Posts Tagged With ‘ColdFusion’
Updated: 20 Nov 2008 08:16 am by Ron
Filed: Food • Geek Stuff
Tagged: Bolt • CFEclipse • ColdFusion • conferences • Flex • MAX • San Francisco
A quick recap of the final day of Adobe MAX…
- Started the day in an excellent hands-on lab session led by Simon Slooten on building CF-powered Flex applications. He did a great job moving through an appropriate amount of material to introduce those of us who haven’t yet had a chance to play with Flex and using it as the front-end for Web-based, data-driven apps.
- Sat in on a fairly interesting panel discussion on what might lie ahead for the next year or so within the RIA area for developers. This one could have (and probably should have) been at least half an hour longer.
- Finished the conference with a session with Sean Corfield on event-driven programming within CF. Kind of a mind-bending concept, focused on using a similar paradigm within the server side of the Web app world as you would use on the client side with a Flex- or AJAX-based front end. Very interesting. It might have been easier to get my head around more completely had it (my head) not just plain been full at this point in the week.
- Spent a couple hours wandering around downtown SF and Chinatown with the guys. It was good to just wander and watch people. Had a great dinner at a place called Santorini Mediterranean Cuisine: dolmos, saganaki, hummus, babbaganoush, souvlakia…
And it’s a wrap. I head for home and family this morning.
All in all, not a bad conference. I’d come hoping for a better feel for what Flex is/does/might help us with and hoping for some general nuggets as far as CF and Web app development in general. I got both of those, along with a chance to talk to fellow developers and get a read on where Adobe is taking CF. Adobe, generally speaking, did a decent job with the conference: decent broad coverage, decent venue, good end-of-day events, decent stuff in the exhibit hall. Thumbs up for those. Thumbs down for not providing a decent bag to the conference attendees, nor for even including a pen with the shopping bag full of throw-away product literature when you check in, and for not ensuring decent WiFi in the convention center (Opera Mini and Google Talk on my Blackberry were lifesavers this week). And a big “Thank you!” for Kristen Schofield of Adobe’s CF team for the CF t-shirts for me and Jeff on the last conference day!
It will be interesting to see where the new Bolt CF IDE goes, and how it compares to existing alternatives like CFEclipse, etc. Mark Drew has indicated that Bolt by no means signals the end of life for CFEclipse. Given that IDE’s tend to be a religious thing with some (most?) devs, I’m sure there will be some interesting turns ahead.
Updated: 19 Nov 2008 08:26 am by Ron
Filed: Food • Geek Stuff
Tagged: ColdFusion • MAX • San Francisco
A quick recap of MAX Day 2…
- Two very good sessions by Charlie Arehart on hidden (or less well-known) stuff in CF8 and the use of Derby (the open source Java-based database from the Apache project that comes as part of CF8). Both were excellent sessions with lots of good pointers that left me with a fairly lengthy list of things to follow up on for our team at work. Charlie, as always, did a great job covering lots of ground at the right level. I’ve sat in on several of his presos at CFUnited in the past and he is a very strong presenter. So far, these two sessions were probably — in terms of valuable potential takeaways — the high point of the conference so far.
- A disappointing session by Scott Stroz on “hack-proofing” your CF app. Not much new ground to plow (which I suppose could be considered a good thing, given our focus on some of this stuff in the past 18 months). He kind of let the audience hijack his session with questions, comments, and even “me too’s” and ended up spending 75% of the preso on SQL injection which left very little time for the remaining two thirds of his talk.
- Another disappointing talk on the use of jQuery and AIR by Ed Finkler. Too much jQuery, particularly given that about 90% of the audience indicated that they were at least somewhat familiar with it, and not enough AIR. Sharp guy, obviously knows his stuff, entertaining speaker with a dry sense of humor, but the preso itself missed.
- The keynote, hosted by Ben Forta and Tim Buntel, highlighted some pretty impressive workflow integration on the design side of Adobe’s product lines, touched on the coming IDE for CF (codenamed “Bolt” in honor of the old CF lightning bolt; an Eclipse-based environment which looks to have some pretty interesting capabilities for the coders in house but for which few if any details are really available), and some cool stuff called Alchemy that allows for existing C/C++ code to be automagically transterpolated into ActionScript for use in Flash.
- Spent a bit of time talking with the CF designee in the Adobe “support lab” about a couple things we’ve bumped in to, and posing a couple of questions about things that Ben had mentioned related to the new CF IDE. Walked away thinking “That was a waste of time…”
- MAX hosted a customer appreciation event at the de Young Museum and California Museum of Sciences in the evening. Very cool place to spend a couple hours hanging out. Saw the show in the new Morrison Planetarium; also very cool!
- Late dinner with Jeff and Blaine (we lost Marco somewhere at the museum, but did talk to him late after he got back) at the Pinecrest Diner. Try the hot pastrami on rye. It’s the kind of place that — had they had one on the menu — I would have ordered the chicken fried steak sandwich. The guy who runs it is a 30-year old guy whose grandfather had it in this same location since the 1960’s, is trained in Italy as a chef, and is keeping the place going. Great basic food and an interesting menu.
So, kind of a mixed bag from a technical standpoint but I did get a couple of items of real value from Charlie’s presos.
Updated: 15 Nov 2008 09:23 am by Ron
Filed: Adoption • Food • Geek Stuff • Life in General
Tagged: ColdFusion • Food • open source • travel • work
I spent this past week in Washington, DC for work and I’m headed to San Francisco next week for a work-related conference. After only being gone once since we got home with Li, being gone two weeks in a row is tough (tough on Deb, too). The timing of the two trips was coincidental as well as bad, but I’d put off traveling to DC for a couple of requests, and had swapped with Jeff at work one, so it really couldn’t be avoided.
I found som good food in DC, which I still think is probably the best thing about getting to travel occasionally for work. In a wierd twist, it was Jeff — who used to be very reluctant to try different things to eat — that gave me the recommendation for the best place I ate this time in DC: Rasika, an Indian restaurant in the 600 block of D Street down just off the Mall. I also had very good Mexican with Cynthia and Temo on evening.
The trip to SF this next week is for a conference (Adobe’s MAX conference, actually). It will be good to get to soak up some technical stuff for a few days. The single most interesting thing to me will be to see if Adobe says anything about a long-rumored IDE for ColdFusion (likely to be Eclipse-based). Lots of indicators around, including hints from leading figures within the CF community at Adobe, and a strong silence from the developer of CFEclipse when questioned. The big question seems to be price for such an IDE, and as an open source advocate (personnally and at work), my hope is that such an effort would be both open and free, but I realize that from Adobe, that’s not likely.