As I mentioned in an earlier post, I started writing up my experience of CFUnited 2009 but it turned into a giant essay as I was going into a lot more detail than I'm sure anyone would really care about. So here's the condensed version:

CFunited 2009 was awesome!

OK, you probably want a bit more detail than that so read on.

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It's a month since CFUnited and I haven't yet posted my thoughts on the conference. I started writing but it turned into an essay and I'm not sure it's worth posting in its entirety, especially since many others have posted their reviews (mostly all glowing - and rightly so!). I will post a brief review of the conference soon - it's on my Things to-do list and everything on that list gets done (eventually).

The other overdue blog post on my Things to-do list covers what it was like to be a sponsor at CFUnited. A first for me (sort of). I've been attending (and speaking) at CFUnited since it was CFUN'04 (when I covered the use of Mach-II at Macromedia). Sure, Macromedia and Adobe have been regular sponsors but that is the ColdFusion product team and I was going independently as part of another team - the joys of a big company - so I never felt I was a sponsor (I never worked for the ColdFusion product team - even tho' a lot of people seem to think I did!). This year - 2009 - Railo was a silver sponsor of CFUnited and so I spent quite a bit of time around the Railo "booth" talking to attendees.

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This week - tomorrow in fact - I'll be giving a re-run of my CFUnited talk "Living in the Cloud" at BACFUG. You can read about the talk - and RSVP! - on BACFUG's Adobe Groups website.

See you there!

Where? On SlideSix of course! Created by Todd Sharp (using ColdFusion and Flex) and lauded by everyone who uses it, SlideSix was featured in Joe Rinehart's day two keynote as an inspirational example to all CFML developers about what is possible.

So, here's my Living in the Cloud presentation on SlideSix.

So it's Sunday and I'm back home after an intense four days in the Washington DC area at CFUnited 2009. Hard to believe it's over and I'm still digesting the presentations and the information I picked up during the (excellent) networking opportunities. If you missed it this year, do whatever you can to attend next year (especially if it returns to this fabulous location).

I'll be collecting my thoughts later today and writing up a (very long) blog entry about my experiences at the conference.

In the meantime, thank you speakers for the great sessions, thank you attendees for all those discussions in hallways - and the bar! - and thank you especially Liz, Nafisa and the rest of the Stellr team for an awesome event!

Since several people have asked, I get into CFUnited on Wednesday morning, hopefully in time for the keynote. I got a good deal on a red eye from San Francisco - it's non-stop and I hate burning daylight traveling.

I've already posted my intended session schedule (PDF) so you can track me down easily although I do have a couple of client meetings to fit in and time on the Railo booth.

Yes, Railo are sponsoring CFUnited and we'll be there at the Railo booth with schwag to give away, a sign-up sheet for folks interested in our consulting services and, of course, Gert, Mark, Peter and myself to answer all your questions about the Railo server as well.

I'm giving my Living in the Cloud presentation on Wednesday afternoon (last session before dinner) and again on Saturday (last session of the conference). I'm also hosting a CFML Advisory Committee BoF on Wednesday night where you can hear what we've been up to over the last year since the committee was formed and hear about our plans for the future.

There are going to be some interesting announcements at CFUnited that will affect lots of CF developers.

See you Wednesday!

I tweeted my schedule recently but figured I'd also post it here for folks to discover where to find me next week - OMG! It's next week!

So, here is my CFUnited schedule (PDF). I'm speaking on Wednesday (5:30pm) and Saturday (4:15pm) and I'm also hosting a BOF on Wednesday evening:

The CFML Advisory Committee - Happy First Birthday!

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Adobe's sessions at CFUnited have been announced. In addition to the keynote, there are a dozen sessions on ColdFusion 9 and ColdFusion Builder!

Adam Lehman kicks off with a general "What's New" talk on Wednesday after lunch and Ryan Stewart will showcase what you can do with CF9/FX4 together. Thursday and Friday are the main events with five sessions on each day! Half a dozen of the ColdFusion engineering team will be over from Bangalore to speak about features they helped develop so you can get the information right from the horse's mouth! In addition, Terry Ryan and Adam will also be giving sessions on some of the new features. I think the highlights for me will be Manju Kiran's "Advanced ORM" on Thursday afternoon and Hemant's "Insider's Guide" on Friday afternoon but Adam's "Building Extensions with CFML" (for CFBuilder) and Hareni and Terry covering "Working w/MS Office, Sharepoint and Exchange", both on Friday morning, also look very interesting.

If you're new to Eclipse, Bhakti and Dipanwita's "Getting Start (Bring Your Laptop)" session on CFBuilder should be gold.

See the CFUnited blog post for more details.

Starting tomorrow (Wednesday), Railo are running a Twitter-based competition to win a ticket to this year's CFUnited conference. Read the Railo blog entry for the rules!

I've talked about the CFML Advisory Committee before and explained that we're working on a specification for the ColdFusion Markup Language that we hope to release this year as CFML2009 and then review every two years.

CFML2009 is intended to be a specification of what the language should be by the end of this year. Ben Forta just posted about some CFML enhancements coming soon in ColdFusion 9 but he didn't mention that many of these will be embodied in the CFML2009 spec.

I figured it was worth looking at some of the items in his blog post through the lens of the Advisory Committee. Where these features are deemed "core" by the Advisory Committee, expect all CFML engines to provide them fairly quickly. Some features are supported already by one or more vendor, some are new to all three vendors.

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Luis Majano just announced ColdBox training the day before CFUnited. If you're going to CFUnited this year and you're interested in learning more about ColdBox from the creator of the framework, I can highly recommend this intense, one-day pre-conference training class!

I was privileged to sit in on parts of this course before cf.Objective() this year and was very impressed at the amount of material covered, the quality (and thickness!) of the handouts and the hands-on approach that Luis takes.

As I've been working on my Living in the Cloud talk for CFUnited (since I didn't have to complete it for Scotch on the Rocks), it occurred to me that this is a topic covering stuff I worked on in the middle of 2008 (Broadchoice Workspace, built for Amazon EC2 and S3) and the end of 2008 (migrating Broadchoice Workshop to Amazon EC2).

Conferences usually want topics submitted a long way in advance of the conference, even tho' drafts and the final version of the talk can be delivered just before the conference. CFUnited 2009's deadline for topic submissions was December 1st, 2008, eight months ahead of the conference. MAX 2009 opened its call for speakers on March 3rd 2009 and closed it in late April, six months ahead of the conference.

Conferences set deadlines far in advance so that they can offer a good roster of speakers and talks because that's what attracts attendees. I've been on the advisory for a number of conferences and getting a schedule out early is key in the battle to boost registration.

Our industry moves very fast. Something that's hot in the Fall may not be on anyone's radar today. Something that's hot today may be old, old news by the Fall. Conference committees have to guess what will be attractive, many months in advance - which is extremely hard! And yet, one of the biggest complaints we hear about conferences is when they have the same topics every year - which is a natural consequence of trying to fill the schedule so early: how many brand new topics can you think of off the top of your head?

How do you feel about conference schedules? Do you feel they manage to stay ahead of the curve? Do you think there's too much "safe" content? Do you have suggestions for how conference committees can balance the need to publish a schedule so folks will buy tickets against the desire to feature bleeding edge topics?

Do you think I'm too concerned about this - and that maybe there's no real issue here?

I've had a few people ask me whether Railo will be doing a session or a BOF at cf.Objective() 2009 - and my colleagues say they've also had similar questions.

The content for cf.Objective() was picked some time ago, before our open source release and before the expansion of Railo into the UK and the US. Similarly, most of the BOFs were selected in early March and the only open slot is in the RIA track.

Despite that, the Railo team will be there in force. Mark, Peter and I are all speaking at cf.Objective() and Gert will be there too. We'll be around every evening for any questions you may have - think of it as a Railo BOF in the bar! I look forward to seeing you there.

All four of us are speaking at Scotch on the Rocks in London - I'm speaking at all three venues and I think some of my colleagues will be attending Manchester and Edinburgh as well. All four of us are speaking at CFUNITED as well. You'll be hearing plenty from us at future conferences!

I just got confirmed from Liz @ Stellr that the committee's request for a BOF has been accepted. Here's the information about the session:

The CFML Advisory Committee - Happy First Birthday!

A year ago, at CFUNITED 2008, Adobe announced the formation of the CFML Advisory Committee, made up of vendors and community members, charged with the tasks of answering the question "What is CFML?", providing a specification of the language and providing guidelines for vendors who implement extensions. Come to our BOF and find out what progress we've made and what we're planning for the future. We expect almost all of the committee to be at CFUNITED so this is a great opportunity to meet the team and ask us all your hard questions, face-to-face!

Both cf.Objective() 2009 and CFUNITED 2009 have their early bird deadlines coming up on Tuesday March 31st.

Register now to get the best price for those two conferences!

Remember that if your company registers at least one person for cf.Objective() as an early bird, you can register others from your company later at the same early bird price!

This is a very cool and inventive promotion idea from Liz @ Stellr:

If you register [for CFUNITED] by Feb 14th, you will be entered to win $150 gift certificate!

This is our way of saying we love our customers. Read more on the CFUNITED blog.

This year CFUNITED is at a wonderful venue with a very diverse set of topics so register early to get the best price - and the chance to win!

I submitted a talk on cloud computing to Scotch on the Road 2009 and just discovered that it has also been accepted for CFUNITED 2009. The talk will cover what it took to migrate Broadchoice's ColdFusion-based CMS (our "Community Platform") from a traditional data center to Amazon EC2, what sort of application design issues you need to consider and what it's like to live in the clouds.

Here's the talk abstract:

The dream of cloud computing is cheap, scalable, on-demand power. What is it really like to run your production applications up in the cloud? What are the design issues you will face? How could you migrate from a traditional data center? Broadchoice runs its two main products on Amazon EC2 and uses S3 for persistent storage. Come and find out how we did it and the challenges we faced along the way - and why we like Amazon as a hosting environment!

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).

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Liz has posted an explanation of the process for announcing the remaining topics for CFUNITED 2009. She had earlier posted a list of just over 40 topics and noted that Centaur and Bolt topics will be announced later, as well as commenting that a quarter of the final topic list will be Flex/AIR.

I know some speakers who didn't make the first list assumed they weren't speaking. Not necessarily true. The manager and beginner tracks have not been (fully) announced yet, not have all the Flex/AIR topics and none of the Centaur and Bolt topics (and, indeed, several slots in the other tracks have not been finalized either). Additional topics will be announced over the next few months but Liz wanted to give a sense of what is coming in some of the tracks this year.

Another clarification in her latest post covers the "exclusivity" of Centaur/Bolt topics, namely that certain topics will be exclusive to CFUNITED but by no means all Centaur/Bolt topics. That means that other conferences will be covering Centaur and Bolt (and may well have "scoops" as has been Adobe's practice in the past during keynotes). That's good news for cf.Objective() and Scotch on the Rocks attendees since they know now that they won't miss out on the "highly anticipated next major release" of ColdFusion!

Don't forget that the early bird price ($849 for 4 days) ends TODAY!

Liz has announced the first round of topics for CFUNITED 2009. It's an interesting mix of speakers - some old, some new - and a broad spectrum of subject matter.

After CFUNITED 2008, Liz has promised lots of changes and improvements and we already know that the venue is something special and an all-in-one location (addressing a bit complaint about the last few years' conferences). One of the new changes for 2009 is that a quarter of the content will be Flex/AIR related, acknowledging the growth and increasing relevance of these technologies to ColdFusion developers at large.

Some of the highlights (from my point of view) of the topics announced so far:

• Flex development with the Swiz framework - Chris Scott
• Railo Open Source - Gert Franz
• Groovy for ColdFusion Developers - Joe Rinehart
• iPhone Apps + Adobe ColdFusion - Josh Adams
• ColdFusion, Model-Glue, Hibernate, Spring, and Groovy - Ray Camden
• AIR: Building Desktop Applications with Flex 3 - Rob Rusher
• Hack Proofing ColdFusion - Shlomy Gantz

Definitely not your father's CFUNITED!

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...

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For those who need to figure out / spend budgets sooner, rather than later, registration for CFUNITED 2009 is open!

Although there's no list of speakers / sessions yet, the location has been announced (the fabulous Lansdowne Resort in Leesburg, VA). The room rate is way down from last year and the conference prices are also slightly lower ($699 for 3 days, $849 for 4 days - compared to $799 and $899 last year). Knock another $100 off with your alumni discount.

You can also suggest speakers and topics for CFUNITED 2009.

CFUNITED have just launched their call for speakers for CFUNITED 2009. As you can see from the blog post, they're going to focus on new presentations, based on attendee feedback, and let the community vote on topics in December.

You can either submit yourself as a speaker, with topics, or submit a suggestion for topics that others could speak on. Since Liz has said next year's CFUNITED will be community-driven, make your voice count by submitting suggestions!

Liz Frederick and her awesome team are evolving out of TeraTech into their own brand and company. As Liz says in the announcement on the CFUNITED blog "We create a clear brand for each event that's easy to understand and we work to unite the community around its purpose." and she goes on to say "Of course CFUnited is still our top priority and I believe 2009 is going to reflect the preferences and the needs of the attendees like never before."

I said publicly that I would not attend CFUNITED 2009 unless there were significant changes in the way the event was handled and - based on early information I've had from Stellr - it looks like CFUNITED 2009 will be significantly improved over CFUNITED 2008 and very focused on "the preferences and the needs of the attendees" as Liz says!