Adobe ColdFusion Summit 2026

AI coding tools are everywhere. GitHub Copilot has 15 million users, Claude Code hit $2.5 billion in revenue in nine months, and headlines say developers are about to be replaced. But what does the data actually say? In this session, we cut through the hype with real numbers and a security professional's perspective on what AI-generated code actually looks like in production, and why 45% of AI-generated code introduces OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities. The truth is that developers matter more than ever, but how you matter is changing. Walk away with a concrete action plan that increases your value, practical security practices that protect your applications, and the confidence that your domain knowledge, architectural judgment, and ColdFusion expertise are irreplaceable assets in the age of AI.

ColdFusion 2025 has been out for over a year now. If you're using it are you really taking advantage of all it offers? If you're still on 2023 or earlier, might there be more than the major new features that might entice you?

In this session, Charlie Arehart reprises his classic "hidden gems" approach to finding what's new that you might miss, like he's been doing since CF4.0.1. Some may be modest features that few would use, while others may be pretty big deals but which just don't get much press. There are always FAR more new things with each release than most people realize–usually several dozen, and CF2025 is no exception. And as always, there have been more changes in updates since its release.

Charlie will identify such things, highlighting some, as well as discussing edition differences, pricing, migration issues, and of course pointing to resources for learning more.

Still clinging to usernames and passwords like it’s 2004? This session is your gentle (but firm) intervention.

Modern authentication has evolved far beyond “Forgot Password?” emails and the sticky note under your keyboard. Today’s users expect seamless, secure, and, most importantly, low-friction login experiences. That means magic links that feel like wizardry, passkeys that eliminate passwords entirely, and single sign-on options that let Apple, Google, and Microsoft do the heavy lifting.

In this session, we’ll walk through the growing authentication toolbox available to ColdFusion applications and how to actually implement it without sacrificing your sanity. We’ll cover:

- Magic Link authentication flows (and how not to accidentally create a security nightmare)

- Passkeys and WebAuthn. What they are, how they work, and why passwords are on borrowed time

- “Login with” Apple, Google, and Microsoft. OAuth without the migraine

- 2FA/MFA options that users won’t immediately resent

- UX tradeoffs, recovery strategies, and edge cases nobody tells you about until production breaks at 2 AM

Expect practical architecture guidance, implementation patterns, and real-world lessons learned the hard way... including what happens when authentication flows collide with legacy systems, compliance requirements, and users who absolutely will click the wrong thing.

If you’re building or modernizing authentication in a ColdFusion app and want fewer passwords, fewer support tickets, and fewer security regrets, this session will help you get there, with minimal wizard robes required.

So you've looked at CF Components, and kind of understand the basics of how they work. Everyone says "frameworks are the way to go", but there's still a big knowledge gap. Each framework has its own terminology, so how do you know where verbiage for one begins and the other one ends? Is "Controller" a Framework-1 specific thing? What about a "Service Layer" or a "View"? There's very little documentation available about the "Model-View-Controller" pattern for ColdFusion that is not specific to a framework, and that's often what causes the confusion for people newer to OO development.

In this multi-stage talk we will go over the following:

- A basic application that's built using the Model-View-Controller design pattern, but does not use any specific framework to get there.

- When using the MVC pattern by itself may be enough for your app.

- Why going to a full fledged framework may be better, and how easy it is to get there, including real-world examples using a real framework you can download and use today.

Main takeaways:

- How do we go from procedural code and start writing Object Oriented code if we've never done it before?

- What's a Model? What's a View? What's a Controller?

- Are any of those terms specific to, say, Framework-1?

- Or are they generic OO terms?

- Is it any extra work to build an OO app instead of just doing things the "old" way?

- Let's look at an OO app both with and without a framework so we can see how similar they really are.

Adobe CFML introduces a powerful set of language enhancements, including improved Java interoperability, native support for Sets, extensive AI capabilities, enhanced exception handling, Query-of-Queries (QoQ) performance improvements, and several other developer-focused features designed to boost productivity, improve code readability, and support modern application development.

In this session, we’ll explore the latest additions to the CFML language, covering new syntax improvements, developer-friendly capabilities, performance-focused updates, and enhancements that simplify writing clean, maintainable, and scalable applications.

Whether you are modernizing existing applications or building new enterprise solutions, this talk will demonstrate how these advancements can streamline development workflows and elevate your overall CFML development experience. Join us for live demos, practical use cases, and a deep dive into the innovations shaping the future of Adobe CFML.

Deploying Adobe ColdFusion to Google Cloud Run is a game-changer for cost and scalability—but it’s just the beginning of the journey. In this session, we go beyond simple hosting to explore how ColdFusion 2025 can orchestrate a complete, modern cloud ecosystem without a total rewrite.

We will dissect CF-Brews, a reference architecture that proves ColdFusion can handle "Big Data" and AI workloads. You will learn how to:

- Scale: Leverage Cloud Run for serverless, cost-efficient hosting.

Analyze: Use AlloyDB to query 100 million+ records in milliseconds for real-time insights.

- Predict: Integrate Vertex AI (AutoML) to assess failure risks and drive proactive business logic.

- Assist: Build the "Brewery Assistant" using Generative AI to chat with technical manuals and live data.

Join us to see how you can use standard CFML to build a system that perceives, predicts, acts, and communicates—transforming your app into a modern intelligence platform.

What does it take to build intelligent, enterprise-ready AI applications? In this talk, we'll explore the platform powering ColdFusion AI and the building blocks behind it—from AI Services and MCP to document intelligence, RAG, vector stores, and tool integrations. You'll see how these capabilities come together to enable scalable, secure, and production-ready AI experiences.But we're not stopping there. We'll also take you on a journey into what's next—AI agents that orchestrate tasks, workflows with humans in the loop, multimodal intelligence, smarter guardrails and deep research capabilities. Consider this a sneak peek into the future of ColdFusion AI Platform.

AI tools are accelerating development and transforming workflows, but they’re also introducing a new class of security risks. In this session we’ll look at some of the real world security risks ColdFusion developers should be aware of in 2026. Most importantly we’ll also look at practical ways to reduce these risks.

Most legacy ColdFusion applications run critical business logic but rarely leverage the platform’s full potential.

ColdFusion has introduced powerful features over the years that many developers rarely use, leaving significant opportunities for improving performance, readability, and maintainability untapped.

This session explores high-impact, underused CFML capabilities such as higher-order functions, safe navigation operators, advanced queryExecute() patterns, built-in caching, parallel processing, and dynamic method handling — that can dramatically improve performance, readability, and maintainability.

Through a live refactoring demo of a legacy application module, attendees will learn how to safely modernize existing ColdFusion code without rewrites or framework migrations, using features already available in the platform.

Attendees will see practical, low-risk strategies to modernize production apps without rewrites, making this session immediately actionable for any CF developer.

Many legacy enterprise applications are trapped behind outdated jQuery & other legacy JS frontends. The standard advice of "just rewrite it" ignores the reality of business constraints. This talk bridges that gap by providing a highly educational look at *why* frontend architectures shifted, followed by a practical, open-source solution for ColdFusion developers. Drawing from Corbin Crutchley's experience writing *The Framework Field Guide* and maintaining massive JS ecosystem tools (Redux, TanStack), this talk focuses heavily on core concepts before introducing the tooling.

Join Mark Takata, Senior Technical Evangelist for Adobe ColdFusion, as he shows you how to find ROI from your AI stacks. We’ll look at model-sizing, hidden costs, and building the metrics which matter to you and your AI powered applications.

When ColdFusion servers crash, hang, or slow to a crawl, logs alone rarely tell the full story. This session walks through practical techniques for performing root cause analysis by analyzing heap dumps, thread dumps and other JVM metrics to diagnose and resolve server failures with confidence.

What if you could build a useful reporting app… without actually building a front end?

In this session, I’ll show you how I use Google Sheets as a lightweight “app” that talks directly to a ColdFusion server through APIs. We’ll walk through setting up a Sheet that can both send data to CF and pull data back in, so it becomes more than just a spreadsheet — it becomes part of your application.

From there, we’ll use Google Sheets’ built-in charts, filters, and sharing tools to spin up dashboards and reports with almost no design work. No custom UI. No charting library to wire up. Just practical, fast results.

If you’ve ever needed better reporting but didn’t want to spend days building screens for it, this approach might save you a lot of time.

The experiments are simple; the outcomes are not. In this session, senior leaders from a range of organizations and backgrounds discuss what it takes to connect AI to real business and operational data while meeting expectations for safety, reliability, and accountability. The conversation covers what “production” means in practice, how teams build and run these systems with discipline, and how hiring, roles, and ways of working are evolving in 2026. The opening segment is moderated, and a substantial portion of the time is reserved for audience Q&A audience so you can connect the discussion to your own stack, roadmaps, and constraints.

As Adobe’s Senior Director of Education Initiatives, he spends a considerable amount of time teaching, talking, and writing about creativity and digital literacy and the future of education, and provides feedback to help shape the future direction of Adobe products. And, in his spare time, Ben leads a high-school robotics program at a local Michigan high-school.

Ben is the author of over 40 books, including the world’s best-selling SQL book, as well as titles on topics as diverse as Adobe Express in the classroom, creative problem-solving using Python for game development, Regular Expressions, and mobile and web development.

Over a million copies of his books are in print in English, and titles have been translated into 16 additional languages. Many of these titles are used as textbooks in colleges and universities worldwide. Through his books and videos Ben has taught coding skills to over a million people.

Ben has decades of experience in the tech space in product design and development, support, training, and marketing. Ben is also a successful entrepreneur with experience creating, building, and selling start-ups. He is a sought-after public speaker, a writer and blogger, and he presents on education and development topics worldwide.

Now that you can rapidly develop any AI feature you want to in Adobe ColdFusion... native LLM integration, RAG, MCP-powered agents, built-in guardrails and monitoring... the constraint isn't capability anymore. It's judgment. Which AI features should you actually build? How do you weigh ROI against compliance and risk exposure? And how do you run them responsibly once they're in production?

This session is the business and governance companion to CF's new AI capabilities. Drawing on AI experience across regulated public-sector and private enterprise environments, you'll get a practical playbook for picking AI use cases that survive contact with reality, building governance that doesn't strangle innovation, and putting guardrails in place before an incident forces the conversation. You'll leave with a framework for evaluating AI opportunities against business value, risk, and operational fit... and a clearer view of what separates AI work that scales, from work that barely makes it past the demo.

This presentation offers a deep dive into the transformative potential of AI in application monitoring. We explore the shift from traditional reactive approaches to proactive, AI-driven monitoring. Highlighting FusionReactor's OpsPilot capabilities, we discuss how AI, supported by dynamic application instrumentation, offers real-time insights and anticipates problems before they impact performance. Join us as we unveil the future of monitoring, where AI simplifies complexity, enhances problem-solving, and paves the way for self-driving observability.

ColdFusion apps deliver reliably, but modern UIs often need more interactivity than server-rendered HTML provides. The strangler fig pattern bridges this gap by letting you migrate frontend slices one at a time. In this talk, we'll explore how to introduce React into a ColdFusion app along natural domain boundaries. We'll walk through picking your first slice, wiring React to your CF backend, and scaling up gradually. We'll also cover why React fits this pattern especially well as it's designed for gradual adoption, has the largest frontend ecosystem, and uses a component model familiar to anyone who's built CFCs.

Building an AI Agent proof of concept is easy. Getting it production ready with enterprise grade security, guardrails, and most importantly responsible AI practices is where things get tricky. In this session you will learn how to build AI Agents with your existing applications and expose your ColdFusion applications, API's and logic as tools for agent consumption.

While CF2025 has been out since Feb 2025, many orgs may still only now be considering moving to it, and whether from CF2023 CF2021, CF2018, or earlier. What compatibility issues might trip you up? What will NEED to change, or what mitigation options might exist to negate such need--and at what tradeoff? And what tools and resources might help? The talk will focus on the differences between CF2025 and each of those CF versions folks may be migrating from.

In the session, veteran CF troubleshooter Charlie Arehart will share from his experience helping folks make such migrations over the past year+ (and for years before with the previous CF versions), in quick engagements as an independent consultant or while providing free assistance to the CF community. (Note that he has previously given related talks on installing CF--as well as on migrating CF admin settings among releases, which you should consider viewing also at carehart.org/presentations.)

Many ColdFusion developers use DataTables for rich tabular interfaces, but most examples rely on client-side datasets that don’t scale. This session demonstrates a practical, production-ready approach to integrating jQuery DataTables with ColdFusion using server-side processing.

Attendees will learn how to build a secure ColdFusion CFC endpoint that supports paging, sorting, and global search while preventing injection vulnerabilities. The session covers safe ORDER BY whitelisting, parameterized filtering, intelligent caching strategies, and row-limit enforcement to protect against abuse. It also addresses recent ColdFusion runtime changes affecting remote method argument matching and how to properly handle DataTables’ nested request parameters.

On the front end, we’ll configure DataTables in server-side mode with Bootstrap styling, column mapping, and custom renderers—demonstrating a clean separation between UI and backend responsibilities.

Participants will leave with a reusable architectural pattern suitable for enterprise ColdFusion applications handling large datasets.

Claude Code AI Agents from Anthropic have been coding up a storm, but are they being helpful or harmful? Setting guardrails and guidelines for AI Agents are the most important thing you can do to get the most productive and helpful results. Come find out how to use the CLAUDE.md file to get the best results from ColdFusion AI Agents.

Every ColdFusion developer has been there: you’re tasked with updating a legacy codebase where a single change in a CFC might unexpectedly break a scheduled task or a reporting module miles away.

The result? “Deployment Anxiety” and a release calendar that moves at a snail’s pace.

In this session, I will share our team’s journey of breaking free from the “Big Bang” release cycle using Feature Flags. We will walk through the evolution of our strategy—starting with a simple, homegrown CFML database toggle and eventually scaling to a sophisticated implementation using Unleash.

Key takeaways from this session include:

- The “Safety Net” Strategy: How to wrap high-risk code in flags to ensure you can “kill” a failing feature in milliseconds without a rollback.

- Testing in Production: Why the best staging environment is actually production (if you have the right toggles in place).

- The Homegrown vs. Pro Debate: A look at our migration from a custom FeatureService.cfc to an enterprise flag management platform.

- Gradual Rollouts: How to release a new module to 5% of your users to monitor performance before a global launch.

- Practical CFML Examples: See code snippets of how to implement flag checks within your logic and how to handle “flag debt” so your code stays clean.

Whether you are maintaining a 15-year-old legacy app or building a modern CFML API, you’ll leave this session with a roadmap to release faster, safer, and with significantly less stress.

As ColdFusion applications grow, traditional scheduled task-driven batch processing can quickly become a bottleneck. What starts as a simple, reliable approach can evolve into a system constrained by time windows, limited throughput, and increasing operational complexity. In this session, we’ll walk through how one of our legacy batch processing systems, which was hitting the limits of what could be processed in a 24-hour cycle, was rebuilt into a scalable, parallelized system using AWS SNS and SQS.

Search is evolving beyond exact text matching. Vector stores and embeddings allow applications to understand data based on meaning rather than keywords alone.

In this session, we’ll explore how semantic search and vector queries can be used inside ColdFusion applications to solve practical search and retrieval problems. Through real-world examples, we’ll look at how vector embeddings work, when they are useful, and how they can be integrated into modern ColdFusion workflows.

The focus will be on building search experiences that help users find relevant information even when their query doesn’t exactly match the stored text; whether that’s logs, documentation, support content, or other text-based data.

We work in an industry where pretty much everything needs to be backed up. Our code. Our databases. Our webservers. Our file servers. Even our network configurations. Everything.

The worst time to find out you’ve got a problem with your backup system is when everything has gone sideways and you need to bring it all back online RIGHT NOW.

Can you do it?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In this session I’ll hopefully convince you that you don’t know if your Backup is alive or dead if you haven’t tried to Restore it.

In this session, we will explore the idea of ingesting a codebase into a vector database. We will then use some of the new AI features in ColdFusion to interact with the codebase; essentially, we will treat the codebase as a "database" and have ColdFusion return information about your codebase by using prompts. In the process, we will see the tool calls, MCP usage, and LLM calls and other AI features in action using ColdFusion.

Everyone is buzzing about coding tools, but what about the less common administration tasks like tuning database performance, fixing intermittent errors, finding and correcting security vulnerabilities, or capacity planning? AI can help in those areas too! In this session we will dive deep into Claude Cowork and explore its capabilities to assist with these tasks and more to unlock massive gains for even the most experience developers and administrators

Join Adeyemi Richards, senior polymath developer and educator, as he explains multi-threading in client-side JavaScript and compares/contrasts server-side ColdFusion asynchronous threaded workflows. He’ll explain the benefits and downsides of each and describe how to move client-side worker-based JS threading to performant ColdFusion Asynchronous programming using the new runAsync features and chaining.

Your web browser can do more than you think.

HTML, JavaScript, and CSS continue to evolve with powerful new features that make it easier than ever to build modern web applications — often without relying on third party libraries. Instead of adding jQuery and dozens of plugins that increase complexity and hurt performance, learn how to use modern browser capabilities that are already built in.

In this session, we’ll explore some of the latest additions to HTML, JavaScript, and CSS that can immediately improve your codebase with zero installation or configuration required.

And yes — everything covered is fully compatible with your ColdFusion applications.

Target Audience

Front-end developers familiar with the basics of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript who want to level up their skills using modern browser functionality.

Assumed Knowledge

Attendees should be comfortable with HTML and CSS fundamentals. Familiarity with JavaScript concepts such as functions, scope, callbacks, and classes will also be helpful.

Main Takeaways

Use JavaScript to control gamepads, create music, manage video quality, push server messages, and more

Learn modern CSS features such as if() statements, grid lanes, and time-relative pseudo-selectors

Create your own custom HTML tags

Explore testing approaches for client-side code along with additional tips and best practices