I am very honored to say that I was able to take part in this episode of the podcast. We were discussing “Promoting CFML Outside of the CFML Community”. I feel we came up with some great ideas. Some of them are a bit pie-in-the-sky, but some of them are tangible.

On a personal note, Brian did an excellent job editing this podcast. I know I am a soft talker and I tend to forget to annunciate most of the time. I tried to speak up during the podcast, but I am sure that Brian had to do a lot of work to get my voice as loud as he did. It is still low in some places, but it would have been a lot worse!
Thanks Brian!

I went into this session with a basic understanding that BlazeDS and LiveCycle Data Services [LCDS] are both tools that can be used to allow Flex to communicate with a ColdFusion backend.

I took a *lot* of notes during this session…
Since the presentation is available as a recorded connect session (linked above), I don’t think I need to put all of my notes online.
What follows are high level notes on what was covered.

Tom explained the history of the product currently known as LifeCycle Data Services (or LCDS).
He went on to explain the origins of the BlazeDS product.
What are the differences?
LCDS is: RPC, Messaging, Data Management, Flash Remoting
BlazeDS is: RPC, Messaging, Flash Remoting [NO Data Management]
Tom gave very detailed explanations for each of those terms and what they mean in the context of Data Services.

Tom went on to demo a simple Chat app built with Flex, with a CF backend.
He also demoed a simple data entry app, then he showed a more complex version of the same app with conflict handling, then an even more complex example with a pretty slick conflict handler.

This session was everything I wanted and more. I know have a much better understanding of what the differences between these 2 products are, and I have tangible examples of how these products can be used to make better applications.

Great job, Tom!

I was not able to find the slides available online, so I have included some of my notes below.

• Objects are about Behavior (don’t micromanage, forget about the data and the database)
• Objects interact with other objects by sending/receiving messages
• Objects should be minimal, complete
• Objects should be Open (for extension) and Closed (from modification)
• He recommends in his Java class that methods should be no longer than 6 lines. Since CF is more verbose, maybe 15 lines max.

Hal gave an example of an Employee scenario where you might be inclined to have an employee that can be either hourly or salaried. I would do a terrible job of trying to explain this, so I found a post by Brian Kotek that goes over this in detail from a talk Hal gave at CF.Objective().

Hal continued:

• prefer composition or aggregation over inheratence. i.e. “is a” vs “has a”
• use design patters
• create custom exceptions
• bundle components behind a facade
• create coding standards
• don’t confuse “Java” with “OO”
• use onMissingMethod for getters/setters
• Ask “Why?”
• Approach development systematically; start with the UI, forget the DB.
• Don’t force everything into objects, not everything belongs there.

He demoed a really cool little app that was able to inspect objects.
I wrote down “persistence generator, object inspector”, but I don’t exactly know what he called this app, nor do I remember if this was something he was planning on releasing.
Basically, he had this app inspecting the Henry VIII family tree.
Anyway, I was a bit overwhelmed by the end of the preso, so that is pretty much all I remember.

I got to this presentation a bit late.
When I arrived, Ray was discussing “plumbing”.

• Plumbing
  • XML
    • use toXML.cfc to generate XML
    • Ray gave a helpful hint that you should use Java’s StringBuffer for working with larger text, in place of a regular CFSet.
  • JSON
    • native in CF 8 (serializeJSON)
    • don’t serialize a CFC
    • queries get funky w/ deserialize
  • CFCs
    • returnFormat
      • clarifies return behavior; plain, JSON, WDDX
    • service proxies
      • handle loading app/session CFCs
  • onRequest
    • Evil Incarnate – avoid using if at all possible
• Performance
  • JSON > XML
• Debugging
  • Ajax Debugger
  • Firebug
  • Logging
  • ColdFusion Debugger

This was a great presentation. This is specifically the kind of preso that I come to CFUnited for.
I know how to use AJAX to make something work, but a presentation like this one makes me question the way I do things, and ask questions. Why did I do it this way, why not that way? etc.
There is also a bit of “Lessons Learned” and best practices shared here as well.
Ray wasn’t saying “You must do it this way”, but rather… I tried to do it that way, and that blew up in my face. What you really need to do is this…

Thanks Ray!

Some of my notes are below:
RAD OO:
– Patterns [enable you to quickly build OO Apps]
– Collection of tools

RAD OO IS NOT:
– Standard Approach [one size does not fit all]
– Suitable for all projects [some projects are small enough that they don't justify the extra overhead]
– hack job [not solutions to fix a problem quickly that could lead to hard to maintain code]
RAD OO IS:
– Fast
– DRY [Don't Repeat Yourself]
– Maintainable

Actually, most of my notes appear to be straight from the slides, so I won’t bother repeating them.
A quick Google search finds the presentation online in other places. This version is apparently from Web Maniacs 2008.

I got a lot out of this presentation, and plan to take the automation ideas and find places I can use them for my client.

• TeraTech Keynote – I felt this was kind of slow… but that could just be because it was early, and I was very, very tired. and it was the first session. Anyway, Micheal gave a presentation on best practices, or at least that is what I think it was about. It was a question and answer format, and it seemed the group was still asleep, so there wasn’t much participation.
• Adobe Keynote – Interesting feature sneak peaks for CF 9… I am sure the blog world is already lit-up with details and a thorough analysis…
• RAD OO [Peter Bell] – This was a great session…
• Ajax and CF with Spry [Ray Camden] – Very good session with Ray Camden. I got more out of this in regard to how to use CFCs most efficiently with AJAX than I did with the Spry pieces. I don’t actually remember him going into great detail at all on Spry. He did mention (as he has said on his blog) that he has played with JQuery a bit recently and is liking some of the things he has used.
• OO Best Practices [Hal Helms] – Wow. I really enjoy Hal’s presentations. I always learn a lot in his sessions and this was no exception.
• BlazeDS and LiveCycle Data Services for CF 8 [Tom Jordahl] – Very good overview of what each product does/does not do…
• BOF – Improving Quality thru Code Reviews and Mentoring [Adam something...] – Great chat session. Lots of open group discussion.

I will go into a greater detail on each of these sessions tomorrow.

Seth Bienek (Manager of the HOUCFUG) and I decided to save a bit of cash and share a Hotel for the trip. Seth saved us a lot of money by finding a great little apartment a couple blocks from the conference for half of what we were going to pay at the conference hotel. Woot! It turned out really well so far; we are actually closer to the conference than the designated conference hotel!

After arriving and getting settled in yesterday, we spent most of the day walking around downtown. The weather was perfect, and it is a great town for sight-seeing. We couldn’t decide on where to eat lunch, so we ended up in a small little place. I forget the name, but the food was okay. For supper, we found Elephant & Castle pub and restaurant. The fish and chips was pretty good, as was my girly drink. I know, I know… I went to a pub and had a mixed drink instead of a pint, what was I thinking? lol.

We also went to MiniMAX last night, but I wrote about that in a separate post.

Ok, time to leave to get breakfast and head out to the conference.

The Hyatt had our meeting room setup in a very hard to find location. Due to some kind of upgrades/work being done on some of the levels, we were not able to utilize the escalators, and had to find a hidden elevator to get down to the conference room.
We were about 10-15 minutes late for the 8pm start time. But when we got there, we realized that we hadn’t missed anything yet. It seems that through some communications error, there was no projector available for the presenters. It took almost 45 minutes for the projector issue to be resolved.

Adam Bell performed a skit parodying Al Gore; having him confuse ColdFusion with Cold Fusion. The premise was good, but I didn’t really like it.
That may not be their fault. The conference was already running almost an hour behind, it felt hot in the room (was it just me?), and I felt that there were parts of the dialog that kept dragging on and on and on for no real added comedic benefit.

Chaz Chumley gave a presentation on Dreamweaver. He demoed some of the new features in Dreamweaver CS4. I don’t use Dreamweaver and do no plan on updating anytime soon, so I really don’t have much to say about this session.

Adam Bell gave a demo/preso on Spry from a non-programmers point of view.
He demoed some features he came up with for various clients using Spry to do some JS GUI magic to give the clients the rich application experience they were looking for, without spending a lot of time trying to code all the functionality by hand.

Simon Free gave an excellent and entertaining presentation on the differences between Blaze DS and LifeCycle. He is an excellent public speaker and he was able to get the whole audience to participate. He very clearly outlined differences between the two competing technologies and the pros/cons of each.

Yancy Wharton gave a presentation on AIR. Frankly, this one almost put me to sleep. If I hadn’t played around with AIR before, I can see how some of the material would have been interesting, but it was a little to dry and basic for me…

Nathaniel Kelso gave us a demo/preso focusing on using Character Styles in Illustrator as well as a basic overview of what CSS does for you in a variety of places (HTML, FLEX, etc). I am completely ignorant of the Illustrator tool, and have no use for the product line, so this presentation did not mean much to me, other than giving me a little more knowledge as to what Illustrator is actually used for.

Simon Horwith, dispite his best efforts to the contrary, gave us a very funny presentation. It seems like the preso was a shorted version of what he will be covering in longer sessions throughout the CFUNITED conference. That by itself would be a good enough presentation… but Simon’s laptop had a mind of it’s own. It appeared as though the trackpad was locking up in the “scroll up” or scroll down” modes, but it affected different applications differently. In some windows he opened, it would scroll immediately to the bottom, in others, it would keep scrolling up and prevent you from scrolling down, and if that wasn’t enough, on some screens the text kept resizing bigger and bigger!
This is all stuff that I am sure falls under the category of “Guess you had to be there”, but it sure was funny when it was happening.

In a rare luckly moment I won a copy of O’Reillys ‘Flex 3 Cookbook’!
Seth won ‘Adobe AIR for JS Devs’.

I do want to end by saying that even though some of my comments seem to be a bit on the non-positive side above, I definitely appreciate the amount of work and dedication that it took to pull all this together. Thanks guys!