Day 2 at cf.Objective() - yeah, I know... several days late!

I blew off the first Saturday session in order to get everything set up for the two hour ColdSpring 1337 presentation by Chris Scott. I didn't have MySQL installed on the machine I took to the conference, and my Eclipse had a ton of updates to do (I'm still a Dreamweaver guy, but that's another blog post as to why that I'll finally send out one of these days). The updates took forever over both the hotel's wireless connection and the Verizon broadband USB device work gave me (tried both at various points), particularly Aptana. I didn't need Aptana for the session, but I figured I'd update it anyway.

Knowing the sessions were well underway, I went down to the Restaurant 11 for breakfast, since I had a free pass for it, thanks to being a Priority Club member. Unfortunately, I found the breakfast in the restaurant not so great. The eggs were dry and tasteless. I only ate part of my plate and decided to head downstairs. Much to my surprise, breakfast was still out for the conference attendees, and I helped myself, and I thought it was quite a bit better.

I tried making the tail part of Terrence Ryan's "Selling Professional Development Techniques at a Hostile Shop", but he finished early. After blowing off Terrence Ryan's presentation because of the updates that took forever (I should have just tried loading the stuff down in the meeting rooms instead of in my hotel room), it turned out being for naught, as Chris' project didn't work! Nevertheless, it was still a good presentation, I did pick up a few things, and he also did a preview of Swiz (I'm not sure if that's the correct spelling).

After that presentation was lunch, which was Prime Rib. It was a little over cooked for me, but better than I've had at some other conferences.

About 1/3 of the way through lunch, I started getting nervous about my presentation. I guess that's normal, but I know the stuff I presented so dead on that I really didn't need to rehearse (in fact, my presentation WAS unrehearsed, which may or may not be a shock to those of you that attended). I mentioned that because, like in my CFMeetup version, I got pretty animated in my 1:30 presentation, especially in my "Over the wall syndrome" section! In other words, "My systems are OK. It must be YOUR problem." The presentation went REALLY well. What can I say? I took Public Speaking at Waterloo and a drama class in high school, and I'm a bit of a ham, so it comes naturally to me. For those of you interested in my presentation, I will post the presentation in the next day or so.

After that was Michael Collins from Adobe who talked about Deploying Large Scale ColdFusion Applications. I did learn of a few other deployment methods I've never tried before, and I plan to on the next ColdFusion installation I do, although he spent a lot of time on using CAR files for deployments. Honestly, and I can't say for sure if it's a bug or if it's just the way I've used them, but I've never had any luck with CAR files. Instead, I've copied over xml files from instance to instance. He showed us using EAR files, which intrigued me and I am going to try it, but I will prove or disprove my issues with CAR files first.

Next was Mark Mandel presenting on Caching in Transfer, or as Mark says, "Cayshing". :-) Mark has presented to my CFUG, and I talk to him over GTalk and Twitter from time to time, but this conference was the first time I've gotten to meet Mark. Mark's yearly trip to the States is for cf.Objective(), and meeting him is a good reason to come to this conference! He's a cool guy to hang out with! Anyway, now that I've totally kissed his butt, :-), Mark's presentation was great.

Following that was the last session of the day. I attended Peter Farrell on Mach-ii 1.6 and the direction planned for 2.0. I was very pleasantly pleased with the progress on caching, and the listeners and page-views by convention (so you don't have to specify each one if they all belong to a certain folder) is an awesome addition planned for 2.0.

After the last session, I had been invited up to Michael and Judith Dinowitz's room for Shabbos. It's a privilege to spend time with them during their holy time. Michael and Judith are well known for their contributions to the ColdFusion community, but what you might not know if you haven't met them in person is how nice they are. They are great people, and I enjoy spending time with them when I have gotten a chance.

The BOFs started at 7:30pm, and the one I went to was Vince Bonfanti's Open BlueDragon session. There were about 40 people in attendance, which was smaller than I expected, but those that were in attendance were a who's who in ColdFusion. It was interesting to see the clarity of the code within the Open BD server. The code is very clean. This project will become more important over the next couple of months as it reaches a full release, but, from what I have seen, it's already stable and fully featured.

After that, I went to the ColdFusion 9 BOF, which went a direction I hadn't expected. Several people, like Joe Reinhart, Maxim Porges, and many others made a convincing argument about adding ActionScript 3 support. I think this would be a good move, but I can't say I think we'll see this in version 9. I got the distinct impression that some of the CF team were annoyed by the suggestion. It wasn't so much that I didn't expect it to go there, but what was surprising that it stayed there as long as it did, and that a new IDE was only barely mentioned. Adam Lehman chuckled, saying that it's like the developer community already assumes that Adobe is building one. For me, there are some really big annoyances with Eclipse/CFEclipse that prevent me from using it all of the time and have kept me on the flawed but usable Dreamweaver CS3 (which isn't all that bad if you disable the design view for .cfm and .cfc files), which will be the source of an upcoming blog post.

Back to the CF9 BOF, there were some interesting things brought up. I brought up the fact that I have had issues with CAR archives, to which Tom Jordahl said, "Have you filed a bug?" I believe I have, but it's been a while. I will test again with 8.01, but I expect another failure like I had with 8. I also brought up a feature I'd like to see: auto minifying HTML and inline JavaScript and CSS. PHP has this function, and I'd like to see the same in ColdFusion. Minifying of HTML would help reduce the bandwidth involved sending rendered pages to clients, which will improve performance. Also, others talked about having full features in CFSCRIPT, which is a common theme, and a CFVIDEO tag, which would be a cool thing for rolling out YouTube like features for a site. Surprisingly, very little was discussed about the need for a ColdFusion IDE. I expected this to dominate the discussion, but it was barely mentioned. Some of the Adobe team said, "you think we are already building one". ColdFusion developers, DO NOT take this for granted. If you want a ColdFusion IDE produced by Adobe, you MUST keep applying the pressure on them!!! Adobe making a ColdFusion IDE is a business decision and they must feel like it will be in their best interests to create one.

The CF9 BOF ran very long, so it turned out being the last of the day that I attended. I then went back down to the bar for a few drinks and several good conversations, too many and too many people to mention them all.

Saturday was the day I realized that cf.Objective() was a conference not to be missed again. I will return!

Still Upcoming: Day 3, an overall review, and my presentation!