How to modernize your application with APIs – ColdFusion Summit 2020 Presentation

I presented “How to modernize your application with APIs” to the 2020 ColdFusion Summit today. There were over 5,000 registrants, and the recordings for all sessions will be made available for free to the public.
The presentation’s main goal was to set the strategy on how to modernize existing applications to meet the latest expectations of users, business partners, and technical platforms. I’ll avoid a full rehash here. Once I have the recording link, it’ll I’ll add it to this post.

Summary

It is possible to modernize and extend existing applications to meet modern expectations without scrapping and rewriting. Unfortunately, some in our industry aren’t comfortable using technologies outside their preferred stack and will recommend scrapping a working, existing application and attempt to rewrite the application from scratch in their preferred platform. This strategy is the right one only when the original application’s platform is obsolete, meaning not functional. Else, it is advantageous to keep the original application rather than pay in time, money, and complexity, just to have the same value as before.

The right approach is to encapsulate the existing application and create defined entry/exit points that other applications will use. The outcome means other applications can use the business logic in place without requiring reimplementation. My presentation discusses the common topics you should consider when evaluating modernization strategies. I also go into tactical considerations you should be aware of when making APIs from ColdFusion applications. 

Slide Deck

You can download the slide deck How to modernize your application with APIs. The slide deck is about 14MB and is in PDF format. 

Recording

I will post the recording link here once the ColdFusion Summit team finishes their editing and publishing tasks.

Need Advice? Have Questions?

Modernization is a topic I enjoy discussing. If you need advice or have questions about the material in my presentation or discuss your specific application and the pros and cons of different modernization approaches, please contact me via Twitter or by the contact form on this website.