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

I got home late last night from CF Objective (stayed in town through the weekend to visit with friends and do some touristy things). Overall it was a great experience, and well worth the time/money! This was my first CF Objective, and I must say it was incredibly inspiring! I learned quite a few new things, and am excited about blocking off time to implement them in my current projects.

The keynote was very informative. Nice to know that our "dying language" ColdFusion has done nothing but grow steadily over the last few years -- the keynote mentioned somewhere around 800K estimated CF developers now! We also got a nice sneak peak at some of the things coming in CF9, the new Bolt IDE, and Flex 4 (including a name change, that's already been blogged everywhere, so I won't get into that here).

Thanks to Troy Pullis for coordinating the Star Trek IMAX outing on Thursday. I'm by no means a die-hard Trekkie, but this movie was so well done, that didn't matter! I highly recommend it, even if you are only peripherally familiar with the Star Trek story lines (or just like well produced sci-fi movies).

It was great to meet some of the folks that author blogs I've been reading over the years -- Ben Nadel (who was easily one of the nicest people I've met in ages), Jason Dean (thanks again for carpooling us to/from the Star Trek film, and for dropping me at the Light Rail), Dan Vega, Bob Silverberg and everyone I'm forgetting due to jet lag. :)

I took notes on the various presentations which I hope to post later; they need to be cleaned up before they'll be of any use to other people. Hopefully time for that soon, but with all the new things I learned, it'll be hard to prioritize everything! :)

Now if you'll excuse me, I want to rewrite all my apps with DSLs, Transfer ORM, ColdSpring, Flex, ValidateThis, Model-Glue, and Peter Bell's IBO library. ;)

-Nolan

I landed in Minneapolis a couple hours ago, and met my friends Brooke and Matt, who are kind enough to let me sleep in their spare room while in town for the conference. Here's my schedule:

Thursday:
Introduction to Flex
Taking Code Reuse to a Higher Level
Rapid OO Development with ColdFusion Frameworks
Security In ColdFusion: The Next Step
RAD OO In Code
Mach-ii meetup
(tentative) Star Trek group trip (is anyone I know personally going to this? :) )

Friday:
ColdFusion as a Service
Build a ColdFusion powered AIR application
The Best of Both Worlds: Java Backends with CFML Frontends
Payment Processing Paradigm
ColdFusion and Flex: Present and Future
Mark Drew / Chris Scott's Mystery Science 3000 Coldspring Session
BOF: Ask the Expert, Architecture and Design
BOF: Application Security
(tho I may change my mind and go to "State of the Glue" instead.)

Saturday:
Model-Glue
PDF Documents and Forms in ColdFusion
Approaches to Automated Secrity Testing
Planning Your Migration to a Framework
Constructing Scalable Services for Flex in ColdFusion

This coming Tuesday I'll be presenting at the Sacramento ColdFusion User Group. The topic will be "Modularity Shoot-out: CFInclude vs CFModule vs CFFunction vs Custom Tags".

While lots of CFers are making strides in learning object oriented programming, there is still quite a big of "5 tag procedural code" being developed out there (much to my dismay *g*). This talk will go over some of the non-CFcomponent ways you can break up your ColdFusion apps into reusable modules of code. We'll go over pros and cons of each, show some code samples, and discuss how memory/variables are handled differently with each. Come join us and start breaking out of the "5-tag mindset"! :)

More info can be found at the SACCFUG site. Assuming no technical difficulties, we'll be posting the Adobe Connect link on the site when the presentation starts.

Hope to see you there! -Nolan

Another great set of Model-Glue posts that I've been meaning to share (and blog, for my own personal reference) is collection of tips from Mark Drew:

Model Glue Tips Part 1: Separate out your Model-Glue file
Model Glue Tips Part 2: Use Naming conventions for your Event Handlers
Model Glue Tips Part 3: Keep your views tidy
Model Glue Tips Part 4: Use Generic Database Messages to speed up your development
Model Glue Tips Part 5: Maximize your re-usability with message arguments
Model Glue Tips Part 6: Create a services directory to keep your model tidy
Model Glue Tips Part 7: Set myself in your views

Once you've gone through a "hello world" Model-Glue application, and the basics of the framework no longer scare you, these tips are what I consider the "next step" -- you've written a "real world" MG app, and now it's time to see how to break that up, and organize it in a way that makes sense. I use most (if not all) of these tips in my own Model-Glue apps; all of them are extremely simple, yet effective when trying to keep large applications well organized, and professional.

...thanks, Mark, for putting these tips together -- they've been very helpful!

-nolan

I just finished going over the Model-Glue tutorial at nodans.com.

Hands down, this is the best Model-Glue tutorial I've seen yet! If you're still unclear as to why/how Model-Glue might benefit you (and your projects), I highly recommend checking out this tutorial.

The lessons that discuss ColdSpring wiring can get a little more abstract and hard to follow (especially if you're not familiar with that type of development). My opinion: just go slow, read each lesson carefully, and build the sample application while you read the entries. Also, be sure to read the comments at the end of each entry; if nothing else, it will help to see that we all have the same questions at times. :)

-nolan

A couple of interesting pieces of info came up at last night's BACFUG meeting.

1. The new, free, "ColdFusion Curriculum" was brought up in conversation. Kristen Schofield has a bit more info (and a link to said curriculum) on her blog.

2. The new East Bay ColdFusion Users Group will be launching in April! Last night's BACFUG was (coincidentally) hosted at the same facility that will be home to the East Bay CFUG. I talked briefly with James about his new group and exchanging information/presentations; hopefully this will be the solution that folks in the East Bay were looking for.

...though i do think these East Bay folks that complain about the drive to Adobe's building in San Francisco are a bunch of wimps. If I can make the drive in from Sacramento (and pay two bridge tolls), then the East Bay guys have no excuse. ;)

-nolan