webDU 2008 is starting to roll and is calling for papers. As usual, it's at the Star City casino resort in Sydney (a great venue). I attended MXDU (as it was originally called) in 2004 and 2005 and it was one of the most vibrant web development conferences I'd ever been too - highly recommended!

Currently flights from the Bay Area to Sydney are around $1,200 including taxes... hmm...

WebDU is happening again in Sydney next March and just issued its call for papers. It's a great conference and I've had the privilege of speaking at it twice (2004 & 2005). I was in the process of changing jobs (within Adobe) so I missed the 2006 conference and I'll miss the 2007 conference as well - my current role only allows me to support a maximum of two ColdFusion events per year and only in North America.

Thanx to Nectarine, I was there at WebDU, albeit virtually as part of one of their great Flash animations...

Watch my cameo as Sgt Bosco "Don't Touch My Mac" Baracus.

Aw, thanx guys! I'm touched!

webDU 2006 has posted its agenda and speaker list. Adobe is the platinum sponsor. Lots of good speakers from all around the world. If you're in that part of the world, it's a must-attend event so hurry up and register!

Very bummed that I won't make it out there this year... Changing roles and personal commitments and so on mean that the timing is impossible for me...

There's a shiny new webDU 2006 website with all the details of the conference, taking place at the beginning of March next year.

Geoff Bowers has announced the dates for MXDU 2006 - March 2nd & 3rd with a workshop on March 1st.

My wife may be doing her first solo judging in Florida that weekend (4th/5th) so it's unlikely that I'll go to MXDU. Unless the mothership insists on sending me, of course...

It's been a great conference the last two years - a lot of leading edge stuff getting showcased. Definitely worth attending, even if you're not normally in that part of the world!

Back in February, I attended MXDU and spoke at the Day Zero National Macromedia User Group meeting. I'd been going back and forth with Robin Hilliard about topics, and he suggested a retrospective look at 2004 based on what the CF blogs had been covering.

I made a short presentation based on that idea and gave a 20 minute talk. I've finally got around to putting up the slides - just the slides, no audio - which you can watch via Breeze.

Geoff just posted links to the two Nectarine-authored animations that opened the keynotes at MXDU 2005. Definitely worth watching!

Want to hear what attendees really thought about MXDU? Check out the Voice of the People application on the MXDU website, built with Flash and Flash Video!

The videos aren't labeled with names so see how many of them you can identify...

...from MXDU will be available on the MXDU website in due course. I'll be taking them around various CFUGs and conferences this year and each time the talks will be slightly different, as is my wont. I expect each CFUG / conference website to host the talks afterward but I will not post them on my site.

And I'll warn y'all that the frameworks comparison talk has a blank slide for the conclusion - don't want to spoil the surprise if you're attending one of my talks.

I will be making the code examples for the frameworks talk available soon. I need to make another pass over the code to tidy it up. It's a real application that is in daily use. I have created six different versions of it as examples of how the two frameworks shape your code:

• "Traditional" Fusebox
• MVC Fusebox
• OO Fusebox
• Mach II (basic)
• Mach II (structured model - with DAOs, beans etc)
• Tartan / Fusebox hybrid

Well, our plane is still grounded but they've rebooked us on Monday's 2pm flight to LAX and then on to SFO arriving at noon. So we will be getting home tomorrow - fingers crossed.

My MXDU write-up is in to Judith for editing. Expect to see it on Fusion Authority early this week. If anyone has photos of any parts of the event that they'd be happy to have published on Fusion Authority (with credits), let me know via email.

This is my team's entry for the collage - click on it for a slightly larger view:

Due to a lightning strike on the incoming plane (yes, really), they canceled our flight back to SFO so we're stuck here, at a hotel near the airport, until we can confirm our new itinerary...

So Scott (Fegette) and I are online - wireless broadband, courtesy of Scott's Airport Express - and catching up on email and generally geeking out (with Monty Python's "Live At Drury Lane" blasting out of iTunes). Mike Chambers was last seen heading back into town to duel on the X-Box with the Flashers who are still around from MXDU...

I'm not going to go into too much detail about MXDU here since I'll be writing an extensive article for Fusion Authority over the next few days but I wanted to publish some brief thoughts here while the conference is still fresh in my mind.

First off, this is an awesome conference! Well-organized, world-class speakers, a palpable enthusiasm for the technology - yet it manages to be all this with a relaxed atmosphere of fun as you feed your brain. The XBox room and the Apple-powered chill-out room contribute to that, as does the fabulous catering (and the sunny balcony on which most people sit to each lunch). This year saw a conference banquet on the first night, preceded by a fun treasure hunt around Darling Harbor. The food was great, the jazz band were tight and the comedian was hilarious.

Both keynotes were excellent - Tim Buntel primarily hosting the CFMX 7 Day One keynote and the two Mikes (Downey and Chambers) hosting the Flash Day Two keynote. Most of the CFMX 7 stuff I'd seen but Tim's delivery is always entertaining. Quite a bit of the Flash stuff was new to me - and blew me away!

As for the sessions, I stayed with the server track throughout the conference and didn't miss a single session. All three tracks had very high-quality content and all the attendees I spoke with agreed that the technical level of MXDU is very special.

Tonight is the speakers' BBQ over at Daemon HQ and then tomorrow I fly home. Right now, I'm going to get back to my Fusion Authority article...

I'm already looking forward to MXDU 2006!

Last night I spoke at the national MMUG meeting, talking about what's been getting a lot of airplay on blogs over the last year. Richard Turner-Jones was up first, showing a very cool RIA that helps people learn about controlled airspace over Australia and flight path planning. Then it was my turn - quite a few people using CF7 already, quite a few people using CFEclipse, quite a few people using an application framework - a good advanced audience! Then Mike Downey talked in outline about Macromedia's plans for the Flash ecosystem and entertained Q&A. More on this in Fusion Authority once I get back to the US!

Through a slight miscommunication, I found out today (by looking at the website!) that I'm actually giving two talks at MXDU, not one.

In addition to my frameworks talk, I'm also giving an early draft of my "enterprise integration" talk which I'll be giving at CFUNITED.

So instead of having until April 22nd to get it finished, I have to get it done between now and February 18th!

And it seems likely that I'll be speaking at the Day Zero MMUG event as well, like last year... So maybe that's three times as much MXDU?

Something new this year at MXDU, they are running one-day hands-on training sessions for AU$495 which is excellent value. Macromedia's own James Talbot is running the Get Ready for Blackstone! training day where you get to build applications with the new features in Blackstone.

I just got news today that I will be going to MXDU to speak about Mach II and Fusebox. The speaker and topic lists are really shaping now and it looks like it will be an awesome conference! Geoff Bowers is giving a very interesting talk on event gateways and there looks to be a lot of Blackstone-specific content this year which is very exciting.

Daemonite: MXDU2005: Venue booked, dates confirmed, call for papers! That says it all really. MXDU 2004 was awesome. I expect MXDU 2005 will be even better. Go on... you know you want to... |

Guy Watson has put his MXDU and FlashForward presentations online. I missed his talk in Sydney and didn't get to FlashForward in the end so it's great see his slides on JSFL and read his notes (both online as FlashPaper - nice touch!). He talks about how you can automate tasks in Flash and how you can script access to the timeline and the panels and so on. It really opens your eyes to the power of the new extensibility API. He's also started publishing things to the new JSFL Extensions category on the Macromedia Flash Exchange.

I've just posted the remainder of my photos from MXDU. Sorry if they're a bit bigger than you'd like! Browse every day here!
Thanx to Andrew Muller and Ben Bishop for providing me with all the names!

Checked out of my room and now I'm banished to the business center for an hour or so before Mike Chambers and I grab a cab to the airport and fly home to Australia.
The bloggers' dinner was a good event - great food at Chinta Ria - and then lots of drinking afterward (Brandon Hall and I didn't get back to our rooms until around 5:30am, chatting about all sorts of things including software design of course!). I'll be posting pictures from that when I get back on a high-speed connection. The BBQ at Daemon was also excellent - again, pictures coming soon.
Big shout out to Geoff Bowers & his wife Julie for being great hosts on Thursday night and to the larger Daemon crew for a wonderful conference.

The final session of MXDU - the speaker panel - saw a large number of folks on stage facing a grilling from various audience members. Some interesting questions were asked as well as some of the "standard" concerns being aired (e.g., "Is Director dead?", "Is Flash Remoting dead?", "Is HomeSite+ dead?" - No on all of these - the response was something like "Macromedia continues to make releases and enhancements to these techologies and is committed to providing the best tools for developers.")
Quite a few questions about the Flashosphere and direction - "Flash is going in six directions at once... can we have a roadmap?" was one question. Mike answered that so I won't attempt to paraphrase (I'm sure he'll be happy to blog the answers to these questions).
Some interesting questions about Flex and its position in the marketplace - "Won't it eat into the existing Flash developer market?". My sense is that there's a whole sector of developers (often called enterprise developers, i.e., folks who write Java and other text-based languages without visual tools) who will never master the Flash authoring environment but will 'grok' Flex immediately - for them, Flex represents a way into the RIA space. The existing Flash developer space will be effectively untouched by Flex (except perhaps to increase demand for their skills to create components for the new enterprise Flex / RIA space!). That's my feeling anyway.
One question was right up my street: "As we build more complex apps with components, it gets harder and harder to debug - what about some tools for this?" This is one of those 'moving to enterprise development' growing pains and it isn't really about components per se. My answer was that you need to start adopting other enterprise development practices such as building test harnesses for components, either as you build the components or - even better - before you build the components. Enterprise software requires enterprise testing.
Another related question was about the compile times for complex Flash applications. Mike talked about using command-line compilers and build systems and I said this is another 'moving to enterprise development' situation where we're building complex enough applications that we're beginning to hit the same compile time stuff that many Java / C++ enterprise developers have been used to for years: edit, compile-wait-link-wait, test. It's pretty much a natural consequence of building complex software and one that many scripting languages manage to hide from us by being very lazy about compiling code (on demand).
And that was it. MXDU 2004 is over. And what a great conference it's been! Incredibly passionate developers building astonishing applications with the latest versions of the Macromedia MX products. I'm looking forward to next year's MXDU already (if I get invited to speak again).
Tonight is the bloggers' dinner. Tomorrow is the partner conference. More later!

I missed the first twenty minutes but for the remainder of the hour Tim valiantly deflected a number of questions while still providing as much of a sneak peak of what really is coming in Blackstone as he could. His catch phrase quickly became "That's a bit too specific an implementation question for me to answer at this point"... People seemed pretty excited about the Flash-based forms and the reporting / printable output features.

Talked about many of the ways that projects can get into difficulty including a number of bad process practices that people easily fall into. Then he started talking about ways in which you can manage this.
His recommendation: develop code locally - use version control - deploy to shared QA server. Daemon favor CVS so he demo'd TortoiseCVS and WinCVS and explained why he likes CVS. Despite a few technical difficulties, he showed a number of ways that CVS helps you manage your codebase, with a variety of tools and different views onto the code.
We use CVS at Macromedia (for our dynamic website code) and it really does make life easier. Look at Bonsai and Tinderbox as well (look them up on Google).

Another amusing Nectarine Flash cartoon intro (I forgot to mention that yesterday). "All your base are belong to us..." Anyways, today it was the Tim and Ben show. Tim asked who is running CFMX 6.1 and lots of hands went up (I noticed yesterday in my talk just how many folks have upgraded - very encouraging!).
Tim outline the "Blackstone" (CFMX '7') themes: application building, enterprise citizenship and new frontiers. For application building, they want to do for applications what did for databases. Most applications are focused on data management, form-based and / or reporting. Tim showed rich (Flash-based) forms with data binding and validation (and tabbed navigation and accordion panes - which got applause) and easy PDF generation with the new tag which got more applause. He talked about enterprise citizenship with source-less deployment etc and for the new frontiers, he hinted at event-based programming. More to come in the Blackstone technology preview this afternoon.
Then Tim gave a history of Rich Internet Applications, positioned Flex and talked about its high-level architecture. Then Ben Elmore stepped up to demo Flex and show us how to build an application with it. He demo'd an e-commerce application - very intuitive user experience - then emphasized the importance of application design and architecture before showing how to build a good portion of the e-commerce application from scratch with really only a handful of lines of MXML.
Finally, Tim came back on and demo'd a financial dashboard built with Flex - very sweet!

There were my two sessions. This is the third time I've given the Mach II talk and it went more smoothly, timewise, this time than before. The audience asked some good questions and a large number of them were already using a framework of some sort. After the beer break I ran a BoF on CFCs and Design Patterns which was a nice informal circle with some good discussion about application structure and design. As I suspected, many folks are already using a number of classic design patterns in their applications, even tho' they don't necessarily know the common pattern names (sometimes they don't even know they are using a pattern at all). This is a good sign - and it shows that design patterns aren't something magical that only gurus can aspire to!
In the evening, I went out to dinner with several user group managers under the wing of Ed Sullivan and had some enjoyable discussions about ColdFusion and the MX universe. It's really encouraging to see how passionate folks are here about the Macromedia technologies!

Scott gave a great overview of the MXDU Central application. He explained the MVC-based architecture behind the typical Central app (Model - Web Services / Shared Object data; View - Shell / Pod; Controller - Agent). He explained how to simplify online / offline code paths by using same internal representation of data as you use in the (local) Shared Object - and how to work with just the new / changed data from the server by passing a timestamp back and forth (which can also act as the seed for alerts). He also warned developers to be careful to alert users only for 'important' changes (in MXDU, that's session deletion, room change or time change - other changes are ignored).
The more I learn about Central, the more I like it (and the more I want to try building some apps myself!).

Although this was a session for experienced Flash developers - and therefore way over my head for the most part - it was very interesting to hear Branden talk about making pragmatic choices when developing applications (or even just small interactive Flash movies). He had a lot of good advice like: use OOP if it benefits you (and don't use it if it doesn't); break the rules when you need to... He also mentioned that using get/set property methods ("key-value coding") allows you to wrap object state changes in a way that makes it easy to build listeners and controllers that communicate state changes across your application. His overall message was that there is no one "true" way to build things (and don't believe anyone who says otherwise!).

John Treloar opened MXDU 2004, showing some great RIAs created by ANZ software developers - excellent examples of single-page Flash applications that bring improved interactivity and responsiveness. My favorite was Hell Pizza from New Zealand - anywhere that lets you put apricot sauce and anchovies side-by-side gets my vote!
Mike Chambers stepped up and talked about Macromedia Central and what's coming down the line. He demo'd the Intel Hotspot (wifi) Finder and an AOL chat client built in Central. Daemon have created a Central application for MXDU attendees that lets folks select their sessions as well as providing news about the conference. The application makes use of the alert feature to notify attendees of room changes (one of the sessions just moved into a bigger room). Central is already very cool and looks set to become even cooler!
Next up, Peter Ryce in San Francisco helped John demo the forthcoming Breeze 4.0 system live, including whiteboarding, Flash Video, file sharing and a number of other interactive features, including recording and a powerful search system. Finally, Peter showed the new extensibility API in Breeze 4.0 - "pods" - including examples of a Google search pod and a stock market pod.
Next on the agenda was Flash on devices, where John showcased the new Leapster educational device from LeapFrog with a full Flash UI and learning games (I think we needed some 4-8 year olds to demonstrate it properly!). The next demo was Flash on a Nokia cellphone - in fact a Flash 4 movie that was written long before cellphones could run Flash! - and then John looked at the i-mode phones from Japan that have very rich user interfaces and interactive content and applications... all written in Flash, including the forthcoming FlashCast system with information channels providing news, sports information, stock quotes, cartoons, traffic information etc.
In closing, John showed yet another great Macromedia-powered experience: Virtual Byron Bay. You can see more examples on the Macromedia Flash Video Gallery.

Mike Chambers has posted a reminder about this event and I'll just reiterate. If you're an active blogger and you're at MXDU, you're welcome to join Mike and myself for dinner on Wednesday evening. Meet in the Star City hotel lobby around 7:15pm and we'll set off at 7:30pm sharp (it's only a brief walk, across the Pyrmont Bridge). And remember: no blog, no dinner!

There was a good turnout for last night's joint Web Standards Group / National Macromedia User Group meeting. Andrew Muller was an excellent MC, Russ Weakley gave us all a great insight into why web standards are important and why they are actually good for you, your clients and your visitors. I talked about macromedia.com in the context of web standards and accessibility, Tim Buntel talked a bit about the MXDU conference and Macromedia's products. Then there was a panel Q&A for a while with lots of penetrating questions from the audience. I enjoyed the meeting and I hope everyone who attended got plenty from it. Afterwards, I hung around chatting with folks until about 11pm - back to my room and sleep... it had been a long day.
MXDU Day One gets underway in a few hours. I'm hoping to blog live from the conference.

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You can now download my WSG presentation (PPT, 90k).

As mentioned on the Daemonite blog, Kai and Diane were married today in the Botanical Gardens. It was a lovely ceremony in a beautiful setting - Kai and Diane make a lovely couple!
I plan to create a photo journal of MXDU 2004 so you can check there each day to see what is happening.
Right now I'm at the Macromedia offices in Sydney, with Mike Chambers and the local ANZ folks, catching up on email and working on my notes for the CFC / design patterns BoF tomorrow night. Tonight is the WSG / National MUG meeting - see you there?

Wandered up to Sydney Harbor Bridge (impressive) and looked over at the Opera House (also impressive). Sydney is a beatiful walking city - like London only smaller, cleaner, less busy and much warmer!
In evening, went out to dinner with Geoff and a few other folks. A nice relaxing evening before the busy week takes over.

I fly out Friday night and arrive Sunday morning so Sunday is my one day as a tourist in Sydney! Here's my itinerary:

• Monday: working breakfast with Geoff Bowers of Daemon; spend time in our Sydney office; WSG/NMUG presentation and panel (Quarry Room, 6pm for 7pm start).
• Tuesday: MXDU Day 1: I'll be attending various sessions, mostly on Flash since that's my weak spot then I'll be speaking about Mach II at Macromedia (Ballroom 1, 3pm) and moderating the CFCs / Design Patterns Birds of a Feather (Ballroom 2, 5:30pm-ish); in the evening, it's dinner with "the team".
• Wednesday: MXDU Day 2: I'll mostly be attending integration and new technology sessions (I want to see and hear people's reactions to Flex and Blackstone) then it's the speaker roundtable (Plenary, 4:30pm); in the evening, it's the bloggers' dinner probably at Chinta Ria if they can accommodate a big group!
• Thursday: spend time talking with MM partners; speakers' dinner at Daemon HQ.
• Friday: probably customer visits; fly home at 3:15pm, arrive San Francisco that morning and work from home!

Hopefully I'll be blogging from the conference - maybe even blogging live - and I'm looking forward to meeting the many denizens of cfaussie!

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I've filled in the blanks - it's a busy week!

My week in Sydney is getting fuller by the day. Here's the schedule so far:

• Monday 23rd: National Macromedia User Group & Web Standards Group meeting at the Star City. I'll be giving a brief presentation on accessibility and web standards compliance in the context of macromedia.com. Tim Buntel and Mike Chambers will also be in attendance (and, I'm sure, speaking about something cool).
• Tuesday 24th: MXDU 2004 Day One. I'm speaking about the use of Mach II at Macromedia in the afternoon and I'm probably going to run a BoF session on ColdFusion Components (and Design Patterns and Mach II).
• Wednesday 25th: MXDU 2004 Day Two. Post-conference Speaker Roundtable. Bloggers' Dinner in the evening.
• Thursday 26th: Partner Conference followed by the MXDU Speakers' BBQ.

I'm hoping to do a bit of touristy stuff on the Sunday I arrive and I fly home on Friday afternoon!

Following JD's lead, I'm happy to organize a bloggers dinner around the MXDU conference. I'm busy Monday, Tuesday and Thursday so Wednesday 25th February has to be the date. If you're going to be in and around Sydney, Australia that Wednesday, let's get together for dinner and an informal chat about the MX universe! I'll be staying at the Star City from Sunday through Friday - I'm open to suggestions on restaurants.

The agenda for MXDU is shaping up nicely now with three tracks covering client, server and experience themes. I'll be speaking in the server theme (of course!), talking about Macromedia's use of Mach II.

Well, it seems to be official now... I'm speaking at MXDU 2004 about my current favorite topic - Mach II. According to current plans, I'll also be previewing a version of the talk to BACFUG in December (on the 18th) - for those Bay Area folks who can't make the trip to Sydney.
Since I was on the schedule for last year's MXDU but had to drop out at the last minute, I'm very excited to be asked back this year and I'm really looking forward to the event, as well as meeting several of the cfaussie mailing list denizens!