CFUnited Blog

Simon Free - CFUnited 08 Review

Simon Free, who spoke on Bring your CF application to Desktop with AIR at CFUnited, sent us the following review of this years conference.



"I am pretty new to the conference scene. I have only attended a few but have been lucky enough to be a presenter each time. From the experiences I have had from those, I am able to compare them to CFUNITED and whole heartedly say that CFUNITED was by far the best conference I have attended to date. Let's start with the venue. There were a lot of attendees for CFUNITED, so it was important that they chose a large enough space to hold the conference. I feel that the DC Convention Center was a great choice.

Many people feel that the backbone of the conference is not in fact the presenters, but the food. If that is the case, then I would say this conference had a pretty solid backbone. I was very happy with over 80% of the meals and even delighted by the finger foods available to us during the evening networking events. The foods varied from chicken dishes to pasta dishes to even some amazing deserts. There was even some sweetened ice tea that had the ability to put even the healthiest among us into a sugar coma. The only negatives I would say about the food were the bagels and sandwiches, and I only mention those as I always see those at the conferences, and for anyone who regularly attends conferences, they can be pretty monotonous.

There were 2 main networking events during the conference, one on Wednesday and one on Thursday night. I thoroughly enjoyed both of these events. Even though there was an open bar at both the events, this is not in fact what made me enjoy them so much. I enjoyed them because people actually networked! This may sound strange, but I have been to a number of different networking events where people stayed with their crowd of friends and people they know and do not try to talk to new people. This was far from the case with these events. Not only did you have new attendees walking around, introducing themselves and striking up conversations, but you also had seasoned veterans and presenters walking around, meeting and greeting people. I was very excited by the fact that I was able to stand and have a conversation with the people who I follow and admire the most in the industry and have them actually be excited to have a conversation with me also. There was no looking over my shoulder trying to find the next person to talk to; everyone seemed genuinely interested in talking to people.

For a conference to be successful I believe it is important to have a good selection of presenters, and I feel that the selection for this conference was very nicely balanced. All the speakers I saw were very knowledgeable on their subject and were well equipped to answer questions from the audience. The selection of topics I had to choose from was nicely varied. I love the track approach that the conference takes. Often with conferences they will choose a single technology, but for CFUNITED they had a number of different tracks, such as RIA, Frameworks, Management, and Advanced ColdFusion. This gave us the ability to move away from what we normally learn and experience something new. I got a lot from the number of management sessions I attended as well as from some of the framework sessions. I feel that I was able to make myself into a more well rounded developer and that I will be able to take the knowledge I learnt and not only become a better programmer but also a better business person.

I feel that the organizers (Liz, Nafisa, and Elliot) truly understand the industry and the developers within it. With the help of the advisory committee, they were able to devise a varied and rewarding schedule of presentations that I think was rewarding for everyone. One of the things that stood out most to me and amplified that they care about what they do, was the speakers diner. This was the first conference I experienced where the organizers actually stepped up and said thank you to the presenters. To me it is these little gestures that have the biggest impact.

I would definitely have to say that CFUNITED was a total success for me. I have learnt a lot of new techniques and have walked away with a lot of new ideas. I thoroughly enjoyed the presentations that I gave. Everyone that attended my sessions seemed to be interested in the subject which makes it even more enjoyable as a presenter. The only major negative (and I mean MAJOR!) I have of the conference is that it is once a year. I am not sure how I will last 12 months until CFUNITED 09."

- Simon Free

http://www.simonfree.com

CFUnited wrap ups from the community

Marc Esher

http://mxunit.org/blog/2008/06/cfunited-wrapup-341.html

Joe Gautreau

http://ken.auenson.com/blog/category/conferences/cfunited-2008/

Sam Farmer

http://samfarmer.instantspot.com/blog/2008/06/23/Its-a-Wrap-CFUnited-08

Ben Nadel

http://www.bennadel.com/index.cfm?dax=blog:1269.view

Sean Corfield

http://corfield.org/blog/index.cfm/do/blog.entry/entry/CFUNITED__Day_1 http://corfield.org/blog/index.cfm/do/blog.entry/entry/CFUNITED__Day_2 http://corfield.org/blog/index.cfm/do/blog.entry/entry/CFUNITED__Day_3 http://corfield.org/blog/index.cfm/do/blog.entry/entry/CFUNITED__Day_4

Dan Vega

http://www.danvega.org/blog/index.cfm/2008/6/22/CFUnited-2008-Wrap-up

Phil Duba

http://www.philduba.com/index.cfm/2008/6/21/CFUnited-Integrated-ColdFusion-Development-Environment http://www.philduba.com/index.cfm/2008/6/21/CFUnited-ColdBox-Framework-101 http://www.philduba.com/index.cfm/2008/6/21/CFUnited-Design-Principles-for-Developers http://www.philduba.com/index.cfm/2008/6/21/CFUnited-Automating-the-build--deployment-process-with-ANT http://www.philduba.com/index.cfm/2008/6/21/CFUnited--Changing-the-Game http://www.philduba.com/index.cfm/2008/6/19/CFUnited-Google-Webmaster-Tools http://www.philduba.com/index.cfm/2008/6/19/CFUnited--DB-Design-Avoiding-performance-and-maintenance-headaches http://www.philduba.com/index.cfm/2008/6/19/CFUnited-jQueryCF-Integration http://www.philduba.com/index.cfm/2008/6/18/CFUnited--OO-Best-Practices http://www.philduba.com/index.cfm/2008/6/18/CFUnited--Test-Patterns-in-CF

Ray Camden

http://www.coldfusionjedi.com/index.cfm/2008/6/20/CFUNITED--Internals-of-the-Adobe-ColdFusion-Server http://www.coldfusionjedi.com/index.cfm/2008/6/19/The-coolest-thing-Ive-seen-at-CFUNITED http://www.coldfusionjedi.com/index.cfm/2008/6/18/CFUNITED-08-Opening-Keynote

J.J. Merrick

http://jeremiahx.com/2008/06/18/cfunited-keynote-live-blog-updates/ http://jeremiahx.com/2008/06/19/cfunited-hms-keynote-live-blog/

I know there are more out there so if I missed your review/ wrap up, feel free to include a link in the comments!

Issues in making CF9 ECMAScript and XML Compliant

Lately there's been a lot of talk about what to do in CF9 and what features developers really want.

For some time there's been this push to make CFScript more powerful, and fill in it's deficiencies compared to CFML. Now that we close on CF9, and developers have had a taste of the new operators in CF8, I'm starting to hear about making CFScript "ECMAScript Compliant" from quite a few people, or even more extreme, implementing AS3 instead of CFScript. Another request I'm starting to see pop up is making CFML "XML Complaint." These requests seem to stem from a significant amount of confusion about what those compliances really mean.

So lets start with CFScript...

CFScript can never be ECMAScript compliant. ECMAScript is a very long, and quite specific standard. It specifies everything from how math should work, to how expressions are evaluated, to how parsing should happen, and quite a bit more.

So what would it take to make CFScript actually ECMAScript complaint?

Well that would involve a completely different prototype based object model, different casting rules, different math rules, different function names, different binding rules, different operators (+ for strings, & is not valid), different type names, different syntax for structures... which wouldn't be structures, but rather Objects, a completely different closure and context system in the runtime, anonymous functions, optional semicolons, different regexp syntax, ... the list goes on.

All of this is totally at odds with CF's current runtime and how it works, and what CF code compiles down into. If it was done then every existing CF application would break. So what if we did it by doing something like embed Rhino? While this would give us JavaScript, it could never replace CFScript. And assuming we did do this, now you'd have two radically different object and language models to deal with. The CF one, and the ECMAScript one.

Okay, so what about XML?

XML compliancy would require very significant language changes as well. When many people think of "XML Compliant" they think of the short hand close tags (the NET feature) that XML uses. This is really a quite small set of what XML really is though.

So what would it take to make CFML XML compliant?

First we'd need to fix cfif, cfelse, cfelseif and cfreturn so that we weren't putting expressions in the tag itself, but rather in attributes. This would make the new struct and array syntax rather odd, and make assigning strings even more odd:

<cfset expr="variables.string = &quot;Why do you want XML?&quot"/>

Doing this is quite against best practices for XML schema design, so something like <cfset name="variables.string" string="Why do you want XML?"/> might work better, but now we're really deviating from old style syntax.

The next issue is that XML documents all need a root element. So we'd need something like <cfpage> that wraps every cfm file (cfcomponent would work for cfcs), to meet that requirement.

Then we need to deal with cfimport and prefixes. These are namespaces in XML, so we'd need to alter the way you import tags significantly. Essentially removing cfimport and replacing it with xmlns attributes on the root.

Now there's issues of dealing with code that uses > and < in script and expressions, so we'd probably be required to wrap all script code in cfscript in CDATA blocks. Worse is that if we really wanted valid HTML entities, they'd need to be double escaped to something like &amp;nbsp;. We'd also end up with &amp; to concat strings, provided we didn't ditch that syntax and go with the ECMAScript redesign discussed above.

Conclusion

I hope this makes it a little more clear what reformulating CFML and CFScript into these standards would mean. The result would be far from the CF we know (and love) today, and not even remotely backwards compatible. I'd imagine it would take a significant engineering effort to totally rewrite CF like this, and what we'd end up with wouldn't really be CF anymore, but some kind of new language entirely. I'm not going to argue if the language would be good or bad, but it certainly wouldn't be anything like CF8 on almost every level from syntax, to semantics.

So here's my big question... what's so wrong with CF as it exists now? :)

More presentations recorded on Connect

Here is another list we received today. We will post them on the topics page once we've had a chance to recover and figure things out. Sorry these aren't linked. Just copy and paste them into your browser. Just want to quickly get these up for people. Includes one of my very own CFUnited staff members, Elliott's topic below.

Adam Wayne Lehman Building your first RIA app with CF & Flex http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p88356266/

Sandy Clark Driving Fusebox 5.5 http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p80053979/

Pete Freitag Image Manipulation with ColdFusion 8 http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p75393513/

Charlie Arehart Interactive Step Debugging with the CF8 Debugger http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p46412072/

Dave Powell Design for Developers : Foundations for Practical Design http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p59043335/

Darren Pywell Announcing FusionAnalytics - "Seeing is believing" http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p87566561/

Steve Nelson Building offline applications with Google Gears http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p90466813/

Tom de Manincor CFQUERY versus the DB http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p78433139/

Luis Majano ColdBox Framework 101 http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p16928123/

Manju Kiran P Pacchhipulusu Taking advantage of 64-bit support in ColdFusion 8 http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p87023998/

Brian Rinaldi Writing an RIA? Secure your data! http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p73585163/

Simon Free Bring your CF application to Desktop with AIR http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p72665033/

Qasim Rasheed Continuous Integration with SVN, ANT, CFUnit & Selenium http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p27287024/

Mike Brunt High Availability - Clustering ColdFusion http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p40891520/

Jeff Peters Square Pegs, Round Holes, and Big Hammers - Where Should This Code Go? http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p68004567/

Ajay Sathuluri Expanding the power of Fusebox: advanced layout, access control and lexicons in Fusebox 4.x and 5.x http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p35891020/

Phill Nacelli Integrated ColdFusion Development Environment (No Audio) http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p46708966/

Elliott Sprehn Internals of the Adobe ColdFusion Server http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p94962996/

Sean Corfield Event-Driven Programming in ColdFusion (Repeat) http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p29389743/

Matthew Woodward Real World Flex and ColdFusion (No Screenshare) http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p90696874/

Simon Free CF Software Architecture For Web 2.0 http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p91706975/

Rupesh Kumar All about CFThread http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p20317005/

Mark Drew CFEclipse Reloaded http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p69604765/

Thanks to everyone!

We created a short video to thank everyone for another wonderful CFUnited conference.

- CFUnited team

Liz & Nafisa (minus Elliott, we can't find him)

Keynote and other presos on Connect

Here are the 2 keynote sessions: CFUnited Keynote - Ben Forta URL for Viewing: http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p13978261/

CFUnited Keynote - Michael Smith http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p88986762/

Some of the presentations got recorded.

Shlomy Gantz 10 Steps to ruin a CF project

Raymond Camden Ajax and CF

Jeremy Kadlec Building Advanced Search Capabilities for your website with SQL Server

Steve Nelson Building Google Maps Applications with ColdFusion

Sam Farmer Intro to CFML as a language http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p75133021/

Peter Bell RAD OO http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p15828446/

Peter Bell Building CFCs http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p32599224/

Mark Drew Coldspring: Better living through configuration http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p37989763/

Scott Stroz Creating Images With Flex and ColdFusion (no audio) http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p60997705/

Chaz Chumley Dynamic Presentation using ColdFusion http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p11401381/

Raymond Camden Part II: Ajax and CF

Bill Shelton Patterns for ColdFusion Test Automation

Charlie Arehart CF8 Server Monitor Introduction http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p91936158/

Shlomy Gantz Databases 101

Matthew Woodward Head First Mach-II http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p29636793/

Hal Helms Object Oriented Best Practices

Dave Powell Skinning your Flex Applications http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p35289493/

Sandy Clark Accessibility and Rich Internet Applications

Tyler Fitch Basic ColdFusion Application Debugging

Tom Jordahl BlazeDS and LiveCycle Data Services for ColdFusion 8 http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p61233987/

Phill Nacelli Leveraging Basic Object Oriented Concepts in ColdFusion

Oguz Demirkap1 Multi Lingual (i18N) ColdFusion Applications

Selene Bainum Report Queries with SQL Server http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p80815046/

Tom de Manincor topic has new speaker - CFQUERY versus the DB

Rolando Lopez is the replacement speaker for CFQUERY versus the DB. Tom contacted Rolando and he is prepared to give you a treat.

Thanks for the last minute availability Rolando!

CFUnited Wednesday Adobe Connect presentations Part I

RAD OO, Peter Bell

Intro to CFML, Sam Farmer

CFUnited Day 1 Wednesday news

Internet is the network "CF_United". No password needed. Endless users. Any problems dial 3800 on any of the house phones.

Mike Nimer's FMS topic has changed to "Hibernating Flex" more updates with description soon.

Tom de Maninicor's topic "CFQUERY versus the DB" has a new speaker announced soon. Same topic.

Twitter, make sure you join our twitter group!

All session rooms have Adobe Connect available for speakers to record sessions. We hope that this will make the experience easier to decide on a session to decide however it is only based upon the participation of the speaker.

Check out Hall B live cam on http://live.yahoo.com/cfunited

Simon Horwith will be unable to speak on his session.

Sorry that Starbucks was closed. we are working to provide coffee options all the time now.

Make sure you visit World Zhulu and find out the exciting news about the China Open this year! See how you can help.

Presentations are being uploaded by speakers as we speak. Sorry for the delay.

CFUnited on Yahoo Live

http://live.yahoo.com/cfunited

There isn't much going on now.. but at the conference we plan to have a few webcams in various places so people at home can tune in.

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