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!

I was hoping for something more advanced. Even as an introductory talk, I would have liked to have seen less text on the slides and more examples with more variety.

Unfortunately I couldn't make it to CFObjective this year due to some family commitement. Would you mind sharing some more information about ColdSpring's getBean("&somebean"). Thanks in advance.