CFUnited Presentation Roudup

CFunited was busy for everyone involved so I have no excuse for falling behind in making blog entries as many others just as busy as I did kept up just fine. I'll only post 2 entries for CFUnited this one with all my presentations and then a second one recapping my CFUnited experience (spoiler: It kicked ass!). On with the recap!

Red Green Refactor
PDF Keynote

I was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to present this topic 2 times at the conference. I feel like both presentations were solid and entertaining; including a reference to old Purple Pants (if you do not know, probably best not to ask :) ). Barney B was disappointed in my lack of gratuitous vulgarity, I'll attempt to not let him down next year. I got really good feedback, even testimonial that TDD does speed up development!

Fusebox Past Present Future (Busy Developers Guide to Fusebox)
PDF Keynote

This was a bit awkward given the current situation surrounding Fusebox and Myself. The first half I did my best to sell on the framework and break down some of the old myths. At about 5:55 I entered my 5th Myth: Fusebox is Dead and instead of really getting into that I made the attendees aware of the current state (at the time) and announced I was resigning. I think spent the second half of the presentation talking about FuseNG (or Fork-a-doodle-doo). Expect more entries soon surrounding FuseNG 1.0 (code named Cuddles).

Code Review and Team Dynamics
PDF Keynote

This started my 3 hour marathon of presenting. It was also a late add to the conference, I was subbing for Jake Munson who was unable to present do to person reasons. I love this presentation, I've given it a few times previous. I felt really good about my delivery and I think everyone got something out of the presentation. I think I might create a new presentation on the same vein but with more emphasis on Team Dynamics and mentoring for next years conferences. I appreciate all the positive feedback from everyone!

Busy Developers Guide to Java Part 1
PDF Keynote

This was one of those presentations with so much content it has to go perfect or you run out of time. I screwed up 2 times and ran over. I was also called Drill Sgt. and Reverend after this presentation. Apparently I was too brash haha! I felt everyone still learn a great deal about java and I got some great positive feedback as well, definitely help enable folks in this one. This was the second session I got to repeat. The second iteration I tried not to preach as much I also pulled some content that might have been too preachy. I ended right on time and had some great interaction, just like the first time. I think this session has great replay potential for future conferences.

Busy Developers Guide to Java Part 2
PDF Keynote

This was my final presentation of the 3 hour presentation marathon. I'll admit that about halfway through the Part1 session I felt ill. This continued into part 2. About half ways through one of the most embarrassing things happened, I had to excuse myself from the presentation for a moment. Luckily this was the last session of the day and everyone was very understanding and allowed me to run over the time and finish the content. I appreciate everyone's patients with me. Aside from the total misery I was in as far as how I felt I think this presentation was awesome. I got good participation from the attendees and very positive feedback from many folks. Anytime I stick around after a session to answer additional probing questions seeking to learn more is awesome.

Overall I had a blast presenting. I hope everyone attending my presentations was entertained and learned or was motivate. As long as I was able to positively affected at least one individual that is all the more I can ask for as a presenter the rest is gravy. Our community is growing and I am glad to be part of the growth. Here's to CFUnited and any other conference that facilitates collaboration and growing! Thanks Stellr for organizing, promoting and kicking ass.

CFUnited Introduction to Java

For anyone attending my Java part 1 session I have checked in all of my sample code to my SVN repo:

http://svn.cfinnovate.com/trunk/presentation-materials/

There are 2 Eclipse projects you will want to download from the repo. I wanted to make this available ahead of time for anyone interested in following along! I'd recommend download it now and then syncing at the conference, download speeds have historically sucked at conferences.

I do not think part 2 will have enough time for much code. Since it is all about JEE environment we'll spend most of our example time exploring the ColdFusion installation (Hopefully you have this already!).

CFML Portlets

Finally the presentation has been given and the world (albeit a small world) has got its first glimpse at what we (my self and Bob Burns) have kept to ourselves for way too long. I haven't really said much recently and it's because I have been very busy getting ready for presentations at cfObjective. I don't think I mentioned Bob enough, he really was to catalyst for this project many moons ago. He rocks in so many ways I really can not describe it. The presentation slides can be downloaded here. The project documentation is a bit shallow right now, that will change, and all the information will be on the Wiki. The code is in SVN (http://svn.cfinnovate.com). I'll keep this short but I promised links on my blog so there you go. If you are interested in hearing more about CFML portlets let me know I'll oblige!

Got the Beta Blues?

Rightly or not the cf-talk boards have had threads where it was made known ColdFusion 9 is in beta testing. Last year Adobe announced they would be more transparent in the development, even announcing the ColdFusion advisory board. It seems like that transparency is a slow build, which I understand as nothing happens over night. I did want to take a second to pimp OpenBlueDragon and say we are working hard to be as as transparent as we can be. If you have the Beta Blues and want to share some ideas on how you thinkCFML can be made stronger, more competitive, or otherwise improve your life check out Open BlueDragon's google group and feel free to submit a ticket to our ticket system! CFML is a great language and I am confident ColdFusion 9 will deliver a great new set of functionality, I also have to say I am very impressed with how OpenBD has progressed through the months. Did you know we are considering adding cfvideoplayer and well as cfvideo? We'll talk more about this as soon as we figure out how we think it should work, until then you tell us how you think it should work. Also add it as a favorite so we can gauge the interest in this feature!

Polyglot Programming and CFML Developers

For those that do not know what Polyglot Programming is allow me to introduce you to the term! It really sounds fancy but when it comes right down to it Polyglot Programming is the utilization of multiple languages to complete a task. We all are more or less polyglot programmers; using CFML, ECMAScript (Javascript or Actionscript), CSS, HTML, and (some of us) Flex/Flash. So for this discussion we'll refine Polyglot Programming down to using multiple server side languages to accomplish a task (as this is the really discussion going on most of the time these days). I think ever since CFML was available on the Java platform many of us began to be partial polyglots (I know this literally would mean we are each programs written in multiple languages but I'm going to use it to describe ourselves instead). As a point of reference one of my first projects I worked on with ColdFusion MX I used Java to zip content. The reason I say partial polyglots is I didn't really write Java I just used CFML to execute a couple of Java objects. Looking beyond a CFML developer barely learning enough Java to dip down into the Java layer, what is the typical growth path of a CFML developer?

CFML is such a high level language the only level above CFML right now would be frameworks, or a custom DSL. I get the feeling that frameworks is where the average CFML developer interested in growing spends his/her time, learning frameworks. This is a good practice as one can learn a great deal from frameworks, not to mention the benefit of using frameworks in many instances. The problem I see here is the average CFML developer is not learning CFML's foundational language, Java*, and not really wandering that far from their comfort zone. Sure frameworks might force you to learn a new technique or push you into a new paradigm but you are still working in CFML. ColdFusion has done a spectacular job hiding the java underpinning behind a curtain. While that lowers the barrier to entry, which is a good thing to grow a community, I think it is a shame too. A CFML developer can blissfully develop code without ever understanding how it is their application works. On one side that's exactly what one would want to look for in a platform. From another perspective, when it comes to developer growth and incentive to grow, this may not be the best thing. Where is the incentive to learn how a war is deployed to a app server? How many CFML developers know what a context root is or how it might affect their application if the context root is not /. I am going to guess the average CFML developer may not even be familiar with what a many of the terms I just talked about are, and even the terms that sound familiar many may not truly understand how they fit together. Without dipping a little further into Java the typical CFML developer can not realize the true power of polyglot programming that can be leveraged on the Java platform. A superb example of someone that has found, for him, a great balance of polyglot programming is Andy Powell. His presentation at cf.O outlined how his projects leveraged Java (with Hibernate and Spring) and CFML. At Kroger we use Spring Security in all of our [new] CFML application as well as an ever growing library of Java classes that allow us to share IP with the Java side of the house. Another good example of polyglot programming, with an added bonus of a lower barrier to entry, would be cf_groovy, Barney Boisvert's project. I've not had the time to look into much yet but the few blog entries Barney has posted have been fascinating. If you are interested in learning more about Java and the JEE environment that most CFML engines run in but don't know where to start leave a comment/question. Let me know if you will be at cfUnited. If there is enough interest I will setup a late night pow-wow in the Lafayette room to introduce folks to Java/JEE.

* maybe .Net for those on BD.Net