Tom Jordahl's musings

For those who were unable to attend my session at CFUnited this year, the CFUnited blog has posted the URLs of many of the sessions that got recorded via Adobe Connect. My session was recorded and is now online here. This talk has some new content about the difference between BlazeDS and LiveCycle Data Services.

The audio is very "hot" - when setting up the microphone the output from the in-room audio system was just super loud so I am distorted, but I think the session is still tolerably understandable. I am much better in person however. See you at MAX 2008. :-)

I recently got confirmation that I will be attending CFUnited again this year. I believe I will be giving the "Adobe Speaker TBA" talk on ColdFusion 8 and LiveCycle Data Services. I will make sure to include a good discussion about BlazeDS and how that fits in to the picture.

I always enjoy attending CFUnited. It is being held at a new location this year. There probably isn't going to be a Dave & Busters handy to play games at, which is was always a highlight. But the crowd is always good and I really enjoy the sessions. Should be a good time, see you there!

Well, another CFUnited has come and gone. I think this years show was pretty good. My Flex/Data Services presentation seemed to fire at least a few people up and all the Scorpio/ColdFusion 8 sessions were successful.

I was really impressed with Rakshith's AJAX session - I think it hit just the right level of detail and Rakshith did a tremendous job presenting for his first time(!!).

Another highlight for me was Ray Camden's CFImage session, which did a good job of introducing this powerful new feature without overwhelming attendees with the huge number of functions we have added.

The special event to the National Zoo was pretty much a bust however, mostly due to weather and not very much food.

All-in-all a very good conference with tons of great info about ColdFusion. See you at MAX in October!

I will be leaving tomorrow morning for CFUnited. Come see me at the Adobe booth or at my session which I am giving on Wednesday at 3:15 pm and repeating on Saturday at 11:00 am. The CFUnited web site did have a description of my session, but since it is Scorpio related they took it down. Go figure. I will be talking about ColdFusion 8 and Flex Data Services integration. Now if I could only get my talk down to less than 90 minutes!

In any case, the conference should be a good time with lots of good discussion about how we should have done this or should not have done that. I just looooove our customers. :-)

I wanted to take a break from working on Scorpio, the next major ColdFusion release, to plug CFUnited. Here are the top 5 reasons to attend:

1. I am speaking. See my weirdly scaled face here. I am giving a talk on how ColdFusion Scorpio will integrate with the latest release of Flex Data Services. It will contain some of the material that I covered at MAX last year, but I think many of those attendees will want to hear it all again now that they have had a chance to try CFMX 7.0.2 and FDS 2.01 together. You have tried it out, right?
2. CFUnied is the ColdFusion conference. I don't mean to slight the others, I love them too. (In fact I am trying to wrangle my way over to cf.Objective in May because I spoke there last year and had a great time.) But CFUnited is where we (the CF Team) have decided to show up in force. While we love MAX, it isn't the Allaire DevCon any more. CFUnited comes close for me.
   
3. Scorpio. Can't really say much about this, but I'll bet that there will be lots of stuff for us Adobe types to talk about. :-)
4. Its Fun. I don't think I paid for a drink or a meal last year. That is a good thing!
5. You will learn a lot. The speakers lined up are always top notch and I consider it part of my job description to attend as many sessions as possible. I always learn something new, even if it another crazy way that CF users have taken something we've done and used it in a way we didn't expect at all. Also, did I mention I am speaking?

In any case, anyone who uses ColdFusion should try to attend if they can.

Since I am on a blogging roll this week, I wanted to note that I and many other members of the ColdFusion team will be attending CFUnited next week.

Even though I am really looking forward to Adobe MAX in Las Vegas this fall (probably because I love BlackJack and Vegas), CFUnited is where "my peeps" are at since it is focused almost 100% on ColdFusion. Through some quirk of fate, I am not giving a session this year (I guess I am not famous enough :-). But I will be hanging at the Adobe booth for large chunks of time and attending as many sessions as I can. I really find it fascinating to hear people explain features of CF that I have had a hand in designing. It is almost like a game of telephone - where someone whispers a message to another person on down the line, then you compare what the last person in the line says to the original message. The result is always surprising. Sometimes the message gets through, sometimes it gets really garbled. :-) But in every case it allows me to get a better view of the problems our customers are solving (or not solving) with CF so that next time I can get it closer to right.

This is your chance to harass me about how CFCs should be "just like" Java objects, why CFML should be strongly typed, why we should rewrite the file browser in the CF administrator to not use Java, why you can't possibly use CF anymore because we don't have {cfimap,cfimage,etc, etc}. I will have my laptop and access to source control, so maybe you can convince me to add/fix/remove something that you have always wanted in Scoprio right on the spot! :-)

See you there!

CFUnited is coming up (OK it's at the end of June) but Adobe is now the platinum sponsor of this ColdFusion focused conference.

The ColdFusion team showed up last year in force and while we haven't set plans yets, you can probably count on us being there again since we are a sponsor. Perhaps we will be sporting some new Adobe branding clothing. :-)

See you there!

As a reminder, I will see you at the CFUnited conference next week. Tons of great sessions, including mine on advanced Event Gateways.

I am going to be speaking at the CF United (http://www.cfunited.com/) conference at the end of June in Washington DC. This is the conference that used to be called "CFUN" and it is turning in to the largest ColdFusion-only conference in the US.

I will be giving a (new!) Advanced Event Gateway talk, detailing lots more of the 'how it works' information that people have asked for and also going in to more detail on how to write a Java Event Gateway. I tried to keep the required Java knowledge to a minimum, but this is an advanced session...

Here is my session blurb: http://www.cfunited.com/topics#193

I was going to do the (old) Event Gateway session that I have at MAX last year, but that has been turned in to both an article and will soon be published as a Breeze "Macrochat" on DevNet on Monday May 2, 2005. So I was forced to write some new stuff, which should be interesting to the event gateway fans out there (you know who you are).

CF United should be a great time, a good chunk of the team is going, everyone is presenting, and the turnout looks to be almost as good as when Allaire did its ColdFusion DevCons years ago. The CF team has always been a bit disappointed with how MAX doesn't emphasize CF enough, since we feel it has the CF DevCon as its roots, so we are very excited to focus lots of attention on this conference as a platinum sponsor.

See you there!