Objective Action - Conferences

MAX Keynote Sessions Online

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 11:47:00+0100

Stacy Sison who does a lot to support all the Adobe User Groups around the world has arranged for group members to be able to see the MAX keynote sessions live online. To do that you must register first. If you are interested please go to Max Online register.

Scotch on the Road

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 14:04:00+0100

There were two great changes to the Scotch on the Rocks conference this year. For me the first was the timing. I am usually away during the Bank Holiday week so I have missed the conference on previous occasions for that reason. This year it was one week later so I got to go for a change. The other was that it is moveing from place to place with days in London, Manchester and Edinburgh. So I didn't have to travel to see some really great presentations. For me the highlights were:

David Rutter who gave a really excellent summary of how to make ColdFusion application secure,
Terry Ryan on Bolt Extensions,
Terry Ryan on the Hibernate features in CF9, and
Serge Jespers on Flash Catalyst.

I thinks the Audience were stunned by the demo of Flash Catalyst even if nobody liked the new name for Flex Builder. It was also good to meet a few of the people who I have interacted with on here and twitter over tha last year. I'll write some stuff about the presentations soon.

CFUNITED Europe Topics Announced

Sun, 30 Sep 2007 12:37:00+0100

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

http://europe.cfunited.com/

MAX 2007 Chicago Sold Out

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 08:31:00+0100

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.

MAX Europe prize draw

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 12:49:00+0100

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/.

CFUnited - Advanced AJAX Development - Rakshith N

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 14:21:00+0100

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.


{ books:[
{isbn:'00230', title:'xyz'}
{isbn:'00231', title:'abc'}
}

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.

OR

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:


ColdFusion.Ajax.submitForm(fomnId, url, callBasckHandler, errorHandler, httpMethod, asynch)

ColdFusion.log.dump(message.component)

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.

CFUnited Day 2 - CFML Enhancements - Rupesh Kumar

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 13:44:00+0100

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. [More]

CFUnited - ColdSpring for Flex Applications - Chris Scott

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 13:20:00+0100

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. [More]

CFUnited - The CF8 Server Monitor - Adam Lehman

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 13:11:00+0100

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. [More]

CFUnited Day 1 - CF8 and LiveCycle Data Services - Tom Jordahl

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 13:03:00+0100

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. [More]

CFUnited - Object Oriented ColdFusion - Nick Tunney and Hal Helms

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 12:31:00+0100

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. [More]

CFUnited Day 1 - Keynote - Michael Smith

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 12:24:00+0100

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.

Flexmaniacs - Sorting and Filtering and Drag and Drop

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 18:11:00+0100

I went to two sessions this afternoon on Sorting and Filtering and on Drag and Drop. What struck me about these two is that despite some minor quirks they both showed how great Flex is. The session on Sorting and Filtering by Scott Stroz was interesting and showed how fast Flex was at sorting and filtering large datasets of around 2000 or so records. It all seemed to happen in the blink of an eye! The final session I went to was about Drag and Drop. For me this is the main reason for using a RIA over the traditional interface. Kevin Schmidt showed the easy and more difficult was to use Drag and Drop in Flex. [More]

FlexManiacs - Day 2 - Mike Sundermeyer and Tom Hobbs - Adobe Experience Design

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 14:06:00+0100

The XD Team is working with companies who want to push the envelope. Including RIAs and Mobile phone interfaces in Flash and Flex. Now working on new Flex components. Mike and Tom outlined a typical scenario involving the development of page wireframes, then graphic design, then code in Flex or HTML. They then showed a series of new techniques and thinking that would allow much better user interfaces to be developed. [More]

1:45 pm John Paul Ashenfelter - Rails for the Ruby-Impaired

Fri, 02 Feb 2007 20:29:00+0100

John Paul gave an overview of why he thinks Ruby on Rails is good framework for web application development. One of the things about rails is that it includes as standard many things that we in the Fusebox world regard as extras. Active Record for example provides similar facilities to Reactor does for CF application and is part of the standard Ruby on Rails installation. It works hard to make the database fairly invisible. For example changing from MySQL to MS SQL is completely painless. The only task that has to be done in the DBMS is to create the database. Everything else is done in Rails. There is built in support for caching, logging and security. When installing Rails a very simple clean install package is available which combines all the features. It has a collection of templates for use in creating views. Rhtml (Ruby), rxml, rjs(Ajax). There is a built in vendor directory structure that allows each vendor to have a valid place to put files. There are a lot of cool plug-ins for rails. Streamline takes Rails scaffolding and bonds it with Google toolkit. Capistrano is a built in deployment tool, which could be used with CF. JRuby is a java version of Ruby. This could be a big competitor for ColdFusion, once Rails is able to run on JRuby. Rails lessons:

Best Practices all together in a single package.
- Version Control
- Deployment
- ORM
- Ajax
Make the database invisible.
- Transfer
- Reactor
Easy things should be easy.
Testing is crucial, and should be easy.
- Rails contains a test harness and can be run.

John Paul has implemented some of the Rails ideas in his ColdFusion Applications.

Move to convention over configuration.
Pick an ORNM and integrate it.
Pick an Ajax Library and integrate it.
Pick a test library and use it. (cfunit or cfcunit or selenium)
Automate the generation of the XML files for the parts.

Book on JUnit can be used with cfcUnit and there is a good presentation on UGTV. John Paul sugessts we choose a scripting language that we can run from the command line. Ant is a good way to run scripts but maybe Ruby is good choice for scripts too.