An Architect's View

It's Sunday afternoon after the best cf.Objective() ever and I'm looking over my notes to offer some thoughts on the last three days.

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I saw that Nolan Erck had blogged his cf.Objective() schedule so I thought I'd do the same. The decisions are not generally as hard for me as for Nolan: when I'm not speaking or attending a general session, I'm going to be focused on JavaScript since that's where I'm weak and that's where I'll learn the most. Mostly focused on JavaScript, that is.

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No doubt much to many people's surprise, I recently bought a Windows machine. I've used every version of Windows since 3.1 but I've always preferred Apple's offerings, both in terms of hardware and software. So what do I think of this new Dell machine and Windows 8?

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Yes, the world's only Enterprise ColdFusion Conference, cf.Objective(), will be back in 2013 at a new location in Minneapolis and has just opened their call for speakers!

cf.Objective() has always been a massive hit with attendees because of the high quality of content offered and this is your opportunity to propose sessions you'd like to talk about for next year's schedule. Your talk can cover anything you believe will be relevant and of interest to an audience of CFML developers looking to improve their skills. Tracks last year covered Architecture & Design in Software, Integration & Tools, Process & Performance, Security & Front-End Development, and js.Objective() - general JavaScript topics, going beyond CFML. Of course the tracks this year might be different: it will all depend on what is proposed by you!

On July 13th, 2011 Robert C. Martin (aka "Uncle Bob") gave a talk at Skills Matter in London called The Last Programming Language. He was scheduled to give a version of it as the keynote for ACCU 2011, a conference I remember with fondness from my days back in England as a member of the Association of C and C++ Users! You can read Martin's blog post about the talk here but note there's a $2 charge to watch the version linked from that blog post - the Skills Matter version linked above is free.

TL;DR: He asks whether we've exhausted all possible programming paradigms and languages and whether we should now consider a single standardized programming language (and offers a suggestion of what that might be). Preposterous?

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This year's cf.Objective() was the biggest, most successful ever: more attendees, more speakers, more tracks, more content, more sponsors, lightning talks, BOFs, ad hoc sessions - more, more, more! Yet it still managed to maintain the great ratio of attendees to speakers that gives people a small conference feel with great networking opportunities.

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Now that the online scheduler is available, I've been picking the sessions I'll be attending at cf.Objective() 2011

Thursday, May 12, 2011

• 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM: Room 1 - Keynote (TBD)
• 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM: Room 1 - Making Legacy Code Testable (Emily Christiansen)
• 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM: Room 1 - ORM Zen (Marc Esher)
• 1:45 PM - 2:45 PM: Room 5 - ColdSpring 2.0 Alpha 1 "What's New and Improved" (Mark Mandel)
• 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM: Room 5 - Forms That Don't Suck (Quick, Easy, & Clean Forms and Data) (Matt Quackenbush)
• 4:15 PM - 5:15 PM: Room 3 - Implementing an In-Memory Distributed Cache Using ColdSpring AOP and Ehcache (Adam Bellas)

Friday, May 13, 2011

• 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM: Room 2 - Introduction to Browser Automation and Testing with Selenium (Bob Silverberg)
• 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM: Room 2 - Web Single Sign-On and ColdFusion (Adam Crump)
• 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM: Room 5 - Simple MVC with FW/1 (Daria Norris)
• 1:45 PM - 2:45 PM: Room 1 - Holistic Program Quality and Technical Debt (Nathan Strutz)
• 3:00 PM - 5:15 PM: Room 1 - Deep Dive: Multi-Tenant, Multi-Lingual Web Platforms - Software as a Service (Sean Corfield)

Saturday, May 14, 2011

• 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM: Room 1 - What is Functional Programming? (and why should I care?) (Sean Corfield)
• 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM: Room 1 - Don't Forget About Custom Tags (Steve Bryant)
• 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM: Room 1 - Getting to Know AntiPatterns (Emily Christiansen)
• 1:45 PM - 2:45 PM: Room 1 - (Abstraction + CF9 ORM) == "Modeled in Minutes" (Matt Quackenbush)
• 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM: Room 5 - Simplifying Development with ColdFusion on Wheels: An Introduction (Chris Peters)

Some difficult choices there because there are some killer sessions on the schedule!

Following hot on the heels of OpenCF Summit in Dallas, I headed to England (this time with my wife) for Scotch on the Rocks in beautiful Edinburgh, Scotland. I spent a lot of time engaged in hallway talks during the day and long discussions in the bar during the evenings so I must confess that I saw very, very few of the sessions. I would have attended more sessions but I was generally a bit late to each one (due to aforementioned hallway conversations) and it seemed that every session I wanted to attended was already completely packed out the door - my sense is that the Apex International Hotel, while perfectly wonderful in many ways, doesn't have enough large conference rooms to handle the number of attendees that Scotch is attracting these days.

With that complaint out of the way, how was the conference? Well organized, well attended and packed with great content.

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My two presentations from the OpenCF Summit are available on my presentations page: CFML and the Open Source Landscape (updated), Open Source Language Evolution (new). The conference team are putting up links to all the presentations as they are made available, via the conference schedule page.

I'll blog my thoughts about the conference in a separate post shortly, possibly on the Railo Technologies blog.

cf.Objective() has just posted the draft schedule for 2011 and, as always, it's packed full of great sessions. I'm very pleased to announce that I am speaking again this year and I'll be bringing two brand new presentations to the conference:

• Multi-Tenant, Multi-Lingual Web Platforms - Software as a Service
• What is Functional Programming? (and why should I care?)

The former will draw on work I did at Broadchoice, building their SaaS-based CMS platform, and more recently at World Singles, building their new internet dating platform. It will cover some of the challenges such systems provide (and various ways to tackle them). Sacramento CFUG will get an early sneak peek of this talk in a few weeks.

The latter will cover a style of programming that's been around for decades and has seen a massive resurgence lately as concurrency, parallelism and efficient use of multi-core / multi-CPU machines have become increasingly more important. While the talk will show examples from Clojure and Scala, I will also show how some of functional programming's powerful idioms can be used in CFML!