I was at MAX and I saw the Meer Meer cross-browser preview technology that Adobe is developing. Given the current buzz about Microsoft's forthcoming SuperPreview technology (announced at their MIX conference), I was pleased to see this response from Scott Fegette, Dreamweaver Product Manager, about Meer Meer and how it stacks up against Microsoft's future offering.

It's particularly interesting to note that whilst Microsoft is initially focused on Windows-only, Internet Explorer previews, Adobe's service will be cross-platform, cross-browser from the get-go - and what was shown at MAX five months ago was a real demo of a real service, based on early working builds. In other words, Adobe is a long way ahead of Microsoft on this and is very committed to the workflows and technologies needed to address this complex problem.

It'll be very interesting to see how this pans out and whether Microsoft will ever address this in a cross-browser, cross-platform manner.

I finally got around to adding the recording URL to Charlie Arehart's UGTV. It's a bit of a wild ride: it's two hours long with a 5-10 minute pizza break in the middle (sorry, Connect doesn't let you edit out the middle of a recording, only the start / end). If I'd known how limited the Connect editing was, I'd have made two separate recordings.

Anyway, here is Unit Testing Improves Your Love Life - and - Groovin' To The Fusion: Marc Esher and Bill Shelton of MXUnit fame kick off the first hour and then Joe Rinehart of Model-Glue fame carries the second hour, explaining why a mixed language technology stack can make ColdFusion even more productive.

Adobe is continuing to put all of the MAX 2008 presentations up on Adobe TV (under the MAX channel). The audio was recorded directly from the in-room mic and the "video" is a screen capture of what was being presented and whatever technology they used to do it has produced a very nice way to watch every single MAX session for free (so I can now go back and watch the sessions I missed which I'd really wanted to attend!).

It seems that only two ColdFusion sessions are listed, one of which is my Event-Driven Programming in ColdFusion session. The other is Rob Brooks-Bilson's Advanced ColdFusion Caching Strategies. Searching Adobe TV for ColdFusion turns up nine videos, six of which are part of the Adobe Developer Connection series from Adam Lehman and Ben Forta.

If you haven't checked out Adobe TV as a learning resource, there's definitely some good stuff up there.

As "usual", I start the year with a round-up of the highlights of last year, based on things that I blogged. It's been a strange year for me. After (seven) years with Macromedia / Adobe and most of 2007 spent freelancing, I took a full-time job with a startup and hired some amazing CFers to be part of my team. I (finally) learned Flex (and AIR). I learned a new language (Groovy) and did a lot less CFML programming than I've done in years while at the same time joining first the Open BlueDragon Steering Committee and then the CFML Advisory Committee, as well as attending more ColdFusion-related conferences than usual (cf.Objective(), Scotch on the Rocks, CFUNITED, Wee Dram of Scotch, MAX).

[More]

I just received my final evaluation forms from MAX 2008. With the exception of one person who "Fell asleep during presentation. It was offensive.", the comments were mostly positive. There was, however, an interesting undercurrent...

[More]

Fusion Authority published My Thoughts on MAX 2008 today.

Overall, MAX 2008 was a good experience. It was extremely well-run and well-organized. The location was excellent. There was a huge amount of content, even if not much of it appealed to me directly.

Read the full article for more detail!

The MAX 2008 version of my Event-Driven Programming in ColdFusion is now available for download (and I'll add it to the right column of my blog soon.

This is a substantially different version of the talk seen at Scotch on the Rocks and CFUNITED...

There's a lot of C / C++ code out there that does a lot of useful stuff - masses of tried and true, well-tested and often well-supported open source software. Now you can take any of that code and automatically convert it to compiled ActionScript code that will run on Flash Player 10.

Check out Adobe Alchemy on Labs. This was demoed in the general session today at MAX. They initially showed a few libraries (such as OpenSSL) compiled to run on the Flash Player, then they showed image manipulation and audio playback (Ogg Vorbis) running in the Flash Player. Finally they showed Quake(!) and a 6502 console emulator running Super Mario...

Whilst it elicited a bit of a "huh?" from many attendees, I think this is a very important piece of technology because it brings a large amount of pre-existing software to the Flash Platform. Oh, and the compiled code runs asynchronously** so that long-running C / C++ cross-compiled processes can run while the Flash Player contains to update the UI etc.

** OK, it runs across Flash frames so it doesn't block execution of other code (at least, that's my understanding).

Now that Adobe Groups has been announced - in today's general session at MAX - I can encourage everyone to visit BACFUG on Adobe Groups and join the group - and any other groups you might want to be part of (e.g., San Flashcisco, Fire On The Bay, Silvafug...).

At present, Adobe Groups does not support RSVP so we'll continue to use the old BACFUG website for that but we will transition fully onto Adobe Groups once RSVP capability has been added.

Some information is posted on Adobe Labs and it was demoed in the general session at MAX today, along with some cool CS4 stuff, Flash Catalyst (formerly known as Thermo) and Flex Builder 4 (aka Gumbo).

The demo didn't go into much depth but it's Eclipse-based (no surprise) and has some "intellisense" (but it's unclear how it will handle more dynamic code) with RDS-style file system and database browsing.

In some ways, it's really not news - most people expected Adobe to announce this based on the somewhat coy comments Adobe CF staff have been making over the last year at conferences - but at last it's real.

The Labs page has an FAQ and an outline of features. You can sign up for the Bolt pre-release program on Labs too.

Important: you must RSVP via the BACFUG website. We have a hard limit of 47 attendees - if you do not RSVP, you may well be turned away. If we get close to 47 RSVPs, I will post again on my blog!

MAX 2008 will be upon us soon and this year it coincides with our regular 3rd Wednesday for BACFUG. Accordingly, we have a special meeting with two presentations by speakers who are in town for MAX!

Bill Shelton and Marc Esher - creators of the awesome MXUnit testing framework - will be presenting "Unit Testing with MXUnit". Unit testing talks have proved very popular at BACFUG in the past and MXUnit has really raised the bar in terms of features and tools so it will be great to have the framework's creators speaking at MAX.

Our second presentation will be related to Model-Glue 3 "Gesture" and will again be the framework's creator, the amazing Joe Rinehart. Joe has hinted that he will be tailoring the talk toward integration with powerful Java technologies, along the lines of what we have achieved at Broadchoice.

BACFUG is free and open to everyone - both regular locals (who may or may not be attending MAX) and all those CFers who are in town for MAX! However, we need you to RSVP on the BACFUG website so that we can figure out numbers and book a large enough room!

Since folks keep asking, I figured I'd blog it...

No, I will not be at MAX on Sunday - I'm busy doing other stuff.

I will be there for the Monday keynote and sessions and the BOFs in the evening. See you then.

I will be there on Tuesday during the day but I am not going to the special event - I'm not paying $100 for a guest pass (this has been a running complaint of mine about MAX - and CFUNITED) so I'm going home to my wife in the evening thank you very much.

Wednesday will be my busy day: Ray's Unconference Uber Panel, Dee Sadler's Manager-2-Manager UGM meeting, the Broadchoice demo at the Adobe Partner booth (noon to 1:30pm - come see the ArgumentCollection team and take a look at our Workspace application!) and then my Event-Driven Programming in ColdFusion talk. And in the evening it's BACFUG - with Bill Shelton, Marc Esher and Joe Rinehart as speakers!

If you've had a hard time finding out about the Birds of a Feather sessions at MAX, you're not alone. It turns out the information is not where you would expect - it's under agenda (not schedule) and then you have to drill into... highlights (at least the BOFs are considered highlights, I suppose)... and then scroll down and then... wait, you can't print the page and you can't select the text! Darn!

So I took a couple of screenshots and then inverted the color selection in Fireworks (because light grey text on dark grey / brown is hard to read).

Enjoy!

Since I just mentioned BACFUG's free event on the Wednesday of MAX, I figured I should also highlight Ray Camden's ColdFusion Unconference that takes at MAX in parallel with the main MAX sessions.

It runs 11am-6pm Monday, 9:30am-5pm Tuesday and 8:30am-5pm Wednesday. Three full days of ColdFusion sessions including an "Uber Panel" on Wednesday morning (10:30-11:30), hosted by Brian Meloche, which includes three of the Broadchoice team (Ray, Joe and myself) as well as Charlie Arehart and, from Adobe, Adam Lehman and Jason Delmore. Bring your hardest questions about ColdFusion!

The entire Broadchoice team will be at MAX and you'll be able to find us at the Adobe Booth on Wednesday, between noon and 1:30pm, as we will be demonstrating the Broadchoice Workspace at the Adobe Partner demo station.

If you're coming to MAX, you might want to check out the MAX 2008 information website created by local user group managers.

It's running on the Broadchoice Collaboration Platform, our "2.0" ColdFusion-powered platform - not to be confused with the Broadchoice Workspace, our "3.0" AIR/Flex desktop application that launched in beta today!

I said I'd blog more about Adam Lehman's keynote at A Wee Dram so here it is...

Adam talked about the success of CF8 and the huge uptick in the number of developers since 2007 (I forgot to write down the name of the research company that provided that data but it was a third party, not Adobe). He said that the increase in interest and use of ColdFusion has meant that the lack of (good) developers was one of the primary problems that companies face. Claude Englebert, Adobe's EMEA CF specialist, confirmed that after meeting with companies all over Europe, CF is very strong but the problem is finding (good) developers.

Adam talked a bit about the various advisory committees (both internal and the public CFML group that I chair) and the free-for-educational-use availability of CF8 from https://freeriatools.adobe.com/coldfusion/.

Next Adam ran through the proposed features for Centaur, including a few new things. He covered the language enhancements around cfscript and CFCs as well as touching on the Hibernate integration.

Then he said that Adobe is considering how to expose all of the "services" inside CF as SOAP and AMF remote services. The idea is that it would allow clients to access the engines that drive CF's query, mail, document (PDF), imaging, charting, Exchange services etc. They are considering making AS3 libraries available that would allow Flex developers to easily call any of these services directly, making CF the back end of choice because of the rich functionality it adds to Flex. An interesting approach. He also said they are considering integrating BlazeDS more deeply into CF, not like the current optional LCDS Express install, but as a core part of CF which would open up the possibility of direct message handling via CFCs as well as potential improvements to AMF performance (since it would be tightly integrated with CF).

As always, he encouraged folks to attend MAX to get a lot more information about Centaur (and hinted that MAX Europe would get more impressive demos than MAX North America due to the extra two weeks the team have to work on things).

---

Updated to correct URL for ColdFusion for education - thanx to Yancy Wharton for pointing that out!

The local User Group Managers have created an attendee information site that provides suggestions for transport, tourism and eating out, as well as offering a forum and a suggestion box!

Feel free to browse around and, if you want to participate in the forums or ideas exchange, register as a user on the site (it's free of course!).

The site is powered by the Broadchoice Collaboration Platform and runs on Adobe ColdFusion (despite the lack of .cfm in the URLs).

---

This is a re-post to remind folks who are attending MAX to take another look at this site.

I just made another pass over my MAX schedule to finalize my choices and thought I'd post my planned list of sessions so folks will know where to find me:

• Monday
  • Opening General Session
  • Adobe Roadmap: Enterprise
  • Flex Architecture Face-Off - panel
  • Real-Time Collaboration Apps with Flex and Cocomo - Nigel Pegg
• Tuesday
  • Mixing Open Source and Commercial Software
  • General Session
  • Adobe@Adobe: IT Innovation
  • Developing Rich Applications with jQuery and Adobe AIR - John Resig
  • The REST of SOA
• Wednesday
  • Advanced Patterns for ColdFusion Test Automation - Bill Shelton / Marc Esher (MXUnit)
  • Building Real-Time and Collaborative Applications with Flex and BlazeDS
  • Event-Driven Programming in ColdFusion - an updated version of my session from Scotch on the Rocks and CFUNITED
  • Cocomo Deep Dive: Building Social RIAs with Flex + Adobe Hosted Services - Nigel Pegg
  • Developing Enterprise ColdFusion Applications - Joe Rinehart

As I was updating my schedule, I noticed that several of the ColdFusion and Flex workshops are already sold out - good to see so much interest in those! I was originally going to Dave Watts' "High Performance ColdFusion" but decided to give up my seat when I saw it was sold out (hopefully someone else will get in now!). There's a lot of excellent ColdFusion sessions at MAX this year but my focus right now is on Flex, AIR and real-time collaboration so that has driven most of my session choices.

Also a reminder that BACFUG meets on the Wednesday evening immediately after MAX ends and I am pleased to announce that we are having a double session with some MAX speakers:

• Bill Shelton and Marc Esher will present on Unit Testing in ColdFusion with MXUnit
• Joe Rinehart will present on Model-Glue 3: Gesture

We hope to have a good turn out with MAX attendees taking advantage of this (free) user group meeting in the evening! Since the meeting is inside the Adobe building, you will need to RSVP for security purposes. See you there!

If you were at MAX last year, you saw a video collage in each keynote of people saying why they loved the web and technology and good user experiences. This year, they're planning something similar and Adobe want you to contribute by making a short YouTube video tagged with 30onMAX (click that link to see what others have already posted on YouTube). See Ted Patrick's blog (first link) for more details.

I'm a bit late with this (I went to Vegas for a friend's 25th wedding anniversary party - an off-topic blog post on that later). MXUnit, currently the best unit testing framework for ColdFusion, just hit the big 1.0 release milestone.

As folks know, I've been a big fan of unit testing for quite a while and used to advocate Paul Kenney's cfcUnit at every opportunity. Unfortunately, Paul hasn't been working on cfcUnit much for the last few years and MXUnit has grown up to take the crown of the most comprehensive, most robust, most feature-rich testing framework for ColdFusion.

If you're still not doing unit testing, you need to check out the MXUnit website and try to get to at least one of the presentations that the MXUnit team are giving. They're on the Online ColdFusion Meetup on Thursday July 17th (database patterns for unit testing - Bill Shelton) and if you're at MAX 2008, you can catch Marc Esher talk about advanced patterns for ColdFusion test automation which should be excellent (Wednesday, November 19th @ 9:30am).

I was just looking through the list of speakers and noticed that John Resig, creator of jQuery, is speaking at MAX this year:

In this session, you'll learn from John Resig, the creator of the jQuery library, how to build a desktop application with Adobe AIR and jQuery. jQuery is a fast, concise JavaScript library that simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages. Although jQuery is typically used inside a web browser, it's now possible to use jQuery to build rich desktop applications.

Should be a great (and extremely popular) talk!

The list of sessions and speakers is available on the MAX site. The site shows 28 ColdFusion sessions (including two pre-event labs). There are just under 200 sessions total so that's a pretty good percentage in my opinion.

34 sessions cover AIR, 54 sessions cover Flex.

Compare that to 13 sessions on Dreamweaver and 14 on the flagship Photoshop product and I think we have no reason to complain (but, of course, some folks will).

My "Event-Driven Programming in ColdFusion" talk has been selected for MAX which I'm pleased about and I will reveal that it will be substantially different to the version shown at Scotch on the Rocks and CFUNITED...

The official MAX 2008 Experience website launched last night. At first it looks like a regular (but nice looking) information site about the MAX conference but... check out the landscape... can you find the explorer and help him get his project started? Can you help him find the assistance he needs to build his dream project?

Ted Patrick has just announced that the call for topics for Adobe MAX 2008 is open. San Francisco, Milan, Tokyo. Submit yourself or suggest a speaker or topic you would like to hear!

Cities and dates have been announced for Adobe MAX 2008. San Francisco, November 16-19, we already knew (it will be at the Moscone Center). Europe's MAX will be in Milan, Italy at the beginning of December (1-4) and Japan's MAX will be in Tokyo in "2009".

The page has a link to sign up for information about MAX to be emailed to you as it becomes available.