Next up was my talk on branching and Subversion which seemed to go over pretty well (and the slides are available on my blog).

Kurt Wiersma was next with his talk on building a solid development environment. He talked about best practices for setting up multiple tiers (dev, test, prod etc) as well as setting up a localhost environment based on multiple CF instances and a local DB. He went into some detail about configuring Apache and showed his local hosts file with lots of sites set up in it.

Finally Gert Franz walked us through several of the new and interesting features of Railo 3.0 and the roadmap for Railo 3.1 and 3.2. The timeline is end of November for the open source Railo 3.1 to appear on jboss.org with a series of 40-50 "Railo Extensions" (some of which will be commercial) that can be easily installed using the new "Extension Manager" (think 1-click installer for applications). Railo 3.2 will appear in summer 2009 and that will introduce Hibernate integration (following Adobe's lead - which is why it won't be in 3.1), JBoss Cache integration, reduced use of reflection (making Java interop performance much, much better) and adding as many of the Centaur language enhancements as they can (keeping core CFML compatibility across the products).

It was a great event - kudos to Kev and Andy et al for organizing this at such short notice! I heard a number of people say that they learned a lot and enjoyed the relaxed structure (being able to drink pints of beer during the sessions seemed to be a big plus!).

At the end, Kev and Andy unveiled their plans for Scotch 2009: a three city tour, with a cheap, one-day event in each of London, Edinburgh and Dublin. "We're bringing Scotch to you, the community" said Andy. I'm looking forward to it!