An Architect's View

The Unconference saw much better attendance on the second day and had a very lively roundtable discussion about the use of / pros and cons of Object-Oriented techniques in CFML which everyone seemed to enjoy. Adobe's Terrence Ryan presented on how to 'sell' ColdFusion to non-ColdFusion developers, Kevin Schmidt suffered some technical issues and ended up just sitting down with us all and talking about using ColdFusion to power Flex. Laura Arguello presented on Mango Blog (rescheduled from Monday) and during her talk I downloaded, installed and configured Mango Blog - it's very impressive and when I rebuild my site (fairly soon - I just need to find the time!), I'll switch from my ancient build of BlogCFC (3.5.2 with a custom Fusebox skin) to Mango Blog instead! Tuesday also saw the Day Two Keynote / General Session and the MAX Awards and Sneak Peeks. The keynote focused mostly on demos of what people are doing with Adobe technologies and some of it was quite impressive. The most eye-catching was the "augmented reality" demo of AKQA's USPS virtual box simulator (see the YouTube video of the simulator for more details). The second most impressive demo was probably FedEx's Custom Critical vehicle tracking system which showcased Flex and LiveCycle: real-time mapping, temperature sensors, live communication with drivers and integration with an AI engine that constantly evaluates the data coming in and makes recommendations to solve problems and tune the business. I hate to admit that I can't remember what else they demoed! The awards were hosted by Mark Hammill in a very brisk, efficient manner with extremely brief video clips of each nominee. A couple of the nominees were truly impressive but it really went by a bit too fast to take much in (which is still better than the awards segment dragging on and on as they have sometimes in the past). The sneaks were therefore all in a Star Wars theme which added humor but got a bit forced at times. Mark Hammill was very good natured about the obvious fact that he clearly had no idea what most of the engineers were talking about during their demos, as he sat on a couch stage left with Ted Patrick (as Obi-Wan), who introduced each demo. The sneaks focused almost entirely on the creative side of the house with the usual stunning demo of an upcoming Photoshop feature (content-aware spot healing / fill). Server side ActionScript made another appearance, this time with seamless debugging across client and server (Adam Lehman later said we should not assume that ColdFusion is not involved in this prototype technology - excuse the double-negative!). Another cool ActionScript debugging sneak was edit/continue (where you can edit/fix code live while debugging and simply continue your debugging session with the newly edited code, without the current quit/rebuild/restart loop. After the sneaks, the Adobe MAX Bash took place with food and drink in four locations around L.A. Live. I spent the evening in the Conga Room listening to the live salsa band (and saw almost no CFers there - no surprise, I guess).

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I started writing up my experience of CFUnited 2009 but it turned into a giant essay as I was going into a lot more detail than I'm sure anyone would really care about. So here's the condensed version: CFunited 2009 was awesome! OK, you probably want a bit more detail than that so read on.

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Since several people have asked, I get into CFUnited on Wednesday morning, hopefully in time for the keynote. I got a good deal on a red eye from San Francisco - it's non-stop and I hate burning daylight traveling. I've already posted my intended session schedule (PDF) so you can track me down easily although I do have a couple of client meetings to fit in and time on the Railo booth. Yes, Railo are sponsoring CFUnited and we'll be there at the Railo booth with schwag to give away, a sign-up sheet for folks interested in our consulting services and, of course, Gert, Mark, Peter and myself to answer all your questions about the Railo server as well. I'm giving my Living in the Cloud presentation on Wednesday afternoon (last session before dinner) and again on Saturday (last session of the conference). I'm also hosting a CFML Advisory Committee BoF on Wednesday night where you can hear what we've been up to over the last year since the committee was formed and hear about our plans for the future. There are going to be some interesting announcements at CFUnited that will affect lots of CF developers. See you Wednesday!

I tweeted my schedule recently but figured I'd also post it here for folks to discover where to find me next week - OMG! It's next week! So, here is my CFUnited schedule (PDF). I'm speaking on Wednesday (5:30pm) and Saturday (4:15pm) and I'm also hosting a BOF on Wednesday evening: The CFML Advisory Committee - Happy First Birthday!

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I've talked about the CFML Advisory Committee before and explained that we're working on a specification for the ColdFusion Markup Language that we hope to release this year as CFML2009 and then review every two years. CFML2009 is intended to be a specification of what the language should be by the end of this year. Ben Forta just posted about some CFML enhancements coming soon in ColdFusion 9 but he didn't mention that many of these will be embodied in the CFML2009 spec. I figured it was worth looking at some of the items in his blog post through the lens of the Advisory Committee. Where these features are deemed "core" by the Advisory Committee, expect all CFML engines to provide them fairly quickly. Some features are supported already by one or more vendor, some are new to all three vendors.

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One of the nice aspects of the "Professional Open Source Sofware" business model is that you can be very flexible for your customers. The Railo server has a roadmap of core features and downloadable extensions - some free, some paid - but our roadmap can easily be influenced by our customers. Now that more developers are trying Railo every day, we're seeing more interest in certain features that were already on our roadmap but were either lower priority or scheduled some distance off in the future.

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As I've been working on my Living in the Cloud talk for CFUnited (since I didn't have to complete it for Scotch on the Rocks), it occurred to me that this is a topic covering stuff I worked on in the middle of 2008 (Broadchoice Workspace, built for Amazon EC2 and S3) and the end of 2008 (migrating Broadchoice Workshop to Amazon EC2). Conferences usually want topics submitted a long way in advance of the conference, even tho' drafts and the final version of the talk can be delivered just before the conference. CFUnited 2009's deadline for topic submissions was December 1st, 2008, eight months ahead of the conference. MAX 2009 opened its call for speakers on March 3rd 2009 and closed it in late April, six months ahead of the conference. Conferences set deadlines far in advance so that they can offer a good roster of speakers and talks because that's what attracts attendees. I've been on the advisory for a number of conferences and getting a schedule out early is key in the battle to boost registration. Our industry moves very fast. Something that's hot in the Fall may not be on anyone's radar today. Something that's hot today may be old, old news by the Fall. Conference committees have to guess what will be attractive, many months in advance - which is extremely hard! And yet, one of the biggest complaints we hear about conferences is when they have the same topics every year - which is a natural consequence of trying to fill the schedule so early: how many brand new topics can you think of off the top of your head? How do you feel about conference schedules? Do you feel they manage to stay ahead of the curve? Do you think there's too much "safe" content? Do you have suggestions for how conference committees can balance the need to publish a schedule so folks will buy tickets against the desire to feature bleeding edge topics? Do you think I'm too concerned about this - and that maybe there's no real issue here?

I was due to speak at all three venues for Scotch on the Rocks but unfortunately, I have to stay home. As many of you on Twitter and Facebook already know, my wife slipped and fell on Friday and hurt her ankle very badly. We were in the ER until 4am and x-rays confirmed her ankle was broken. Badly broken! She has a tri-malleolar fracture which essentially means she's snapped off the bottom of both her tibia and her fibula. She'll be going in for surgery as soon as the swelling has gone down enough to operate, hopefully on Thursday. She's going to be off her feet for about a month and I need to stay home and look after her. I'm very bummed about missing Scotch - it was the one conference I wanted to speak at this year (and originally was going to be the only conference I spoke at)! Here's looking forward to Scotch 2010! Andy and Kev should be publishing an updated schedule in the next few days - I know they have backup speakers on the waiting list. In the meantime, here's Jay's x-ray: Click for a bigger image!

An official beta of Model-Glue 3 aka Gesture was announced yesterday. You can read about the new features in MG3 on the wiki (all new Model-Glue documentation!). For folks attending cf.Objective() 2009, there will be a Birds of a Feather session at 8pm on Friday night, led by Dan Wilson, which will introduce the beta and discuss the new features.

In the absence of a printable schedule - sorry, Joe Rinehart says it's a problem with the Media3 hosting and he's been trying to get them to fix it for months! - here is my schedule for cf.Objective() 2009:

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