Thank you everyone who voted in the State of the CF Union survey. I noticed that many folks are not on the latest version of CF and are yet to adopt OO and frameworks. However CFC use is nearly universal. And open source products such as CFEclipse, MySQL and Railo are heavily used. Group learning resources such as user groups and conferences are used by the majority of developers.

Here are some of the interesting things I learned from the detailed results:

• 80% of developers are using CF8, with about half that number using CF9
• If you are running CF6 or earlier you are behind the curve
• Nearly a quarter of developers are using the open source Railo ColdFusion
• More than half are using Enterprise CF (vs Standard)
• 80% run on Windows
• A third use Fusebox with other frameworks such as Model Glue, Mach-II and ColdBox at 12-16%
• While nearly everyone uses CFCs only a third use ColdSpring or similar to organize their CFC and only one in six do data via CFCs using ORM
• UDFs, Custom tags and CFIncludes are still popular ways to reuse code but are starting to fall behind CFCs these days
• Most developers have used CF for more than 6 years and over 90% use object orientation
• CFers are heavily multi-lingual - using Flex, Java, PHP, AIR and .Net in large numbers
• SQL Server remains the database of choice, with MySQL closely following. Oracle and Access runners up.
• Two-thirds of developers use subversion, but a shocking 20% don't do source code control at all
• CFEclipse, Dreamweaver and CF Builder are the top tools
• Two thirds of developer attend a local user group some of the time
• CFUnited is the most attended conference by CF developers, followed by MAX and CF.Objective()
• The top challenges facing developers today is too much work, followed by maintaining someone else's badly written code and finding the time to learn new features.

And the winner of the ticket to CFUnited is Matthew Jones from Indianapolis IN. If you need to get on top of your backlog of work, learn new CF features, meet OO gurus or get up to speed on Flex or AIR then check out CFUnited.

This entry was posted on January 29, 2010 at 5:54 PM and has received 6632 views. There are currently 6 comments. Print this entry.

The State of the CF Union survey ends Wednesday 1/27/10. If you missed the survey you can take it here. See how you compare with other CF developers.

And one lucky person will win a ticket to CFUnited. Yes it could be you, President Obama, if you are not too busy with your own State of the Union address Wednesday night that is - to spend 5 minutes answering questions on your ColdFusion development skills and challenges! :-)

This entry was posted on January 26, 2010 at 12:24 PM and has received 2395 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Hey fellow CFUnited followers!

Call for Speakers is coming to a close. Officially, the last day to submit topics is February 5, 2010. Submit anything you want, before midnight next Friday at the Call for Speakers.

If you submit after this date, it will most likely never get looked at, and probably gather dust in a dungeon off the coast of Antarctica.

PLEASE SUBMIT YOUR TOPICS!!!!

This entry was posted on January 25, 2010 at 7:13 PM and has received 3471 views. There are currently 2 comments. Print this entry.

Lo and Behold - What You All Have Been Waiting For...

NEXT ROUND OF TOPICS!!

Building Self-Updating ColdFusion Builder Extensions- Brian Rinaldi - This will cover not just the basics of building ColdFusion Builder extensions but will also incorporate a library of components that allow you to make your extension update itself when new versions are released. The library is being built as part of a ADC article to be released in late January. It will even directly link to RIAForge to look for updates.

What Your Mother Never Told You About ColdFusion 9 ORM -Bob Silverberg - The ColdFusion engineering team have made it very easy to make use of Hibernate's ORM features out of the box, but what if you want to do something a bit more complicated? In this session we'll cover some topics that are important to understand, but that might not be that easy to pick up by reading the ColdFusion documentation. These topics will include Hibernate Session Management, Understanding Object States, Working with Detached Objects, Concurrency and Event Handling.

Real World ColdSpring - Kurt Wiersma - Have you ever wondered what ColdSpring is and why you would want to use it? If so this session is for you. We will go over the problems that ColdSpring solves and how you can use it to make your applications better.

CFWheels - Convention over Configuration - Mike Henke - Would discuss how Conventions over Configuration make life easier and use examples from CFWheels.

ColdFusion One Liners - Sam Farmer - ColdFusion is all about making the hard things easy. This topic will explore this concept by showing examples of what can be done with one line of ColdFusion to produce compelling results in AJAX, Rich Internet Applications, Converting Files, PDF and Object-Relational Mapping (ORM).

Practical Ajax Security-Jason Dean - With the introduction of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) over the last several years, it seems that everyone is jumping on the RIA bandwagon. But is any thought being given to what might need to be done to ensure that our Web 2.0 applications are secure? Or are they are not introducing new vulnerabilities into existing applications? In this presentation, we will look at some of the security issues that can arise from introducing Ajax into your applications and about how to mitigate the risks of opening up remote services for Ajax.

How to Read a Stack Trace -Daryl Banttari - Learn how to gather, interpret, and act on Java exception and running-thread stack traces in ColdFusion.

Searching With Apache Solr - Shannon Hicks - Solr is now included with ColdFusion 9, but are you using it to it's full potential? Explore using Solr directly, instead of using CF9's built-in search tags & functions.

Testing and Debugging CF for Flex UIs - Joe Rinehart - When ColdFusion returns an error message to Flex, you're not exactly given a user-friendly error message. Instead, you often have to dig to find out just where the error occurred. Join Joe as he shares lessons learned from four years' of enterprise ColdFusion + Flex RIA development. We'll discover how to use MXUnit and ColdSpring to simulate a running Flex client, how write to automatic Flex tests for your ColdFusion services, and how to see exactly what bytes are travelling between your ColdFusion server and Flex clients. After this session, you'll be able to write ColdFusion RIAs with less bugs, and spend less time fixing problems when they do occur!

This entry was posted on January 18, 2010 at 11:48 AM and has received 4954 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.

Below are the partial results to date for the State of the CF Union survey. See how you compare with other CF developers.

The results you can find also here

We will announce the final results on the day of President Obama's State of the Union address.

Survey : Results

This entry was posted on January 14, 2010 at 3:52 PM and has received 5941 views. There are currently 2 comments. Print this entry.

Help us find out the State of the CF Union with this survey - what versions of ColdFusion do people use, what frameworks, tools etc. We will share the summary results with everyone so that you can see how you compare with other CF developers. Thanks for your time completing this survey!

Oh yeah I nearly forgot, we will raffle off one ticket to CFUnited (a $999 value) picked at random from everyone who completes the survey.

We will announce the final results on the day of President Obama's State of the Union address. Hey perhaps he will slip the results into his speech, might get a standing ovation!

This entry was posted on January 14, 2010 at 3:35 PM and has received 9507 views. There are currently 3 comments. Print this entry.

Hello wonderful world of CFUnited lovers! Allow me to introduce myself...my name is T to the A to the R to the A (Tara)! Many of you may remember my lovely face from CFUnited 2009 where I ran around doing random important things and looking important behind the registration desk.

Last year I was an intern. Now, I am officially with Stellr Team, and I am so excited to begin the journey to ColdFusion heaven at Lansdowne Resort. Mainly, I will be immersed in marketing/PR for the conference, but I will be at your service for all of your conference needs, in true Stellr style.

On the side (in my 4 spare hours of the year), I enjoy playing piano and watching movies, but mainly sleeping and eating. I am a spunky little monkey and I am ready to go bananas! Feel free to email me tara ( at ) stellr.com for a quick hello or if you have any questions. Adios CF-Amigos!

This entry was posted on January 8, 2010 at 3:26 PM and has received 2218 views. There are currently 3 comments. Print this entry.

Happy New Year one and all! 2009 was packed to the gills with big news. Among the biggest were: world changing political events, earth shattering celebrity events, and the mind-blowing success of premier ColdFusion event at CFUnited 09. Yes, 2009 was in intense year. And 2010 already shows promise of knocking our socks off. CFUnited 2010 is cleared for take off. The Stellr team is in gear, once again teaming up with the lavish Lansdowne Resort, dropping topics like snowflakes, and making big plans for 2010.

As we move into the new year and advance into a new phase of the CFUnited 2010 countdown, many forward thinkers have already claimed a piece of the action. Join them, register for CFUnited 2010 before 1/8/2010 and take advantage of Early Bird prices. Then cling to CFUnited.com like static to a dryer sheet to stay on top of the latest announcements and updates about the hottest thing this summer, the event around which the yearly calendar truly revolves.

As we sit here in our chilly office at Stellr headquarters, we huddle close to the space heater. We know it is now only a matter of time until we will be feeling the warm summer sun and seeing once again the CF community come together wearing flip flops and sunglasses, high-fiving their hellos, reconnecting and making new connections. At that time, the only things frozen will be our drinks. Make the fantasy a reality, and do it at a low price.

Register before the Early Bird ends on 1/8/2010. And don't forget that we are still donating $1 from each registration to The Heart of Virginia in the month of January. www.theheartofva.org

This entry was posted on January 4, 2010 at 1:45 PM and has received 3254 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.