Don't miss the ColdFusion 9 / Flash Builder 4 tour when it hits the Bay Area: Ben Forta, Adobe's Senior Technical Evangelist, will be the speaker at this cross-user group event!

Learn about Flex 4, Flash Builder 4 (formerly Flex Builer), Flash Catalyst, ColdFusion 9 and Bolt!

Make sure you RSVP via the BACFUG website!

Last night I presented to BACFUG on ColdBox, Mach-II and Model-Glue. I just posted the recording of the presentation to Charlie Arehart's UGTV. I've edited the recording to remove some of the chatter at the beginning and end which is why it will seem to jump in without my usual biographic introduction and cuts off at the start of Q&A.

BACFUG meets tonight in Alameda, hosted by Planitax (thank you!), and the featured speaker will be me!

I'll be looking at ColdBox, Mach-II and Model-Glue - talking about their similarities and their differences - and showing demos of each framework.

Please see the event listing on Adobe Groups for more details and to RSVP (you must login with your Adobe ID to RSVP!).

I'm very pleased to report that the Bay Area has not just one ColdFusion User Group but two!

In addition to BACFUG, which has been around longer than the user group program itself, we now have the East Bay CFUG courtesy of Charlie Griefer (Amcom) and James Morrow (Planitax).

The inaugural meeting of the East Bay CFUG will be Tuesday, April 7th, hosted by Planitax in Alameda. It's a great facility - Planitax hosted BACFUG's meeting last night - so you can expect meetings to be broadcast and recorded if you're remote and a chance at foosball and darts if you turn up in person!

Tonight's BACFUG presentation by Peter Farrell has been posted to Charlie Arehart's User Group TV site. You can view the recording directly.

All BACFUG meeting recordings have now been added to the BACFUG site on Adobe Groups under Resources > Reference Library.

Peter Farrell will be presenting remotely to BACFUG on the topic of ant. See BACFUG on Adobe Groups for more details.

We'll be covering Fusebox, Model-Glue and Mach-II in coming months, based on requests from our members. If you have any suggestions for topics or speakers, please comment on the BACFUG plans for 2009 blog post.

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.

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]

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.

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!

The recording of my BACFUG presentation on Subversion is now available on Charlie Arehart's User Group Television website. With post-talk demos, it's an hour and a half - the slide-based preso is the first hour.

Big thanx to the University of Santa Clara for sponsoring pizza tonight - sponsorship is very important to BACFUG since it means we don't go home hungry from a meeting! Thanx to my co-manager Sid Maestre for securing sponsorship tonight.

I'll be reprising my Wee Dram talk for BACFUG this week:

By now you've heard a dozen times that source code control is good for you. Perhaps you're already reaping the benefits of tracking code changes in a separate system that is nicely backed up.

You've heard about tags and branches - most talks touch on them - but you haven't really figured out how to leverage these features to improve your life. Come and find out how the engineering team at Broadchoice use branches and tags in Subversion as part of their daily life to manage parallel development, automate deployment across multiple environments and deal with the complexities involved.

At the end of this talk, you should be prepared to introduce more advanced use of Subversion into your own workplace to help streamline team development.

Barring technical problems, the talk will be both broadcast and recorded - details on the BACFUG website.

Please RSVP via the BACFUG website!

Tonight's recording of Seth Duffey presenting Image Manipulation with ColdFusion 8 is now available on Charlie Arehart's UGTV.

---

Updated: the code samples shown in the presentation are available from Seth's website.

From the BACFUG website:

Image Manipulation in ColdFusion 8 - Seth Duffey
9/17/08 6:30 PM
Adobe San Francisco - Kojak

Connect URL: http://experts.acrobat.com/bacfug

Seth Duffey will walk us through what's possible with and the dozens of image manipulation functions introduced in ColdFusion 8.

Location:
601 Townsend St, San Francisco, California 94103

The Kojak conference room is in lobby but you still need security clearance (so you must RSVP!).

We have a copy of the ColdFusion 8 WACK Volume 3 to raffle off as well as three of the Teratech/Adobe CF8 tag posters and the usual swag!

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!

Teratech and Adobe have worked together to create these impressive posters for ColdFusion 8. User groups will be raffling off some of these shortly (BACFUG will raffle three off each month while supplies last) but you can also fill out a Teratech survey to get your own copy (U.S. only due to shipping costs). See the CFUNITED Blog for more details.

Our original speaker had a schedule conflict and our backup speaker just pulled out so there will be no BACFUG meeting tonight. Sorry.

We'll be back in September with Seth Duffey and image manipulation.

The recording of tonight's presentation can be viewed online.

Thanx to Ashwin Mathew for coming to present. He'll be back in August to present on the ColdFusion 8 Server Monitor.

There was no food at tonight's meeting because we couldn't get anyone to sponsor pizza. Hopefully companies will step up to sponsor future meetings. It's usually about $100 and you get to stand up in front of the group and pitch your company and hand out flyers and / or business cards - and if you're hiring it can be a great way to talk about the openings you have and to reach good CF developers...

COLDFUSION 8 AJAX - ASHWIN MATHEW

5/21/08 6:30 PM
Adobe San Francisco - Kojak

Connect URL: http://experts.acrobat.com/bacfug

Former Adobe ColdFusion product team member, Ashwin Mathew, will talk about how to leverage the power of and other gems in the AJAX features introduced in ColdFusion 8.

601 Townsend St, San Francisco, California 94103

The Kojak conference room is in lobby but you still need security clearance. It's too late to RSVP now but bring a picture ID and you can still get a badge at security.

COLDFUSION 8 AJAX - ASHWIN MATHEW

5/21/08 6:30 PM
Adobe San Francisco - Kojak

Connect URL: http://experts.acrobat.com/bacfug
Former Adobe ColdFusion product team member, Ashwin Mathew, will talk about how to leverage the power of and other gems in the AJAX features introduced in ColdFusion 8.

601 Townsend St, San Francisco, California 94103

The Kojak conference room is in lobby but you still need security clearance (so you must RSVP!).

RSVP for this meeting.

Nolan Erck came down from Sacramento to give us an excellent introductory talk about ColdFusion Components and Object-Oriented terminology. If you missed it, you can watch the recording (which is also posted on Charlie Arehart's UGTV).

Nolan Erck will be presenting at BACFUG this week, on Wednesday. He will be giving an introduction to CFCs. Here's what the BACFUG site says:

Curious about Object-Oriented Programming in ColdFusion but not sure how to start? Interested in taking your first steps with ColdFusion Components? What's all this talk about constructors and inheritance and "is-a" and "has-a"? Let Nolan walk you through the OO terminology and show you the basics of using CFCs to create the building blocks of your application.

601 Townsend St, San Francisco, CA 94103

6:30pm for socializing / networking, main talk at 7pm.

Please RSVP on the BACFUG website so that security has a badge ready for you.

Remember that everyone entering the Adobe building has to sign an NDA. This is standard practice to protect Adobe's intellectual property.

If you missed Ray's presentation tonight, you can view the recording which is also available in Charlie Arehart's UGTV (User Group Television).

Connect crashed a few times on Ray after about an hour in but he logs back in pretty quickly (Adobe really need to fix the Leopard compatibility problems with the Connect Add-In!).

It was a great talk - well attended - and I learned a lot about how powerful Spry really is (I hadn't looked at it before because I thought it was "too simple" - my mistake).

Big thanx also to Kit Kurktchi and Neetek for sponsoring Pizza!

---

Ray just posted the example files used during his preso.

The ColdFusion Jedimaster, Ray Camden, will be in San Francisco in person tonight to talk about Adobe's Spry JavaScript framework and how it can help ColdFusion developers create great user experiences using idioms that are already familiar to them.

Details on the BACFUG website.

It's too late to RSVP but if you turn up "unannounced" you can still get a security badge to get into the meeting room. Bring photo ID.

All non-employees entering the Adobe building are required to sign an NDA. This has apparently upset a couple of people in the past (who obviously didn't understand what an NDA actually is!). This is to ensure that if you accidentally see something "secret" while you are in the Adobe building, you agree not to go blabbing about it!

The ColdFusion Jedimaster, Ray Camden, will be in San Francisco in person to talk about Adobe's Spry JavaScript framework and how it can help ColdFusion developers create great user experiences using idioms that are already familiar to them.

Please RSVP via the BACFUG website.

Tonight's BACFUG presentation was recorded and has been posted in Charlie Arehart's UGTV archive. Here is the direct link to the recording. The updated PDF of the slides are also available (although I have not yet updated the link under software in the right hand column of my blog).

I will be speaking at BACFUG this Wednesday (the first time since I became manager of the group) and based on feedback from the group I will be doing an updated version of my CFUNITED 2006 talk (which has not been given anywhere else since!).

The conventional wisdom for working with CFCs is that you should provide returntypes and argument types for methods. This idea stems from working with strongly-typed languages such as Java and C#. What if, though, we accepted ColdFusion as a dynamically-typed language, such as Smalltalk or Ruby? This talk explores the problems "duck typing" solves and the new possibilities it opens.

Please RSVP on the BACFUG website.

Meeting at 6:30pm for socializing / networking with the presentation at 7pm. Adobe San Francisco, 601 Townsend.

For immediate release

On-Demand Services Attract In-Demand Architect

CASTRO VALLEY, Calif. -- Feb. 16, 2008 -- Sean Corfield today announced that he will be joining Broadchoice, Inc. headquartered in San Mateo, California as their Chief Systems Architect and Vice President of Engineering. In this new position, Corfield will oversee the evolution of Broadchoice's Digital Marketing Manager™ platform, expanding the capabilities and scaling the on-demand service to meet the ever-increasing customer base. Corfield said "Broadchoice has a really gifted team that has already created a winning service, used by companies such as Cisco. I'm excited to be part of that team and to have the opportunity to really take the platform to a new level." Broadchoice's Digital Marketing Manager™ is created and powered by Adobe technologies.

Richard Bennion, Broadchoice Founder & CTO, is a long-time advocate of ColdFusion and has been a pioneer in digital marketing for twenty years. "Bennion's energy and enthusiasm was key in attracting me to this role," said Corfield, "and he and I share an enthusiasm for great experiences created by great technology."

Also joining the Broadchoice team is Luke Kilpatrick, co-manager of the Bay Area ColdFusion User Group (BACFUG) and manager of Fire on the Bay, an Adobe Fireworks User Group serving the San Francisco Bay Area. Kilpatrick brings a wealth of experience in UI development and content management systems to the Broadchoice team. Corfield said "Kilpatrick's a friend of mine and I'm looking forward to having him on my team."

About Sean Corfield
Sean Corfield has been a freelance consultant since leaving the Hosted Services group at Adobe Systems, Inc. in April 2007 and was formerly the Senior Architect for the IT division of Macromedia, Inc. for almost six years. Prior to joining Macromedia, Corfield drove the architecture of a number of high-traffic, high-profile websites for a diverse group of companies after working on the ANSI J16 C++ Standards Committee for eight years and building compilers, interpreters and runtime systems. He is also manager of BACFUG and a frequent speaker at ColdFusion conferences around the world, as well as a contributor to a number of open source ColdFusion projects.

About Broadchoice, Inc.
Broadchoice is the leader in providing on-demand marketing solutions for the enterprise. The Digital Marketing Manager™ platform provides a fully integrated, enterprise application for web content management, enterprise marketing management and channel partner management.

For those who aren't sure, this is intended to be a somewhat tongue-in-cheek announcement but the news is real. I start the new job on Monday, February 18th, and I'm looking forward to hiring some of the best talent to help me grow a very exciting product! Stay tuned!

BACFUG, BAADAUG and Fire on the Bay are proud to be hosting the kick off of the Flex 3 / AIR Pre-Release tour in San Francisco this Monday (January 21st).

It'll be a big event - we have around 150 RSVPs so far across the three groups!

• 6:30pm for food / drink / networking
• 7:00pm for the main presentation from Ted Patrick, Adobe's Technical Evangelist for Flex

Location: Adobe, 601 Townsend St, San Francisco, CA 94546

The raffle will include:

• iPod Nano
• Flex Builder 3 Professional ($699 value - when released)
• CS3 Web Premium Suite ($1,599 value!!)

as well as Flex backpacks and some Flex/Air T shirts

Due to the popularity of this event, we will be in the "Town Hall" open space inside the security area so you must RSVP using the BACFUG web site - http://bacfug.org/ (scroll down - the RSVP link is below the meeting information)

Direct RSVP link.

About this presentation:

Flex 3 and AIR are getting close to launch and in preparation, Ted Patrick from the Adobe Flex/AIR product team is traveling to select cities to show off the great new features and help prepare us for this exciting launch.

Flex 3 is a feature-packed release, adding new UI components like the advanced datagrid and improved CSS capabilities; powerful tooling additions like refactoring; and extensive testing tools including memory and performance profiling, plus the addition of the automated testing framework to Flex Builder.

Adobe AIR is game-changing in so many ways, extending rich applications to the desktop, enabling access to the local file system, system tray, notifications and much more. Now you can write desktop applications using the same skills that you've been already using to create great web apps including both Flex and AJAX.

Don't miss out on the opportunity to see and hear about this highly anticipated release of Flex 3 and AIR during this special pre-release tour. Plus, in addition to giving away some one of a kind Flex/AIR branded schwag, we will also be raffling off a copy of Flex Builder 3 Professional (pending availability), a full commercial copy of CS3 Web Premium and an iPod Nano at this event!

About Ted Patrick:

Ted Patrick is a Technical Evangelist for Flex at Adobe Systems. He worked with Flash since FutureSplash Animator and watched its evolution from animation to application.

Ted helped Macromedia/Adobe with the development of ActionScript 3, AVM2, ASC compiler, and Flash Player 9 for some 18 months prior to Flex 2's release.

Prior to joining Adobe in May 2006, he provided consulting services at PowerSDK Software and Cynergy Systems.

Ted is a serial entrepreneur having successfully started-up 4 times and raised over 7 Million in VC funding for companies he founded.

3 companies have been successfully sold to other businesses and one was sold to a publicly traded company in 2001. Ted is actively involved in the Flex development community and works at Adobe to define the future of rich media.

On Monday, January 21st, Adobe's Ted Patrick will present Flex 3 and AIR to a joint meeting of BACFUG, BAADAUG and Fire on the Bay. This is part of Adobe's pre-release tour to promote Flex 3 and AIR.

We will be raffling off some incredible prizes:

• Flex Builder 3 Professional (shipped after launch)
• CS3 Web Premium
• Apple iPod Nano

We will also be giving away a lot of Adobe / Flex branded swag as part of this meeting so you'll want to attend.

Read the BACFUG website for more details and make sure you RSVP (on the BACFUG website) since the meeting will take place inside the security perimeter at Adobe's San Francisco building!

Tonight's BACFUG meeting was well attended and the recording of Rob Johnston presenting Hot Banana's content management system is available online.

Chris Black of ODA - coincidentally a Hot Banana development shop! - won the iPod Touch and Jennifer Larkin won the Adobe giveaway of ColdFusion 8 Standard edition (or equivalent). Congratulations to both of them!

Hot Banana will be presenting their extensible content management system at BACFUG tonight and will be giving away an iPod Touch in the raffle as well as sponsoring food and drink.

We will also be drawing for the "big Adobe prize" at this meeting, based on raffle ticket entries for the July, August, September, October and November meetings - you could win ColdFusion 8 Standard Edition!

The meeting will be broadcast and recorded (technology permitting). Broadcast URL: http://experts.acrobat.com/bacfug Recording URL will be published after the meeting.

Stay tuned for details of our special January meeting, on Monday 21st, combined with BAADAUG and Fire on the Bay!

And you can win an iPod Touch at Fire on the Bay too! Here is the joint meeting announcement from Hot Banana, this month's speakers:

You're Invited to Two Great Adobe User Group Events!
Only 2 weeks away - RSVP NOW!

Hello,

Join Lyris, Inc & Hot Banana Software at this month's Adobe User Group meetings in San Francisco with FREE food, great prizes, and more! Please note, security clearance is required to enter The Kojak Conference Room, so you must RSVP in advance!

Fire on the Bay - Adobe Fireworks Usergroup November Meetup - RSVP

When: Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 at 6:30pm
Where: Adobe, 601 Townsend Street, San Francisco, CA - The Kojak Conference Room (in the lobby)
What: Logo/Site Design Contest and Presentations by Lyris, Inc & Hot Banana Software

• Free Pizza and Beverages (Sponsored by Lyris, Inc)
• Great Networking Opportunity
• Fantastic Giveaways including an iPod touch (8GB)

More information about the Logo/Site Design Contest and to RSVP

Bay Area ColdFusion User Group Meeting - RSVP

When: Wednesday, November 21st, 2007 at 6:30 PM
Where: Adobe, 601 Townsend Street, San Francisco, CA - The Kojak Conference Room (in the lobby)
What: Hot Banana will discuss their ColdFusion-powered Web Content Management System with a difference. You'll learn about the overall architecture and how to develop custom modules for the Hot Banana framework.

• Free Food and Beverages
• Great Networking Opportunity
• Fantastic Giveaways including an iPod touch (8GB)

More information and RSVP

A link to the recorded version of the November 21st event will also be available from Hot Banana. Stay tuned!

Directions - Map of Location

If you have any questions about either event please contact Danielle Carty at 1-866-296-1803 ext. 2238. We look forward to seeing you there!

Sincerely,

Danielle Carty
Business Development Manager
Lyris, Inc.
Direct: +1(705) 719-3007
Toll Free: +1(866) 296-1803 ext. 2238

P.S. Mark your calendar and RSVP NOW so you don't miss out on two great chances to win the new iPod touch!

Luke (FotB manager and BACFUG co-manager) and I are both very excited to have such an enthusiastic and generous speaker / sponsor visiting our groups from Barrie, Ontario!

You may have seen Hot Banana at CFUNITED. Luke works with this product in his day job and speaks very highly of it. Our speaker will be Rob Johnson who was employee #1 at Hot Banana and is the Lead Architect for the product so you'll be able to ask him lots of technical questions about creating and customizing a commercial-grade content management system!

In addition to the iPod Touch at each meeting, we'll be drawing for the "grand prize" of ColdFusion 8 Standard at the BACFUG meeting. A lucky runner-up will get a copy of Ben's new CFWACK Volume 1!

Tony Hillerson of EffectiveUI will be speaking at CFUNITED Express Bay Area on November 9th in San Francisco. His talk will focus on the online/offline features of AIR. Tony will be replacing Simon Horwith on the schedule. That means the final session lineup will be:

• Tony Hillerson - Offline/Online Features of AIR
• Charlie Arehart - Hidden Gems in CF8
• Michael Smith - Using your Whole Brain for Developers
• Paul Kenney - Test-Driven Development with ColdFusion
• Sean Corfield - Design Patterns and ColdFusion
• John Paul Ashenfelter - Pragmatic ColdFusion: Build, Test, Deploy
• Matt Chotin - Introduction to Flex with ColdFusion

Remember: if you register by October 31st (next Wednesday!), you can offset the entire cost against your ticket for CFUNITED 2008!

BACFUG meets next week on Wednesday, 6:30pm for networking, food and drink, 7pm for the main presentation.

Axel Schultze will present a case study of Xeequa: a CRM system built with ColdFusion and will show how they pushed the envelope to create a rich application (using Flash Forms) as well as Vista Gadget integration.

Xeequa will be sponsoring refreshments as well.

Attendees will be eligible to enter a raffle that will be drawn at the November meeting for ColdFusion 8 Standard Edition (or similar value Adobe software of their choice).

Please RSVP via the BACFUG website!

There is now a separate announcements-only mailing list for BACFUG that will be used for meeting announcements and other special notices.

You can subscribe by sending an email to:

bacfug-announce-subscribe@vfive.org

You cannot post to the list - it is announce-only for myself and our listmaster Brian Ghidinelli who graciously hosts the lists.

If you are already subscribed to the BACFUG discussion list (see the contact page on the BACFUG website, then you have been subscribed to the announcement list (and should have received an initial announcement already).

With our August speaker unavailable for our regular date, we're going to take advantage of Adobe's special "Launch Party" offer for the upcoming meeting on Wednesday.

Come and learn all about the great new features in ColdFusion 8 from Adobe's own gurus via a specially prepared Connect presentation that has been recorded just for User Groups for August!

Adobe are providing sponsorship of food and drink and (hopefully) some special ColdFusion 8 promotional items.

A copy of ColdFusion 8 Standard Edition will be raffled! A $1,299 value! Must be present to win!

Foundeo are offering a copy of their brand new Image Effects Component for ColdFusion 8 and this will be the second prize in the raffle!

Due to the nature of the presentation and the raffle, this meeting will *not* be broadcast or recorded - you must attend in person!

Please RSVP via the BACFUG website by Tuesday afternoon to ensure your entry badge is ready at the security desk - the meeting will be in the regular location at the Adobe San Francisco building, in the Kojak conference room.

6:30pm for networking and the presentation will start at 7pm. The raffle will be drawn at the end of the presentation!

The all-new Bay Area ColdFusion User Group website just went live. It is based on Matt Woodward's open source Capitol Hill User Group application, built with Mach II 1.5 and ColdSpring 1.0. It's still a bit of a work in progress (both as an application and as a website) but more content and functionality will be added over time.

If you missed tonight's meeting live, you can catch the re-run. Thanx again to Gert Franz of Railo for taking time out of his busy US tour to speak to our group! Also big thanx to Roundpeg for sponsoring the food so no one went home hungry!

Tonight's meeting will be broadcast: http://experts.acrobat.com/bacfug/. Barring any technical problems, the meeting will also be recorded.

Don't forget to RSVP by 4:30pm today for tomorrow's BACFUG meeting! I've heard lots of positive comments from people who've seen Gert Franz present Railo elsewhere so it should be a good talk.

The July BACFUG meeting is this week, Wednesday, July 11th in the Adobe San Francisco building. The meeting will be open at 6:30pm for networking and socializing and the main presentation will start at 7pm.

601 Townsend St
San Francisco
CA 94103

Gert Franz of Railo, Switzerland will present their alternative CFML engine, covering their unique features and roadmap as well as showing example applications running on the engine. They have a unique approach to administering and configuring CFML, allowing you to configure a number of runtime behaviors, especially around CFCs. They also have a unique concept in "resources" which allow you to use file operations transparently on local and remote file systems as well as in memory. Even if you're absolutely wedded to Adobe ColdFusion, it should give you some interesting ideas about new ways to write your CFML code!

Please RSVP via the BACFUG website so that Adobe security are prepared for your arrival! RSVP by 4pm Tuesday please!

There will be announcements and giveaways - and local sponsorship for refreshments would be very much appreciated!

As always, the meeting will be broadcast via Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional and recording for later viewing. I will blog the URL on the day of the meeting.

The next BACFUG meeting will be next week on July 11th (a week earlier than usual!) in the Adobe building, 601 Townsend St, San Francisco. The room will be open from 6:30pm for networking and socializing with the presentation starting at 7pm.

Gert Franz will be our speaker, from Railo in Switzerland. Railo is an alternative CFML engine that offers some very interesting unique features, while focusing on compatibility and performance. Gert will provide an overview of their product and cover their unique features as well as a product roadmap. Gert will also show some framework-based code running on Railo.

I've cautioned Gert that we want a technical presentation, not a sales pitch!

PLEASE RSVP at http://bacfug.org in order to speed up the security process!

In order to make it easier to find information I post about BACFUG, I have created a BACFUG category and so you can subscribe to that that category's RSS feed if you want. I have gone back and categorized all past BACFUG posts so you can easily find details of topics, dates and links to recordings (where available).

Last night I took over as manager of the Bay Area ColdFusion User Group.

First off, I'd like to thank Jennifer Larkin, the outgoing manager, for four and a half years of stalwart service! Last night she was the speaker, covering the recently released Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR). Nathan Dintenfass, the previous manager, also turned up to witness the passing of the torch.

Second, I'd like to appeal to all the Bay Area ColdFusion developers out there: I know there's a lot of CFers in the Bay Area - what can I do to make the user group more appealing to you so that more of you come to meetings?

We meet every month on the 3rd Wednesday at 7pm in the Adobe building in San Francisco (601 Townsend St). Would other times, dates or locations appeal to you more (knowing we can't please everyone all the time)? What about topics? What would you like to learn about? Would you like to speak? Perhaps you (or your company) would like to sponsor refreshments at meetings in return for having your promotional material available to attendees?

Feel free to leave comments or contact me privately with your thoughts!

Jennifer Larkin will be presenting the recently released Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), showing examples and talking about what it means for you.

Remember to RSVP on the BACFUG website so that Adobe security have your badges ready when you turn up.

7pm, 601 Townsend St, San Francisco (as usual).

Tonight Paul Kenney presented to fairly packed audience at BACFUG, with about a dozen people online - a very popular talk! He talked about the difference between "testing" and test driven development, why you should write tests first, why you should refactor ("code smells") and then walked us through a small but practical example of building code to satisfy tests that were written first.

You can view the recording and it's already posted on Charlie Arehart's UGTV site. We had a few technical problems: Connect crashed for me (which didn't seem to affect the recording) then Connect crashed for Paul two or three times, causing breaks in his presentation as he had to log back in and restart his microphone and screen-sharing. Thank you for your patience! The problem seems to be the Connect Add-In on Intel Macs - I think it runs under Rosetta and it's pretty flaky.

Next Wednesday, Paul Kenney will be at BACFUG, with a re-run of his excellent talk from cf.Objective() on Test-Driven Development. If you missed cf.Objective(), make sure you get along to BACFUG next week! Don't forget to RSVP on the BACFUG website!

I meant to post this yesterday but got side-tracked, integrating a new design for the Scazu, Inc. website. We'll be launching the site in the summer and it's really coming along nicely. We're looking forward to moving it to Scorpio as soon as that is released, so that we can take advantage of many of the things Ben showed at BACFUG.

Ben started out by saying that Scorpio has three broad themes: developer productivity, integration and management / administration. He also said that because this was the beginning of the tour, lots of other new features would be previewed at later User Group meetings to keep things fresh. What he showed us was enough to have most people cheering and desperately wanting to buy Scorpio NOW!

So what did he cover?

[More]

Jennifer announced tonight that she will be stepping down as manager after several years. She invited folks to volunteer for the role - and noted that I will be running - so contact Jennifer if you're interested. She hasn't decided exactly when the election will be, maybe at the May meeting, maybe at the June meeting.

Big thanx to Jennifer for all her hard work over the last few years!

Just got home from BACFUG where Ben fed us a feast of information about new features coming in Scorpio! If you've been following the coldfusion twitter, you'll have seen a number of live updates from the audience during Ben's talk as each new features was shown.

It was a very impressive show - and as Ben pointed out, this is early in the tour and there are many, many more features to be unveiled across subsequent User Groups and also at cf.Objective() 2007.

Ben also referred to his blog post about per-application settings in Scorpio which he unveiled at the Seattle User Group last night.

I'll be blogging some more tomorrow about what he covered tonight. For now, I'm going to enjoy my Scorpio m&m's - Adobe red and ColdFusion blue with the Scorpio logo on them. Yummy!

Just a reminder from Jennifer about Ben Forta's Scorpio tour coming to San Francisco:

Next wek Ben Forta will be here talking about what's new in Scorpio. When Ben goes on tour he announces something new at each meeting so if you read all of the blogs for the previous meetings you will still miss something! There will be food and beer! And stuff to give away! And Ben Forta! You know you wanna.

RSVP now at http://www.bacfug.org
Tuesday, April 24, 7pm
601 Townsend St
San Francisco

Tell your friends!

As it says, you must RSVP - the meeting is inside the security perimeter of the building!

San Francisco, April 24th - Ben Forta brings the Scorpio road show to BACFUG. Mark your calendar! Note that it is a Tuesday - not BACFUG's regular night. The meeting will be at the Adobe office in San Francisco (601 Townsend St) and will start promptly at 7pm. It will be inside the security perimeter, in the Chaplin presentation theater, so you must RVSP via the link on the BACFUG home page.

Ben will be showcasing several of the new features in Scorpio so this is a must-see event. Scorpio is going to be an incredible release of ColdFusion so make sure you attend Ben's tour and see for yourself!

For other Scorpio road show events, see the ColdFusion events listing on the Adobe website.

If you aren't already RSVP'd - or you don't live near San Francisco - pop into this Connect Pro meeting room at 7pm PST and watch / hear me present "Extending the Language of Fusebox" where I will discuss custom lexicons and several other new features in Fusebox 5 / 5.1. The meeting will be recorded and, technology permitting, made available for later enjoyment.

I will be speaking at BACFUG next Wednesday, 21st, with a re-run of my Frameworks Conference talk "Extending the Language of Fusebox".

Please RSVP on the BACFUG site (and it really is the February meeting on Wed, Feb 21 despite the website claiming it's January! - Jennifer just fixed this).

Here's Jennifer's announcement:

Next week at BACFUG, Sean Corfield will be lecturing on Extending the language of Fusebox.

We're used to the XML language of application frameworks being a static, fixed thing. If it doesn't let you do what you want, you're out of luck. Not so with Fusebox 5! This recent release lets you define your own verbs, which offers a much richer, more expressive way to build applications. This session will briefly walk you through the architecture of Fusebox and then dive into how to use third party custom lexicons as well as how to write your own language extensions. Enjoy the power of higher-level abstractions without the performance penalties they so often bring!

Wednesday, Feb 21, 7pm
601 Townsend St, SF

RSVP at: http://www.bacfug.org
We must give Adobe security a list of attendees based on our RSVP list, so please sign up early if you plan to go.

Also, Ben Forta will be in town in April 24 to give a Scorpio pre-release lecture! Same time and location as usual. RSVP details are still being worked out.

Announcement from Jennifer Larkin:

Adobe ColdFusion Specialist and former manager of the US Department of State ColdFusion User Group, Adam Lehman will be talking about using ColdFusion with the Flex Data Services.

This will be a joint meeting of BACFUG and SilVaFug, so the meeting will follow 2 hours of free Flex training. Flex training starts at 5:30.

Also, we will be giving away software and having a Holiday Party! (I guess that means we'll have to spike the eggnog.)

Usual location:
601 Townsend St (Adobe SF), Kojak
San Francisco

RSVP for the meeting at http://www.bacfug.org

For more information on free Flex training, go to http://www.silvafug.org/

Jennifer says:

Scorpio is the upcoming version of ColdFusion. If you missed MAX, you probably missed the latest news. Catch up with that and other things you might have missed Wednesday. RSVP by 4pm Tuesday at the BACFUG website if you think you might go. We won't hold you to it.

Wednesday, 7pm
601 Townsend St
SF
http://www.bacfug.org

Should be a good one for folks who couldn't make it to MAX!

Jennifer Larkin says:

Tomorrow, BACFUG will be spookified! In celebration of Halloween we will be having spooky treats and telling scary stories of code gone bad! (I'll try to come up with an artificial campfire for scary story time.) At the end we will vote on the scariest code story and that person will receive a fully-licensed copy of Macromedia Studio 8, still in the shrinkwrapped box. Of doom.

I have to turn in RSVPs soon, but if you are a regular I'm just going to put your name on the list since I'm announcing so late.

Wed, Oct 18, 7pm 601 Townsend St San Francisco

To RSVP, please fill out the form at the website: http://www.bacfug.org

Jennifer says:

In this talk, veteran CFML developer Charlie Arehart will introduce and demonstrate the ability all ColdFusion developers now have to step through their code interactively. FusionDebug is a commercial plug-in for Eclipse (www.fusiondebug.com) that gives you that ability. No, it's not free, but it's a small price to pay (< $300) if you want to do step debugging. He will show all the features, as well as some tricks and traps. Don't worry if you don't care for Eclipse. You can continue to use DWMX or CF Studio/HomeSite+. Just use FD for your debugging. He will show you how easy it is and the problems it can solve. And if you're thinking you don't need interactive debugging, Charlie will also explain over a dozen benefits this offers over traditional CFDUMP/CFOUTPUT debugging.

Charlie will be joining us via Breeze. The breeze url will be posted on Wednesday. RSVP if you plan to come in person. ( http://www.bacfug.org/ ) People who come in person can win stuff and are entered to win our semi-annual software giveaway (based on cumulative attendence). Oh, and, um BEER!

Wednesday, Sept 20, 7pm Adobe SF, 601 Townsend St

I strongly urge local BACFUG folks to attend in person for the benefits of networking and group discussion.

Many thanx to the folks who turned up in person to hear me talk about Objects & Persistence (and Reactor) last night at BACFUG - and to Phill Nacelli and Nic Tunney for attending online (and contributing to the discussion).

If you missed it, you can view the Breeze recording. Or, if you're attending CFUNITED next week, you can hear the presentation live, along with my talks about factories and the all-new duck typing talk!

For those of you unable to attend last night's BACFUG meeting, you can now watch the recorded presentation. Enjoy!

Jennifer just posted another reminder about this meeting (see her blog posting for more details). To assist the building security staff, you must RSVP on the BACFUG website before 5pm on Tuesday (today - it's 3:20pm PDT as I write this)!

I'll be presenting my "Managing ColdFusion Components with Factories" talk to BACFUG on May 17th (and then my "Objects and Persistence" talk on June 21st).

Adobe San Francisco, 601 Townsend, 7pm

Simeon Bateman will be presenting ColdFusion / Flex 2 integration, showing how to build a real world database-backed application. Although he will be presenting via Breeze, there are lots of good reasons to attend in person, according to Jennifer's blog entry: beer, new Adobe swag (including electronics!). You need to RSVP via the link in Jennifer's blog post.

Jennifer says:

Just a reminder that Ben Forta will be lecturing at BACFUG this Wednesday, Feb 15, 7pm. His presentation will be "Flex 2 for ColdFusion developers", introducing the new Flex Builder 2 and new ColdFusion Flex integration. Plus we will be giving away a copy of Ben's book Advanced Macromedia ColdFusion MX7 Application Development and a fully-licensed copy of CFMX 7 Standard. (You could probably hit him up for an autograph too.)

RSVP HERE: http://www.acteva.com/go/bacfug

Make sure you RSVP because building security need the list in order to badge everyone! It should be a great talk.

See you there!

We had a small audience last night - but Breeze attendees from Kansas and Indiana (and a guest from Australia in person!) so shame on you local folks who didn't make the effort!

The presentation was excellent - thank you Tyler! For those of you who didn't make it, you can watch the recording.

Don't forget that February's BACFUG will be Ben Forta on Flex 2 and ColdFusion (February 15th).

Another reminder about tomorrow's BACFUG (Wednesday 18th). Tyler Fitch, Adobe Systems Inc web engineer, talks about debugging techniques. More details on Jennifer's blog (Jennifer is the BACFUG manager).

Note also next month's BACFUG (Wednesday, February 15) features Ben Forta talking about Flex 2 with ColdFusion.

Jennifer just announced next week's meeting:

There are about as many ways to debug the problems in your ColdFusion code as there are ways to write the CF code in the first place.

Join Tyler Fitch, Lead Web Engineer on the macromedia.com, now a part of Adobe Systems, On-line Store while he shows several methods to figure out what's going wrong in your code. From when "everything looks right" to when code being processed doesn't actually have any visual access - yes this means ColdFusion Components (CFCs), Remoting and Event Gateways.

Wednesday, January 18, 7pm
601 Townsend St (at the corner of 7th) (former Macromedia headquarters)
San Francisco, CA

Also, win free Macromedia merchandise, now collector's items!

This should be a really good talk - Tyler's going to cover a lot of the techniques the (former-Macromedia) Web Team engineers use to debug real-world problems. See you there?

Jennifer says:

At tonights meeting I'll be going over some new features and bug fixes in CF 7.0.1 (Merrimack). We will also be going over some details of upcoming product updates announced at MAX. Color commentary by Sean Corfield.

7pm tonight
601 Townsend at the corner of 7th St
1st floor meeting room on the left (Kojak)
San Francisco

This meeting will also be broadcast via Breeze

See you there?

BACFUG will be meeting next Wednesday, October 26th, and the topics will be a recap of MAX for those who missed it and an overview of what's new in the recent ColdFusion MX 7.0.1 Updater. Speakers look like being Jennifer Larkin and myself. I expect it will be fairly informal and we welcome attendees who went to MAX and/or who are using CFMX 7.0.1 to contribute to the discussion.

What sort of topics would you like to see covered at future meetings?

Jennifer Larkin is giving tonight's BACFUG presentation. She says:

Tonight, I will be lecturing on the new features in Dreamweaver 8 that help ColdFusion developers get their job done. I know that many of you have never liked Dreamweaver for ColdFusion development, but as usual, Macromedia is trying to change your mind. How? With new features like the coding toolbar and new tag completion options and all sorts of fancy whizbangs. But best of all, they fixed my biggest pet peeve with the previous versions of Dreamweaver!

Plus, you can upgrade from any previous version of Dreamweaver or even CF Studio! Special introductory pricing is such a steal that I've already bought it.

Wendesday, Sept 21, 7pm
Macromedia Building (conference room on the left near the entrance)
601 Townsend St
San Francisco, CA

This lecture will also be available online via Breeze.

---

Update: the recording can be viewed at http://mmusergroup.adobe.acrobat.com/p54417029/.

More details on the upcoming BACFUG meeting:

Paul Kenney will be introducing the Tartan Framework, a service layer framework for ColdFusion that helps you leverage your domain model in isolation from your application-level logic. Tartan's service management allows you to manage data consistently across multiple MVC frameworks, such as Fusebox, Mach II, and Model Glue, as well as Flash/Flex via Flash Remoting and SOAP web services. This lecture is a preview of Paul's upcoming lecture for the FuseBox conference.

Wednesday. Aug 17, 7pm This meeting is in our new location: 601 Townsend (the new Macromedia building) corner of Townsend and 7th St., across Townsend from the old location

Unfortunately, this means no outside food or drink (even beer, sniffle). Please eat before you come or eat with us after the meeting. If the "no beer" policy doesn't work out for us, we'll have to come up with a new plan of some sort.

Note that this is a preview of the talk Paul will be giving at the Fusebox & Frameworks Conference.

Tonight's BACFUG presentation is now available as a Breeze recording. It starts with Jennifer's introduction and I take over at around 2'30". The recording is just over 45 minutes.

It's a slightly different version of the talk compared to the MXDU version but it's very close to what I'll be showing at CFUNITED (1:30pm Thursday).

By the way, my frameworks comparison talk at CFUNITED will be run twice (6:10pm Wednesday, 10:40am Friday).

Just a reminder that there is a meet'n'greet / BACFUG presentation tonight (June 15th) at the new Macromedia building. There will be cocktails and snacks and networking. I will give a talk about how Macromedia uses ColdFusion to power the enterprise, looking at our use of CF historically since the acquisition of Allaire up to a major integration project that is currently in development, based very heavily on the event gateways in CFMX 7.

You must register if you wish to attend!

---

Update: we're going to try to Breeze and record this via my Breeze room!

Jennifer Larkin just posted details of the June BACFUG meeting:

The June meeting is being replaced with the much more fabulous Meet'n'Greet! Sean Corfield will be lecturing on Enterprise Integration with ColdFusion. This will also be our first event in the new building, so Macromedia is throwing us a party! Free food and drink, plus you get to hang out with Macromedia celebs! (And me. You love me, right?)

More about the lecture: Macromedia uses ColdFusion as the glue that holds the enterprise together: XML, JMS, FTP - data conversion, import and export are all parts of the puzzle. Take a walk through Macromedia's ecosystem and learn how ColdFusion oils the wheels, with a focus on the new event gateway in Blackstone.

YOU MUST RSVP FOR THIS MEETING TO ATTEND. Space is limited, so please RSVP only if you really plan to attend. Please RSVP ASAP so Macromedia can order food!

June 15, 7pm

601 Townsend St (across Townsend from the old building at the corner of 7th St) SF, CA

As she notes, due to the catered nature of this event, you must register to attend!

My talk will give a history of Macromedia's use of ColdFusion both on macromedia.com and behind the scenes, as well as walking through the evolution of our ColdFusion-powered enterprise infrastructure. If you can't attend CFUNITED, this is your chance to see one of the talks I will be giving there!

June 15th, I'll be talking about how Macromedia use ColdFusion, both on the web and behind it as I walk through a case study of how we're using the event gateways in CFMX 7 to enable near real-time data integration across all of our IT systems.

It will also be a chance for you to see our new building, to mix and mingle with other local CFers and to have some food and drink on Macromedia, courtesy of our new campus restaurant!

I'll be giving my application frameworks talk, comparing Fusebox and Mach II (and Tartan and Model-Glue) at BACFUG next Wednesday, May 18th, 7pm, at Learn IT! on Montgomery St, just north of Montgomery BART station.

On June 15th, I will be talking about enterprise integration with CFMX and giving you an inside look at how Macromedia uses ColdFusion MX. That meeting will be in the newly opened Macromedia HQ building - 601 Townsend (directly opposite where BACFUG used to meet).

More details as they become available.

Another reminder that Alexandru Costin and Bogdan Ripa of InterAkt will be talking about Dreamweaver and ColdFusion at BACFUG on Wednesday, April 13th. That's tomorrow (at least, as I write this, despite the 12:12 AM East Coast timestamp on my blog!). Note that the meeting is in a new location: it is at LearnIT! 250 Montgomery, three blocks North of Montgomery BART. Make sure you RSVP!

See you there, I hope?

Jennifer has just announced the April BACFUG meeting which will be next Wednesday, the 13th, a week early to accommodate the team from InterAkt who will be in town (from Roumania, en route from Powered By Detroit this weekend). They'll be talking about developing ColdFusion using Dreamweaver and their MX Kollection 3 set of extensions. Please make sure you RSVP so Jennifer can judge attendance.

Jennifer says:

This month's lecturer will be Tyler Fitch, former CFUG manager, member of the Macromedia Web Team, and all-around nice guy. He'll be talking about CFImport, how it is used, and how it can help you.

Wednesday, March 16, 7pm
600 Townsend (Macromedia Building)
1st Floor meeting room
San Francisco

There will be beer and food. To get yourself into the headcount for beer and food, use the RSVP form at http://www.bacfug.org/. There's a button inside the meeting listing box. We don't hold you to showing up, either.

This week sees two BACFUG meetings! Tonight's meeting is somewhat informal, held at the Mars Cafe on 7th St just behind Macromedia. I'll be there to field questions about CFMX 7. Spike Milligan and Rob Rohan of CFEclipse will also be there. And, most importantly, you can come along and vote to move the BACFUG meeting from its old Thursday slot to a new Wednesday slot (which will make it easier to get speakers).

Thursday's meeting is in the usual venue with Paul Kenney presenting on CFMX 7. And, again, you can vote on the meeting date!

Jennifer posted the following announcement to the BACFUG list - I felt it could do with some more publicity since it's a very interesting topic:

David Gassner, Macromedia-certified instructor in both Flex and ColdFusion, will give a lecture and demo on using Macromedia Flex with ColdFusion. Currently teaching for Schooner Technical Media Training, David also teaches classes in Java, JavaScript, ASP, ASP.NET, HTML, and XML, and has published numerous articles in ColdFusion Developers Journal. He also lectured at Macromedia Max 2003.

Also, a recap of Max 2004, including lots of juicy info on the upcoming Blackstone release, the usual beer and food, and books to give away!

7pm
Macromedia Building, first floor meeting room
600 Townsend St
San Francisco, CA


RSVP: http://www.acteva.com/go/bacfug
RSVP is for food planning only. We won't hold it against you. :)

The holiday season meant it was a somewhat lower turnout than I hoped and even the promise of ColdFusion MX 6.1 Standard Edition being raffled off didn't draw folks. At most meetings, the speaker asks who is using which version of ColdFusion and normally it's a few on 6.1, a few on 6.0 and most folks on 5.0 or earlier. I asked the same question and found more than half the audience are using 6.1 - that might be because of the topic (Mach II requires CFMX 6.1) but it was encouraging nonetheless.
I'll be making the talk available on the BACFUG site - it's a little Mach II application, that takes an XML file containing the information and renders it into a slideshow (a rewrite of my earlier custom tag based slideshow) - but I thought I'd give a little outline here anyway.
I started out with a brief introduction to the Mach II framework and explained why you might want to use an application framework. Folks seemed surprised that Macromedia hadn't been using a framework previously even though only one person in the audience seemed to be using one (Fusebox). Only about 5-10% of developers use any sort of framework (based on usage statistics for Fusebox in the CF community and Struts in the Java community - the most popular frameworks for those languages respectively). Why is that? Well, frameworks make you do things "their way" and not everyone likes that - and every framework has a learning curve and an overhead that you have to deal with.
I talked about why my team at Macromedia uses Mach II - we already did a lot of OO-style devlopment in CF and tried to structure apps in a loose Model-View-Controller pattern. Mach II was a good fit for us. I showed a couple of the applications on macromedia.com that use Mach II: the new showcase and the HTML version of the European online stores (here's the UK store). We've had Flash versions of the European stores for quite some time (here's the UK store in Flash - if you have the latest Flash Player installed) and they used to fall back to the previous HTML store built in BroadVision. The previous version of the showcase was also built in BroadVision - these were the last two applications rewritten to get us off BroadVision. Hurrah!
Then I talked about the pros and cons of Mach II, based on feedback from the developers on my team, and I also showed some code (including the near-1,000 line mach-ii.xml file behind the showcase and the myriad CFCs behind the online store - demonstrating that you can build serious applications with the framework).
For more details, you'll have to download the talk from the BACFUG website - or come and hear me give (a variant of) this talk: SCCFUG (February), MXDU 2004 (February), SacCFUG (April), SDCFUG (May).

---

The preso / app is available from the BACFUG code page.

As I mentioned last week, I'm speaking at BACFUG tonight about Macromedia's use of Mach II. RSVP if you plan to attend (so Jennifer can guage beer/food requirements). See you there?

I'm speaking at BACFUG next week on Thursday. Here's the details from the BACFUG Manager, Jennifer Larkin:

Our December meeting features Sean Corfield talking about Mach II: "Mach II is an Object-Oriented, MVC-based application framework that implements the Event-Based Implicit Invocation Architecture. Buzzword overload! This talk will briefly introduce the audience to Mach II and then talk in more depth about Macromedia's real-world experience with the framework."

December 18, 7pm
600 Townsend (at the corner of 7th St)
San Francisco

Food and beer!
Free stuff!

As I've announced repeatedly, this meeting we will give away at least one fully licensed copy of CFMX 6.1. Even if you submitted a business card in a previous meeting, you must be present to win!

Tonight Nathan Dintenfass gave a terrific presentation to the Bay Area ColdFusion User Group about Impart - a blogging system for ColdFusion MX.
Impart is an open-source project that provides a blogging toolkit with pluggable persistence, caching etc, using CFCs and also providing a custom tag layer to make the toolkit very, very easy to use.
Nathan talked about the design goals and the OO principles behind Impart and showed how the various layers are constructed - with many peaks under the hood at the (well-structured) CFC source code. He explained the various design trade-offs involved in his implementation and some of his ideas fo future development of the system.
It was an extremely worthwhile talk and I thoroughly enjoyed it!
During the post-talk Q&A session, there was quite a bit of discussion on the Eolas '906 patent issue. I pointed folks to the Active Content Developer Center on macromedia.com where they can find out more about the facts and the impact of the changes that Microsoft is planning to introduce to Internet Explorer.
Thankfully discussion quickly moved on to ColdFusion migration - someone wanted to know what people's experiences had been going from CF4.5 or CF5 to CFMX. Most folks very pretty positive about the upgrade process, saying their code ran with no changes, although a few gotchas were pointed out (e.g., multiple SQL statements in a single , dots in variable names). The general consensus seemed to be that if your CF code was reasonably well-written, the upgrade would be pretty painless.
Next month's BACFUG (in two weeks!) looks like being Brian Ghidinelli talking about Cascading Style Sheets. Incidentally, Brian's blog is built with Impart!
Decemeber's BACFUG (12/18) will be me, talking about Mach II.

As noted last week, Ben Forta came to BACFUG to talk about the benefits of CFMX for J2EE and to give a sneak peek of Red Sky.
Ben asked the audience a lot of leading questions about how convenient it would be if they could have more than one ColdFusion install on a server, with different CF Admins for different applications and users... Then he showed how this is exactly what CFMX for J2EE provides and set everyone 'homework' to go and download JRun and CFMX for J2EE and try it for themselves.
I'm a huge advocate of the J2EE edition - I'm currently running four independent CF installs on one Tomcat instance on my Mac as well as four separate JRun server instances, each running CF. I have different versions of CFMX installed side-by-side for testing as well as few specific applications that I'm experimenting with. For example, Mach II has its own CF instance.
After the break, Ben talked about some of the things coming in Red Sky. Red Sky is the codename for the upcoming maintenance release of CFMX. It's more than an "Updater" but it will still be a free upgrade to all licensed users of CFMX 6.0. What's in it? Ben said the three main focuses were on simplicity, performance & stability and backward compatibility but that there were also a lot of enhancements. He mentioned improvements to the internet protocol tags (e.g., cfmail, cfinvoke on a web service), improvements to CFCs (e.g., addition of a "super" scope for inheritance, fixing the 'page context bug' so that CFCs can be stored in shared scopes and still access other shared scopes).
He also talked briefly about the major overhaul of the CFML compiler. Currently, CFMX reads the CFML pages and translates them to Java (and writes .java files) and then uses either 'jikesw' or 'javac' to compile that to bytecode (and writes .class files) which is then loaded into memory and executed (by the JVM). That's why there's such a big 'hit' the first time you access a modified page. By contrast, Red Sky reads the CFML pages and compiles them directly to bytecode which is then executed by the JVM. The result is a much faster development cycle. Red Sky is also "much, much faster" than CFMX. Ben couldn't say how much faster (and nor can I!) - but we think folks will be impressed.
Finally, Ben started asking folks for their CF wishlists and set homework for some - for each cool new feature they requested, write up the CF syntax you'd expect to use for that feature! Much of the focus was on image processing, manipulation of PDF (or other document formats) and report generation. It's always interesting to hear what CFers want from CFML!

Newsflash!

Macromedia Senior Evangelist Ben Forta presents at the Bay Area ColdFusion User Group on July 22.
The Bay Area CFUG is hosting Macromedia Senior Evangelist Ben Forta as a guest speaker at its next meeting on July 22.
Join the meeting to hear the presentation, "Running ColdFusion on top of J2EE," followed by a sneak peek into the next ColdFusion update.
For more information and directions, visit: http://www.bacfug.org.