Oct 31st 2007 is the last day to register for CFUnited Europe with the early bird rate! The current registration rate is $749.00 USD which is approximately 362.07 GBP, 518.83 EUR

Starting November the registration will be $849.00.

So take advantage of the early bird discount and register today at http://europe.cfunited.com/

This entry was posted on October 31, 2007 at 3:49 PM and has received 3019 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.

November 9th in San Francisco at the JW Marriott. Be there!

"Test Driven Development"

Presented By Paul Kenney

For many folks, the idea of taking a test-first approach to development means writing lots of unit tests for every aspect of an application. In truth, test driven development is much more and represents a completely different paradigm for building applications. This session gives you the key concepts behind test driven development and provides a number of practices and tools which make the test-first approach accessible to ColdFusion developers today.

To learn more about CFUnited Express Bay Area and other topics go to: http://express.cfunited.com/go/bayarea/2007/

This entry was posted on October 31, 2007 at 3:03 PM and has received 4686 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

At Midnight on Halloween night, I will close the call for speakers and view only those who have submitted on time. The topics submitted are outstanding this year.

The track chairs will be chosen and announced in the next week or so and they will aid me in the decisions. Advisory members will be helping me choose the track chairs as well as suggesting which topics to accept.

Your last chance to submit a topic for early pickings! http://callforspeakers.cfconf.org/?event=suggest&eventId=170

This entry was posted on October 30, 2007 at 6:51 PM and has received 2338 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Tony Hillerson will be replacing Simon Horwith at the CFUnited Express Bay Area on November 9th. His topic will cover "Offline/Online features of AIR" - use cases, how to do it with LocalSharedObjects, Files, and SQLLite.

We are excited to have Tony join us in San Francisco. Thanks!

Event details:

November 9th 2007

Location: JW Marriott 500 Post Street corner of Post and Mason San Francisco, California 94102 USA

http://express.cfunited.com/go/bayarea/2007/

Other topics:

Tony Hillerson - "Offline/Online Features of AIR"

Charlie Arehart - "Hidden Gems in CF8"

Michael Smith - "Using your Whole Brain for Developers"

Paul Kenney - "Session 4 - TBA"

Sean Corfield - "Design Patterns and ColdFusion"

John Paul Ashenfelter - "Pragmatic ColdFusion: Build, Test, Deploy"

Matt Chotin - "Introduction to Flex with ColdFusion"

This entry was posted on October 26, 2007 at 2:05 PM and has received 3423 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Here is the rough schedule for CFUnited Europe. A final version will be posted in approximately 1-2 weeks.

Each Session runs three topics in break out rooms.

Wednesday

8:30 AM - 10:00 AM Day 1 Keynote

10:00 AM - 10:30 AM Networking Break

10:30 AM - 11:30 AM Session 1
" Ajax Development using CF 8 Presented By Rakshith N (Adobe) "
" Using The Iterating Business Object Presented By Peter Bell (SystemsForge) "
" IIS 7.0 for CFML Developers Presented By Vince Bonfanti (New Atlanta Communications) "

11:30 AM - 12:30 PM Session 2
" CFEclipse Plus! Presented By Mark Drew "
" Atom and RSS feeds with ColdFusion 8 Presented By Chaz Chumley (Community MX) "
" Pragmatic ColdFusion: Build, Test, Deploy Presented By John Paul Ashenfelter "

12:30 PM - 1:30 PM Lunch

1:30 PM - 2:30 PM Session 3
" Embrace Factories Presented By Rob Gonda (iChameleon Group) "
" Practical Code Generation Presented By Peter Bell (SystemsForge) "
" Databases Presented by Nate Nelson "

2:30 PM 3:30 PM Session 4
" Dynamic Presentation using ColdFusion 8 Presented By Chaz Chumley (Community MX) "
" Fusebox Scaffolding Presented By Kevin Roche "
" Application security Presented By Russ Michaels (Satachi and CFMX Hosting) "

3:30 PM 4:30 PM Session 5 Repeat

4:30 PM 5:30 PM Session 6 Repeat

6:30 PM 8:30 PM Evening Event

Thursday

8:30 AM - 9:30 AM Session 1
" ColdFusion and the User Experience Presented By Simon Horwith "
" Coding in XML Presented By Andrew Schwabe (IEXP Software, LLC) "
" Case Study: Using FLiP as a sole developer Presented By Christian Ready "

9:30 AM - 10:30 AM Session 2
" Implementing Usability: Improve your Chances Presented By Ron West "
" ColdFusion Powered Ajax Presented By Rob Gonda (iChameleon Group) "
" Multi Language Presented by Oguz Demirkapi "

10:30 AM - 11:30 AM Session 3
" Recursive Technique in ColdFusion Presented By Andrew Schwabe (IEXP Software, LLC) "
" Using your Whole Brain for Developers Presented by Michael Smith " 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM Lunch

12:30 PM - 1:30 PM Session 4
" Managing ColdFusion Projects from start to finish Presented By Shlomy Gantz (BlueBrick) "
" Flex for ColdFusion Developers Presented By Jeff Tapper " 1:30 PM - 2:30 PM Session 5
" Creating and Consuming WebServices with ColdFusion 8 Presented By Chaz Chumley (Community MX) "
" Testing ColdFusion Presented By John Paul Ashenfelter "
" RAD OO Presented By Peter Bell (SystemsForge) "

2:30 PM 3:30 PM Session 6 Repeat

3:30 PM 4:30 PM Session 7 Repeat

4:30 PM 5:30 PM Wrap Up

This entry was posted on October 24, 2007 at 4:18 PM and has received 3027 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Some folks wanted to know what types of topics have been submitted so far for CFUnited 2008. The list below is just as it appears to us. No editting, no removals, no additions.

THIS LIST IS NOT THE FINAL TOPICS ACCEPTED. The call for speaker is still open until 10/31/07! http://callforspeakers.cfconf.org/?event=suggest&eventId=170

On October 31st we will begin to look at the submitted list of topics and only 50% of the slots will be filled. From there, the track chairs (coming soon) will look over the list and determine what is missing and help decide if we need another call for speakers and conduct speaker invitations.

Thank you everyone for your submissions. We are excited about all the new speakers coming out and all the new topics our previous speakers are submitting! (note: anyone can submit a topic for themselves to speak on or suggest a topic you would like to hear.)

Rey Bango "Offline application development with Ext JS, Adobe AIR, Google Gears and ColdFusion" Discussion of the how to build offline applications using Adobe AIR and Google Gears. I'll use the Ext JS framework for the UI and ColdFusion for the backend. Discuss how they all tie in together and how to sync offline data back to an online application

Vince Bonfanti "IIS 7.0 for CFML Developers" Internet Information Server (IIS) 7.0 is the newest release of Microsoft's web server for Windows. Currently shipping with Windows Vista, IIS 7.0 is also part of Windows Server 2008, scheduled for release in February 2008. This talk will present an overview of the major new features of IIS 7.0, including: customizable installation, simplified configuration and administration, security enhancements, integrated request pipeline, extensibility enhancements, and much more. The impact and benefits of the new IIS 7.0 features for developers using Adobe ColdFusion or New Atlanta BlueDragon will be explored.

Scott Knaub "Issue Tracking" Issue tracking is important for every project. It helps to organize, distribute and report on the workload of system development and maintenance. This session will explore the advantages of issue tracking and introduce various software tools. The information is applicable to a large development shop or an individual developer. Executives, managers and developers should attend this session.

Jon Rowny "CFImage by Example" Perhaps one of the most requested features for ColdFusion, CFImage is finally here. In this session we'll be covering how to use CFImage to accomplish many tasks from a simple Captcha, to generating barcodes and badges, a ransom note generator, and a favorite: watermarking. Uploading, handling, processing, and displaying of image files will be covered throughout the examples.

Nicholas Tunney "Building your First HTML/JavaScript AIR Application" Attendees will learn common API usage to Leverage your current skills to build awesome desktop applications! build a useful Adobe AIR application in HTML/Ajax.

Nicholas Tunney "ColdFusion Administrator API" Learn to build administration consoles with restricted rights for your web developers using the CFAM API. Take the pain out of server administration without the security worries!

Nicholas Tunney "Building 508 Compliant Web 2.0 Applications" ColdFusion 8's layout components are built upon the Ext and YUI frameworks. This is great for the average site, but Government developers who must comply with Section 508 requirements also desire to make slick applications. This session will focus on utilizing the Ext and YUI libraries directly to achieve 508 compliant layouts.

Andrew Schwabe "In Depth: A simple CF / Flex App using CFCs and Web Services" This is for those CF developers just getting into Flex. This will be a step by step presentation on the code that goes into a very simple Flex application that uses CF as a back-end.

Andrew Schwabe "Coding with XML" Learn how to write CFML code to read and create well formed XML.

Jeff Coughlin "Introduction to FarCry 4.1" Learn the basics of the most recent version of the FarCry framework. This presentation will demonstrate the ever popular FarCry CMS plugin as well as show how easy it is to add and deploy other plugins offered by the FarCry community.

Jeff Coughlin "FarCry 4.1 Custom Types" Most likely the best feature in FarCry 4.x (and often overlooked by newcomers) is FarCry's Custom Types functionality. Custom Types essentially allow you to build an entire application development environment in a matter of hours, instead of weeks. Taking advantage of features like formtools, auto-deploy to the database (using the Content Object API (COAPI) tools), and scaffolding we'll demonstrate how you can create a relational database for an application and manage the data with very little coding, allowing the FarCry framework to do the dirty work we so often find ourselves struggling over.

Theo Rushin "AIR Development: The SQL Data Manager on AIR" This presentation takes a look at the SQL Data Manager on AIR. The SQL Data Manager on AIR is a set of reusable ActionScript classes that allow a Flex developer to easily interact with a SQLLite database within an AIR application. The SQL Data Manager on AIR also allows provides methods for synchronizing your local data with remote data sources without having to use LiveCycle. I will show you how much easier it is to build database driven AIR applications using the SQL Data Manager on AIR.

Sandy Clark "Accessibility and Rich Internet Applications" With the advent of Flex and Ajax and Web 2.0, there is still a requirement for these websites to be accessible. See whats available now to help and find out whats coming up, both in the International and US standards communities.

Sandy Clark "Intro to Fusebox 5.5" Introducing the new features of Fusebox 5.5. Includes xml-less fusebox and implicit circuits

Sandy Clark "Driving Fusebox 5.5" A lot of people use fusebox, but few do it using MVC (Model View Controller). This topic will take both the XML version and the xml-less version for a test drive, using MVC with both a regular model and a CFC model.

Brian Meloche "Promoting ColdFusion Outside the ColdFusion Community" This will be a panel discussion, covering some of the same ground discussed at the MAX 2007 session of the same name. This time, we'll cover where things are since MAX, and where they still need to go.

Brian Meloche "MVC and OO for Procedural Developers" Are you stuck developing your applications procedurally, in classic CF5 style, but want to get with the times? This session will help you make the change. We'll cover CFCs, separating logic in the Model-View-Controller patterns, and using object oriented concepts to make your code more reusable and easier to maintain. We'll take a procedural stack CF-app and make it MVC and OO.

Brian Meloche "Custom Tags - A Lost Gem?" It seems that, with CFCs, a lot of ColdFusion developers, particularly those that came to CF after CFCs were developed, seemed to have forgotten the usefulness of custom tags. This session will cover custom tags, how to use them, how to call them, and where they are useful, particularly in skinning an application.

David Hannum "Creating Dynamic Dropdown Menus Using ColdFusino and Spry" The Spry framework offers some great tools. For content management systems, you can use ColdFusion to build your dropdown menus in this spry framework, thus eleminating a significant amount of work. This session would be a beginners to intermediate level session. Demonstration of Spry, ColdFusion, HTML and Arrays.

Jeff Tapper "Flex 3 For ColdFusion Developers" Using Flex, you can deploy Flex applications using any number of backend technologies without the addition of a Flex server product. However, with the ColdFusion-Flex connectivity features, ColdFusion will have a significant advantage over all other backend technologies; providing the most efficient data exchange, the easiest programming model, and specialized tooling that make it the fastest, easiest way to build Flex apps  with or without the purchase of a Flex server. This session will provide information on RemoteObject and the CF-Flex connectivity features including the use of value objects to exchange data between ColdFusion and Flex. Previous experience with CF/Flex applications is highly suggested.

Jeff Tapper "Flex 3 For ColdFusion Developers" Using Flex, you can now deploy applications using any number of backend technologies without the addition of a Flex server product. However, with the new ColdFusion-Flex connectivity features, ColdFusion will have a significant advantage over all other backend technologies; providing the most efficient data exchange, the easiest programming model, and specialized tooling that make it the fastest, easiest way to build Flex apps  with or without the purchase of a Flex server. This session will provide information on RemoteObject and the CF-Flex connectivity features including the use of value objects to exchange data between ColdFusion and Flex. Previous experience with CF/Flex applications is highly suggested

John Farrar "jQuery/CF Integration" With each version of AJAX there are special unique benefits and challenges. This talk will be on how to mix your ColdFusion sites with jQuery AJAX library. Learn how to use the AJAX and how to build your own plugins.

John Farrar "EXTJS 2.0 for CF Integration" With each version of AJAX there are special unique benefits and challenges. This talk will be on how to mix your ColdFusion sites with EXTJS for ColdFusion. Some of the version 1 library is built into CF8... but why wait for version 9 to start using the new technology today?

John Farrar "ColdFusion XML Basics" XML should not replace queries. Yet, it is a great technology if you know how and where to use it. We will talk briefly about the better where to use XML concepts. The main focus of this session will be learning to easily get XML working for your applications with CF.

John Farrar "Dehydrate Your Code with Custom Tags" Custom tags have been overlooked with the adoption of CFCs. Custom Tags can dehydrate your code by allowing you to not repeat the same code over and over. In fact it is far better than copy and paste solutions. The unique things you can do with custom tags make this a must for any developers skill set and practice.

John Farrar "Skin Your Web Applications" Web sites are FAR to difficult to move from one site to another. One of the biggest issues and most common source of bugs is the redesign of a site. Learn how to build your site so the look and feel of a site go beyond CSS. We updated a site for Sprint when they combined with Nextel to corporate standards in 6 hours. Learn how to put this same power into your applications.

John Farrar "COOP Forms, AJAX and More!" COOP is a library that works with or without other CF Frameworks. It separates the processing from the markup in ways that others have called "elegant". The reuse of logic for AJAX is about as clean as you can get it. Imagine your designer needs never touches the page where the code is and the developer never needs to touch the markup page! That would create new levels of harmony in many shops. There is much more... don't miss watching the race to see how many cool features of COOP can be exposed in one session!

Kevin Roche "Fusebox Scaffolding" How to use and modify the Scaffolding features in Fusebox.

Kevin Roche "Fusebox Scaffolding" Learn how fusebox scaffolding can be used to create a complete maintenance application in ten minutes. Learn how to create your own templates and what the scaffolding generator can do with your code.

Nat Papovich "Reviving the Lost Craft of Writing Specifications" Software luminary Joel Spolsky said it best: "specs are like flossing: everybody knows they should be writing them, but nobody does." This session will change that. I've been involved in many software projects that include beautiful functional business specification documents, and let me tell you, they're a godsend. You get the spec and the design, you put your headphones on, and three weeks (or months or years) later, you FTP up the site and walk away with NO (more) GREY HAIRS! Or if you sit in a manager/analyst role, you get the pleasure of writing plain English, interacting with the client free of budget constraints. When the spec is done, you hand it off to the subcontractors and the only questions they ask you are, "Where do I send my invoices?" Oh the sweetness of victory. Come to this session to learn the following: Who should write spec docs and who should read them. What a spec doc is and what it is not. When to write one and not to. Why a spec doc must be written. And how to go about doing it.

Scott Stroz "Using CFExchange" An overview of using the family of tags in ColdFusion 8.

Scott Stroz "Derby, more than just a hat." Learn how to leverage the power of Apache Derby database so that you can develop applications everyone can use.

Scott Stroz "AIR and SQLite, perfect together Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) includes SQLite, so that your applications can store data without needing a network connection. In this session, learn how to harness the power of this database to create dynamic AIR applications.

Chaz Chumley "Creating and Consuming WebServices with ColdFusion 8" Web services provide us a channel to communicate using standard XML (Extensible Markup Language) to users over an internet, intranet or extranet without exposing all of the functionality of your application. Using ColdFusion you can easily publish a web service - to make application functionality available for remote use as well as consume a web service - to access remote functionality to perform specific tasks. Join us as we discuss the basic structure of a web service, utilize ColdFusion Components (CFCs) to create simple data typed web services, how to consume a web service and the different data types you may encounter, take a look at working with soap requests including nillable arguments and isSoapRequest function, error handling and finally best practices to ensure that your experience with ColdFusion 8 and web services is a memorable one.

Chaz Chumley "Dynamic Presentation using ColdFusion 8" Learn how to create dynamic presentations with ColdFusion 8. Leverage existing HTML and ColdFusion documents to create dynamic presentations using cfpresentation, cfpresenter and cfpresentationslide tags.

Chaz Chumley "Atom and RSS feeds with ColdFusion 8" ColdFusion 8 introduces the new CFFEED tag, which can read and create RSS and Atom feeds in commonly used formats, so you can quickly and easily create complex content syndication applications. Learn how to take advantage of this new functionality as we create a quick and simple RSS reader and aggregator with minimal coding within 60 minutes.

Dale Fraser "Report Builder Goodness" A session on all the features and power of Report Builder. Including the wizard, passing queries, locic, formulas and calculations. Also covers some of the new tags that help with this such as

Gert Franz "Something about Railo" I would like to hear something about Railo. I have heard so many things about this engine but never seen it live...

Brian Rinaldi "Speeding Up Application Development with Code Generation" Learn how to integrate the Illudium PU-36 Code Generator into your workflow to speed up object-oriented ColdFusion development. Learn how to use the tool to ease integration of frameworks such as Transfer, ColdSpring, Fusebox, ColdBox and more.

Bruce Phillips "Develop A Login For A Flex Application Using ColdFusion on the Backend" Many Flex applications require the user to login. However, there are few fully functional login examples available on the web or in published Flex books. In this session, attendees will learn how to create a login user interface in Flex that allows a user to login or register before gaining access to the main application. The Flex front end uses ColdFusion on the backend to register new users and verify login data. The ColdFusion backend uses data access and gateway objects to process the data sent from the Flex login application. The ColdFusion backend also provides robust error information back to Flex when problems occur such as user name already exists (during registration) or user name not found (during login). Flex then uses the error information provided by the ColdFusion backend to provided immediate feedback to the user.

Jake Munson "Attack of the Spammers" Most web developers depend on Captcha to prevent spammers from attacking their web forms. However with recent high profile Captcha failures like the hackers that created massive amounts of Youtube accounts to send out a virus, more and more developers are looking beyond Captcha for better ways to stop web based spam. This session will discuss various techniques to stop form spam in a user friendly, accessible way. We can use software to find out if a form user is really a human, like checking for keyboard activity, mouse movement, and even simple content analysis. We should never just depend on ONE method to stop spam.

Qasim Rasheed "Continuous Integration with SVN, ANT, CFUnit & Selenium" I will try to explain a setup where you can a have continuous build system using few free open source tools. SVN - source code repository ANT - build tool CFUnit  used for unit testing of CFC and templates Selenium  used an acceptance testing tool. By using the above tools, presenter will pick an open source ColdFusion application and will guide the audience through the process of creating individual unit test to developing integration test with Selenium. By the end of a session we will have a final ANT build file that can be scheduled to run on regular basis.

Bryan Hogan "Product Development" I would like to speak on how to plan and develop a large project including outsourcing and insourcing development. The plan would go from Project Management, Product Management, Development Management, Release Management, etc.

Samer Sadek "Levaraging CF in Air Applications" Session will include a brief introduction to AIR and a general architecture of an AIR applications. Then, different ways of leveraging the power of CF as your application's data provider, including web services, flash remoting, Ajax and JSON.

Brian Klaas "Helping Users Help Themselves" Ever built Web applications that users say don't do what they want them to do? How do you know that your users are actually doing what they said they need to do in your application? How do your users prefer to get help when they can't figure out how to accomplish taks in your application? In this session, we'll first look at the power of UI-driven application design and building applications that match the business workflow of your users. ColdFusion 8 will be used to demonstrate how working prototypes can quickly be built and iteratively tuned based on user feedback. Then, we'll look at some simple strategies to deliver truly useful help on application launch with tools like Captivate and RoboHelp, and how frameworks like Model-Glue and Mach-II make it reallly easy to monitor user activity in your application to see if what users say they need your app to do is actually what they are doing inside of your app. By combining these techniques, you can not only build applications that make sense to your users, you can provide them with useful help and get real data to guide future iterations of the application.

Brian Love "Bracketology" Bracketology - noun - The science of efficiently using [brackets] in CFML. Overview: What is this bracket thing all about? Object.property notation Associative array notation How it all works Embedding brackets Mixing it up Avoiding Evaluate() Looping over arrays, structures, and queries Using brackets with objects

Dan Wilson "Refactoring to Object Oriented Programming in ColdFusion" We will look at a well known procedural ColdFusion open source application and compare with an Object Oriented version. Care will be taken to show the benefits of Object Oriented Design and how good software engineering principles reduce the overall cost of Application Design, Development and Maintenance.

Joe Gautreau "The Power of CSS - CSS Layouts vs. Tabled Layouts" Showing the power of CSS and why it should be used to layout web apps as opposed to the old school way of using tables. Speed Scalability Standards Using real live examples to show the difference between the two. Speed tests, quickness of development when using CSS. Wendy Raulin "Importance of ColdFusion in the Not-For-Profit market" This presentation provides insights on working with the not-for-profit market. Specifically, these items would be covered: 1) How ColdFusion has become important to this market 2) What to expect when working with this market. 3) How to win proposals and increase your income through this market. 4) Where is this market going? What are their needs in relation to CF.

Doug Hughes "Building Frameworks On Top of ColdSpring" The Model-Glue framework is built on top of ColdSpring. Some people complain about this extra "dependency". I'd like to discuss why this is NOT a dependency and the extra advantages this brings to the table. For example, developers are encouraged not to alter the core files for a framework. However, often times developers need to do so to accomplish business goals. However, the modifications lock the developer into a specific version. By building a framework such as Model-Glue on top of ColdSpring you can avoid this pitfall. ColdSpring allows you to change and extend a framework without actually modifying the framework itself. I would also like to show a validation framework (Validat) that uses this technique to allow you to change validation routines, and an example where we'll take Model-Glue's generic delete and make it a "soft" delete.

Doug Hughes "Techniques for using Actionpacks in Model-Glue." Model-Glue ActionPacks are like miniature applications that can be reused. They're very cool and provide a lot of power. However, without forethought they can be a bit of a hassle. I'd like to cover techniques for using ActionPacks that makes the majority of the code reusable and keeps the ActionPack itself very flexible.

Doug Hughes "Marketing Techniques for Small Development Shops" I'd like to put together a presentation on how Alagad had been successful in marketing development services to other businesses and individual. I expect I would cover cost effective ways to: 1) get your message out there 2) show up in google 3) other marketing techniques This is clearly non-technical, but I think a lot of small consultants and small development shops might appreciate this.

Doug Hughes "A Review of Ajax Technologie" I would like to put together a presentation covering various AJAX techniques and tools from the ColdFusion developer's perspective. I'd like to cover: 1) The classic techniques for AJAX (xmlhttp) 2) jQuery and related frameworks (spry, prototype, etc) 3) cfajaxproxy Time permitting, or as a part of another presentation we could cover some of the UI elements now available from most of these frameworks (cfpod, cfwindow, etc; jQuery UI elements; Spry widgets, etc)

Doug Hughes "Using metadata for data persistence" I'd like to cover a theoretical means by which you can use metadata to persist CFCs directly to a database. This is inspired by the hibernate framework for Java. I've been slowly working on a new framework which works similar to Hibernate and it would be interesting to cover some of the highlights of this more as inspiration for advanced developers than as a review of the new framework.

Luis Majano "ColdBox Framework" Introduction to the ColdBox framework. An in detail look at this CFC and conventions based framework. Overall capabilities, functionality and hands on application generation.

Luis Majano "Decorator / Interceptor" ColdBox request context decorator and interceptor implementation and as well as more depth understanding in the light of CF language

Robi Sen "Continuous Integration with Flex, FlexUnit, and Ant" Learn how to use commercial or open source version control, build, unit testing, and Continuous Integration tools to accelerate and improve your software projects. In this lecture you will learn how to automate the build, deployment, management, testing, and reporting of your projects as well as what tools are available and what best practices to follow.

Raymond Camden "Ajax and CF" I'd like to keep this vague for now. MOst likely CF8 and Ajax, but maybe a comparison of CF8 Ajax, Spry, and jQuery.

Adam Howitt "Load Testing for ColdFusion developers" You've built the site, you may even have launched it but is it ready for the traffic it gets now or more as demand grows? As the web and your web site continue to grow and web applications surpass the lowly traffic expectations they were initially conceived to handle, you will be ready. Adam will show you how to load test your applications (including Flex and AJAX segments) to find bottlenecks and prevent spikes in traffic from damaging your reputation.

Adam Howitt "Reduce bandwidth and save money with Amazon's S3" Learn how to use Amazon's S3 service to host static files for a few dollars per month. Adam will walk through code examples for sending files to S3, demonstrate some of the tools you can use to manage S3 files and show cost savings for a site getting 3,000 visitors a day. Amazon S3 (simple storage service) is a flexible, cheap way to host files on Amazon's infrastructure to speed up the delivery of the static elements of your web pages and save money.

Adam Howitt "Build a scalable architecture with Amazon's EC2" Learn how to use Amazon's EC2 service to build a scaleable architecture with EC2 from just $75 per month per machine. Adam will show you how to boot up Amazon servers, bundle up a machine image and then boot a farm of identical machines to handle temporary increases in load. Amazon EC2 (elastic compute cloud) is a beta service offered to allow you to boot virtual servers on Amazon's infrastructure to handle surges in traffic or provide extra processing power on demand.

Adam Howitt "Using Google Tools to Optimize Content and Drive Traffic" Finding the right messaging can make or break the success of your website. Learn how to manage the risk associated with changing content and how to measure the effectiveness of your work. Adam demonstrates how to help your customers understand how their sites are performing with Google Analytics and how to use the Google Website Optimizer to perform A/B tests to experiment and measure new content on your websites.

TBA NULL "Code Generators" I've created my own codegenerator that creates various objects, including data access objects, data transfer object, validator objects, and a model object that connects them all together, simply by giving the name of a data source, the tables that you want the objects created for, and a path to save the files. This has saved time for our development team and has been very beneficial in helping introduce them to object oriented concepts. I think a session on how to create and use code generators would benefit many coldfusioners.

TBA NULL "CFGRID" A more advanced topic that includes a discussion of using CFGRID to edit a list of items. How to bind with text boxes, dropdown lists and check boxes / radio buttons. Maybe include with other new features but might be enough to stand on its own.

TBA NULL "Moving from Procedural to Object Oriented Programming with Coldfusion" I've been writing a couple of primers on using OOP with Coldfusion. One focused on OOP with Mach-II and one without. http://www.iknowkungfoo.com/blog/ I'd like to present either as a talk or a hands-on class. Curtis Layton "Deubbing in ColdFusion 8" A look at the new interactive debugger included with ColdFusion 8. Also discuss other common debugging tools and techniques.

Christopher Vigliotti "Turning Your Ideas Into Reality With ColdFusion 8" Every developer you speak with has a laundry list of million dollar technology ideas. Based on the number of developers not driving Land Rovers it becomes obvious that most of these ideas never come to fruition. In this session you will learn how to have fun while working and learning, and employ the power of ColdFusion 8 to take your idea from concept to development and beyond.

John Mason "Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS)" The PCI DSS standard is required for all merchants who process, store or transmit credit card information. The major credit card companies established this standard back in 2004 and have been working to have the industry comply with it. Noncompliance can cost merchants in fees, audits and possible removal of their merchant accounts. For example, Visa in 2006 levied $4.6 million in fines due to merchants not complying with the PCI standard. This year will be even larger as Level 1 & 2 merchants will have to completely meet compliance by the end of the year. The presentation will explore the requirements of PCI DSS as it applies to ColdFusion developers and hosting companies. Knowing the PCI DSS standard is not only helpful, it will simply become a requirement if you wish to develop or host Ecommerce applications in the future.

Terrence Ryan "ColdFusion 8 and Exchange" This session will take you through the in's and outs of using ColdFusion 8 and Exchange. It will start with a basic explanation of the feature set. Then go to some examples of what can be accomplished with ColdFusion and Exchange collaboration. Finally, we'll go over some tips, tricks and Best Practices for using ColdFusion and Exchange. This will also include common answers to questions asked by Exchange administrators when you ask them to connect to their box.

This entry was posted on October 24, 2007 at 11:16 AM and has received 3967 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Keynote Day 1:
CF8 well received overall. Cool demos, very inspiring. Loud music and it got the audience really pumped. I saw AIR applications like snipage, anthropology, pownce, AOL top 100 and more. It was so cool to see what people have done. I want an AIR application for CFUnited so badly. If anyone wants to help me out, I'll make you popular beyond your dreams. lol. I love buzzword, that was cool, an online processor is great. Ok, so the keynote went a little over, but who cares, this was great stuff! (honestly I could have attended just the keynote and networking event and I would have been happy)

Sessions on Day 1:
I hardly remember what I saw because my feet hurt so much from walking. The conference center was HUGE. I just wanted to go back to my room and relax, but no, I have to stick around for the sponsor reception. Ugh... no break. I promise you, I will work on providing CFUnited attendees time to relax.

Sponsor Expo:
Very nicely spread out. Lots to do and interact. Community pit was cool. I saw they had massage people, which we did one year at CFUnited and it was a great idea that I'll try to have them back again in 2008. There was ok food and an ok band. Lots of people attended. So it was to be expected and my feet still hurt. Once again I made my way to the speaker hotel, actually I had a meeting with some folks as a follow up from an earlier conversation. Went really well.

Keynote Day 2:
Yikes, yesterday was nothing compared to today. As a designer, I almost fainted! Thermo was the highlight of my day. http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Thermo Best way to put it (correct me if I'm wrong) is that it is tool for designers to create a design in photoshop/illustrator, import into Thermo and indicated in a simple way, what the website should do. Meanwhile, it writes code for the developer to work with using Flex. Saves time, money, headaches, and is perfect for any type of designer/developer environment. Amongst the other cool things to note, Share, Scene7, Pacifica, Cocomo. I love MTV's contest for new AIR apps. Very cool.

Day 2 and 3:
All just a big blur, I'm tired and I miss my family. The evening event was fun with an 80's, 90's, etc. approach. Kind of a fun carnival. I really would have enjoyed being out on the town more instead, but I guess I can't expect Adobe to move over 4,000+ people to another location.

Thank you Adobe for a great event. I appreciate everything that was offered to attendees and thanks for having it in Chicago, great idea. I hear its in San Francisco next year. Sweet.

Hopefully everyone understands that I feel for you when I say conference going is such a huge commitment and really takes a chunk of your time, money, and energy. I hope from my experience at MAX I can improve CFUnited and make it as smooth as possible for everyone to gain knowledge, inspiration, connections, and lots of fun.

The biggest question on people's mind is when is CFUnited 2008? I'm 80% sure it is the same hotel and same week in June. However, there will be more sessions and repeats, more to do, awesome special events, and more show casing/demos. We are improving our Audio Visual (if you have suggestions, RFP goes out now). And... CFUnited is bringing a special gift to attendees upon registering, more details soon.

Don't forget CFUnited Express Bay Area and CFUnited Europe in UK! See you soon! Thanks friends and fans!

CFUnited Europe Website

CFUnited Express Bay Area Website

This entry was posted on October 15, 2007 at 9:56 AM and has received 3781 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Entry at 7:15pm, September 29th

Noon on Saturday I find out my flight is delayed 1 hour, then 2 hours, then 3 hours. Ugh.... Enough said. I started thinking that some CFUnited attendees must have the same experiences traveling to DC. Well, I feel for you. I've been traveling since I was 6 years old but now that I'm a conference go-er all on my lonesome I find traveling to be boring and a pain in the rear. Just something I have to get through to get to the end of the rainbow. Arriving in Chicago, I picked up my luggage and pack myself into a shuttle on my way to the Hotel I'm staying at and not but 1 minute into the ride do I bump into 2 people on the same ride going to MAX as well. Tells me I'm going to be bumping into a lot of designers and developers this week. I love it! See, I adore developers but did you know I'm a designer by nature? Yup, I attended University of Maryland for my degree in Art Studio Graphic Design. I'm obsessed with design and I'm so excited for this year's MAX conference because I'll not only be learning what CFUnited should cover in 2008, but I get to learn about my own love in life. I recently installed my CS3 and I am ready to find out what I can do with it.

Entry 10:05pm September 29th

I'm finally here. I can't wait to have a beer. Chicago is amazing. Beautiful city. Lots to see and eat. Eat. I'm so hungry. Found cute little Ma and Pop places.

Entry September 30th:

The Welcome reception wasn't a welcome for me because I stood in line to check-in, seemed like forever. While everyone was at the reception, I was in the longest line of my life. I bumped into some Adobe people along the way and got some hot tips on who to talk to. Thanks guys! I saw there were almost 2 dozen people behind the counter in a mad ciaos, I had to laugh. It is hard to perfect conference check-in. With only 5 people at CFUnited, we busted through 700 people in 1 hour. I'll be working to still improve that process. Maybe play a movie or some music, cause it really sucked just standing there (I won't say how long cause I stopped counting after a while).

I made it to the reception with 15 minutes left. I grabbed a glass of wine and started reuniting with my speaker buddies and CFUnited fans. It was nice to relax. I found out early on that the place to be after hours was the nearest hotel to the conference center. It was wear all the Adobe Staff and Speakers were staying and it was networking heaven. I really got a chance to hear and be heard. I never realized how people have misperceptions of our speaker picking, sponsor processes, and generally how CFUnited is created.

Speakers are chosen in a selection process including about 10 or so Advisory Members. We allow them to vote, then we create track chairs who help arrange the topics by popular vote to complete track sessions. NOt everyone gets in, but they have the opportunity to submit whitepapers or become a backup speakers. We are working to improve the process. The Call for Speakers is open really early so we can get some topics committed. A lot of people want to register early to spend training budgets from their companies. Also, just to plan early over all. The sponsor process is very simple and there are so many opportunities. We provide the booth structure for silver and gold, tables for bronze. CFUnited is created by myself and Michael and a team I've hired to help me. I can't give away all my secrets and I can tell you I'm not a big fan of third parties.

I always want to hear suggestions on how to improve. Some will tell me "I suggested something last year and you did it! Thanks!".

Read my next blog entry about the rest of my time in Chicago on Monday. :-)

This entry was posted on October 12, 2007 at 4:01 PM and has received 3533 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

After several attempts at writing this blog entry, I finally found the words to describe my experience at Adobe MAX. Though, I figure I don't have any real technical insight to offer. I'm a designer trying to describe developer content. I came to the conclusion that what I need to let the CF community know is that after attending MAX, I learned a lot about what developers are thirsty for. I did a lot of one-on-one's with speakers, sponsors, and attendees. Something I never have time to do at CFUnited. I really enjoyed hearing how much people loved CFUnited and the stage for ColdFusion that we've created. What I really liked hearing was new ideas for presentations.

I came to the realization that Adobe has put a lot of effort into finding out what tools, developers and designers alike, want and need to advance themselves and their work in the future. This includes CFUnited in my case. I want to create useful applications that mimic the message I've worked hard in creating. Uniting the community, spreading knowledge, and creating opportunity for those who are passionate about this technology. I think CFUnited can be more than just a one-week experience. With the number of people we can reach, I think we have a responsibility to display in a tangible sense the possibilities of these technologies. In addition, I think CF is great, however I think CFUnited should address more like Flex, AIR, Ajax, LiveCycle, Framework, etc. Keeping CF alive is all about keeping the community advancing. Its like if I bake chocolate chip cookies over and over again. They might get better and better each time because I stop burning them and learn how to use the oven correctly. But then I bring in some other tools and components to improve the recipe for the tasty experience I'm creating for my audience. I want to bring you the traditional chocolate chip cookie at its perfection and also introduce you to the many different flavors. Offering a taste of all these different languages and technologies lets you renew pleasure in these experiences. ... while still bringing you the down home goodness of the chocolate chip cookie we love.

The most exciting part about MAX was the keynotes! Wow, I have never been so blown away with what people are creating with these technologies. It almost makes me want to learn how to code so I can start making my own applications. I have tons of ideas! I was disappointed that ColdFusion was shortly mentioned, however it was positively displayed and made me think that CF has found its calling and will be around for a long time. They just announced ColdFusion 9 Centaur, I think for a 2009 release.

Stay tuned for the rest of my blog entry about MAX on Monday.

This entry was posted on October 11, 2007 at 4:40 PM and has received 3619 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.

It was great seeing the many CFUnited attendees at MAX this past week. There were may of you sporting the CFUnited t-shirts and backpacks during the conference, which was nice to see. For those of you who got to meet us we passed out lolly pops, buttons and a CFUnited 08 MAX show discount card.

This is a reminder to everyone who received the CFUnited discount card during MAX, the expiration for the MAX discount is October 15, 2007. Its one of our best discounts so don't miss the opportunity to use it! CFUnited 08 will be held June 25th - 28th, 2008.

This entry was posted on October 10, 2007 at 4:23 PM and has received 4002 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.