Teratech have announced some of the topics and speakers at their first Conference outside Europe. Here is what they have so far, I expect more to be announced later.

• "Coding in XML" Andrew Schwabe
• "Recursive Technique in ColdFusion" Andrew Schwabe
• "Dynamic Presentation using ColdFusion 8" Chaz Chumley
• "Creating and Consuming WebServices with ColdFusion 8" Chaz Chumley
• "Atom and RSS feeds with ColdFusion 8" Chaz Chumley
• "Case Study: Using FLiP as a sole developer" Christian Ready
• "Flex for ColdFusion Developers" Jeff Tapper
• "Pragmatic ColdFusion: Build, Test, Deploy" John Paul Ashenfelter
• "Testing ColdFusion" John Paul Ashenfelter
• "Fusebox Scaffolding" Kevin Roche
• "CFEclipse Plus!" Mark Drew
• "Ajax with ColdFusion, Spry and Scriptaculous" Massimo Foti
• "Using your Whole Brain for Developers" Michael Smith
• "Practical Code Generation" Peter Bell
• "RAD OO" Peter Bell
• "Using The Iterating Business Object" Peter Bell
• "Ajax Development using ColdFusion 8" Rakshith N
• "Embrace Factories" Rob Gonda
• "ColdFusion Powered Ajax" Rob Gonda
• "Implementing Usability: Improve your Chances" Ron West
• "Application security" Russ Michaels
• "Managing ColdFusion Projects from start to finish" Shlomy Gantz
• "ColdFusion and the User Experience" Simon Horwith
• "IS 7.0 for CFML Developers" Vince Bonfanti

It will be good to see so much CF Talent in the UK.

The conference is going to be held at the Novotel in Hammersmith 12-13 March 2008. You can get a discount by booking early so head over to http://europe.cfunited.com/ and book now. The discount ends at the end of October.

I see from Ben's Blog that MAX is Sold Out this year. I wish I was going but unfortunately I have to work.

With all the new stuff that Adobe has released this year its bound to be a good one. On top of that there is new stuff in the pipeline looks like being announced.

Andrew Shorten of Adobe is running a competition on his web site for a free ticket to MAX Europe.

One winner per a day on September 24, 25, 26 and 27 2007 will receive a complimentary conference pass to Adobe MAX Barcelona 2007 and a copy of Adobe Flex Builder or a copy of Adobe Flash CS3.

Can't go to MAX myself as I am teaching that week but if you are interested. Try and answer the daily question at http://www.ashorten.com/.

I went to another CF8 session with Rakshith N who was covering some of the new AJAX features.

CF8 now has an easy way to handle JSON. JSON is Javascript Object Notation and represents the data in Javascript. Based on array and object literals. It is less heavy than XML.

CF8 has new functions to deal with JSON

• SerializeJSON()
• DeserializeJSON()
• IsJSON()

When CF8 creates the JS data types, simple types remain as simple types, Arrays and Structs get converted to JS arrays and JS Structs.

There are two different formats of Query, Row format and Column format.

AJAX Plumbing

Essentially when we use AJAX some area of the page will be updated by a call to the server from a Javascript program. There is some HTML markup for the area of the page we want to update. We can now define an AJAX region with a cfdiv tag. cfdiv uses the bind parameter to link to a cfc or cfm page that will be called to create the content for that area of the page.

There are four types of bind

• CFC
• Javascript
• URL
• Plain

A new cfajaxproxy tag will create a JS proxy for a cfc method, allowing you to call the cfc from within javascript.

A ColdFusion object in the client JS code can be used to get information from ColdFusion. For example you can use "ColdFusion.navigate" on a link to make it download a JSON object from the server.

Other examples:

In addition there are now AJAX versions of the tree and grid controls which can replace the Java versions in earlier CF.

There are tags to do layout like the flash form layout tags.

Yesterday there were a few problems with the network connections here at the conference. It seems thay have 4 lines this year versus the one they had last year but its still overloaded.

The first session I attended was a session on CFML enhancements by Rupesh Kumar one of the Adobe CF Developers.

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Chris Scott gave a very detailed review of ColdSpring and how to use it with Flex. Unfortunately there was so much content I did not get most of the detail in my notes so I just have the bits that really interested me here.

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Adam Lehman, gave an interesting presentation on the new CF8 Server Monitor which was built using Flash Player 9 as the presentation engine.

The first point he made is that it is not just for use in production for monitoring your live server, 80% of use should be in development. You need to understand what your code is doing so that there are no surprises when application goes into production. In fact you should never run the memory tracker in production, as it will place too much load on the server.

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Live Cycle Data Services can be used for RPC, Messaging and Data Management.

There is a free updater to CF7 which does most of this. But in this case you have to install two copies of JRun. One for CF7 and one for Data Services. With CF8 it will be installed with both Standard and Enterprise in same JRun instance, unless you untick the box in the install. It is difficult to update later, so may be worth installing it from the start.

This allows the Live Cycle APIs to be called directly which improves performance. There is no need for the RMI interface that would be required in earlier versions.

Flash Remoting has also been updated and can be used to connect Flex to ColdFusion.

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Two separate presentations here with two completely different takes on the subject. I was asked by the members of the Tames Valley User Group to give a presentation on OO in CF so thought it would be good idea to attend these two presentations.

In the first one, Nick was very practical and after a short introduction to OO Nick covered how OO can be implemented in CF.

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Michael asked us all to discuss three questions with two of our neighbours in the conference.

• What do I want to get out of the conference?
• What needs to change in web development?
• What can I do to improve the web?

We were also asked to contribute the answers to the survey on the CFUnited web site. Michael will report back on the themes he discovers from the answers posted.

One of the great things that has been growing on the web is use of wikis. CFUnited has a wiki and the team has set up a wiki for the conference. All attendees were invited to contribute to the wiki and link their conference notes.

Michael announced the new Fusebox web site and thanked the mebers of Team Fusebox fro their work on the web site and the new version of Fusebox (5.5) which is now in Alpha.

Michael also asked people to contribute their photographs to the CFUnited group on Fliker.

Originally many sites on the web told you what to do. Now you often combine your input with others to create web content on a site. More users are getting involved with web applications such as You Tube and Second Life. Michael highlighted Spiral Dynamics as a technology for thinking about the future of the web.