Brian Meloche's Blog I'll blog about ColdFusion, weight loss, podcasting and life with too many pets! :-)

OK. Day 3 of cf.Objective() was six days ago, but I SAID I'd blog about all three days of the conference, and daw-gone it!!! That's what I intend on doing!!!

Day 3 got off to a late start for me. The night before was a long one, and I was a little slow in getting up. It was past 9AM when I finally got out of my hotel room, still in the night before's clothes, and headed down for breakfast. I was pretty run down. The previous weekend was a long one, so I would have been tired even without the conference. Add a conference to it made me even more tired, especially by Day 3. By the way, a small conference like cf.Objective() in so many ways nicer than a conference like MAX because you're in the hotel that hosts the conference. You can go up to your room at any time and not have it become a major chore. Peter Farrell, Sean Corfield and a few other "dignitaries" were down there, too, so I didn't eat alone (well, yes I did... their table looked like a food fight had interrupted, so I sat at the next table).

After breakfast, I went back up for a shower, and by the time I was ready to come down, I figured I might as well check out, beat the rush, and get it over with. So, that meant I missed the first two sessions of the morning. The only one I really wanted to see of that was Peter Farrell's ANT session.

The first session of the day was Brian Kotek's Leveraging Code Generation to Jumpstart Your Development. I am a recent BIG fan of code generation, so I was looking forward to the discussion. I learned about Model-Glue and Reactor's code generation. I've not used either framework much, so that was interesting. Beyond that, I didn't learn very much that was new.

After that was lunch, and salmon, which was OK. You could definitely notice a lot of people had gone home already, as the dining area had the smallest crowd of the three days.

Following lunch was the session that I have to admit was one of the sessions I was looking forward to the most out of all the sessions at cf.Objective(): Mike Brunt's Clustering and Distributing ColdFusion Applications. It did not disappoint. I learned more in this session than probably any other. Setting up a ColdFusion cluster is VERY POORLY documented anywhere, and really needs someone like Mike to help fill in the holes. Mike's definitely one of the best CF server guys in the world, and I learned a lot from him in that one hour. Specifically, here's a tidbit... When he sets up a CF server, he does not hook cfusion into IIS. He uses the built in webserver. He then sets up an instance, creates a CAR file (obviously, I need to try CARs again, because I haven't heard many others having issues with them), and then creates other instances and deploys that CAR on the other instances. Once the instances are set up, he then creates the cluster as round-robin with sticky sessions. Then, he turns off the cfusion instance and sets it to manual. Again, I've never seen this mentioned anywhere else and I will do it the same from now on.

My last session of the conference was Jason Delmore's Building Hybrid Applications with ColdFusion and Java. I thought this covered a lot of ground in an hour, but was a great presentation that I really enjoyed.

After that session, I said my goodbyes, and made the next shuttle to the airport. The shuttle was a who's who of the conference. On it were five speakers - Peter Bell, Brian Rinaldi, Oguz Demirkapi, Maxim Porges and myself - and two other guys from Boston (sorry, I can't remember your names, guys, but I saw you both later in the terminal). That was an interesting ride. Brian R. talked about past cf.Objectives and I think we all agreed what a great conference it was.

I got home to Cleveland about 10:05 or so. My wife was getting ready for her surgery the next day (carpal tunnel on the right hand - she's doing OK, by the way), so after picking up my bag, I took a cab and was home by 10:40 or so.

To recover from the conference and because of my wife's surgery, I took a couple of days off and finally got back to work on Wednesday.

That's about it for Day 3. Following this post will be my preso and my overall review.