The sun came out in DC yesterday as the conference began and the city is breathing a sigh of relief. ColdFusion can do that :-) I'll try and keep it short but you all know how I can ramble on...
CF Roadmap keynote: I agree with my coworker Kelly that the Adobe influence on CF looks ominous. It's clear that PDF integration for CF jumped the queue at the expense of other key features that were left out. "Scorpio", the next release of ColdFusion, will include some new PDF form based tags to allow users to fill forms in online. That's about it from that angle. Flex 2 was launched officially yesterday and Ben Forta gave a demo of a wizard to build a master-detail web application without writing any code. I could see us thinking about this for our CMS duoCMS for the content administration since it offers some saucy looking UI out of the box.
Sean Corfield talked for an hour on factories in the context of ColdSpring, a framework Duo Consulting (my employer) can and should leverage for all of our CMS cfcs. As it stands, the CMS is built in a way that forces us to keep only one version on each server. ColdSpring would allow us to maintain multiple builds of the code so that a client who was built on duoCMS 1.1.345 would have identical CMS to another client operating on the same build number. This is HUGE for Duo since we can easily identify a fix for one customer and know that it can be fixed for all clients on that build version. It also allows us to plot upgrade paths for clients based on their build number. I know this isn't as exciting as my design buddy Jeff's new addition to the family but it's a close second :-) The other advantage of the framework is that it allows us to hotswap different databases for an individual client so they are still duoCMS but the connectors for getting and setting information in the database are broken out. Fusebox 5 release candidate 1 was also released on Tuesday but I haven't had a chance to look at the details yet.
Note: if you are wondering where I have the time for this in the middle of the day, Kelly is attending the Microsoft Atlas presentation on their attempt at an AJAX library. The part I saw was too intense about Visual Studio so I skipped out.
Next up was Joey Coleman, a thoroughly entertaining speaker describing the concept of having turning yourself into an IPO. Not about starting a business but just managing your career as a brand to maximise your earning potential. Things like getting testimonials from your manager about the work you do and taking stock once a year with an annual report. This can make you more productive and help you realize whether you are stagnating and need more training or need to dig in a little more.
Douglas Ward gave an average presentation on Fundamentals of Usability. The issue was that it was another Jakob Nielsen style "Don't do this, don't do that" and not enough "You should do this". Darn negativity drives me crazy. If anyone has any good recommendations on authors or books describing what should be done please let me know. The only good thing I took away was his analogy of your website as a billboard and the notion that an effective billboard is short, sweet and to the point "Good chicken next exit at Bob's" vs a long winded flowery pile of text which doesn't help the user get to their end point.
An Adobe presenter, Sarge Sargent gave a disappointing talk on gateways with little substance so it looks like I will need to dig in more myself.
John Ashenfelter talked about Agile Programming as a methodology. There was a lot of content and theory but less practical. It would have been better if he had revised his material to focus on the audience: every coder here either builds websites or reports so with that assumption I wanted him to say "a client wants a new website, here is how the process works". I still have pages scribbled on the topic if anyone wants detail. The nugget here was the use of ANT as a tool for web development. Built into the tools most of our developers use it allows you to automate the deployment of applications and the configuration to setup a project. In our environment this would reduce some of the lead time necessary to set our machines up for maintenance of client websites and grab local copies. He also recommended some great development books he believes every developer you hire should read as part of their job requirements.
This morning, slightly less awake I watched Joe Rinehart introduce Model-glue unity as a framework for rapidly developing ColdFusion applications with a ruby on rails for ColdFusion feel. In five minutes he built a rudimentary blog from scratch typing every line of code while we watched in awe. The key component is something called reactor which works on most database platforms through JDBC. It understands the database design and then creates the pages with Model-glue to list, edit, add and delete items.
Lastly, I watched a friend from Atlanta present the benefits of running BlueDragon on .NET - our company sysadmin and I will need to try a demo of this because the benefits are huge including the ability to leverage application pools allowing you to start and stop one part of a website without bringing down the whole site or any other clients on the server. It also means better monitoring abilities and helps us see which client site is bringing the others down.
Food is being served now so I'll wrap up. Great conference, great content and a really good crowd.
