When Bruce Trevarthen was just 22 years old, he decided to start his own business. He wanted to challenge the status quo and develop technology solutions that help businesses thrive. When a developer at his company introduced him to Adobe ColdFusion, he was hooked.

“I fell in love with ColdFusion from the beginning,” says Trevarthen. “It’s so elegant and readable compared to other languages. You can pick up ColdFusion quickly and start expanding upon it to deliver fantastic results for clients.”

Trevarthen brought his love for ColdFusion into his newest company, LayerX Group. Founded in 2006, LayerX aims to bring groundbreaking, emergent technologies to New Zealand businesses. The company originally focused on bringing custom ideas to life for customers, including design and development of electronics and firmware, web and mobile apps, and software. The company later refocused its priorities around developing its own portfolio of products, including the vGRID Service Provider Platform.

Backed by a mature portfolio of solutions, LayerX has started going back to its roots, taking on bespoke software and app projects for clients. “We’re in a great position where we can pick really interesting projects,” says Trevarthen. “It’s exciting for us because we’re always doing new things for our customers.”

Trevarthen believes in using the best platform or framework for each project, so the company works regularly with C#, Python, Java, and numerous other technologies. But for most web and client apps, the platform of choice at LayerX remains ColdFusion.

“When you’re creating mission-critical apps for your company, you want to build it on an enterprise platform with excellent stability and security that you can trust,” says Trevarthen. “Other frameworks can’t compare with the depth of functionality that we get from Adobe ColdFusion.”

Unbeatable development speed with powerful functionality

One of the best advantages to working with ColdFusion is rapid development. According to Trevarthen, the development speed comes from several different angles.

First is the speed of the platform itself. Adobe ColdFusion comes with a rich selection of out-of-the-box capabilities, from its API management platform to the built-in WebSocket framework. Adobe engineers work on security to keep application servers protected. In-depth breakpoint debugging provides insight into how the application is running that helps developers identify areas for change faster. ColdFusion easily integrates with Java, Python, or any other script as needed, extending capabilities even further.

“ColdFusion is language that is both lightweight and has a lot of depth,” says Trevarthen. “We love how flexible it is. If you want to go really deep and make the entire application strict typed and object-oriented, you can. But if you want to do something quick and just throw down some code to add functionality, you can do that too.”

Trevarthen also praises the speed that comes from having a strong community to lean on. The active ColdFusion community shares insights, snippets, and frameworks that developers can use as building blocks for their own projects. This support, along with the intuitive ColdFusion language, means that Trevarthen can quickly train new developers to become ColdFusion experts.

“The documentation from Adobe is phenomenal, far beyond what other companies offer,” adds Trevarthen. “Most of the time, documentation barely scratches the surface, but Adobe understands what it takes to support developers. We never have to worry about finding ColdFusion developers as our company grows because we can bring people onboard and have them writing their first ColdFusion code within a day.”

Bringing live cattle auctions across the country

New Zealand Farmers Livestock is a mainstay of the agricultural economy in New Zealand. For more than 100 years, the organization has built relationships to deal livestock around the country. One of the reasons that the organization has stayed strong over the years is its commitment to innovation. When the organization was looking to replatform its flagship website, MyLiveStock, it turned to LayerX.

Relationships are critical for members of New Zealand Farmers Livestock, and most farmers work through agents to finalize any livestock sales. The organization wanted a website that could support those relationships by listing livestock online, encouraging farmers to browse listings, and then drive them to agents.

In just three months, LayerX replatformed the MyLiveStock website using Adobe ColdFusion. This project included a custom CMS, CRM capabilities, searchable and browsable stock listings, and a clean front-end website to tie it all together.

While New Zealand Farmers Livestock and LayerX discussed a future roadmap for organization, the COVID-19 pandemic suddenly changed the conversation. A big portion of the business is conducted in person with live auctions. Restrictions around social distancing meant that New Zealand Farmers Livestock could no longer crowd people into small auction houses. Many farmers could not attend if they wanted to, either due to travel restrictions or health concerns.

New Zealand Farmers Livestock came up with a new request: virtual auctions. In just three weeks, LayerX created a hybrid online/offline auction system. Auctions are streamed live over the website and mobile app. People could attend auctions in person or participate from the comfort and safety of their own homes.

“The new Live Auction platform revolutionized business overnight,” says Trevarthen. “Farmers don’t need to travel 1,000 km to an event. They can monitor an auction on their phones while working on their farms. We couldn’t have done it without ColdFusion. With ColdFusion we could take advantage of rapid prototyping to expand across web, mobile, and in-person auctions.”

“LayerX developed a fantastic platform that allowed us to continue sales,” says Bill Sweeney, General Manager – Livestock at New Zealand Farmers Livestock. “We sold a large line of cattle even during COVID-19 restrictions — that would not have happened without the Live Auction platform. As we continue making enhancements to the system, we’ve seen our market share and profile rise even further, benefiting our whole team.”

Working within an enterprise system

For Trevarthen, the security and confidence of working with an enterprise platform backed by Adobe is unbeatable. “ColdFusion is serious about security,” says Trevarthen. “Adobe has a team making sure that the application server is completely locked down, and we don’t need to worry about people taking advantage of vulnerabilities for us or for our clients.”

As part of the Adobe ecosystem, ColdFusion also makes it much easier to integrate popular Adobe solutions or services into projects. For one client, LayerX is adding electronic signatures through Adobe Sign.

“We get excited over every new release of Adobe ColdFusion,” says Trevarthen. “The commitment from Adobe is phenomenal. Every language, platform, and framework has its own strengths, and we like to use the best approach for every project. For many applications, Adobe ColdFusion is simply the fastest, deepest, and most flexible option for us.”

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