Tonight at the Sacramento ColdFusion User Group, Matt Graf will be giving a "tips and tricks" presentation, showing some useful techniques in SQL and Firebug.

Assuming no technical difficulties, we'll be broadcasting the meeting via Adobe Connect. The URL will be posted on the Saccfug site at around 6:30 PM PST.

Hope to see you there, virtually or otherwise. :)

-Nolan

I meant to blog this sooner, but I've been buried under a deadline (still am, actually, but while the laptop is busy FTP'ing a zillion things to the server, I have a few minutes)...

This Saturday in San Francisco is CFDevCamp, an all-day event to promote ColdFusion, do some collaborative programming, and teach new people about ColdFusion...that's right, you don't need to be a ColdFusion...you don't even need to have it installed before you show up (though that would help, but we'll have mentors on-site to assist anyone with trouble getting CF running).

You can get all the details off the website. I'll be there along with Sid and Luke (from BACFUG and Fire On The Bay respectively), long with a few other folks from the Sacramento CFUG.

Come on out! This is a great chance to get that .NET/PHP co-worker of yours to see the light as to why ColdFusion is so great! :)

Hope to see you there! -Nolan

I made it back from CFinNC, late Sunday night, extremely jet lagged, but in one piece, and very happy I made the decision to go. First, I want to thank Dan Wilson, and the rest of the folks that helped put this conference together. Not being able to attend MAX this year, I was very happy there was another ColdFusion-related conference, so soon after MAX. The fact that it was over a weekend made it much easier to schedule. As you may have read on CFCDev, Dan and I exchanged several posts about information on the conference website, what was/wasn't up to date, etc. Eventually, Dan and I took the conversation off-list (and off-email, talking more in person at the conference), and what became very clear to me is how genuinely personal he takes his work in the CF community; putting together this conference was no exception, and I think the quality of the CFinNC conference is proof of that. Everything seemed to run very smoothly -- registration was quick and painless, parking was a snap, wifi was up and accessible throughout the venue, the staff were all very courteous and happy to help. Nothing about the conference seemed out of place, or an obvious indicator that this was a newer project -- I was quite happy with how well everything was organized.

Session highlights for me included:

Mike Brunt -- 10 Steps To A High Performing ColdFusion Application, Clustering ColdFusion Great talk on performance testing, and all kinds of related items. Mike came with a real world demo that required not one, not two, but THREE laptops to get everything running (so it looked like it does in the real world) -- talk about putting a serious amount of effort into your lecture! My only regret is meeting Mike just minutes before I had to leave for my flight home; I was unable to say much more than "nice presentation" before I had to go. He was wearing a Beatles / Sgt Pepper shirt; I suspect we would have gotten along quite well. :)

Jason Dean -- Intro to Securing CFML Applications I met Jason at cf.Objective(), and caught his other talk on security. This one is the precursor to said cf.Objective() talk. Both are worth checking out; not too much overlap, you'll learn something new at each one. And you can play the drinking game "take 2 sips every time Jason says 'validation'". :)

Brian Kotek -- Intro to the Swiz Framework Nice first look at Swiz, with some notes on how it compares/contrasts to Caringorm, what Swiz is/isn't, how it can help w/ event handling, auto-wiring and tons more. For anyone new to Swiz, this was a great introduction.

Andy Matthews -- jQuery & AIR: Desktop Development for the Front End Designer While in NC, I was staying with my friend Rob who is typically known as a .NET developer. Half way through this presentation, I was tempted to call Rob and have him come watch -- I'm continually impressed by AIR/JavaScript fun that can be had in projects. Andy did a great job with this; very well put together presentation. Definitely worth checking out.

Joe Rinehart -- CF Inspirational Session I was not sure what to expect from the "Inspirational ColdFusion" session. Joe gave a great talk about what he's been up to for the last year-ish, how he'd moved away from CF, and how he's coming back into the fold. His presentation was hilarious, and it was one of the more comical yet compelling presentations I've ever seen. Joe missed his calling as a sitcom writer. :)

Rick Root -- Using Java in ColdFusion Applications Rick gave a great introduction to using Java classes in CF. This is a topic that I often see on lists/blogs, but it's always done as the answer to some other question, so the context of said blog posts often makes it hard for people to see that "first look" at how you can dip directly into Java from ColdFusion, and utilize both to improve your applications. That's where Rick's presentation came into play; don't go if you're already doing big crazy things like writing your own Hibernate wrapper for CF7, but if you want to see just how the CF data types are tied to Java data types under the hood (and how to utilize the power of both), then Rick's talk is worth checking out.

Bob Silverberg -- CF9 ORM - Part 1 and 2 Admittedly, I've been kind of dismissing the Hibernate integration in CF9 up until now. Partially because none of my clients have upgraded yet (tho 1 is talking about doing so), and partially because between Transfer and/or some homegrown things, I haven't really had a need to learn much more about it. Bob's talk was so good that I have now officially started "drinking the Kool-Aid", and want to start using CF/Hibernate whenever possible. I may very well (ahem) "borrow" content from his preso and give a similar demo for Saccfug later in the year. I would like to have seen a code sample in action, but the code presented in the slides was clear and "real world enough", that maybe that's not necessary.

It was also good seeing the familiar faces that I met at cf.Objective() -- Ben Nadel, Jason Dean, and others I'm forgetting -- as well as catching up with my friend Rob who moved to NC several years ago. North Carolina is a really pretty area -- trees everywhere, decent weather (and this is coming from a spoiled California punk *g*), and EVERYone I met was extremely nice and polite all weekend. Even the grits I had for dinner were pretty good! :)

Nice job, CFinNC, I hope you do it again next year. -nolan

My apologies for the late blogging on this -- lots of projects going on these days, taking time away from blogging (but I'm hoping to fix that soon).

Tonight at Saccfug, Seth Duffey will be giving a presentation on ColdFusion Security. We'll also be doing our Software Giveaway -- and if you're brave enough to drive to the meeting in this crazy weather we're having today, you deserve to win! :)

More details and directions are available on the Saccfug Site. See you there!

-nolan

This Tuesday (today/tomorrow, depending on when you read this), Seth Duffey will be giving an introduction to "Software Development with Scrum".

No ColdFusion experience required! Bring your other developer friends to participate in the fun! :)

More details can be found on the Saccfug site.

See you there! -nolan

Tonight at the Sacramento CFUG, Seth Duffey will be giving an introduction to ColdSpring. This will be a great first-look at ColdSpring, dependency injection, and all that ColdSpring has to offer.

More details are available at the Saccfug site. Hope to see you there!

This Thursday (June 18), we (the Sacramento CFUG) has a special joint meeting with the Sierra Multimedia User Group, and the Nor Cal Flex User Group. We'll be showing off parts of the new version of ColdFusion, the new IDE "Bolt", as well as features in the upcoming Flex Builder 4 and Flash Catalyst.

The fine folks at AcademyX will be hosting the meeting. We'll have the usual assortment of pizza, some new tshirts, and possibly other goodies to share as well!

More details can be found on the Saccfug website. Hope to see you there!

This Tuesday night Sean Corfield will be speaking at our Sacramento ColdFusion User Group. He'll be speaking on Ralio, showing off some its features, answering questions, and so on.

More details (and a link to the webcast hopefully) can be found at www.saccfug.org. Hope to see you there!

-nolan

Continuing with my notes from the cf.Objective talks...

Code Less, Code Smarter: Taking Code Reuse to a Higher Level
Jeff Chastain
(www.alagad.com/go/blog for all the presentation materials)

Jeff gave a good look at several techniques to help with building OO applications. Nothing was really framework-specific, but more ideas such as building an AuthenticationService.cfc, so you can abstract out whether your app's login system is based on LDAP, or a SQL database, or something else -- the app no longer cares about those details, only if it got back a "yes, the user can log in" message from your AuthenticationService.cfc.

He also touched on DSLs (domain specific languages), a common topic, brought up at several other discussions. I don't know if this was intentional or not, but Jeff's talk gave a very quick, high level look at DSLs, which worked perfectly first thing in the morning...considering that other presenters went into more detail later in the day. :)

The slides were a good mix of useful bullet points and things on the lighter side (little jokes, pictures to keep our interest, etc). (This is something I keep meaning to add to my presentations, but haven't actually done yet.)

Jeff knows his stuff, speaks clearly, is easy to understand, and doesn't go so fast as to lose anyone in the audience. When presenting on high level OO topics, it's pretty easy to lose people in the audience, but I didn't see any indications of this happening here (based on the few people I talked to afterwards). All the slides are available here. It's well worth a look, especially if things like "service layers" still seem like "just a lot of extra typing" to you. ;)

-nolan

Finally, a few minutes to start posting my notes/reviews of the various cf.Objective() presos! I'll do these more or less in the order that I attended the talks. Hopefully the info will be useful to some of you...

Introduction to Flex 3
Theo Rushin

Theo gave a very clear, well put together introduction to Flex. He went over some basic code, building a sample app for the audience, and gave a good first-look at the Flex Builder environment. Theo showed how easy it is to drag and drop components into a Flex app ala Visual Basic, wrote a little code, and poof...he was up and running (as expected).

My only critique would be for a more real-world sample application, as I find that helps the light bulbs click for the audience at times. However, I know how hard it can be to come up with a good real-world example that's not too complex for a beginner audience. Something already prepared so things like "setting a break point" can be demo'd quickly might be nice next time.

If you're new to Flex, this was a great introduction. Hopefully Theo's slides are available on the web (apparently I didn't write down the URL for his blog).

-nolan