We'll be back in September with Seth Duffey and image manipulation.

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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.

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!

So come along and hear me talk at 1:30pm on Thursday (6/19) or 8:30am on Saturday (6/21)!

I'll be doing a "session focus" on Ron's topic shortly.

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.

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• CFEclipse Reloaded - Mark Drew
• An Intelligent Approach to OOP in CF Architecture - Nic Tunney

• 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.

• 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!

• 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!

Don't forget: the early bird ends on January 15th so register in the next three weeks to take advantage of that special price!

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 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

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• Tony Hillerson - Offline/Online Features of AIR
• Charlie Arehart - Hidden Gems in CF8
• Michael Smith - Using your Whole Brain for Developers
• Paul Kenney - Test-Driven Development with ColdFusion
• Sean Corfield - Design Patterns and ColdFusion
• John Paul Ashenfelter - Pragmatic ColdFusion: Build, Test, Deploy
• Matt Chotin - Introduction to Flex with ColdFusion

I've already posted the raw notes I took in the sessions which were pretty much just a brain dump of what the presenters were saying without much of my own commentary. In general, the sessions were extremely good. My goal was to learn a lot about AIR and some useful stuff about Flex and the conference met that goal perfectly. The AIR sessions were great and covered a lot of ground, with plenty of information about the file APIs and using SQLite, the embedded database. There was also a fairly good balance between Flex and AJAX in the AIR sessions (some presenters actually showed the same functionality in both Flex and AJAX side-by-side). The two Flex sessions that I attended - both led by Joe Berkovitz - were really good with a lot of practical information about designing and building large Flex applications.

What about the other aspects of the conference? The size of the conference (around 1,000 people I think) meant that all the sessions were together on one floor and all the food / community / vendors were together on another floor. That meant you didn't have to rush between sessions and you had a chance to network in the hallways between sessions. The session rooms were rarely completely packed so you always got a seat. It was nice and relaxed. It was much better than Chicago in that respect.

The food, however, was a serious disappointment. Tapas-style food was fun and interesting on Monday lunchtime but it was the same sort of thing at the reception on Monday night, at lunchtime on Tuesday, at the special event Tuesday evening and at lunch on Wednesday. Nothing was labeled so if you had allergies or just plain ol' don't like certain things, well, you were pretty screwed. And if you didn't like / don't eat fish, you went pretty hungry. I eat pretty much anything but I lost a few pounds this week because not much appealed to me on Tuesday (either at lunch or at the special event) and on Wednesday I completely skipped lunch. The most charitable thing I can say about the special event was that the jazz band was pretty good. Like Chicago, the event was in the conference center and was just food and drink (and they ran out of beer apparently - I stuck to wine). The Chicago event was $100 for guests and since I couldn't imagine what would be so special it could be worth that much money, my wife & I skipped the guest pass. From what I heard, we made the right choice. The Barcelona event was $75 for the guest pass and, with hindsight, we probably wouldn't bothered with that either. Come on Adobe, do something special next year in San Francisco - or at least don't charge guests such outrageous amounts.

Apart from the food - and Tuesday evening's event - everything else about the conference was really enjoyable. It was great to finally meet so many European community members - there was a large British contingent, as well as folks from every part of mainland Europe. Barcelona itself is a beautiful city with great public transport and is also an interesting city to walk around. The beach was really nice (so I'm told) and the hotel restaurant was really good (at the Vincci Maritimo), although the relaxed European approach to schedule meant that they opened when they were ready, not when the posted hours said they would open.

Of the two MAX events, Barcelona was by far the better experience in many ways. It'll be interesting to see what Adobe do next year since both events will likely be even bigger...

One other thought (added later): whilst it was great for speakers that they were in one of the nearest hotels to the event (as was the case in Chicago), there seemed to be no networking in the speaker hotel: folks did not congregate in the bar in the evening. The hotel was amazing quiet in the evenings. That was also true to some extent in Chicago. The bar was more of a networking location in Chicago but still you only got to network with other speakers instead of a broader range of attendees. I suspect this will be less of an issue in San Francisco since everyone should be staying within walking distance of the Moscone Center but it's something to think about.

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!

Monday:

• Flex best practices
• General Session
• Working with persistent data in AIR
• Using AIR APIs
• Local database access with AIR and data sync strategies

Tuesday:

• General session
• Leveraging ColdFusion with AIR applications
• Building AIR applications using AJAX and Aptana
• AIR security
• INSPIRE: Design Patterns and ColdFusion (me!)
• Sneaks

Wednesday:

• Practical patterns in Flex
• INSPIRE: Making Buzzword
• Using CFEclipse for ColdFusion development
• Creating new Flex components
• Introduction to LiveCycle Data Services for Flex developers
• ColdFusion powered AJAX

See you in Barcelona next week?

It really does highlight just how much more control CF8 provides over your server including:

• Lots of new tuning parameters
• Mail server credentials and SSL support
• New database drivers
• Pause scheduled tasks
• Step-through debugger (OK, that's not part of the admin but there's a whole new page of controls for it in the admin)
• Server monitoring
• User management

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.

See this CFUNITED blog entry for details - scheduling for limited seating sessions will close on Friday! Some sessions are already full (such as Scott Stroz's "Prototyping Applications with Flex 2").

While I was at Adobe / Macromedia, I went to just two MAX events: DevCon 2002 in Orlando, FL and MAX 2005 in Anaheim, CA. In both cases, I was scheduled to speak (although my talk was pulled for DevCon 2002). In general, employees don't get to go to MAX unless they're part of the "MAX team" (speakers, community folk, infrastructure, support etc).

Now I'm no longer an employee, I can go to MAX whenever I want - so the question is: do I want to? I'm going to CFUNITED on my own dime and I already went to cf.Objective() on my own dime. As a speaker at both of those events, I didn't have to pay the conference fee itself. So MAX will be comparatively expensive for me. I got a lot out of DevCon 2002 and MAX 2005 in terms of networking and, with the latter, some good sessions about Macromedia technology outside my core focus. It really will come down to budget, I suspect.

I just finalized my schedule and, somewhat to my surprise, my session choices are nearly all Flex! So I guess you could say CFUNITED is a great conference for learning about Flex :)

Here's where I'll be:

• Wednesday
• 8:00am - Welcome - Michael Smith et al (KN)
• 8:30am - Adobe Keynote - Ben Forta (KN)
• 10:15am - Flex 101 - Ted Patrick (FL)
• 11:30am - Leveraging ColdSpring to build robust Flex applications - Chris Scott (FL) - Yes, I know I saw this at cf.Objective() - it was a good session!
• 2:00pm - Integrating Spry and ColdFusion - Andrew Powel (FL)
• 3:15pm - OO Flex: An introduction to the Flex Framework - Andrew Trice (FL)
• 4:30pm - Using the Adobe Flex toolkit for Salesforce.com - Steve Rittler (FL) - Because I missed it at cf.Objective()!
• 6:00pm - Networking Event
• 8:00pm - Solo Coding - Charlie Arehart, Chaz Chumley, Mark Drew (BOF)
• 9:00pm - Apollo and Flex fears debunked - Andrew Powell (BOF)
• Thursday
• 8:30am - Testing CF Applications - John Paul Ashenfelter (ME)
• 9:45am - Continuous Testing with Flex and ColdFusion Projects - Thomas Burleson (FL)
• 11:30am - The Future of BlueDragon and CFML - Vince Bonfanti (KN) - Very interested to see progress on their "IronDragon" / DLR project!
• 1:45pm - Prototyping Applications with Flex 2.0 (FL) - Should this be 2:00pm I wonder?
• 3:15pm - AJAX Integration with ColdFusion 8 - me! (AC)
• 4:30pm - Using MVC with Flex/ColdFusion projects - Thomas Burleson (FL)
• 7:00pm - CF Celebration - Top Secret!
• Friday
• 8:30am - Ins and Outs of working with XML - Erik Goodlad (AC)
• 9:45am - Flex and Ajax: perfect match - Rob Gonda (FL)
• 11:00am - ColdFusion 8: Application Security - Adam Wayne Lehman (AC)
• 1:30pm - Flex Charting Explained - Rob Rusher (FL)
• 2:45pm - Pragmatic ColdFusion: Build, Test, Deploy - John Paul Ashenfelter - (DP)
• 4:00pm - Q & A Panel Session
• Saturday (my non-Flex day!)
• 8:30am - Step Debugging in CF 6/7/8 with FusionDebug or the new Scorpio - Charlie Arehart (BC)
• 9:45am - Working with RSS in ColdFusion - Pete Freitag (AC)
• 11:00am - ColdFusion 8: Integrated Flex Data Services (AC) - It's a bit Flex-y :)
• 1:30pm - AJAX Integration With ColdFusion 8 - me again! (AC)
• 2:45pm - Are You "Cashing In" on Caching? - Tyson Vanek (DP)

• Thursday May 3
• 9pm - Reception!
• Friday May 4
• 9am - Jason Delmore - Scorpio Keynote
• 10:15am - Mark Mandel - Developing Applications with Transfer ORM ... or ... Chris Scott - Introduction to Aspect Oriented Programming with ColdSpring
• 11:25am - David Keith - adobe.com ... or ... Hal Helms - Object Oriented Modeling
• 1:30pm - me - AJAX Integration with Scorpio (up against Ray Camden - Model-Glue, Spry and You as well as Joe Rinehart - Model Glue 2: Built to Last... yikes!)
• 2:40pm - Mark Mandel - Advanced Transfer ORM Techniques
• 4:10pm - Charlie Arehart - Understanding, Improving and Resolving Issues with Database Procedure Caches ... or ... Mark Drew - The CFEclipse Project (where I think he'll unveil his super secret "Project: U")
• 7pm - BOFs!
• Saturday May 5
• 9am - Hal Helms - Large Scale Application Architecture ... or ... Matt Woodward - OO Architecture Back to Front?
• 10:15am - Jason Delmore - Scorpio: Diagnostic Server Monitoring and Realtime Performance Alerts
• 11:25am - me - Real World SOA: Building Services with ColdSpring and Transfer (repeated on Sunday)
• 1:30pm - Simon Bateman - Fusebox - The original CF Framework
• 3pm - Scott Stroz - Filtering and Sorting Data in Flex 2 (although I don't know what Howard Sholz will be talking about in this slot)
• 4:10pm - Peter Farrell - Mach-II 1.5
• 7pm - BOFs!
• Sunday May 6
• 9am - Paul Kenney - Test-Driven Development with ColdFusion (although he's up against Jason Delmore - Scorpio: l337 which is a cruel choice!)
• 10:15am - me - Real World SOA: Building Services with ColdSpring and Transfer (repeat)
• 11:25am - Ben Forta - Scorpio Keynote
• 1:30pm - Rob Gonda - Introduction Cairngorm ... or ... Hal Helms - Object Oriented Modeling ... or ... Dave Ross - Intro to Dependency Injection and ColdSpring?
• 2:40pm - Maxim Porges - Maximizing your CF/Flex Applications with Java ... or ... Simon Horwith - XML for the Rest of Us?
• 4:10pm - Chris Scott - Leveraging ColdSpring to Build a Robust and Maintainable Architecture for Flex
• 5:10pm - Jared et al - Closing Comments

Ben started out by saying that Scorpio has three broad themes: developer productivity, integration and management / administration. He also said that because this was the beginning of the tour, lots of other new features would be previewed at later User Group meetings to keep things fresh. What he showed us was enough to have most people cheering and desperately wanting to buy Scorpio NOW!

So what did he cover?

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I don't remember last year's prices but this years seem to be in the same ballpark. The difference this year seems to be options to attend for just a day or just two days - I don't remember that from previous years (mind you, Anaheim was the last MAX I attended and that was because I was asked to speak at the last minute, before that it was Florida).

MAX is once again scheduled to overlap with On Safari, the Bengal breed national cat show, which is in Toledo, OH this year. Jay & I are thinking about coming out to Chicago, driving to Toledo for the cat show and then driving back to Chicago for MAX and hanging out with our friends in Chicago. We'll see how things pan out. The MAX early bird runs until July 23, so we have quite a while to make up our minds.

AJAX Integration With Scorpio

AJAX is one of the most talked about "new" technologies of recent years but the reality so far has been that writing dynamic, cross-browser applications that leverage JavaScript is a complex, labor-intensive process. Find out how Scorpio will change that reality by providing AJAX functionality built right into our favorite language!

The schedule on the cf.Objective() site should be updated shortly to reflect this (I believe a few sessions are moving around in response to feedback from attendees and speakers).

Early bird registration ends on April 1st so hurry up and save $100!

I mostly followed the schedule I posted a week before the conference although after I finished my talk, I was caught in the hallways and missed both Oguz's and Matt's talks. I got caught again at lunch and missed the start of Nat's session too.

Highlights of the conference for me (in no particular order):

• Steve Nelson's "CFCs ARE the Framework"
• Peter Bell's "Application Generation - Beyond Scaffolding"
• John Paul Ashenfelter's "Rails for the Ruby-Impaired"
• The food! Did I mention the food was great?

It was great to chat to so many CFers who (for the most part) are fans of frameworks. There was also a very productive Team Fusebox meeting and we now have leaders for a number of areas where the team will focus as part of the big drive you're going to see around Fusebox - the website, the framework and the community. You'll be hearing a lot more about Fusebox from me over the coming months as I lead the development of Fusebox 6, based on community involvement!

• Thursday, February 1st 2007
  • 8:00 AM 8:40 AM Michael Smith Welcome/Keynote
  • 9:00 AM 10:00 AM Advanced Matthew Woodward Building Sustainable Software with Frameworks
  • 10:15 AM 11:15 AM Other Jon Rowny SAM for Humans
  • 11:15 AM 12:30 PM Lunch
  • 12:30 PM 1:30 PM Other Steve Nelson CFCs ARE the Framework
  • 1:45 PM 2:45 PM Other Peter Bell Application Generation - Beyond Scaffolding
  • 3:00 PM 4:00 PM Other Simon Horwith When and Why to use a Framework
  • 4:15 PM 5:15 PM Advanced Jeff Peters Tools for faster Fusebox Development
• Friday, February 2nd 2007
  • 8:00 AM 9:00 AM Advanced Sean Corfield Extending the language of Fusebox
  • 9:15 AM 10:15 AM Other Oguz Demirkapi Frameworks Development Teams Pragmatism
  • 10:30 AM 11:30 AM Advanced Matthew Woodward Mach-II in Action: Anatomy of a Blog
  • 11:30 AM 12:30 PM Lunch
  • 12:30 PM 1:30 PM Beginner Nat Papovich Making the Jump from FB3 to FB5
  • 1:45 PM 2:45 PM Other John Paul Ashenfelter Rails for the Ruby-Impaired
  • 3:00 PM 4:00 PM Beginner Christian Ready Using FLiP as a sole developer
  • 4:15 PM 5:15 PM Advanced Elliott Sprehn Smart Frameworks: Utilizing Rich Metadata and Code By Convention
    

I'll be speaking (you might say "of course"). About Fusebox 5 and 5.1 (you might not be surprised by that either). In particular, I'm going to be speaking about "Extending the language of Fusebox", showing the power of custom lexicons and touching on domain specific languages and expressiveness. Fusebox is the only framework that lets you extend the XML language that you use to describe the "event handlers" in your controller layer. That allows you to use a rich, expressive style of programming that makes your applications easier to maintain and much faster to develop.

I got the 8am slot on Friday which mean I'll be competing with people's hangovers and, unfortunately, Kurt Wiersma's talk about ColdSpring which I would have really liked to have attended. Given the selection of topics at the conference, it would be hard to pick a slot that didn't conflict with something I wanted to attend so that's just the luck of the draw.

See you in a couple of weeks in Washington, DC? Remember, registration is still open for the conference!

Hal was an early advocate of adding Java-like features to ColdFusion but has changed his position for a number of reasons and thinks ColdFusion's success depends on allowing developers to innovate quickly, which means providing unique features that help get certain types of job done quickly.

I like the article but I don't think it's really a "new vision" (as its title claims) because ColdFusion has always been about providing unique features that help developers innovate quickly.

For a contrasting view, read Vince Bonfanti's evaluation of Hal's article - and Hal responds in the comments (in fact, the whole comment thread is very interesting!).

So let's take a look at the prices...

The Frameworks Conference is up first in early February. Early bird registration is $399 thru January 5th with $50 off if you've been before. The hotel is $194 per night and let's assume you have to be there two nights (for most out-of-towners, that will be the case). That's $737 or about $370 per day of training which isn't a bad price really.

Now let's look at CFUNITED 2007. Same location, same hotel so we can assume the same price (it doesn't currently list the room rate). It's a four day conference, with the earlybird of $849 thru December 31st (odd that it closes before the F/W conf, even tho' CFUNITED is much later in th year). Alumni get $100 making it $749 if you book early. Again, assume we need a hotel each night so that's $776. A total of $1,525 or about $380 per day of training. Again, that's still not a bad price for training really.

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A bit of Googling discovered that Skype has an API that can be driven by AppleScript (and I knew iTunes could be driven by AppleScript) so all I needed was a way to run a script automatically every minute or so. I found Script Timer ($12) which can schedule scripts of all sorts, either by time or by interval or by certain events. Very nice.

And the AppleScript I wrote?

This month's meeting is this Thursday in San Francisco. Here's the announcement from Tom:

As promised, the next meeting for Silvafug is looking to be a good one. Here's the tentative schedule for the evening, tentatively scheduled for 7 to 9 pm. (Would a 7:30 to 9:30 work better?)

• Call To Order
• Intros (5 Mins)
• Announcements (5 Mins)
• A word from our sponsor - roundpeg, Inc. (10 Mins)
• Beginner Session I (30 Mins)
• Intro to Flex concept, architecture, framework, key functions, etc.
• Break (10 Mins)
• Beginner Session II (30 Mins)
• Development Lab - 1-2 Page/Component Design
• SilVaFUG Member Open Forum - Intros/Q&A (25 Mins)
• Give Away/Closing Comments/Announcements (5 Mins)

As you can see, if you're new to Flex and want to get a jumpstart, this is the meeting to go to. If you're "beyond" the Beginner level, don't worry, we still want you! With one instructor/speaker, we'll need the "advanced" members of the group to walk around and help out the newbies. It'll be a great chance to help out the group and get to know each other.

The Intro to Flex speaker slot is open. If we don't get a volunteer, yours truly [Tom Ortega] will be at the podium. If no one steps up, no complaining as you were warned! =)

roundpeg, our meeting sponsor, is going all out. They're providing the meeting facilities, the lab with 12 computers, the food and yet another FREE TRAINING SEAT! You'll get a taste of the roundpeg Breeze-style training during the second session.

To make sure there's enough food and chairs, we're asking you to RSVP to fugrsvp .at. gmail .dot. com or to my email. Please make the subject line, "8/10 RSVP". In the email body, include the following info: # of people the RSVP is for, whether you'll have your own laptop, and time preference (if any).

I'm sure there will be other items to discuss and I'll bring them to the group beforehand so you can come with answers. If you have something your dying to bring up now, run it by me (if your shy) or post it to the group to get feedback.

Looking forward to seeing you at meeting #2!

Location: roundpeg, 595 Market St, San Francisco.

MAX 2006 links:

• Main MAX 2006 web site.
• Registration information - pricing and customer service contact details.
• Online registration form - powered by ColdFusion!

Well, first off we uncovered an interesting edge case bug that could cause corrupted parsed/ files (even in production mode) if a server was hit with a lot of traffic as it was starting up. That was a subtle thread safety issue and I think I have that fixed. My blog has been running "GR0" - General Release candidate zero - for a couple of weeks now without seeing the problem reoccur (prior to that, several folks had alerted me to corrupted parsed/ files on my blog after server restarts).

Second, there turns out to be more involved with an official release than I'd originally planned for. Quite a bit of the content on the Fusebox web site needs some degree of tweaking and we have to figure out how to avoid confusing Fusebox users who opt to stay on Fusebox 4: if we update the documentation, where do they find their answers - if we don't update the documentation, what happens for people who do upgrade to Fusebox 5? I did a review of the site and opened about two dozen tickets covering changes to the web site - some of them, quite broad changes.

Third, there are some philosophical issues to address about where Fusebox is and where it is going. There have been a number of different "committees" in charge of Fusebox over the years with varying degrees of success. In fact, Fusebox politics seems to be responsible for driving a number of people away from the community and even the framework itself.

Fusebox 5 has been developed in a much more public, much more community-focused way than any previous release. It's an experiment that has been very successful, in my opinion, helping to create a release that addresses genuine needs that the Fusebox developer community have.

The Fusebox web site went through a major overhaul (last year or perhaps in 2004) but still has some major holes in the content. I think we need more community involvement in contributing content but in order for that to happen, we need a more open approach to developing that content.

Using SVN and Trac, hosted by Simeon Bateman, has allowed Fusebox 5's development process to be much more transparent. Team Fusebox is having discussions about how to build on this transparency and engage the community more, going forward, but ultimately - for now, at least - the final decisions are made by The Fusebox Corporation (Hal Helms and John Quarto-vonTivadar).

I'm posting this to let folks know where things stand because whilst discussions were moving forward quite well a few weeks ago, things have gone rather quiet again.

My scheduled lineup for the day was:

• Sarge's Asynchronous Event Gateways
• My Objects and Persistence
• Sandy' CSS Floating
• Adam Lehman's Application Security
• My Managing Components with Factories
• Simon's Object Think

A packed day and more sessions than I'd managed on any other day!

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As anticipated, I skipped the first session in order to catch up on some sleep. I woke up in time to write some code examples for my Duck Typing talk and was pleased with how that went, for a first time talk (code and PDF already posted - see earlier blog entry).

I skipped the keynote (and didn't actually find anyone who had attended it - I'd like to hear about it!) to chat to various folks and then, after lunch, went to Kelly Brown's session on Spry because I haven't had a chance to try it out yet. Kelly seemed pretty nervous and went through the framework at a rather slow pace but gave a nice, clear overview of AJAX, explained the Spry libraries and how to use it for master/detail and repeating regions. I downloaded the framework from <labs> during the talk and, with a little help from Kevin Roche (thanx!), got it working with a ColdFusion CFC generating an XML document to drive the Spry data set mechanism. It's pretty slick stuff!

Then it was time for the closing session and the Q&A panel, featuring Michael Smith, Shlomy Gantz, Jeff Peters and Ray Camden, MC'd by Simon Horwith. Questions from the audience covered ColdFusion feature wishlists (Ray feels CFMX 7 is pretty complete, Simon wants interfaces and "lots of other stuff"), the impact of podcasts and blogging (which generated lots of praise for Breeze!), which is the best ColdFusion framework (they sensibly didn't touch this although they ventured their own preferences - split about 50/50 between Model-Glue and Fusebox), which is the best AJAX framework (they all picked Adobe's Spry!) and what sort of changes they expect on the 'net within five years (mixed responses on this but a sense of unification of media and a richer experience). Michael started drawing surveys and tickets for the big stack of prizes (books, software and an X-Box 360).

I hung around, chatting to folks, until the Adobe crew went out to dinner (at the Hibachi Steak & Sushi House, where the speakers' dinner had been held on Tuesday - highly recommended!). I've love to tell you what we talked about but, hey, I'd have to kill you... Then it was time to hang out in the bar and wind down post-conference.

It is kind of strange having an "end" to the conference when there's still one more day - the Saturday repeat sessions. My current plan is to get to every session (i.e., six choices) but so far this week I've ended up getting distracted and missing many sessions.

My "factories" talk will be Wednesday at 10:15am and again on Saturday at 2:15pm.

My "persistence" talk will be Thursday at 4:15pm and Saturday at 9:15am.

In addition to the scheduler, the Saturday repeat schedule is now posted. I'm very pleased to see both of my talks are popular enough to need repeating on Saturday! The Saturday schedule should be added to the scheduler "real soon now".

I also want to plug the pre-conference classes, in particular John Paul Ashenfelter's "Testing ColdFusion" on Monday 6/26 which will cover a wide variety of testing strategies and tools - something we should all care about - and on Tuesday 6/27, Jeff Peters is running an all-day class on XML, XPath and XSLT and Hal Helms is running an all-day class on domain modeling. Check the website for the full listing of courses. Hurry up and register as these classes are half full already!

In keeping with what seems to be a blogging tradition around CFUNITED this year, here is my session schedule (PDF, 56k).

It's been an insanely busy few weeks and it looks like the next few weeks will also be insanely busy. I can't really go into much detail because most of what I'm working on right now is all about future product and service offerings but we're going through a lot of the "necessary evils" that startup-style projects have to go through: technology stack decisions, budget estimates, schedule planning and so on.

Adobe handles some of its innovation by incubating startup-style projects within the larger organization. It's kind of the best of both worlds: the freedom of a startup with the support of a large corporation.

Right now I'm developing a lot of architectural concept diagrams as well as estimating hardware requirements and trying to create blocking schedules for things we think we have to deliver. It's an exciting time and I think we'll be creating services that will appeal to a large audience.

Bear in mind that I'm part of the Knowledge Workers Business Unit. That means that you, dear reader, as a software developer are not exactly part of my target demographic for now. However, as we start to build out our systems and solutions, I hope to be able to share some of what makes everything tick behind the scenes - especially where we get to "eat our own dog food".

Back in 2001, after the Allaire acquisition, I created a small team whose remit was to rebuild macromedia.com using our own (new) technologies. In 2006, I find myself in a similar situation but instead of producing a website for product consumers, I'm looking at services for business consumers. The business unit I operate in now includes pretty much all things Breeze-related and PDF-related so it has a different dynamic and a different set of challenges.

I hope you'll stay with me in this new phase and I hope I'll find relevant things to talk about here.

• May 17th, BACFUG, "Managing ColdFusion Components with Factories" (was originally planned for April)
• June 20th, BACFUG, "Objects & Persistence"
• June 28th - July 1st, CFUNITED - both talks

Past shows and talks:

• December 2nd, DoS MMUG "Enterprise Integration with ColdFusion" for the La Plata, MD cat show (12/3 & 12/4) - good to meet some of our government friends!
• January 2nd, TACFUG "Application Frameworks" for the Raleigh, NC cat show (12/30-1/1) - thank you for braving a rainy, holiday evening to come and hear me talk!
• Sacramento, CA (1/7 & 1/8) - I'm coming to see you folks in March!
• Dayton, OH (1/14 & 1/15)
• January 26th, PDXCFUG "Objects & Persistence" for the Portland, OR cat show (1/28 & 1/29)
• January 27th, Dept of Revenue, Salem, OR "Objects & Persistence" for the Portland, OR cat show (1/28 & 1/29)
• Santa Clara, CA (2/4 & 2/5) - another local show
• February 10th, Austin CFUG "Objects & Persistence" for the Waco, TX cat show (2/11 & 2/12)
• February 13th, Dallas CFUG "Objects & Persistence" after the Waco, TX cat show (2/11 & 2/12)
• Monterey, CA (2/25 & 2/26) - another local show
• cf.Objective, Minnesota, March 11th & 12th
• March 14th, Sacramento CFUG, "Managing ColdFusion Components with Factories"
• March 20th, Denver CFUG, "Objects & Persistence" for the Denver, CO cat show (3/18 & 3/19)

• Day One Keynote - Tom Jordahl. Tom gave a great demo of some new wizards that will be available in the next public beta, which help automate ActionScript / ColdFusion interoperability. He went a bit deeper into the new Flex Data Services, explaining the publish and subscribe model as well as the new persistence model (aka "assembler"). It all points to making ColdFusion the best choice for the backend of your next Rich Internet Application.
• SQL Abstraction - Isaac Dealey. His basic premise was that SQL is often database-specific but by providing an abstraction you can write more portable code. It reminded me quite a bit of what Reactor is able to do with its OO "query" object.
• Managing ColdFusion Components with Factories - me. I'll leave it to others to write about my talk. All I'll say is that this was the first time I'd ever given this talk and I was pleased that it ran to time!
• AOP with ColdSpring - Chris Scott. Aspect-Oriented Programming can be really hard to get your head around (since it effectively rewrites how your code behaves) but Chris did a great job of explaining what it is and why you'd use it, covering the terminology (which will be new to most everyone) and then running through some great demos.
• Duck Typing - Hal Helms. The heresy of our time: treating ColdFusion like Java leads to trouble. Hal explained why he thinks we should embrace ColdFusion's dynamic type system and leverage the power of that instead of trying to make ColdFusion look like Java.
• Mach II and ColdSpring - Kurt Wiersma. Gave an overview of the architecture of both frameworks and a "before and after" view of a Mach II application, showing how ColdSpring could simplify creation and management of CFCs in medium to large systems.
• Day Two Key