So I was gave a design patterns presentation at both MAXs... I figured I'd Google to see if I could find any coverage of it (no, I couldn't) and what turned up was my own blog post from four years ago! Along with the observation that CF lets you implement certain patterns more easily I said "The bottom line is that it's useful to be aware of the J2EE patterns but beware of slavishly applying them to ColdFusion - some of them were designed to solve problems that are specific to the Java technology and you can often find a more elegant form of the solution in ColdFusion."

As folks who attended my session in Chicago and/or Barcelona heard, I'm still offering that caveat today and people still think it's news...

Summary: MAX Europe was great, except for the food.

I've already posted the raw notes I took in the sessions which were pretty much just a brain dump of what the presenters were saying without much of my own commentary. In general, the sessions were extremely good. My goal was to learn a lot about AIR and some useful stuff about Flex and the conference met that goal perfectly. The AIR sessions were great and covered a lot of ground, with plenty of information about the file APIs and using SQLite, the embedded database. There was also a fairly good balance between Flex and AJAX in the AIR sessions (some presenters actually showed the same functionality in both Flex and AJAX side-by-side). The two Flex sessions that I attended - both led by Joe Berkovitz - were really good with a lot of practical information about designing and building large Flex applications.

What about the other aspects of the conference? The size of the conference (around 1,000 people I think) meant that all the sessions were together on one floor and all the food / community / vendors were together on another floor. That meant you didn't have to rush between sessions and you had a chance to network in the hallways between sessions. The session rooms were rarely completely packed so you always got a seat. It was nice and relaxed. It was much better than Chicago in that respect.

The food, however, was a serious disappointment. Tapas-style food was fun and interesting on Monday lunchtime but it was the same sort of thing at the reception on Monday night, at lunchtime on Tuesday, at the special event Tuesday evening and at lunch on Wednesday. Nothing was labeled so if you had allergies or just plain ol' don't like certain things, well, you were pretty screwed. And if you didn't like / don't eat fish, you went pretty hungry. I eat pretty much anything but I lost a few pounds this week because not much appealed to me on Tuesday (either at lunch or at the special event) and on Wednesday I completely skipped lunch. The most charitable thing I can say about the special event was that the jazz band was pretty good. Like Chicago, the event was in the conference center and was just food and drink (and they ran out of beer apparently - I stuck to wine). The Chicago event was $100 for guests and since I couldn't imagine what would be so special it could be worth that much money, my wife & I skipped the guest pass. From what I heard, we made the right choice. The Barcelona event was $75 for the guest pass and, with hindsight, we probably wouldn't bothered with that either. Come on Adobe, do something special next year in San Francisco - or at least don't charge guests such outrageous amounts.

Apart from the food - and Tuesday evening's event - everything else about the conference was really enjoyable. It was great to finally meet so many European community members - there was a large British contingent, as well as folks from every part of mainland Europe. Barcelona itself is a beautiful city with great public transport and is also an interesting city to walk around. The beach was really nice (so I'm told) and the hotel restaurant was really good (at the Vincci Maritimo), although the relaxed European approach to schedule meant that they opened when they were ready, not when the posted hours said they would open.

Of the two MAX events, Barcelona was by far the better experience in many ways. It'll be interesting to see what Adobe do next year since both events will likely be even bigger...

One other thought (added later): whilst it was great for speakers that they were in one of the nearest hotels to the event (as was the case in Chicago), there seemed to be no networking in the speaker hotel: folks did not congregate in the bar in the evening. The hotel was amazing quiet in the evenings. That was also true to some extent in Chicago. The bar was more of a networking location in Chicago but still you only got to network with other speakers instead of a broader range of attendees. I suspect this will be less of an issue in San Francisco since everyone should be staying within walking distance of the Moscone Center but it's something to think about.

Here are my notes from MAX Europe. This covers all of the sessions I went to. I'll probably flesh out some of the notes over the next few weeks and - if I do - I'll republish the doc and bump this blog entry

I'm in the Flex Best Practices panel right now (Joe Berkowitz, Steven Webster, Sascha Wolter, Dirk Eismann). MAX Europe has a much more intimate and relaxed feel than MAX North America. The CCIB conference center is right on the beach. This part of Barcelona seems very new and constantly expanding with lots of construction - and lots of parks in amongst the new buildings.

Yesterday, my wife & I went to see La Sagrada Familia temple. It's a big tourist attraction these days (it wasn't when my wife last visited Barcelona) and you can't really explore the building now. There are long waits for the elevators, there is a lot of scaffolding inside, you get to go through the building in one direction and that's all. The old side of the temple is beautiful (the nativity facade) but the new side is ugly with cubist sculpture. I'm glad I've seen it but I was a bit disappointed to be honest.

Today and tomorrow, I'm mostly focused on AIR sessions. There's a ColdFusion BOF tonight that should be very interesting. I'm wondering whether the general sessions and/or sneak peeks will bring something new that we didn't see in Chicago.

Wifi access seems good so I may well be blogging live from sessions.

I was just looking over my session schedule for MAX Europe and it looks like all-AIR, (almost) all the time for me, at least on the first two days!

Monday:

• Flex best practices
• General Session
• Working with persistent data in AIR
• Using AIR APIs
• Local database access with AIR and data sync strategies

Tuesday:

• General session
• Leveraging ColdFusion with AIR applications
• Building AIR applications using AJAX and Aptana
• AIR security
• INSPIRE: Design Patterns and ColdFusion (me!)
• Sneaks

Wednesday:

• Practical patterns in Flex
• INSPIRE: Making Buzzword
• Using CFEclipse for ColdFusion development
• Creating new Flex components
• Introduction to LiveCycle Data Services for Flex developers
• ColdFusion powered AJAX

See you in Barcelona next week?

Brian Meloche provides a great summary of the MAX experience that covers the good as well as the not-so-good.

At MAX, Brian Meloche ran a BOF on this topic and he has published his interim report as well as the specific findings of the non-ColdFusion target group.

Brian focused on what the community can do which is the right approach in my opinion (Ruby and PHP got popular because of their community, not because of corporate marketing) and one of the key suggestions from the non-ColdFusion target group was for the community to rally around a single point of promotion and build CF versions of all the free, open source software integrations that are seen in the Java, PHP and .NET communities. We won't get their by constantly reinventing wheels - we need to pitch in and help with existing projects (and authors of projects need to get better about allowing others to contribute - which is one of the problems with RIAforge since it does not support multiple contributors).

Back home and catching up on a full week of mail and chores. Why do I ever go away?

Anyway, day three of MAX was a much more subdued event without a general session. I started off with the "Bootcamp for Flex" run by Matt Chotin, expecting it to be a great way to go from basics to something useful in three and a half hours. It seems that "Bootcamp" means something very different to Adobe and, instead, I was treated to a very disorganized "open mic" event where random people got up and gave short presentations on random topics.

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Today's general session kicked off with Bruce (Chizen, CEO) telling us how much it inspires Adobe to see 4,000 people at the conference (after he told a funny story about going backstage at a rock concert, only to have the lighting and sound guys mob him and enthuse about Adobe software!). Then Steven Webster talked about LiveCycle ES, showing some examples of the Eclipse-based forms designer, some possibilities with rights management (via Policy Server restricting access to documents across the 'net) and the process management workflows (again, an Eclipse-based workflow designer and a Flex app that provides a dashboard / workspace view into active documents in the workflow).

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It's been an exhausting day. MAX is completely overwhelming, partly because of the sheer scale of the event. Registration was very organized, breakfast for 4,000 people followed by a keynote for nearly 4,000 people (there were overflow rooms with live video feeds). The keynote was mostly run by Kevin Lynch and really only touched lightly on a lot of the ways that Adobe is addressing the "engaging experience".

Ben Forta and Scott Fegette showcased what a week with Dreamweaver CS3 and ColdFusion 8 can do for a website. It was nice to see CF getting such a high profile feature in the keynote!

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The ZIP files can now be downloaded from the fusebox.org Beta Program site. If you see me at MAX today, I also have them on a USB stick. To whet your whistle, here are the Release Notes, courtesy of Adobe Share - a cool new hosted service created by my old hosted services team at Adobe.

After spending the weekend in Toledo, OH at the annual On Safari cat show - effectively the Bengal breed national - my wife & I are now settled in at the Hyatt Regency McCormack Place for MAX. We wandered around the conference center (and admired the onAir bus!) for a while and it is absolutely enormous. Bumped into Ben Forta, Scott Fegette, Bob Regan, Shlomy Gantz, Ed Sullivan, Rob Gonda, Peter Farland (and I know I've forgotten someone - sorry!) then had a fabulous dinner at the Shor grill before a relatively early night (for us - midnight). Very much the calm before the "storm"...

Registration opens at 7am, breakfast, then the General Session at 9:30am (and I think there are a lot more people present than will fit in the General Session space - be warned!).

My Monday selections are fairly varied (a couple of INSPIRE sessions, if I can get in, ColdFusion / LiveCycle, Flex on Rails) but most of all I'm looking forward to the BOFs in the evening: Meet The Team (ColdFusion), ColdFusion Frameworks (chaired by Matt Woodward) - up aginst ColdFusion in the Enterprise (chaired by Brian Meloche), Design Patterns in ColdFusion Applications (not sure of the chair) - up against Promoting ColdFusion outside the CF Community (a panel chaired by Brian Meloche). Some tough choices there - and if you're into AIR, Flex or Flash the choices are even harder. Oh, and the Meet the Adobe.com Web Team is also in that 9:30-10:30pm slot!

Ben Koshy asked on the Fusebox forums "who is going to MAX?" to see if folks want to meet up. Might be a good idea with Fusebox 5.5 going into Public Beta just before then. Either leave comments here or on the forums under that thread.

If you can't make MAX in Chicago, you'll get another chance to see my Design Patterns and ColdFusion INSPIRE session in Barcelona. Tuesday, October 16th, at 4pm.

See you in Europe?

Now that it's up on the official speaker listing, I can say that I'm speaking at MAX 2007.

I'll be giving one of the INSPIRE sessions - about Design Patterns and ColdFusion - on Tuesday, October 2nd, at 2:45pm.

I'll try to cut through the hype and explain what design patterns are really about and how they can help you in your every day development tasks.

Hope to see you in Chicago!

If you're thinking about attending Adobe MAX 2007, don't forget that the early bird price ends on August 10th. After that, the price goes up $200.

You can register for MAX 2007 here.

With Ted Patrick driving the focus to be more developer-centric, MAX should be a great conference this year!

Looks like there are nearly 30 ColdFusion sessions at MAX 2007. There are also lots of Flex and AIR sessions as well. Should be a really good conference for developers this year, based on Ted Patrick's comments about the direction of the conference.

This week I had the good fortune to attend the annual Adobe Community Summit - a San Jose-based event for User Group Managers and Community Experts to learn about the "state of the union" in Adobe-land. Last year I popped into a couple of sessions as an employee and saw some sneak peaks of what ultimately became the CS3 product line. This year I attended as a Community Expert, to learn about the many recent releases.

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Jonathan Wall - Group Manager for Developer Relations at Adobe - wants you to tell him what MAX means to you!

While I was at Adobe / Macromedia, I went to just two MAX events: DevCon 2002 in Orlando, FL and MAX 2005 in Anaheim, CA. In both cases, I was scheduled to speak (although my talk was pulled for DevCon 2002). In general, employees don't get to go to MAX unless they're part of the "MAX team" (speakers, community folk, infrastructure, support etc).

Now I'm no longer an employee, I can go to MAX whenever I want - so the question is: do I want to? I'm going to CFUNITED on my own dime and I already went to cf.Objective() on my own dime. As a speaker at both of those events, I didn't have to pay the conference fee itself. So MAX will be comparatively expensive for me. I got a lot out of DevCon 2002 and MAX 2005 in terms of networking and, with the latter, some good sessions about Macromedia technology outside my core focus. It really will come down to budget, I suspect.

Although registration is not yet open, Adobe has posted prices for MAX 2007 on the Adobe MAX 2007 blog.

I don't remember last year's prices but this years seem to be in the same ballpark. The difference this year seems to be options to attend for just a day or just two days - I don't remember that from previous years (mind you, Anaheim was the last MAX I attended and that was because I was asked to speak at the last minute, before that it was Florida).

MAX is once again scheduled to overlap with On Safari, the Bengal breed national cat show, which is in Toledo, OH this year. Jay & I are thinking about coming out to Chicago, driving to Toledo for the cat show and then driving back to Chicago for MAX and hanging out with our friends in Chicago. We'll see how things pan out. The MAX early bird runs until July 23, so we have quite a while to make up our minds.

You can now submit topics for this year's Adobe MAX conferences in Chicago (9/30-10/3), Barcelona (10/15-10/18) and Tokyo (11/1-11/2). Topics must be submitted by April 10th!

Just got internal notification that we can blog the dates and locations for three MAX events this year:

• North America MAX 2007 - September 30-October 3, 2007 - McCormick Place West, Chicago
• EMEA MAX 2007 - October 2007 - Barcelona, Spain
• Japan MAX 2007 - November 2007 - Japan

More details as they become available.

I hope I can get to MAX this year. On Safari is in Toledo, OH immediately prior and my wife and I have friends in Chicago so we could turn this into a nice little vacation with the conference in the middle.