I only work with Lucee, but I wanted to get the certification for Adobe ColdFusion specialist (hope I can ask a question about that here, since it has to do with Lucee as well). We are gonna do that as a team with two juniors as well, so they get a good start. The problem is: you need to have Adobe ColdFusion Server and the Builder IDE installed. We don’t want that, since we all work on Lucee and use Visual Studio Code. But they say it is a requirement. Does anyone know if we can get away with not installing these?
This is my opinion: Because Adobe is the entity who issues these certificates for their products, they can demand whatever they want to do so. If it’s a requirement to use those products, then that is what it is, and they totally have the rights to do so. I don’t think there is a legal correct way to get an Adobe certification for Adobe Coldfusion Products by using Lucee only.
If you are using Lucee only, what do you need an Adobe Coldfusion certification for? If you want to have an Adobe Certification you must comply with Adobe requirements for that certificate.
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Adding to Andreas’ always-helpful answer, I’ll note as well that this “requirement” to install cf and cfb is not something to be dissuaded from due to cost: you can install cf for free (the developer edition) and cf also (more in a moment).
More than that, when I sat in on the public cert training program at Cf summit last year (offered to those who paid to take the cert exam), they had folks run it via Commandbox. So it’s a modest effort for a current Commandbox user to “pollute” their machine with CF long enough to get through the cert training.
As for CFBuilder, that too is now free and offered as a vscode extension. (The old Eclipse-based version is retired.) Here too, one could easily temporarily disable a favored cfml vscode extension to avoid conflict. But honestly I don’t recall call the exam prep training session (and included hours of helpful training videos) really leveraging anything about cf builder specifically, which is a pro or con depending on one’s perspective.
To be clear, NO installation OF ANYTHING is required to TAKE the cert exam. It’s just an online exam (open book/search anything you want, at that). But it’s not as trivial as it was in years past. And those training materials (live at the summits or recorded and online, available for a year to those who pay to take cert exam) are quite good. This is not your father’s cf cert and old “fast track to cf” training.
Indeed, I’ll go so far as to say that most Lucee folks would probably benefit from nearly all of that training (despite whatever acf specifics there may be), but that’s just one opinion. It would certainly be helpful to hear from any other Lucee users who took the training and/or exam. I realize the chances of that may be slim.
But your focus was the software, and I hope I answered that clearly enough for you. Let us know if any question remains.
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In my previous reply, I said originally that I didn’t recall the cert exam training “leveraging anything about cf specifically”. I meant there to say “cfb” (cf builder), as that was what that paragraph was discussing.
I have revised the sentence there, but for the sake of those who may get emailed replies here, I thought this to be important to clarify as a new comment and not JUST as an edit.
Thanks for your always helpful replies. Indeed, our wish for certification is one of personal challenge and curiousity, but as mentioned also for two juniors starting with CFML (which is awesome). Doing this together is also beneficial. Obviously we don’t really mind installing something (and indeed Adobe has the ‘right’ to ask this), but if it is not actually required. We already talked about using separate machines so as to not pollute the development machines. Thanks again for your insights!
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By the way, good to hear the training materials are better than they used to be. Looking forward to learning more!
Charlie, thank you for your clarification and insights. I want to get one of those Certifications myself soon.
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I wonder how chatGPT would do on the exam? Might be interesting to test the different LLMs on such a test. Maybe get them certified!
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Why bother at all?
Just go pick up any photo editing program and insert your name on a certificate. Save yourself nearly a hundred and fifty dollars for an equally lost effort.
Hmmm, do you really mean like forgering a certicate that is issued by a private or public entity? As far as I know, that is illegal in many places all over the world. If you issue a certificate by yourself (as being a private certificate issuer yourself) that is another story. Such a certificate would have no value. But placing your name with a photo on a certificate issued by a third party entity(who you are not), that may be document foregering and subject to sensitive penalties.
Please do not overthink my sarcasm too much.
)
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Sorry for misunderstanding:)
Sorry buddy. I didn’t feel like ranting on the uselessness cheating what in essence oneself.
I meant (referring to chatgpt tasking the test) I would love to see how well it performs now, and test every once in a while to see how it is getting better. Since I use it a lot now to help. It is a lot better with plain html, css, javascript , jquery and bootstrap, but not the best with lucee yet.
For example, It generated a nice script for me in lucee, that exports a table to a csv file, but the nestling of the tags was wrong and it threw an error. I told it of the error and it fixed it… then it worked. So took 5 minutes to do something that would have taken me 15 minutes… but would have been 1 minute without the problems!
I have taken the Certification test twice and was certified on CF 5 and CF 10. The test are very hard and one has to really know the material. While I did feel a personal accomplishment the certification has never helped me in getting a job. None of the employers seemed to care if I was certified by Adobe or not. My CFML career spans 25 years as a CF developer at 10 different employers none of them cared about certification.
To expand on Andrew’s helpful comment, things are quite different since your experience then–and for the better. To be clear, there was a period of several years after that (cf10/2012) with no Adobe cf cert at all. (And indeed, there was–and remains–a trend devaluing certs in general).
But first the exam now is quite different (and still very challenging).
More important the registration fee gets you the several hours of online training, which again is quite good. (And if you do it when attending an Adobe conference where they offer it, you get a full day of live training also.)
And for many, just getting that training is worth it (and the test, a useful adjunct), even if no employer cares about the cert itself. And it’s a bargain as cert prices go, let alone certs that include training
(Adobe charges US$100-200 on average, varying up and down over time).
Finally, it would seem to benefit someone using only Lucee nearly as much as a person using only CF. But some may want to hear more opinion on that from lucee folks who take the modern cert training of recent years.
Charlie, I agree. We do the training, not for future jobs, but for updating and testing our knowledge and for having a teams goal. Even one of the product owners is doing the training to get a better sense of what the developers are doing. I just started myself (20+ years CFML) with the training, I will give an update on our experience here in a couple of days!
Marcel, great to hear on all counts.
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