This repeat replaces the planned repeat of Hal's Introduction to OO Modeling talk.
We have swapped these two sessions on the website schedule as well as in the online scheduler.
Please visit the online scheduler to reconfirm your schedule if you were planning to attend either of these sessions.
Workshop Prequisites for cf.Objective() 2008
This document will continue to be updated between now and the conference but this should help you get ready for your workshop session.
Haven't registered for the conference yet? It's only a week away but you can still sign up. It's the best value ColdFusion content anywhere on the planet!
Announcing a new meeting for The Online ColdFusion Meetup Group!What: "Cleveland CFUG Simulcast: cf.Objective() Preview", with 3 Speakers
When: Thursday, Apr 24, 6:00pm US EDT (GMT-5) (What time is that for you? See this link which shows the time as US EDT and you can choose your city from the list offered to see it in your own time.)
In addition, we've had to move a few sessions around on Sunday to accommodate speakers' travel arrangements. Josh Adams' talk on .NET has swapped with Sanjeev Kumar's talk on PDF. In order to ensure the two .NET talks do not conflict, we've swapped the rest of the first two slots. Mostly that means that the session choices in each slot haven't changed so, hopefully, attendees' choices won't need to change either.
Please take a look at the revised schedule and, if necessary, update your selections in the online scheduler.
See you in just over a week!
Don't forget that cf.Objective() 2008 is the first place to get your hands on Open BlueDragon where Vince will launch the project to the public and a number of the OpenBD Steering Committee members will be present to answer your questions.
Here's what I said in response:
We've worked hard to make cf.Objective() 2008 a "must see" event. We have a number of firsts this year that we're very proud of:
- The public release of Open BlueDragon on May 3rd!
- The public unveiling - and Alpha - of Model-Glue 3: Gesture!
- The public unveiling of Mate, the new Flex framework from AsFusion!
- The first conference to feature the latest rising star in the frameworks world: ColdBox - with an introductory session and a two hour, hands-on advanced workshop!
- The first public information about Swiz, the new Flex framework from Chris Scott of ColdSpring fame!
- Speaking of Chris Scott, we're the first conference to feature a two-hour, hands-on workshop for ColdSpring!
- We're also the first conference to feature a two-hour, hands-on workshop on agile development for ColdFusion developers by the leading light in automated process & testing, John Paul Ashenfelter!
If you're a Mach-II user - or thinking of using Mach-II - you might also be interested in the pre-conference classes.
$3,800. Ouch!
That's return flights for me and my wife for SFO/LHR and SFO/DCA. With cfDevCon later in the year, plus several more cat show flights to book, at least we'll both be Premier flyers on United next year!
See you at cf.Objective() in early May? Or Scotch in early June? Or CFUNITED later in June?
By the way, today is the last day for the guaranteed hotel price for cf.Objective() so if you haven't registered and booked your hotel, you might want to get on that tonight!
I'll be doing a "session focus" on Ron's topic shortly.
If you have used the ColdFusion 8 Server Monitor at all, you probably think it's a pretty useful tool. Charlie Arehart has used the Server Monitor a lot and he wants to share his experience and knowledge by showing you hints and tips to get the most out of the monitor. He covers general use of the monitor in development as well as what you can and cannot reasonably do with the monitor on production systems. He also covers automation, alerts, thresholds, snapshots and debugging as well as several advanced features and usage scenarios. Almost all of the presentation is based on active use of the Server Monitor, rather than being just a slide deck, so come along and learn how to make the Server Monitor work for you.
Whilst a presentation about an e-commerce security standard might sound very dull, the reality is that this is probably one of the most important topics on the cf.Objective() schedule. "Any company processes, stores or transmits credit card numbers is required to be PCI DSS compliant." John Mason explains the scope of PCI DSS, where you fall within its levels and what is required of you - and how expensive non-compliance can be! He covers each of the major areas of PCI DSS such as network security, encryption, vulnerability management, access controls, monitoring / testing and policy issues. Some of the requirements are "duh!" obvious but some were quite surprising to me (and some are surprisingly burdensome). Along the way he provides examples of specific things you need to deal with in your CFML code.
Even if you don't do e-commerce, there are a lot of useful security tips in this presentation - or at least potential security problems that you may not have considered yet.
We hear a lot of talk about using individual Java objects within ColdFusion but the reality of enterprise development is that entire subsystems tend to built entirely in Java. Software teams that serve the enterprise often build large, complex systems using Spring and Hibernate. How do you go about using ColdFusion with such systems? I haven't seen any presentations on this subject so I was pleasantly surprised when I started reviewing Andrew Powell's slide deck to find that he was focusing on how ColdFusion can provide the web front end to enterprise class Java systems.
He introduces Spring (the Java version) with a demo and then introduces Hibernate (the industry standard ORM for Java), again with a demo. After that, he will walk you through solutions to the problem of connecting ColdFusion on the front end to Spring on the backend and, using Mach-II as an example, he then shows how to create an MVC web application that allows you to leverage the entire Spring-powered, Hibernate-persisted Java backend.
If you work along a Java team - or you are considering using more Java for your backend systems - this talk will provide you with a lot of good information about how well ColdFusion plays in this space.
- Mate - Laura Arguello
- Cairngorm for ColdFusion Developers - Brian Rinaldi
- Flex: No Frameworks Required - Maxim Porges
Would folks be interested in a Flex frameworks shootout BOF?
- CFEclipse Reloaded - Mark Drew
- An Intelligent Approach to OOP in CF Architecture - Nic Tunney
Transfer continues to evolve at a rapid pace. The SVN repository is light years ahead of the last "official" release (0.6.3) and 1.0 is "coming soon". Mark Mandel deserves huge kudos for his work on this project - and his intent to turn this into "Professional Open Source". In other words, making Transfer something we can rely on like we rely on JBoss or MySQL today.
Come to cf.Objective() 2008 to hear Mark talk in person about Transfer in two great sessions!
The release date for BlueDragon Open Source is May 3rd at cf.Objective(). Register for cf.Objective() and be one of the first to see the project "in the flesh"! Come along to the BOF and ask Vince all about the whys and wherefores of the project and New Atlanta's decision to go open source (assuming Dan's interview doesn't answer your questions).
Alan Williamson has also posted about the steering committee and the process for getting involved.
- Deploying into Large Scale ColdFusion Environments - Michael Collins
- Integrating ColdFusion with .NET - Josh Adams
- Building Hybrid Applications with ColdFusion and Java - Jason Delmore
- Adding Live Chat with ColdFusion and BlazeDS - Adam Lehman
- Document Driven Applications with PDF - Sanjeev Kumar
I'm particularly excited to have Michael's talk on the schedule since this covers a number of very important topics for enterprise ColdFusion shops - including a lot of new material, not seen anywhere before!
Josh's talk is an excellent complement to John Bland's session on .NET integration. John will cover the mechanics of the architecture and how to build .NET assemblies you can call from ColdFusion. Josh will cover specific uses of the feature to leverage Microsoft's Sharepoint and Office technology.
Likewise, Jason's talk is an excellent complement to Andrew Powell's session on ColdFusion and Java. Jason will cover ColdFusion and Java integration with pros and cons and Andrew will dive into building your entire business model in Java and using that with ColdFusion for presentation.
Adam's talk brings coverage of Adobe's newly released open source remoting system, BlazeDS, showing how it can be used to create interactive applications with ColdFusion and Sanjeev's talk goes deep into the Adobe PDF integration that ColdFusion 8 brought to the table, including architecture level information.
ColdFusion as a Different Type of "Glue"
Is ColdFusion really "the glue" that Adobe says it is? We always hear about functions like PDF generation, image manipulation, Outlook integration and all of the new functionality, but is that all that ColdFusion is good for? Is ColdFusion for intranet use only? Can ColdFusion be a different type of glue? This topic will cover using ColdFusion as the front end to an enterprise-level, customer facing application, integrating it with a business object back-end from enterprise-level systems. This will cover what types of things you would need to integrate, levels of integration, ways to integrate, including MQ Series and WebMethods, WSDL vs. REST, direct vs. indirect integration, integrating with external applications, and data replication.
I think this shift in focus will make the session more appealing to a broader audience at the conference so "Thanx!" to Brian for that.
If you haven't already registered, bear in mind that the guaranteed hotel room block price expires on April 1st and may go up after that.
- Leveraging Basic Design Pattern in ColdFusion - Phill Nacelli
- Refactoring in ColdFusion: from Procedural to OO - Dan Wilson
Adobe should be providing session titles and abstracts soon (I hope) so that we can populate their five sessions on the schedule.
I'll be blogging about schedule additions / updates as they happen - stay tuned!
- Flex 3 for ColdFusion Developers - Mike Nimer
- Agile Bootcamp: What ColdFusion Developers Need To Know - John Paul Ashenfelter
- ColdSpring l337 - Chris Scott
- Advanced Techniques With The ColdBox Framework - Luis Majano
Not all of these have been scheduled yet - we wanted to get your feedback on what you think would be most popular:
- ColdFusion 9 feature brainstorm - Jason Delmore / Adam Lehman
- Source Code Control - volunteer?
- Best practices for UI design - Ken Sykora
- Frameworks - using them / not using them / roadmaps - run by the frameworks authors
- Using Ant as part of your ColdFusion development environment - Peter Farrell
- Testing tools, techniques and frameworks - John Paul Ashenfelter and Peter Farrell
- Open Source development and publishing - Andrew Powell
- Blogging and Writing - Judith & Michael Dinowitz
As we see which sessions are going to be the most popular, we'll finalize the Sunday sessions.
New Atlanta are working hard to make an initial source code drop available, especially for cf.Objective(), so that Vince can show how to download, install, build and configure the project - and field questions about New Atlanta's thinking behind open sourcing the J2EE edition of BlueDragon, as well as discussing with the community how the project can move forward, how the license works, how the steering committee operates and so on.
If you're excited about New Atlanta's recent announcement - or even just curious about how such a large open source project might work for the CF community - be sure to attend this Birds of a Feather session on Saturday evening at 7:30pm. The schedule shows it running an hour but I expect this will need more than an hour so I currently plan to keep the 8:30pm slot open immediately afterward to allow for an extended Q&A session.
If you are attending the conference and want to run a BOF, or even just suggest a topic and maybe recommend someone to run it, please contact me about it!
I'm going to be posting a series of "mini-features" on some of the sessions at the conference (based on the actual slide decks that the track committee has been reviewing) so you will get a better insight into various sessions to help you pick your schedule.
If you have not already registered, the conference is only six weeks away so time is running out! The three-day price is $629 which is great value - and there are group discounts available so it's even better value if you send more of your team. Don't forget that Mach-II pre-conference training is also available!
Of my other two clients, both are ongoing rearchitecture projects along similar lines but with slightly less impending deadlines. It doesn't look like I'll be anything less than insanely busy for several months tho'. January was a record month for me in terms of hours worked and I expect that will continue for the next few months.
The downside of that is I'm less available on IM than usual (sorry) and never on IRC (so folks have to ping me if the cfmx7bot goes offline). I'm also behind on getting articles and columns and presentations written - but I am almost completely caught up on reviewing cf.Objective() presentation outlines!
They also talk about how the event has changed, becoming more organized and more streamlined, with an active committee that started working behind the scenes soon after the 2007 event ended.
It's also worth noting that the early bird rate of $499 for the three day package has been extended to January 20th - an extra five days.
Note: the general badge and banner are JPEGs, the specific badges are GIFs.
There is now an announcement-only information mailing list where you can sign up for notices about deadlines and events and any changes.
Also another reminder that the early bird price of $499 for the 3-day pass ends on January 15th. If you are an alumni of 2006 or 2007 cf.Objective() conferences, you should have received your alumni discount code (back in October). If you did not, contact me and I'll get you sorted out.
We'll be posting speaker bios and pictures over the next week or two and sending out logistics information to the speakers.
Don't forget: the early bird ends on January 15th so register in the next three weeks to take advantage of that special price!
- Jeff Coughlin thinks we have an "amazing" list of topics and will be speaking about FarCry
- Maxim Porges says you should make sure you register because our topics "tend to be more on the advanced/esoteric side" - Maxim will be explaining why Flex is a good enough framework that you don't need to add others on top of it
- Luis Majano talks about the debut of two ColdBox sessions, one of which will be a two hour, hands advanced workshop
- Terrence Ryan is "thrilled, excited, and a little intimidated" and says we have "the most advanced content of any of the various ColdFusion world events" - he will be talking about how to convince skeptics to use frameworks, source control and automation which I think a lot of people will be very interested in!
- Peter Bell says this is one of his "favorite CF conferences" and will be speaking about Software Product Lines
- Matt Woodward says "WOW what a fantastic conference" - he will be speaking about enterprise level Mach-II
- Todd Sharp is "thrilled" and "honored" to be speaking about ColdFusion 8's AJAX capabilities and says we have "amazing topics"
- Brian Kotek will be covering a number of code generation techniques to make coding more fun
- Mark Mandel is "very excited about coming over again" (from Australia) and thinks the "speaker lineup this year looks absolutely amazing" - Mark will be providing an introduction to Transfer ORM as well as an advanced session on caching within Transfer ORM
- Flex 3 For ColdFusion Developers - Jeff Tapper
- Advanced Techniques With The ColdBox Framework - Luis Majano - hands on
- ColdSpring 1337 - Chris Scott - hands on
- Agile Bootcamp: What ColdFusion Developers Need To Know - John Paul Ashenfelter - hands on
We will be the first conference to provide extensive coverage of the increasingly popular ColdBox framework, offering both an introductory one hour session and the above two hour hands on advanced session!
All speakers listed should have received confirmation of their acceptance today - and to those of you who submitted topics but didn't get picked, thank you (and you should also have received an email today).
The early bird price of $499 runs until mid-January!
We'll be posting the schedule soon and we plan to repeat popular sessions on Sunday.
We are very close to finalizing the selections. Our problem is that we have so many really good submissions and it's very hard to reject enough sessions to fit into the slots available! In order to accommodate the greatest number of sessions, we're looking at room availability on Friday night to see whether we can run regular sessions into the evening.
We are planning four workshops - two hour sessions that are at least partly hands on - in addition to around 45 unique sessions with the most popular sessions being repeated on Sunday so that you will have a chance to see as many of your favorites as possible.
Registration for cf.Objective() 2008 is already open and the early bird rate of $499 runs until mid-January!
At this point, we would also like to invite submissions from the community to supplement our initial topic choices and speakers. If you have a topic you'd like to present at cf.Objective() 2008, please send me an email containing:
- Your name
- Your email address
- Your session title
- An abstract describing your session in one or two paragraphs
The final date for submission of the completed Speaker Request Form is November 30th so you probably want to get those emails in to me as soon as possible.
We will then review all submissions and by mid-December we will notify all submitters to let them know whether they have been accepted, rejected or placed on the reserve list.
If you have any questions about the process that are not answered by this earlier blog post, feel free to ask me by email!
If you refer back to my blog post about the speaker invitation process, you'll see that we're about halfway through the process. All the speakers we've contacted so far about speaking (and those who volunteered to fill the slots we did not have speakers for), will have received formal invitations.
We'll also be posting the general call for papers later this weekend. You'll have about four weeks.
Then we will review all submissions - giving preference to submissions from speakers on our initial list since we want to ensure we fill our original topics - and make our final selections by early December, at which point we'll notify everyone who submitted a topic to let them know whether we've accepted or rejected their submission - or whether we'd like to keep them on the reserve list in case any accepted speakers have to drop out.
We all got together early in the summer and came up with the tracks:
- Architecture and Design in Software
- RIA - Flex / AJAX / AIR
- Frameworks A-Z
- Process and Tools
- Platform: Database Tuning & (Application / System) Security
- Introduction to Design Patterns
- Advanced Design Patterns
- Integrating ColdFusion with .NET and other Microsoft technologies
- Publishing and consuming Web Services
- Interface-driven design (interface = API)
- Introduction to AIR
- Data synchronization techniques with AIR
- Designing for multiple user interface technologies
- Designing for code reuse between AIR and Flex
- Real-time data management with LiveCycle Data Services
Soon we'll be posting a general call for speakers. Watch this space!
Remember that registration is already open for cf.Objective() 2008!
See this blog post for more details on the speaker selection process.
I'll be posting a tentative list of speakers on the cf.Objective() site later today, as well as a tentative list of topics. We'll be confirming speakers and topics over the next few weeks as well as opening up a general call for papers shortly to help us populate the rest of the schedule. Yes, we've followed the lead of several other conferences this year in planning out tracks and topics and inviting an initial round of speakers first so that we can structure the tracks and sessions more formally this year. We hope you'll like what we're doing!
Next year, the conference will have official tracks. The tentative track titles are:
- Architecture & Design in Software
- RIA (Flex, AJAX, AIR)
- Frameworks A to Z
- Process & Tools
- Platform (database, tuning, security)
We'll be fleshing out the tracks and inviting a first round of speakers during July, adding more topics and speakers through August. Once we've got main infrastructure in place, we'll issue a call for topics and speakers to fill in the rest of the schedule.
Joe Rinehart showed off a new project at cf.Objective(), which aims to brings the ease of use of Model-Glue to Flex. He showed me an example that he'd converted from Cairngorm to his nascent "MG:F" and it was definitely an improvement. I was still bothered by all the repetitive code, left over from Cairngorm, for handling the model - endless delegate object creation, asynchronous token management, responders and result / fault handlers. Boring, tedious, monotonous boilerplate code. There had to be a better way.
I asked Joe if he thought he could come up with some sort of automagic proxy mechanism to make all that code just go away. Being Joe, of course he could!
Read about the big changes to MG:F that introduce autoproxy functionality around the service layer so that you do a lot less typing! Very nice!
I think this is going to be a great project that will really help a lot of ColdFusion developers get into Flex (me included!).
The location made a big difference this year - it gave the conference a much lighter feeling, much more space, so it was much more relaxed and friendly (last year was friendly but in a cramped sort of way).
The food was also out of this world. I heard nothing but praise for the catering (although some grumbled at the price of beer) and that also led to a very upbeat atmosphere.
That seemed to lead to a lot more laptop-based sessions in the hallways and in the bar. A lot of collaboration on projects and a lot of idea sharing. Definitely a good thing.
ColdSpring and Transfer were the darling frameworks of the conference - I think eight or nine sessions covered those in some form or another.
I was impressed with the new stuff coming in Mach II 1.5 - Matt and Peter (and Kurt) have been hard at work with a lot of good ideas.
It was great to see so many people I only know from online discussions. We often seem to be such a close "family" in the CF community and it's hard to remember that we sometimes only see each other face to face a few times each year!
Definitely a "must attend" event. Start preparing for cf.Objective() 2008. Details will be made available much earlier next year.
Sorry, but the "AJAX Integration with Scorpio" talk will not be posted. It's all about prerelease features and those are subject to change per the usual disclaimer that Ben, Jason and Adam all put in their slide decks. I expect I'll be revising it for CFUNITED anyway and, once Scorpio is released, I'll make sure it is fully up-to-date and post it then, with code.
My SOA repeat session came next, in the ballroom this time and I was somewhat surprised to see such a good turnout (thanks!).
Ben Forta - "Top Secret" Scorpio Keynote. See my BACFUG summary for details of the themes of Scorpio (and several features). Ben focused on just three features, across two themes (developer productivity and integration), that were all Eclipse related. First up he showed the AJAX Application Generation wizard - he showed this at BACFUG. Next was the step-through debugger - lots of cheers and applause! This really is very slick, leveraging the debug perspective in Eclipse, the RDS connection to the server, and providing breakpoints and watch expressions and so on. For the third feature, he explained the whole Flex Data Services integration in CFMX 7.0.2 then showed how Scorpio provides even tighter, higher performance integration with FDS (now known as LiveCycle Data Services).
After lunch I went to Rob Gonda's talk on Cairngorm. I'd had to pick up a Cairgorm app at Adobe and found it very confusing so I really wanted to know more. Rob explained that it is based on six design patterns and a fairly rigid "micro-architecture". He showed how code is typically organized and how requests are handled. Some of it is very clean but a lot of it seems very repetitive and tedious - it certainly creates a lot of little AS3 class files! At the end of the talk, I definitely understood it more but was a long way from being a fan of the approach.
Simon Horwith - XML for the rest of us. I was very disappointed in this talk. Simon pretty much just listed all of the tags and functions CF provides for dealing with XML and really didn't give any good examples. I didn't expect such a basic, unstructured talk at cf.Objective() (and I wish I'd gone to Maxim's talk about Java integration instead).
Chris Scott - Leveraging ColdSpring for Flex. Chris gave a great explanation of how the remote factory bean works. He also gave an overview of the Cairngorm architecture, including what he doesn't like about it. The ability to add logging advice so easily around all the proxied remote methods is certainly very powerful! A useful ColdSpring nugget that came up: getBean("&beanName") returns the factory for the bean, rather than the bean itself!
Dinner with Jared and Steven and a handful of others who were staying until tomorrow (including the British and Australian Marks).
Fantastic conference! Looking forward to next year!
Adam Lehman - Scorpio Monitoring and Alerts - Showed the new server monitor, drilling into requests, scopes, variables, queries, both in terms of execution times and memory usage. The monitor is very sophisticated when you dig into it! Also showed how you can configure a number of alerts, based on the condition of your server, and either email the admin or proactively "self-heal" by killing errant threads or running CFCs to perform other actions.
After lunch I was waylaid by Chris Scott, Charlie Arehart and Jared Rypka-Hauer on a variety of issues so I only caught the last ten minutes of Simeon Bateman's Fusebox session. He had covered the whole evolution of an application from page-based spaghetti to basic Fusebox to MVC to OO to ColdSpring-managed CFCs. Emphasizing how Fusebox supports you without getting in your way and forcing you to do things a particularly way.
Then I took a break and chatted to a number of folks, including showing Simeon some of what's coming in Fusebox 6 (and promptly running into a bug - which I fixed during the next session!).
The final session of the day was Peter Farrell on Mach II 1.5. Lots of interesting stuff coming: XML includes, sub-applications (modules), calling events (subroutines), enhanced configuration properties, URL management. The new module stuff is very heavily inheritance-based in concept, in keeping with Mach II's OO focus. Definitely some nice, powerful features.
BOFs start in about an hour but I'm in need of a nap I think. And food. And maybe beer.
Skipped the next session - spent time with Mark Drew going over Project: Unity, helping him configure support for Transfer ORM.
David Keith - adobe.com - history of the site, infrastructure, architecture. Good explanation of what has worked well (service-based approach) and what needs to be re-architected (monolithic application deployment).
Me - Scorpio/AJAX - the talk seemed to be well-received. Lots of people seemed very excited by just how gosh darn simple Scorpio will make AJAX. I can't post the slides (sorry) so you'll have to watch other people's blogs for reports of what I covered.
Mark Mandel - Advanced Transfer ORM - Covered caching and soft references, observers and the event model, decorators. Transfer really is an impressive piece of software!
Mark Drew - CFEclipse - Started with a lot of introductory material but ramped up. Interesting how so many things are based around the concept of snippets. Introduced Project: Unity - a new plugin that analyses, displays and lets you edit the XML configuration files for any framework. Yes, any framework! How? Mark has built a completely generic, XML-driven parsing engine with several standard "actions". You can now configure CFEcllipse (via this plugin) to discover and render any XML file and provide a context-sensitive editor for it. Extremely impressive! An "alpha" build should be available shortly...
Had dinner with Sami Hoda and his colleagues, along with various Mach II folks. Lots of good discussions about architecture and software design over a fabulous meal (although I had to send the steak back - overcooked!). La Fougasse is amazing (the French / Spanish restaurant at the Sofitel).
Now I'm working on my Real World SOA presentation (again) and struggling with the increasingly serious head cold I seem to have developed in the last couple of days.
And can I just say what a fabulous hotel this is?
Ahem... Well, it would be if I'd actually remembered to borrow the darn phone! So, SkypeIn and Skype voice mail it is. I'll be checking for messages as often as connectivity allows.