CFUnited Blog

CFUnited 2007 Preview: Charlie Arehart on New in CFMX 6&7: What Did You Miss?

Planning to move to CF8? Did you skip either 6 or 7? Or have you perhaps installed and been running on them but doing little or no new development? Were you paying attention as all the new features (and folks' experiences using them) were being shared? There may be a lot you've missed. Veteran CFML developer Charlie Arehart will introduce both the key features introduced in those releases as well as many hidden gems. It's surprising how many little things get slipped into releases, and point releases, and sometimes it's those which can be as important to you as any prominent feature. In his typical encyclopedic but pragmatic style, Charlie will help you make the most out of features you may have missed. Of course, this is just a 20- minute preview of what is in fact a day-long course. But it will give a taste of what's to expect and will provide value in and of itself.

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CFUnited 2007 Preview: Oguz Demirkapi on Multi Language Apps in CF, Theory and Practice

In this 20-30 minute session, Oguz Demirkapi will preview his day-long class which will explain the theory of creating multi-language applications and methods in ColdFusion with best practices. The main goals of this class are explaining multi-language applications theory, defining requirements and solutions, and providing best practices with direct coding in class.

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CFUnited 2007 Preview: Mark Drew on CFEClipse Plus!

In this 20-30 minute session, Mark Drew will preview his one-hour class, CFEClipse Plus!, presenting how to use some advanced features in CFEclipse, with an in-depth look at modifying the libraries to add your own tags, using ant as part of your development process and demonstrations of the new features in CFEclipse. This presentation is geared towards current users of CFEclipse.

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theWHIR magazine article: Hostmysite to Present

HostMySite to Present at CFUnited

June 21, 2007 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Web hosting provider HostMySite (hostmysite.com) announced on Thursday it will present at the eighth annual CFUnited conference (cfunited.com) to be held in the Washington, DC area from June 27 to 30. In addition to the presentation, HostMySite is a Gold Sponsor of CFUnited for the second year in a row.
...
Please click the following link to read the article http://www.thewhir.com/marketwatch/062107_HostMySite_to_Present_at_CFUnited.cfm

The Web Host Industry Review (www.thewhir.com) is the publication of record for the Web hosting industry. Reaching more than 14,000 industry insiders and consumers daily, theWHIR is the most targeted venue to disseminate your company's news.

Monish Sood's CF8:Case Study session is now changed to Deploying and Managing CF Enterprise: A Hoster's View by Byron Mann. http://cfunited.com/go/topics#topic-1409

Not Limited Seating Topic "ColdFusion 8: Advanced AJAX Development"

ColdFusion 8: Advanced AJAX Development
Speaker: Rakshith N
Time: 8:30AM - 9:30AM
This Topic is NOT LIMITED SEATING
We have opened up the number of people that may attend this session.

This session's video capture will still be made available for free after the event. -Liz

ColdFusion 8 Beta is Released by Adobe

Hey Folks, this article was just sent to me and has been picked up by most popular magazines and newsletters
ColdFusion 8 Beta is Released by Adobe
By Derek Vaughan

The wait is over and the latest version of ColdFusion has just been released in beta. Code named 'Scorpio' (the eighth sign of the Zodiac) during the development stages, the new release is officially named ColdFusion 8 and has just recently been made available for free trial beta accounts through select ColdFusion web hosting providers.

Mr. Tim Buntel, Senior Product Marketing Manager, ColdFusion at Adobe and Mr. Monish Sood, Director of Marketing with ColdFusion webhost, HostMySite.com were kind enough to help us learn more about the new release, it's features, and how to get started with a free beta account.

First the basics - the new beta release has been available since May 30, 2007. At this point the full commercial release of ColdFusion 8 is anticipated to be in a couple of months. Adobe hasn't set a specific date yet, as the company is leaving a bit of time to react should they discover anything through the public beta. According to the company that puts the estimated delivery of the full releases at pretty much dead center of the calendar year.

When asked to distill the key features of the new ColdFusion 8 into a brief statement, Mr. Buntel stated, "The tip of the iceberg on new features is already a pretty long list. I think if I had to say one thing about the release, this is Adobe ColdFusion. ColdFusion 8 shows what happens when you inject ColdFusion with Adobe's DNA.

It's really about making this great experience for the application user, with a whole slew of new features: PDF's, rich Internet applications, and multimedia presentations - simply a much more meaningful experience for users. There is also a lot more integration in the enterprise. We're Doing for .NET what we've done for Java in the past. Plus Exchange integration. Then also enhancing the developer's experience."

One feature that's getting considerable attention is the ability of ColdFusion 8 to invoke .NET components directly from ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML). This is true for both local or remote .NET components. According to Adobe the new feature works much like cfobject/CreateObject for java. Here's how Tim Buntel describes it: "There are organizations that have both java and .NET development work going on, whether through acquisition or size or different divisions or different areas of the world. ColdFusion has been in a great position over the years to build an application with ColdFusion, if you were doing java development as well - no problem. ColdFusion can take advantage of those java assets within the ColdFusion language for it's own application. So now we're able to do the same thing for .NET. If some group in your organization is writing a specific piece of business logic in .NET - up until now the ColdFusion application couldn't take advantage of that development work that the .NET team was doing - except maybe with SOAP services - but there were some issues with that. Now your ColdFusion team can leverage that business logic that the .NET team developed within ColdFusion in a much easier and efficient way than you could have with web services.

For the .NET guys the important thing to them is that they don't have to change their code. The primary way today that you would bridge java and .NET would be with .NET remoting - but that would require the .NET team to change their .NET. They would actually have to compile .NET assemblies to use remoting, but they don't want to have to do that. ColdFusion 8 will allow you to access .NET directly from ColdFusion without the .NET team having to do any additional work. We're unique as a java into .NET bridge without using either web services or .NET remoting."

Other new features of note - the ability to monitor the server applications in production. According to information supplied by Adobe, the server monitoring will permit developers to diagnose slow pages queries and threads, track memory usage, manage active threads, and monitor database usage. Added in this version as well is the ability to create on-demand presentations with a customizable look and feel. ColdFusion 8 will also further improve the Flex/ColdFusion connectivity through data exchange simplification and a simpler architecture.

So the new features look good, but what if you are satisfied with the current ColdFusion version that you're running today? Mr. Buntel explained the benefits of upgrading to ColdFusion 8, "First and foremost in terms of people who are running ColdFusion today - There are compelling reasons to move to ColdFusion 8 even if you don't rewrite a single line of code that you're currently running in ColdFusion version 7 or 6.1 or 6. Simply moving your applications to ColdFusion 8 will yield a whole range of benefits. It's going to be faster, it's going to be more stable, and you're going to have the ability to monitor those applications in production.

Existing ColdFusion developers are going to be able to take advantage of all of these features very quickly and easily. As well, people who are getting into rich Internet application development, and want to find the easiest and most productive server side compliment for a rich Internet app. So if you're doing AJAX or you're doing Flex, or flash for rich client, ColdFusion 8 is going to allow those applications to talk to databases and object services and enterprise infrastructure very easily and make you productive to hook that rich Internet app up to all of those back end services.

To get started, if you feel comfortable installing ColdFusion on your own computer or workstation, all you have to visit the Adobe Labs and they will provide you with the full product along with all kinds of documentation and helpful articles to get you started. You can also access multimedia demonstrations as well. That is all free. According to Tim Buntel, "A developer can just grab that and go to town".

He continued, "If you don't want to install or are unable to install the product on your machine for any reason, then with a ColdFusion hosting partner such as HostMySite.com, you'll be able to go sign up and have a small account that is running on ColdFusion 8 that will allow you to start writing code and use the features that environment. Those accounts are free as well."

With regard to the beta accounts mentioned above, Monish Sood, Director of Marketing at HostMySite.com explained the details, "The ColdFusion 8 Beta comes fully loaded with features including a 600 MB MS SQL Server database, 4 GB of disk space, and ASP.NET 3.0 framework access. We want developers to be able to test the newest release of ColdFusion in real-world situations with features that are available with our ColdFusion developer edition plans."

Mr. Sood continued, "We have worked closely with Adobe throughout the beta process to transfer all feedback from participating developers. The developers get access to production level features to test in a beta environment. HostMySite.com provides the same level of support and service for the beta as any production plan."

For further details on the new beta release of ColdFusion 8, please visit the Adobe Labs at: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/coldfusion8.

To sign up for the free ColdFusion 8 beta account with HostMySite.com, please visit: http://www.hostmysite.com/CF8/.

About the Author
Derek Vaughan is Chief Marketing Officer with TechPad Agency, LLC - a full resource advertising and marketing agency, specializing in products and services for the web hosting industry. Mr. Vaughan's writing appears courtesy of the hosting experts at www.thehostingnews.com.

Billy Brown - Spry

A presentation on Spry, Adobe's new framework for Ajax.

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Open Source Winner of Wii!

Thank you to everyone who entered in the Open Source Code Off.

The winner of a Nintendo Wii is Barney Boisvert "Management Tool"
A simple schema management tool. You write your database mods into migration scripts (CFCs), and then the tool manages application of the scripts on an as-needed basis in all environments the application is deployed to. Very handy if you have a laptop, an office workstation, a home machine, and a production server and don't want to spend your life keeping the databases backing each one in sync with the others.
It is licensed under the Apache Software License 2.0. Download File

Second: Mary Jo Sminkey "USPS tracker"
Third: Joe Danzinger "Project Tracker"

View all entries here:http://wiki.cfunited.com/index.cfm/Open_Source_Contest_Entries

Winner of iPod Nano! Pre-Conference Classes Drawing

The winner of the iPod Nano is Carolyn F. of Sacramento. Congratulations!

Thank you everyone for registering for CFUnited's Pre-Conference Classes. Please note that you should have received an email from us about your classes and instructions. See you soon!

Conference Registration Package and Scheduler Instructions

Hello Attendees!

If you have not received your registration package in the mail we will give you one onsite at the event. It contains a t-shirt and a document, which you can download here.

Please note that we will CLOSE LIMITED SEATING SESSIONS on Friday June 22nd at 5pm (COB). You will not be allowed to add Limited seating sessions to your scheduler after June 22nd.

If you have not filled out your scheduler, do so now! http://scheduler.cfunited.com/

ALL ColdFusion 8 topic recordings will be made available for FREE after the event to all attendees. They will be Screen Video Capture and Sound recordings!

Limited Seating Sessions are:

6/27/2007 10:15AM-11:15AM
ColdFusion 8: Going Beyond Paper with PDF Documents and Forms - Dean Harmon

6/27/2007 11:30AM-12:30PM
ColdFusion 8: Dynamic Image Processing - Raymond Camden

6/27/2007 2:15PM-5:15PM
CFC Development - Raymond Camden

6/28/2007 8:30AM-9:30AM
ColdFusion 8:CFML Enhancements - Rupesh Kumar

6/28/2007 9:45AM-10:45AM
ColdFusion 8: Flex 3 & Apollo (The Future of Adobe Development) - Matt Chotin

6/28/2007 1:45PM-2:45PM
Prototyping Applications with Flex 2.0 - Scott Stroz

6/28/2007 3:00PM-6:00PM
The Microsoft .NET Framework + BlueDragon: A Better Platform for CFML
Integrating CFML and .NET Code - Josh Adams

6/29/2007 8:30AM-10:30AM
Managing ColdFusion projects from start to finish - Shlomy Gantz

6/29/2007 1:30PM - 2:30PM
ColdFusion 8: Microsoft Exchange and .NET Integration - Ramchandra Kulkami

6/29/2007 2:45PM-3:45PM
ColdFusion 8: Case Study: Hostmysite.com - Monish Sood

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