cf.Objective() 2008, the third instalment of the “enterprise engineering conference for ColdFusion MX Programmers” run by Jared Rypka-Hauer, is now over for another year. cf.Objective() is unique in the conference circuit in that it concentrates almost solely on advanced topics. It also seems to generate a huge buzz in the community, and attracts attendees from around the world to Minneapolis.
It seems most delegates have arrived back home and updated their blogs, so I figure it’s time to see what they all learnt over the three days…
Brian Rinaldi wrote a comprehensive wrap-up for Fusion Authority. He noted that as the CF community continues to mature, developers are looking to the more advanced tools available to them to solve problems, namely Java, and this was evident in a number of session topics. He also noted that Flex was a hot topic, with so many sessions that a developer could spend the entire conference focused solely on Flex. Brian also reviewed several sessions in detail: Selling Professional Development in a Hostile Shop by Terrence Ryan; Leveraging Code Generation by Brian Kotek; Mate Flex Framework by Laura Arguello; Transfer Caching Mechanisms by Mark Mandel; and Flex: No Frameworks Required by Maxim Porges.
Mark Mandel wrote up his highlights, which included workshops on Model-Glue, ColdSpring, and Terrence Ryan’s session on Selling Professional Development at a Hostile Shop. While he was there, Mark presented two sessions on Transfer ORM (now at version 1.0) which were well-received – watch out for an interview with Mark on SitePoint in the near future. He noted that the ColdFusion 9 information that was revealed was nothing overly surprising, but welcome nonetheless. Oh, and Mark was the lucky winner of the Nintendo Wii!
Brian Meloche posted three daily summaries – Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3 – as well as an overall review, giving the conference an ‘A’ grade. Brian goes into quite a bit of detail about each of the sessions he attended, and makes note in particular of the Open BlueDragon initiative (a beta version was released during the conference) and covers what was discussed at the BF9 “Birds of a Feather” session. He was disappointed that more emphasis was not placed on the need for a dedicated ColdFusion IDE from Adobe.
A lot of material was published post-conference! Some more highlights include:
- Brian Kotek took away from the conference an impression that ColdFusion is at a crossroads. His thoughts on the future direction of the language are an interesting read.
- Terrence Ryan posted his conference postscript in easy to read bullet points – and created a cf.Objective() 2009 to-do list.
- Peter Bell summed up a whole stack of the presentations, noting the cf.Objective() “rocked”.
- Adam Lehman posted about the suggestion that cf.Objective() might expand to Europe and/or Australia.
- Free copies of the latest issue of the Fusion Authority Quarterly Update were distributed to attendees.
- Andy Powell posted his cf.Objective() Flickr stream in a funky slideshow.
A number of presenters have provided session materials online – slides and code samples:
- Jason Delmore’s Developing ColdFusion Java Hybrid Applications
- Phil Nacelli’s Leveraging Basic Design Patterns in ColdFusion
- Peter J Farrell’s What’s New in Mach-II 1.6 and Using ANT
- Raymond Camden’s Spry and Model-Glue sessions
- Peter Bell’s Software Product Line Presentation
- Brian Kotek’s Leveraging Code Generation
- John Mason’s Unit Testing and PCI-DSS
- Dan Wilson’s From Procedural to OO (slides linked from bottom of Chris Phillips’ session review)
- Terrence Ryan’s Selling Professional Development Techniques
- Andrew Powell’s Enterprise MVC with ColdFusion and Java
One factor that nearly every post mentioned was that it’s the people that make cf.Objective() so great. Steve Bryant resisted the urge to do some name-dropping, while Ben Nadel likened the experience to walking among giants. It’s certainly a recurring theme – as was the wish of many attendees to be back for cf.Objective() 2009!
Kay Smoljak
