An Architect's View

I'm very pleased to have been accepted as a speaker for Scotch on the Rocks 2011! Wow! What an incredible line up of speakers! It's going to be an awesome conference!

SOTR 2008 was incredible so I was very sorry to have missed SOTR 2009 - due to my wife breaking her ankle! Schedule and finances got in the way of me even considering SOTR 2010.

So what will I be speaking about?

To be honest, I don't know. Topics will be announced in about five or six weeks. I submitted three suggestions to the SOTR folks. I don't know what they'll pick.

But I want to open it up to everyone who'll be at SOTR 2011 - what would you like me to talk about? If there's a strong preference for a topic, even if it isn't one that I submitted, we'll see what we can do about accommodating your choice!

I didn't get to many sessions this year but I thought the last CFUnited was great! Here's my review of the event.

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By now, many of you will have read Adam Lehman's blog post that Adobe is no longer part of the CFML Advisory Committee. Adam has disabled comments on that post and folks have been asking me all morning for my take on this so, as chair of the committee, I'm going to post my thoughts - and leave comments open so the community can provide feedback.

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Now that the Saturday schedule is available on the CFUnited site, I can confirm that I'm speaking three times in total:

• Thursday 9:00am - ColdFusion and the Open Source Landscape
• Friday 2:00pm - FW/1: The Invisible Framework
• Saturday 4:00pm - ColdFusion and the Open Source Landscape

Hope to see you at CFUnited - it's the last one so it will be legendary!

This blog post captures my current thoughts about the sessions listed so far for CFUnited 2010 - and how many difficult choices I'm going to have to make between lots of great sessions. I think this is the best line up ever for CFUnited!

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Voting ended March 31st and the most popular eight topics have been selected and added to the schedule for Friday night (22nd):

• 7pm - Test-Driven Development - Marc Esher & Bob Silverberg
• 7pm - Open Source Projects Discussion - Luis Majano, Mark Mandel & Matt Woodward
• 7pm - Extending Mura - Matt Levine & Sean Schroeder
• 7pm - ColdFusion "next" - hosts to be confirmed
• 8pm - Pecha Kucha - Bob Silverberg (host)
• 8pm - Being Agile - Peter Bell & Sean Corfield
• 8pm - Security - Justin Mclean & Jason Dean
• 8pm - Mobile Development - Andy Matthews & Dan Vega (and maybe Josh Adams?)

Thank you for all your suggestions and votes!

Today the CFUnited team published the full list of topics for CFUnited 2010 and I'm pretty impressed! In past year's I've grumbled that I've found it a bit hard to fill my schedule but there's a lot of variety this year and a lot of new and exciting topics. The changes to the process for picking submissions has clearly paid dividends. At a quick glance, I saw about 30 sessions that I'd happily attend so I'm looking forward to the scheduler being updated so I can start to plan my days!

Adobe will showcase ColdFusion 9 at cf.Objective() 2010 with six topics. The schedule has been updated with two Adobe topics each day and they are listed on the session page as well. We believe Terry Ryan will be handling most of the Adobe talks but we'll be confirming that as soon as we know for sure! Now that Adobe's talks are finalized, we'll be picking two more community submissions from our list and adding those. If you submitted a talk and wondered why you haven't received either an acceptance letter or a rejection, now you know. We hope to let everyone know within the next week! We're also ready to accept BOF suggestions - I'll make a separate blog post about that in the next few days.

The Content Advisory Board have finalized all the sessions for cf.Objective() 2010 and the accept / reject emails should start going out today to folks who submitted proposed talks! We have a draft schedule prepared already so as soon as the accept / reject letters are in the mail, we'll make a formal announcement and start updating the website so everyone can see what great content the conference is offering. Registration is already open and there is a broad selection of one-day and two-day pre-conference classes available this year!

David Tannersyn commented on my blog post about MFG.com taking three years to overhaul their web site. He's interested in a balanced argument as to why anyone would choose CFML over Java in this day and age. Here's David's comment, with my answers interspersed.

I spotted your comment on the Tech Crunch, MFG.com article (among many other CF advocates), found your blog, and had a look around.

The TechCrunch article received a lot of commentary from CFers, much of which bordered on fanboi-ism - which we as a community do tend to slip into because of our passion for CFML. Some of the comments were downright insulting (to TechCrunch and to MFG.com) which might be a whole bunch of fun but doesn't do our image much good when viewed from outside our community. Given some of the heat in the comments, I'm glad David still took the time to come here and ask questions - many folks reading those comments probably just wrote us off!

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