Tom Jordahl's musings

I have (mostly) recovered from another exciting and tiring Adobe MAX, and I see that my session "Whats new in Data Services 4.6 for Java EE" has been posted on Adobe TV.  Since we released our 4.6 Preview release on Monday 3-Oct-2011, everything I talk about in this session is available for download on the Adobe Labs site. Please check it out and give us some feedback.

I had about 60-70 folks in the room and my voice held up pretty well considering I was fighting a killer cough for the entire week.

Lots of other session have been posted as well, check out the Adobe MAX Online site for a complete rundown on the sessions, complete with "Watch Now" buttons for those that have been posted.  I do not believe that you need to have attended MAX to watch any of the sessions.

Enjoy!

MAX is only 4 weeks away!  This is going to be another great conference, with tons of new stuff in all areas of Adobe, and in particular the Enterprise software space.  Since we have released our new ADEP Experence Server product, there are lots of great sessions to attend to learn all about it.

As for Data Services, make sure you sign up for these sessions:

- Discover What's new in ADEP Experience Services - Data Services with Tom Jordahl: http://t.co/I9sc94l
- Building Enterprise Mobile Applications with ADEP with Mete Atamel and Stacy Young: http://t.co/UKYEaya
- Extending Flex to the Enterprise with Data Services Connectors for .NET and SAP with Matt Butler: http://t.co/xfM0GMS
- Model Driven Development with Flash Builder and ADEP Data Services with Dean Harmon: http://t.co/BSmiKyx

Plus there is going to be our own "ADEP lounge" area for folks to gather, bring questions and problems and generally hang out with the development teams.

See you there!

I am getting tired of deleting spam comments on the previous blog entry, so I thought I would add a new one just for variety. I wonder why the particular spammer is able to get around the Google captcha that is required to post, but every week or two they post to the last entry in my blog.

In other news, It has been confirmed that I will be speaking at MAX 2010. The tentative plan is for me to run a BYOL (Bring Your Own Laptop) session on the new Offline features in LiveCycle Data Services 3.1 for Flex and AIR. I have never done a BYOL, just a hands-on lab session, so this is going to be a "learning experience". This is a really a neat and powerful feature, so I hope folks will come away with a good idea of how they can use this feature in AIR apps that can go offline.

See you there!

MAX 2008 registration is now open. Check out more information at the MAX web site here.

MAX is the descendant of the Allaire ColdFusion Developers Conference, which turned in to the Macromedia DevCon, which morphed in to Macromedia MAX and is now Adobe MAX. This year it is going to be in San Francisco, which will be great. Not as great as MAX 2006 in Las Vegas IMHO, but SF is a fun place to visit. :-)

I will be giving a session on Livecycle Data Services and BlazeDS deployment, probably with a slant toward integrating with ColdFusion. But anyone who is interested in learning more about Data Services, BlazeDS and how they can leverage the power of these technologies in to their web applications using Flex should get a lot out of it.

For those of you who attended MAX 2007, a PDF version of my slides and (more importantly) a ZIP file with my demo files are now available on the Adobe MAX 2007 web site here: http://adobemax2007.com/na/sessions/library/ You may need to login to to the MAX web site get to this page.

To find this info without going to it directly, you log in to the MAX 2007 web site (http://adobemax2007.com/) and on the screen with your registration details click on the "Presentation Library" link on the left hand navigation panel.

If you unzip the demo files in to your ColdFusion web root, you will get two directories, 'messaging' and 'samples', each with a README.txt file that explains how to set up CF for each application (create gateways, data sources, etc).
Included are:

• A simple chat messaging application along with a CFML template that can publish a message through the Messaging event gateway.
  
• The classic "Contact" Data Management application - MXML and Assembler CFCs
  
• Some templates that demonstrate the new CF8 ability to notify LCDS through an event gateway when managed data has changed outside of the Flex/LCDS world.
• The more complex CRM Data Management application, include a better conflict resolution handler

Lots of good stuff here.

You will need to have ColdFusion 8 installed (Developer Edition is free!) with the integrated LCDS installation option. The database used for the Data Management applications is MS Access. Sorry to Mac and Unix users , but these are my Windows laptop demo files.

Well by now you have read everyone's blog postings about the largest MAX ever - over 4200 attendees. ColdFusion developers rocked the house as usual, but since ColdFusion 8 has been out since July, Flex and AIR (the Adobe Integrated Runtime) got a chance to really shine and I can say that many of the CF developers I talked to were ready to jump on to Flex 2 and the upcoming Flex 3, using ColdFusion as the back end.

My session on ColdFusion and Live Cycle Data Services integration went well, with a good crowd for both showings. As usual I had too much to talk about (40 slides!), but I managed to keep both times on track and finish in 60 minutes. I hope I inspired at least a few people to try the integrated installation and write a simple MXML file, drop it in their CF web root and see what happens. The trial edition of Flex Builder 2 (or the beta edition of FB 3 on labs) is a good place to start.

All-in-all I think this MAX was a success. The food was good (and plentiful - every time I turned around, there was some sugary snack or dessert starring me in the face) but the conference center was huge and I felt like I walked for miles to make up for all the food. I got to play some Halo 3 in the after hours lounge, even though the lounge in the conference center was kinda lame. And I got to talk to a whole bunch of customers about their problems and successes, which is really why we hold these events.

See you in SF next year!

ColdFusion 8.0 Cumulative Hot Fix 1 has been posted to the ColdFusion support site.

Fixes include:

• Debugger steeping issue when Break On Exception is turned on
  
• A fix to ensure that user included CSS style sheets come after the CF files so you can override the default styles in Ajax controls
  
• A bug with cfzipparam that broke it when using it in a loop
  
• A tweak for the cfpdf tag so it preserves the "Enable Usage Rights" flag in the PDF. This is something you can turn on in Acrobat.
  
• A bug in CreateObject for components that manifested itself under heavy load
  
• A fix for certain cfdocument table rendering
  
• A fix for datasources defined in JRun not working in ColdFusion

Also, for those who haven't upgraded to ColdFusion 8 (why not?) we have posted ColdFusion 7.0.2 Cumulative Hot Fix 3 which fixes another dozen issues with CFMX 7.0.2.

Both of these have some good stuff in them and I recommend that (after proper testing with your applications) they get deployed on all of your servers.

Just wanted to remind everyone that Adobe MAX 2006 is coming up on Oct 24-26, which is just under two weeks away. Registration ends on Oct 16 (onsite registration will still be available). ColdFusion users should definitely attend this year as a) its in Las Vegas and b) My session on Flex FDS and ColdFusion integration is a must see :-)

The keynote sessions promise to be pretty interesting this year. Day 1 will cover the "Adobe Engagement Platform", which should be something that any CF developer should probably understand. Not because ColdFusion is at the center of it (think Flash and PDF) but because Adobe will be talking about this a lot in the next year and it will help the CF team if you know what it is when we start talking about how CF fits in to all the pretty boxes. :-)

The Day 2 keynote is going to have lots of Adobe mobile info (yes, I sometimes get tired of hearing about flash on phones too) , but also the MAX awards, which I think are always neat.

The Day 3 keynote will be the sneaks session we have had in many past DevCon/MAX shows. The ColdFusion team has some stuff we want to show at this one. Can't say much more about that, but you can bet that the other groups in Adobe will have some real cool stuff to show too.

I am presenting my session twice, Tuesday at 4:15pm and Wednesday at 10:30am. I will also be manning the Adobe booth on Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning, plus I am sure I will be loitering around at other times too. You wont be able to miss me or the other members of the CF team as we will be wearing yellow bowling shirts (yikes!) when we are not wearing the official Adobe uniform for MAX.

Hope to see you all there!

I gave my first session on Blackstone Event Gateways yesterday afternoon and again this morning at 11:30. I think it went well. I was trying to work on my pacing and speaking effectively. The MAX conference organizers give us access to a speaker coach, who gave me lots of great feedback on what I do that is good and (mostly) bad. I tend to talk really fast, run out of breath and mumble a the end of my sentances. Hopfully I didn't do too much of that. He also explained to me how I can completly get rid of al of the umms and ahhhs in my speaking. Great stuff and I hope I put it to good use.

My voice has been shot due to (at first) being sick but staying out late, drinking, and screaming at people in noisy bars didn't help much. The voice held out for Wednesdays session OK, and I didn't drink at all last night and I think I am getting better, so the voice was stronger this morning.

In any case, I had a bunch of people for the first(100-150+?), and a good number (50?) for the second go 'round. The feedback I got was universally good in that lots of CFML developers are very excited about using the gateway to do really interesting stuff. I really can't wait to see what people are going to do with this stuff. And since we gave Blackstone B2 to every attendee, I hope we get lots of good feedback in the Beta forums.

I finished really early in both sessions, much to my dismay. I was worried that I didn't put enough content in the slides, but I believe that I built in 10+ minutes for questions, and I didn't get that many. In talking with people about why this is, I believe it is because the gateway is so new, users are just trying to get their heads around the feature so they do not have the "how do I...?" and "Can you do..?" questions that (I hope) they will have next time.

All-in-all, I think it went really well. I love speaking about ColdFusion and I certainly can't ask for a better audience than we get at MAX.

Sitting in on Hal Helms session on OO. He is giving a very nice intro to the subject and tying it in to CFML very nicely. He has the most soooooothing voice and I haven't been getting much sleep. Hard to pay attention, but if I didn't already know the subject matter, this would be a great intro in to how to slide from procedural CFML in to using CFCs and thinking more OO.

Notable quote: "Encapsulation is at least 60% of the benefit of OO".

Another thing, Hal is giving his preso sitting down, which I could never do.

The second day keynote session is in progress and I must say that there is much more interesting content than I expected. Rob Burges, our CEO talked for a while and then Juha Christenson, our president of Mobile & Devices unit of Macromedia. He is always an interesting speaker, and he really showed the serious inroads that Macromedia is making in to the overseas mobile marker with Flash and FlashCast. The real kicker is the 1.4 billion users out there that (obviously) Macromedia wants a piece of.

After that Rob came back to demo Breeze, which if you haven't seen is the best thing since sliced bread for making presentations. He showed the Macromedia quarterly results conference call, which if you haven't seen Breeze, is a great introduction to how cool it is. Before that though, he did something which I think was great. He emphasized the fact that Designers and developers (i.e CFMX, Dreamweaver, Flash) was really core to our business and that we were not losing sight of the fact that even though the company is going after these new opportunities, we continue to invest in these products.

Tom Hale then showed off Contribute, which is also a wonderful product for allowing users to control web content, while keep control of the site style.

Just finished listening to Ray Camdens "Coding for Reuse" session. Not much to say, Ray knows his CFML and he did a good job of covering custom tags, a part of CFML that doesn't get as much PR as the more glamorous CFCs, but are still very useful and a bit simpler for CFML coders to wrap their heads around.

The general session was pretty good. Lots of incredible stuff, but of course not enough ColdFusion for my taste. It seemed to me that the crowd was just patiently waiting for the 'interesting' stuff (i.e. ColdFusion) to happen. Or maybe it was just me. Stephen Elop, our new COO, did a great job at the opening. Kevin Lynch talked a lot about the various types (5) of Rich Internet Applications that Macromedia sees emerging, and showed multiple demos of each.

Tim and Ben did a good job of showing just a little bit of the Blackstone stuff in the 20 minutes they were given. The crowd seemed to perk up during this, and Ben made sure we all knew when we were supposed to respond to the things he said.

The sneak peak of the next generation Flash player (Maelstrom) came at the very end and the performance improvements did demo very nicely. This stuff doesn't rock my world, but there seemed to be some excitement in the room.

Putting on my CF customer hat, it was a mildly interesting general session, but there was tons of Flash (duh) and probably not enough CF. But it did a good job of showing our customers some of the things Macromedia is focused on moving forward

I started out in Tim Buntel's Blackstone session, but realized that he always has great presentations and that there would be nothing that I already didn't know and left after the first few minutes. It was in a big room that was mostly full, which is great. A good number of people raised their hands when asked if they were in the Beta, so I am not sure if they will hear much news there also.

I moved over to "Building a Basic CMS with CF and Dreamweaver" given by Dave Gallerizo. He was a dynamic speaker and I enjoyed listening to him talk even though it is very unlikely that I will ever design web sites, much less ones with Dreamweaver templates. I did gain even more respect for what you can do with DW and Contribute, and I liked how Dave worked in lots of ColdFuison references in to a DW based talk.

I moved on to catch the last 15 minutes of"CF performance Tips and Tricks" given by Rob Rusher. Rob had some really good advice (scope your variables, arrays are faster than lists, use cfswitch, watch out for whitespace). My favorite comment about someone who used a 30 deep - cfelseif: "Are you on crack?!!?"

There are many thing that I "know" about CFML, just because I am in the code every day. It is good to see stuff like that to remind me that some day we need to fix the fact that CFML lists use Java string functions and are dog slow, so our CFML users wont have to worry about how fast/slow a particular tag or function is. True, we may not be able to prevent every bad coding practice from slowing things down (for instance, we may never be able to 'fix' our friendly variable scope searching) , but everything we provide to users should not penalize them for using it!

On to the keynote!

I am sitting in Dean's, Xu's and Sherman's reporting and printing session. The functionality that these guys have put together is just awesome! It's around 8:45am, which is ridiculously early for a session since Burbon Street is just 5 blocks away and let me say my head is still feeling the hurricanes from last night. :-)

The crowd is pretty good considering the early hour and everyone seems jazzed for these features. Of course there are the usual questions about how much and "can you give me", which we really can't answer given the fact that we are still in Beta and have not announced pricing and packaging.

There was just a question about Excel format reports, which always confuses me as I am really not sure what people do with reports in Excel. I know I am being short sighted, but perhaps I can talk to someone about what happens to reports once they enter a spreadsheet.

I am off to Tim Buntels Blackstone session, which ought to be really good.

I am off to MAX 2004 next week where I will be giving a session on the Event Gateway feature of ColdFusion Blackstone. Should be a great time. I am looking forward to talking with customers and getting the kind of feedback that we on the CF team really love. Almost the entire engineering, QA and documenation teams are attending this year, and we have been given shirts to make us highly visible (I call them our bulls-eye shirts). I don't know if that is a good thing or bad.

So stop me and tell me what you like/don't like/want to see in CFMX. You will have better luck talking to me about Gateways, Verity Search and Web Services than database drivers and reporting, but such is life.

Also, watch for the "Meet the ColdFusion Engineers" BOF session which is (I think) Tuesday night. You can have us all lined up at the front of a room (all wearing our bulls-eye shirts probably) and that will be a 'target rich' environment. :-)

See you on Burbon street!