An Architect's View

My notes from today's CFUNITED Express Bay Area:

The CFUNITED Express Bay Area early bird price ends on Sunday. The speakers are Charlie Arehart, John Paul Ashenfelter, Michael Smith, Simon Horwith and, from Adobe, Paul Kenney and Matt Chotin. Matt will be giving an introduction to Flex for ColdFusion developers. Oh, and me. Remember that you can use the cost of CFUNITED Express as a discount against your CFUNITED 2008 ticket!

The CFUNITED website has started posting presentations from a number of speakers. You have to login to access the presentations (i.e., they are only available to attendees). My presentation has been posted (but is already available from my blog - under 'software'). If you attended CFUNITED 2007 but missed some talks, you'll want to login and see what's available.

Rupesh Kumar, one of the ColdFusion engineers, writes about his experience of CFUNITED 2007 and posts his slides. For those of you who missed his talk, his slides are full of details about the many, many language enhancements in ColdFusion 8, including several in-depth slides on <cfthread>.

Several nights of poor sleep and long, information-filled days got the better of me and I accidentally slept in, missing Eric Goodlad's session on XML, Rob Gonda's session on Flex and AJAX and Adam Wayne Lehman's session on security and ColdFusion 8. In other words, I got up just in time for lunch (which was, again, very good!). After lunch, I went to Rob Rusher's session on Flex charting. He seemed to be having some problems with Flex Builder and ended up fielding so many questions from the audience that he didn't get very deep into the charting machinery. I was a bit disappointed by that. My plan was to attend John Paul Ashenfelter's pragmatic ColdFusion session but I lingered in the room after Rob's talk and Joe Rinehart took the stage to talk about AJAX and ColdFusion frameworks so I stayed put. If you haven't heard Joe present, you really, really need to make an effort to attend one of his sessions. I think he is probably the best speaker on the CF circuit today. He is well-paced, clear and engaging. He makes sure everyone understands his agenda and he manages his time in a very professional manner. I'd probably go see him present the phone directory, based on the last few talks of his that I've attended. He really is one of the "must see" speakers these days. He talked about the challenges of AJAX development, the proliferation of frameworks, then he zeroed in on a couple of frameworks and showed how easy it is to use them with a ColdFusion framework like Model-Glue. He also covered how ColdFusion 8 will change the playing field - essentially making it even easier to use AJAX with Model-Glue (and other CF frameworks). In the evening I went out for dinner with a small group of CFers and their partners and then just hung out in the bar and in people's rooms getting a sense of the conference and geeking out about ColdFusion. The networking that the event is so good for.

After lunch (did I mention the food was pretty good this year, especially the desserts?), I went to a session on prototying applications with Flex which was originally going to be given by Scott Stroz. He's moved from AboutWeb to Alagad (Doug Hughes' company) so two AboutWeb folks stepped up: Kelly Brown and Michael Oddis. The session wasn't entirely what I expected but it was very interesting. Instead of really focusing on prototyping, Kelly and Michael talked about best practices in a number of areas and some techniques for event handling. Amongst the best practices, they listed pick a good directory structure (with the finished application in mind - and keep to it), use granular custom components for view (your prototype will likely become your real application so writing reusable code for your prototype will pay dividends), use inline XML or external XML files and HTTPService for prototyping so that you have a data model to build on, use CSS for styling, use the Flex style explorer, use external CSS (and compile it with the mxmlc compiler). They talked about event handling, using custom event types (so you have clear mnemonics for your application logic), event chaining and event bubbling (I got a bit confused here about what they were really recommending). They recommended adding your listeners in an onCreationComplete handler. One recommendation that I found really strange was to use ViewStack for different views onto the same data or components but to use States for different areas / aspects of your application. This flies in the face of every other recommendation I've encountered around view stacks and states - and it contradicts my experience of states in general. Overall tho', a very interesting session. Next up was my AJAX / ColdFusion 8 talk which had a large audience and lots of questions. Fortunately, several of the ColdFusion team were in the room so I picked on them and directed folks to question them after the session. When I gave the talk at cf.Objective(), there were far fewer questions and I ran through all of the slide deck, interspersed with examples. In the face of more questions, I focused on the code examples and just skipped through the slides which seemed to go over well. After my session I fielded a lot of questions in the hallway - good to see so much interest in the new AJAX features in ColdFusion 8! Consequently I missed most of Thomas Burleson's session on using MVC with Flex and ColdFusion - what I saw looked good but since I only caught the tail end, I didn't take any notes. I decided to skip the special event at the zoo and, after working on my startup's website for an hour, have a quiet dinner by myself. There was a thunderstorm and it rained heavily so I guess I made a good choice there. As far as dinner went, several of the ColdFusion team came into the restaurant just after I ordered my meal and they invited me to join them so I had an interesting informal chat with them (most of which centered on the advisability of a team sky-diving event, rather than ColdFusion!). The Meridian restaurant at the Marriott is extremely good and the "surf'n'turf" special - filet mignon and Maryland crab cakes - was absolutely wonderful! The bar was a zoo as well so I skipped that and continued work on my startup.

John Paul Ashenfelter kicked off my day with his talk about testing ColdFusion applications. He started out by defining the different types of testing and then talked about some tools that help you test applications. He mentioned cfcUnit for writing unit tests but didn't go into details (Paul Kenney was doing a talk on Test-Driven Development with cfcUnit later on at CFUNITED). John Paul did go into quite a bit of detail about Selenium which is an incredibly cool browser capture / playback testing tool written entirely in JavaScript. I downloaded Selenium and within a few minutes - with a little help from John Paul - I was recording test scripts for a web application and automatically running entire suites of test scripts. Very impressive - highly recommended! John Paul also covered continuous integration (where tests are run automatically for you as you change code) and different types of load testing: testing under expected load, testing for bottlenecks, stress testing - to see what traffic will break the site. Overall, this was a great session and John Paul is an engaging and passionate speaker. The next talk I attended was also about testing: Thomas Burleson of Universal Mind, talking about continuous testing with Flex and ColdFusion. He was plagued with technical problems (the A/V system failed in Ballroom GH for several speakers) and didn't get through all of his presentation, unfortunately. The big takeaway for me was that Universal Mind have developed a Java application that keeps your source code (CFCs and I think AS3 classes too) in sync with your unit tests (assuming you use FlexUnit and cfcUnit). The Java app automatically generates new stub tests (that fail) for any new methods you create in your source code. Unfortunately, I didn't see a URL for this "Synchronizer" tool. Next was Vince Bonfanti's keynote talk about BlueDragon. He surveyed the audience and found nearly half of those present were at their very first CFUNITED and a few people in the audience had never heard of BlueDragon. After a brief overview of New Atlanta, who are now ten years old, he talked about the three main innovations coming down the pike from New Atlanta over the next few years:

• IIS 7 integrated administration and request pipeline (Application.cfc) (2007)
• AJAX & Silverlight support (2007-2008)
• DLR integration (2008 onwards)

Vince talked about how with IIS 6 there are three request pipelines: IIS, ASP.NET, BlueDragon (Application.cfc). With IIS 7, these can be integrated into a single set of handlers, allowing you to write event handlers in Application.cfc that apply to all requests - not just CFML pages. This will also allow for three new Application.cfc event handlers: onAuthenticationRequest(), onRequestAuthorize() and onRequestLog(). This will allow you to write security wrappers in CFML that apply in general across your web server, e.g., for images, HTML pages etc. Vince also showed an early build of the integrated administration, which exposes BlueDragon admin functions directly into the IIS 7 control panel. That means that all of the IIS 7 administrative concepts (cascading settings, remote delegation, deployable application configuration through web.config files) will now be applicable to BlueDragon. Bugs aside in these early builds, this level of integration is pretty impressive and I can see it being very appealing to people who are heavily invested in the Windows platform and IIS 7. Vince went on to show a new tag - <cfupdatepanel> - which allows a portion of a CFML page to be executed remotely as part of an AJAX region. It's a different approach to the AJAX widgets in ColdFusion 8 and my initial impression was that ColdFusion 8's approach is more powerful and more flexible. Vince has since assured me that this is just the first step in AJAX support for BlueDragon so comparisons should wait for now. The final demo in the keynote was a console application that compiled and executed CFML code by using the BlueDragon engine running on the DLR - Dynamic Language Runtime - that Microsoft recently announced. This is codenamed IronDragon (in the spirit of Microsoft's version of Python that runs on the DLR: IronPython). Since Silverlight implements the DLR, this opens up the possibility of using CFML on both the server (as today) and the client (in Silverlight). Given the appearance of Monolight - an implementation of Silverlight on top of Mono (the open source .NET runtime implementation) - this could be a very interesting development.

After the networking event, Joe Rinehart hosted a Birds of a Feather session on frameworks. He covered the new release of Model-Glue 2.0 for ColdFusion, the Alpha 1 release of Model-Glue for Flex (which looks very exciting!) and said that Model-Glue for Java, developed by Chris Scott (I think) would also become an official Model-Glue project - all on the new Model-Glue website. Next up I covered the Fusebox 5.5 release which is currently in limited Alpha with a public Beta planned in July (as soon as we can get enough documentation together on the new features). I also announced publicly that providing a migration path for Fusebox 3 was on the roadmap (for Fusebox 5.7 probably). Matt Woodward (and Peter Farrell) presented Mach II 1.5 which is in Beta right now, and the new website. He also talked about plans for their 2.0 release (but didn't go into specifics). Next up was Chris Scott, who said that an official 1.2 release would appear within a few weeks and then they would be working toward a 1.5 release. This will be the last release of ColdSpring that will run on CFMX 7 - ColdSpring 2.0 will require CF8 because they want to take advantage of cfinterface and onMissingMethod() to make ColdSpring faster (and simplify the core files). Last up was Doug Hughes who assured us that Reactor would hit an official 1.0 release as soon as the documentation was complete. Ah, the dreaded documentation...

I've already blogged the ColdFusion part of the Adobe keynote but I wanted to provide a quick summary of the rest of the keynote and the other sessions I attended on Wednesday. Tim Buntel and Ben Forta handed over the stage to Matt Chotin who talked about the success of Flex 2, the roadmap for Flex 3, moving to open source and a little bit about AIR. He commented that Ben had prepared his slide deck for him and, sure enough, there were some amusing Scorpio cameos in Matt's presentation! After the keynote, I attended Matt Chotin's "Flex 101" which, unfortunately, was plagued by technical problems and ended up being a very, very basic introduction to Flex. Next was Chris Scott presenting ColdSpring as a robust way to manage your services behind a Flex front-end. This was the same talk he gave at cf.Objective(), focusing on tiered application architecture. It's a good talk and I got a little more out of it now that I've actually started to build applications with Flex. The best talk of the day was next: Andrew Powell talking about integrating Spry with ColdFusion. I haven't really looked at Spry so I learned a lot from this talk. In particular, I didn't know that Spry supported JSON as well as XML which is important now that CF8 provides native JSON data formatting. I took a lot of notes, mostly code fragments and technical tips, that I won't reproduce here. Definitely check out his presentation when it is published on the CFUNITED site! Worth mentioning is Service Capture which is an awesome tool for debugging Flash Remoting and AJAX applications ($35). Andrew Trice was next, covering Object-Oriented Flex development. He's obviously a smart guy but his presentation was a bit fragmented and jumped around between topics, making it hard to follow the points he was trying to make at times. Mostly it was basic OO 101 stuff but I picked up a couple of Flex concepts which hadn't sunk in before so it was helpful. The final session of the day was Steve Rittler, showcasing Flex integration with SalesForce.com. I'd missed this at cf.Objective() so I was glad it was repeated at CFUNITED. He explained how SalesForce.com expose their "Application Exchange" platform in different ways and showed the Flex SDK that they offer which provides a simple interface to work with their hosted CRM application. Steve walked us through a simple application, from start to finish, including setting up the initial Flex project. He noted that SalesForce.com's API is pretty basic and has a number of limitations which makes building applications a challenge. It was an interesting real-world session - something I'd like to see more of at conferences.

Now I'm on my way home from CFUNITED, I feel I have some space and time to write up my thoughts about this year's conference. I'm going to post one entry for each day of the conference which is a fairly arbitrary division of the material but it's fairly managable. Overall, the conference was excellent and exhausting in roughly equal measure. Four days of intense sessions and interaction with other developers combined with less than five hours sleep each night takes its toll, especially on an old man like me! TeraTech have gotten this conference down to a science now and it runs very, very smoothly. The food was much better this year and the seating arrangements also seemed better. Wifi coverage and bandwidth was significantly better than last year (but not without problems). The only thing that seemed worse this year was the A/V equipment which completely sunk a couple of presentations, leaving speakers without projection altogether for at least part of their talk or some screens cropping a substantial border off the display, causing no end of frustrations. Fortunately, most of the speakers are troopers and are able to carry on in the face of adversity. The content, as always, covers a broad spectrum and is appropriate for the audience. It seemed that many, many people were first timers at the conference and there were also clearly a lot of novice-to-intermediate level developers there (based on the questions being asked in several sessions). The networking opportunities are superb, of course, when you have 900 developers in one place for a few days - and evenings!