I know some speakers who didn't make the first list assumed they weren't speaking. Not necessarily true. The manager and beginner tracks have not been (fully) announced yet, not have all the Flex/AIR topics and none of the Centaur and Bolt topics (and, indeed, several slots in the other tracks have not been finalized either). Additional topics will be announced over the next few months but Liz wanted to give a sense of what is coming in some of the tracks this year.
Another clarification in her latest post covers the "exclusivity" of Centaur/Bolt topics, namely that certain topics will be exclusive to CFUNITED but by no means all Centaur/Bolt topics. That means that other conferences will be covering Centaur and Bolt (and may well have "scoops" as has been Adobe's practice in the past during keynotes). That's good news for cf.Objective() and Scotch on the Rocks attendees since they know now that they won't miss out on the "highly anticipated next major release" of ColdFusion!
Don't forget that the early bird price ($849 for 4 days) ends TODAY!
After CFUNITED 2008, Liz has promised lots of changes and improvements and we already know that the venue is something special and an all-in-one location (addressing a bit complaint about the last few years' conferences). One of the new changes for 2009 is that a quarter of the content will be Flex/AIR related, acknowledging the growth and increasing relevance of these technologies to ColdFusion developers at large.
Some of the highlights (from my point of view) of the topics announced so far:
- Flex development with the Swiz framework - Chris Scott
- Railo Open Source - Gert Franz
- Groovy for ColdFusion Developers - Joe Rinehart
- iPhone Apps + Adobe ColdFusion - Josh Adams
- ColdFusion, Model-Glue, Hibernate, Spring, and Groovy - Ray Camden
- AIR: Building Desktop Applications with Flex 3 - Rob Rusher
- Hack Proofing ColdFusion - Shlomy Gantz
Definitely not your father's CFUNITED!
Although there's no list of speakers / sessions yet, the location has been announced (the fabulous Lansdowne Resort in Leesburg, VA). The room rate is way down from last year and the conference prices are also slightly lower ($699 for 3 days, $849 for 4 days - compared to $799 and $899 last year). Knock another $100 off with your alumni discount.
You can also suggest speakers and topics for CFUNITED 2009.
You can either submit yourself as a speaker, with topics, or submit a suggestion for topics that others could speak on. Since Liz has said next year's CFUNITED will be community-driven, make your voice count by submitting suggestions!
I said publicly that I would not attend CFUNITED 2009 unless there were significant changes in the way the event was handled and - based on early information I've had from Stellr - it looks like CFUNITED 2009 will be significantly improved over CFUNITED 2008 and very focused on "the preferences and the needs of the attendees" as Liz says!
