BFusion Bound/I'm bbbaaccckkkk

If you've not noticed a blog post from me since January that's because I haven't blogged ;) Life has been busy and most of my time has been spent on things I can't just go blogging about. Besides the majority of the work is not CF related and most of the folks out there would not find much interest in it. That being said I am ecstatic to announce I'll be teaming with Matt Woodward to provide a complete day of sessions/training at BFusion concentrating on Open Source CFML. BFusion is one of those conferences that has an awesome mix of CFML and non CFML folks. Many of them college students that like PHP or some other cool open source completely free (all the time) web language. This is a great audience for Open BlueDragon and I love showing them how awesome the CF world is. I'm sad I missed CFUnited, and cf.Objective for that matter, this year but it just was not in the cards. I'll definitely be as BFusion and with luck I'll be at CF Open Summit as well. Maybe dust off my CFML portlets stuff and show you how we are using it at Kroger, hint: if you work for Kroger in a store you've seen it and probably never knew it was CF powered.

bFusion Marterials

I've spent a lot of time working through the hands on work for my TDD presentation at bFusion. Though the result may not seem like it as there are no materials (files) that you will need for the presentation. You will still want everything installed and running (coldfusion, eclipse, mxUnit) but you will need no additional files from me. You see I wanted a nontrivial example to work through but the problem with this is even if I did not speak at all 1.5 hours is not enough time to do a non trivial example. Besides TDD is much less about writing a test (anyone can do that) and much more the thought process. So inside of throwing you to the wolves to work hands on I will present and answer questions for around 30-40 (depends on ???s) minutes and the remainder of the time we work together to solve as much of the non trivial problem as we can. This will everyone understand what types of things we should think about when writing tests and how to work TDD into a real project. The reason the presentation jumped in amount of time is during the presentation we'll be dropping into the IDE a quite a few times to work through things together. I hope everyone will work along with me as you will get much more out of the session if you work along with me, as well as provide feedback!

Speaking at bFusion

Bob Flynn and is once again hosting bFlex and this year has added bFusion! bFusion is an awesome 1 day FREE(!!) event at Indiana University (Bloomington Indiana) followed by a 1 day FREE event for Flex. I won't get into the sales pitch just check out the site. I do want to pimp my 2 sessions though both of which are very near and dear to me. First is Open Source CFML Engines and second being Headfirst TDD.

In my Open Source CFML session we'll explore the open source business model and take a deep dive into how open source CFML engines will help shape the future of CFML development. There is a lot more to Open Source than just the free cost aspect we'll explore this for a brief while. We'll also discuss the differences between Platform and language. I think its just as important to recognize the value of ColdFusion as it is to see the value in CFML. At the end of the session you'll walk away armed with the knowledge you need to make a conscious well informed decision if open source CFML is the right option for you!

My second session, Head First TDD, is pretty much what the title describes it to be. We'll be diving head first into how to start developing with Tests in mind. The cool part is the Head First TDD will be hands on. I won't tell you how you should do TDD you will follow me and work with others and PRACTICE TDD. In the 1.5 hour session there might MIGHT be 20 minutes worth of presentation the remainder of the time will be used to explore TDD together with, hopefully, non-trivial examples. Since this is hands-on and interactive you'll need ColdFusion (or Railo should work), Eclipse, cfEclipse and mxUnit installed. If you'd rather you can just use pulse and get my profile, which I have talked about before. You'll still need to install a CFML engine and have mxUnit's CFML code downloaded and preferably running in ColdFusion. You'll also need an open mind and bring a little extrovert along b/c you will be working with others! You'll also need to download some CF files for the hands on but the examples I have are very boring and I am trying to come up with new ones, ones I have not finished yet. Most likely that will be done the week of the bFusion as I procrastinate and have a lot on my plate. I'll post them as son as I am happy with them.

Welp that's all I have to say for bFusion, I can't wait to see you all there!