Rooni's Ramblings

I'm back from spending 2 great days up in London at the Scotch on The Rocks ColdFusion conference which this year was held in the Tiger Tiger Bar, Picadilly. This years conference was very well organised, featured some great international and homegrown speakers and really interesting topics over 2 tracks. I've definitely come away from this years conference more excited about ColdFusion than ever before. But why though? Here's my highlights from SOTR 2010:

4.0 features on the Railo Express (Gert Franz)

Although I've always worked with Adobe's products, I attended a great presentation by Gert Franz of Railo who was extolling the virtues of their own CFML engine. Version 3.2 has some great additional features including caching, event gateways, support for HQL in CFQUERY and the ability to easily extend through the Railo extension store. Version 4 will include some massive changes to the core application and will allow you to easily extend JAVA objects and remote web services and the sweetest thing for me will be the ability to execute Railo from the command line.

Productive Work Environment & Practices (Peter Bell)

Peter Bell's presentation on productive work practices will hopefully revolutionise the way I work. Am I efficient enough in my current work environment? I have been using CFEclipse for a little over a year (yes I know I was a late starter but was far too comfortable in my old role with CFStudio) and have a print out pinned up next to me of all the CFEclipse shortcuts but have I really been bothered to read it, memorise it and use it in my day to day work to improve efficiency? The answer is no - but I sure will now. I'm also going to take some time out to review in more detail MXUnit and the Pomodoro technique. For those not familiar with the Pomodoro Technique, it is quite simply a way to effectively and efficiently manage your time. Taken from their website:

The Pomodoro Technique™ is a way to get the most out of time management. Turn time into a valuable ally to accomplish what we want to do and chart continuous improvement in the way we do it.

ColdBox Platform 3.0: Developing Sustainable ColdFusion Applications (Luis Majano)

Luis Majano's presentation on ColdBox almost left me slightly aroused....shit did I really say that about a framework? ColdBox is a framework I've always said I'd give myself time to look at, but after work's over and I've driven the 50 miles home around the M25, I've got 3 young kids and a wife that need my time so I've never been able to get round to it. I always perceived ColdBox to be "just about the documentation" - I mean that's what seemed to be its unique selling point. I'm sure that is one of it's USP's but there are also a whole lot more.

Favouring convention over configuration, ColdBox offers out of the box, SES & REST based URLS, caching, dependency injection, extensions, security, unit testing (via MXUnit) and offers brilliant IDE integration. Because it's convention based, you just drop and play your modules into their respective directories and you are off. This also makes it highly scalable. Luis also mentioned the folowing standalone frameworks that will be released in August:

• LogBox - enterprise level Logging
• MockBox - mocking expectations (eg simulating queries from your data layer)
• CacheBox - A memory aware caching system with stas & reporting
• WireBox - Next generation dependency injection allowing you to manage everything from JAVA objects to Groovy services as well as good old CFC's

Air & Printing (Luca Mezzalira)

I have been working on an HTML / Javascript Air based batch printing application for some time. I wasn't sure if I was going to get any inspiration from Luca Mezzalira's presentation because he's a flash platform developer and my Air project has been created using the ExtJs framework with a ColdFusion backend via web services. I was wrong! Luca gave a great overview of the new features in Air 2 and then focused primarily on the printing API and two open source AS3 Libraries: AlivePDF and PurePDF with some great demonstrations.

My Air batch printing application currently pulls PDF's down from our server (which handles the merging of PDF's and creating of them) and writes them to a directory on the client machine. I have then used some 3rd party software called SilentPrint that will automatically watch a given directory and send the files off to the print spool. This works extremely well but the 3rd party software isn't free so thanks to Luca, I'm going to have a good look at exposing the AlivePDF AS3 Wrapper to my HTML Air App.

SQL to HQL (John Wish)

John Wish won the award for the best ColdFusion developer to follow on social media at the Reachies which I was glad of as I had voted for him. A very talented developer and an Adobe Certified Expert in ColdFusion, John gave a thorough and informative presentation on moving from SQL (Structured Query Language) to HQL (Hibernate Query Language). I've yet to get my teeth into CF9 and specifically ORM but John gave so many demonstrations and highlighted so many gotcha's that his presentation will no doubt be invaluable when I start to tinker.

Mastering the CF Application Framework (Ben Nadel)

Great to see Ben Nadel over in the UK giving two presentations the first of which was Mastering the CF Application Framework. Ben gave a great overview of how the Application component can be used to deal with the maintaining of sessions with flash and mobile devices amongst others by intercepting requests into the Application component in the Pseudo constructor and event methods. Unfortunately I missed Ben's second presentation which was unfortunate as a colleague informed me that it was particurlarly apt for another project I am working on - exposing some of our data via a REST based API. Hopefully Ben will post the presentations up soon so I can have a good look.

Measuring Performance Improvements in CF Apps with Effective N-Tier Caching (Mike Brunt)

Having not met Mike Brunt before or heard him speak, I was more than a bit suprised to hear this rich northern English accent as I was expecting a southern American drawl! Anyway, Mike gave a really great presentation concentrating on Caching and configuring the CF Administrator for optimal performance. Who hasn't had issues with ColdFusion eating memory? Not many I suspect and getting to the bottom of it can be a PITA. Mike Brunt can apparently talk lovingly to and stroke your CF box back to life should you have any of these issues - that's why he's the self-titled CFWhisperer right?

So, two days out of the office has given me a great insight into what other CF developers are up to and what else is going on in the community. I've certainly learnt a lot over these past couple of days and hope to be able to use this new found knowledge in my day to day work. I didn't really get that much of a chance to talk to other people and have a beer there as I shot off before the awards on Monday and slightly early on Tuesday so I apologise for that. Hopefully I'll be a bit more social in Edinburgh if I can give my boss a good enough business case to get up there.

Finally, thanks to all the people that made the conference what it was - that's the organisers, Fuzzy Orange and all the speakers who take their time out to share their knowledge. The CF community is alive and well in the UK.