidentally building a phishing system.
15 September 2026
Part 4: Running Behind a Load Balancer
Make passkeys survive reverse proxies, multiple ColdFusion nodes, shared challenge storage, forwarded headers, and infrastructure decisions returning for revenge.
ColdFusion AI 101 Series
June 22, 2026
AI 101 for ColdFusion Developers: Before We Write the First Line of Code
A practical, jargon-light introduction to what LLMs are, what they are not, and how ColdFusion developers can start using AI without mistaking the robot for the application.
June 24, 2026
ColdFusion AI Hello World: Making the Robot Say Something Useful
A hands-on first step into ColdFusion AI, using ChatModel() to send a prompt, get a response, and understand where simple stateless AI calls fit before things get complicated.
June 26, 2026
Giving Your ColdFusion AI a Memory: Sessions, Preferences, Windows, and the Joy of Not Becoming a Gossip Appliance
How to move beyond stateless AI calls by giving your ColdFusion assistant short-term memory, user-specific context, and preferences without accidentally turning it into a cross-user gossip appliance.
June 28, 2026
Giving Your ColdFusion AI Tools: Letting the Robot Use Your CFCs Without Handing It a Flamethrower
Letting your AI assistant call real ColdFusion application logic through carefully constrained CFC tools, while keeping validation, authorization, and production safety exactly where they belong: in your code.
June 30, 2026
Adding MCP to ColdFusion AI: Giving the Robot a Passport
MCP lets your ColdFusion AI assistant connect to external tools, prompts, and resources through a standard protocol, without pretending the robot should be trusted with every system it can reach.
July 2, 2026
Adding RAG to ColdFusion AI: Giving the Robot an Open-Book Test
RAG lets your ColdFusion AI assistant answer from your own documents instead of guessing, while still respecting permissions, freshness, source quality, and the basic rule that the robot only reads what ColdFusion allows.
July 6, 2026
Adding Guardrails to ColdFusion AI: Keeping the Robot Out of Trouble
How to validate, block, redact, and safely fail AI inputs and outputs before your helpful assistant becomes a compliance incident with a loading spinner.
JULY 8, 2026
ColdFusion AI Cheat Sheet
A quick reference for the core ColdFusion AI concepts, when to use them, and what to watch for.
Building a Slack-Backed Support Chat in ColdFusion
Part 1
Why I Let My Users Talk to Slack Instead of Building an Admin Console
Stop building admin consoles your support team will never use. Here’s how Slack became the UI for our ColdFusion support chat instead.
PART 2
Why I Used Server-Sent Events Instead of WebSockets
Think every realtime app needs WebSockets? Mine didn’t. Here’s why Server-Sent Events were the simpler, more reliable choice for ColdFusion.
PART 3
Designing the Conversation Data Model
A good chat starts with a great data model. Design conversations, messages, and Slack threads that won’t haunt Future You in production.
PART 4
Getting Slack Ready Before You Write Any Code
Before writing a single line of CFML, get Slack configured the right way. Bots, permissions, threads, secrets, and the setup tutorials usually skip.
PART 5
Posting ColdFusion Messages into Slack Threads
Build a reusable Slack integration in ColdFusion. Post messages, create threads, store thread IDs, and lay the foundation for production-ready chat.
PART 6
Receiving Slack Events and Verifying Requests
Securely receive Slack events in ColdFusion by verifying signatures, rejecting replay attacks, handling duplicate deliveries, and queueing webhooks for reliable processing.
PART 7
Turning Slack Events into Customer Conversations
Slack received the reply. Your customer did not. Part 7 turns queued Slack events into support messages, maps threads and users, prevents duplicates, and pushes replies live to the customer’s browser.
PART 8
Building for Failure
Production will fail. Part 8 shows how queues, idempotency, retries, dead-letter tables, logging, and recovery keep a ColdFusion Slack integration working when the real world gets involved.
PART 9
The Complete Reference Implementation
A complete, production-ready Slack support chat for ColdFusion. Download the reference implementation, add your Slack credentials, run the SQL, and have a working Page-to-Slack system in minutes.
In My Not-So-Humble Opinion
AI Can Write the Code. Can You Solve the Problem?
AI is changing what makes a developer valuable. It’s time our hiring process evolved beyond a trivia contest with health benefits.
Four Things Adobe Could Do Tomorrow That Would Make ColdFusion Stronger
Adobe has done a commendable job modernizing ColdFusion. The next challenge isn’t the language... it’s growing the community around it.
AI Is a Pencil. Learn How to Hold It.
AI didn’t invent incompetence. It just gave incompetence a faster keyboard. Let’s talk about why AI makes people cringe, and why they’re only half right.
Why “Welcome to the Modern World.” Might Be the Most Unhelpful Thing You Can Say to a Developer
So you were just welcomed to “the modern world.” Before you smile and nod, let’s unpack why “it’s old” isn’t an engineering argument, and how to respond without flipping a desk.
Code Monkey Chronicles
August 7, 2026
Running Adobe ColdFusion on ARM: An Adventure in Unsupported Territory
I tried to move Adobe ColdFusion to AWS Graviton. ColdFusion worked. The connector didn’t. Then CommandBox made the whole problem disappear.