ColdFusion Beyond

The final day of cf.Objective() 2012 offers five slots of sessions plus the closing remarks. Often times with conferences, it feels like the last day gets a bit of the shaft, with the least favorite sessions pushed there because so many folks bail out before the conference ends. I was therefore happy to find that other than the pre-lunch slot, I was able to find something to go to throughout the day and, for the most part, it was all useful info. Yay!

Less CSS, Meet ColdFusion - Nathan Strutz

This session was alternately frustrating and very interesting. On the whole, I walked away feeling like LESS CSS might be worth looking into and could do some cool things, but it was an aggravating journey. It was clear Nathan knew his topic but he kind of forgot to explain what LESS CSS was. He did give lots of code examples, though they were at the start (which were interest piquing for sure) before he explained how you actually use this stuff. I was able to follow along and eventually figured it out, though I'm still not sure I really understood about how to compile it all. Still the basic idea sounds interesting (pseudo-programmable CSS!) so I'll be looking into it more.

Authentication Made Easy Using Twitter, Facebook, Google, and More - Billy Cravens

Billy certainly wasn't kidding when he talked about making it look easy. Wow! I always figured such stuff would be ridiculously complicated. He gave a great overview of the various options with OpenID and oAuth, along with demonstrations. The only minor negative for me is I have no particular real world application for it myself, but at least now if the need arises I'll be much more ready to go for it :)

Enterprise Search with ColdFusion Solr - Dan Sirucek

Dear Dan, thank you for making me love Solr :) Seriously, we have a few apps using Verity so of course we were excited to hear about Solr, but actually getting to see how to do it and how to go way beyond just what ColdFusion ships with was very useful, as was his details on how to set up master/slaves.

Making High-Performance Caching Easy with ColdFusion - Brian Klass

I was a bit leery of this one after the second day's similar session, but I'm so so glad I went! Besides actually explaining what EhCache was, Brian went through how to use the new caching features of CF 9 (as well as some CF10 stuff), how to avoid misusing them, and ways to help decide when and what to cache. This session had me so excited not only because it will of great use in our work applications once we finish migrating to CF9, but because it solved a problem I'd be wrestling with that was delaying the launch of the redo of my personal site, An Eclectic World. That night I put what I'd learned into practice and danced around my hotel in giddiness at the crazy performance boost. I suspect if I'd been to this one before the second day's caching one, I might have understood the second day one's just a little bit better.

The closing remarks were, well, closing remarks LOL. Adorable little girl recruited to help give away raffle goodies (we won nothing) and then cf.Objective() 2012 was officially over. We did make an attempt at being social this day, with my partner trying to recruit folks on Twitter to join us for dinner but no one seemed to respond (and Twitter really sucks for actual conversation, IMHO). With that, this year's conference was done for us. We left for home the next morning and bid Minneapolis a fond fair thee well. Hopefully we'll be visiting again next year!

The second day of cf.Objective() 2012 is the big day for sessions, with six slots of sessions spanning from 9-5, followed by a dinner break and the birds of a feather (BoF) stuff. I'll go ahead and note, we didn't go to any of the BoF stuff. I'm not a social person by nature, so that part had no appeal and none of the topics seemed like something that would be of interest to me. I was also still a bit annoyed that the submissions and voting for BoF all required Twitter accounts. I don't tweet, I don't have an account, and I refuse to sign up just for that. Should have used FaceBook, way way way more users (as I learned in one of the second day's sessions).

Managing Your Software Development Life Cycle - Jason Delmore

Although we are a development "shop" of two + a manager (who isn't a coder), we are still trying to find ways to deal with our software development life cycle. We are way further along than we were a few years ago, when we basically had nothing. It was a free for all with our clients of whoever got to their pet developer first (we also had four developers back then). These days we do have a basic "contract" even though all of our clients are internal and we've been working on having set life cycles. Jason gave a great overview of some development methodologies and, even better, how to go about deciding which one might work for your situation. He threw out a lot of tools and showed some examples of their work flow. It wouldn't all work in our shop, but it gave some starting points for suggestions on ways we can improve our system, particularly if we ever get more developers.

10 Steps to Move Use of Caching Beyond Basics - Rob Brooks-Bilson

Unfortunately, this session ended up being a complete waste of time for me other than giving me some time to work on stuff from work. It really didn't match its session description at all, which said it would explore "10 steps you can take to move your use of caching beyond what ColdFusion provides out of the box". In reality, it was all about using ehcache and I guess the "10 steps" were the ways he talked about using it. Unfortunately, he didn't bother opening by explaining what ehcache was and seemed to presume you already had pretty advanced knowledge of it. Since I didn't, most of it just went over my head.

ESAPI and ColdFusion: "Security, Authentication, and Encoding, oh my!" - Matt Gifford

One of the best sessions of the conference for sure! Both my partner and I went to this one and I think I can say we both thought it worth our time. I'd seen the letters "ESAPI" but had no idea what it was or why I should care. Matt did a great job of explaining what it was, how to use it, and most importantly why to use (and the cons of using it). Like Pete from the day one presentation, Matt didn't waste time focusing on SQL injection attacks that can be handled by CFQUERYPARAM. We both came away with the beginnings of our plans to get this implemented in our shop with our next project.

CFML Mythbusters: 10 Coding Myths Put to the Test - Mark Drew

This was a fun presentation mostly because Mark is kind of nuts and the audience seemed to have fun having random arguments over the results of his testing. Using the Mythbusters model, Mark went through a few commonly repeated "truths" about ColdFusion and tested them on both Railo and ColdFusion 10 instances. Some were kind of "oh" things but they did at least disprove some silly statements made. A few had surprising results, and I was really surprised as how many folks seemed to hate the IsDefined() function. He did debunk some ideas about its performance, but still called it bad to use which I didn't quite get. Was nice to see that the idea of "minifying" ColdFusion code would improve performance was completely debunked - it just makes the code hard to read.

How to Pimp Our Your Model - Scott Stroz

OMG, where was this session when we first got started using frameworks??? Seriously, if you are like we were two years ago, having no idea what a framework is, why you'd use it, and what the heck a model-view-controller session is, you need to go to this if it is offered next year or at another conference. Not only did Scott do a great job explaining it all in an easy to understand manner, but he also gave us permission to take it slow and not try to do it all at once!

We skipped the last set of sessions for the day. None of the ones available in that slot were of interest, so we went to dinner early instead. Other than that though, only the one session noted above felt like a waste of time. All the rest I definitely walked away from with some good info, so a great day overall.

So let's talk sessions! As in the sessions I attended at cf.Objective() not ColdFusion sessions ;-) Fair warning, I'm honest of my views, positive or negative. For the first day, I hit five sessions. The titles link to the presentation slides if they have been posted online and I could find them.

Introduction to HTML 5 - Ray Camden

You really can't go wrong by starting your day off with a session by Ray, developer evangelist for Adobe, multiple published author, and just an all around fav in the ColdFusion community. I've been avoiding the whole HTML5 thing for awhile, seeing it more like a gimmick or fad than anything else. However in my continued efforts to step up my game, I figured I should at least get some sort of intro do it and Ray gave a great one. It was easy to understand for someone who pretty much just knew "HTML5" and "next big thing" about it. He gave a lot of great examples and an overview of stuff that actually made sense to me and would be great to have. The only down side was most browsers barely support any of it yet, so while it will be cool to play with one day, it won't be today. When the time comes, though, I'll be ready thanks to this session!

Using Amazon Services - Simon Free

Of the sessions available in this hour, this one seemed like it would be the most useful, though more for my private developing versus my work stuff. In some regards, I was a bit disappointed. Simon is a great speaker and fun to listen to, but I ended up finding that the info was less useful than I expected. He did discuss some of the basics of accessing AWS items with ColdFusion, but the bulk of the session was running through a few of the services and what they do, but only for the email did he give any compelling reason why it might be better to do AWS versus using your own, particularly with the prices of some of this stuff. I do agree with him that the docs can be very hit or miss and the warning about a possibility of big bills was a good one.

Enterprise JavaScript Applications - Simeon Bateman

This session was really the first big disappointment for me. I was expecting an intro/overview to some JavaScript frameworks and tools, but it seemed like Simeon presumed we all already knew all about them and after just briefly noting that Backbone JS was a framework, he jumped straight in what seemed like a lot of complex code for Backbone JS. No discussion of why we'd want to make it even more complicated or how this improves applications. (I never go along with the "it just does" idea - explain it so I can actually see why it's better). He also just talked way way way too fast, to the point I finally just gave up trying to follow him until near the end and instead worked on some work stuff until the session ended.

Practical Performance - Make It Go Fast! - Dan Wilson

Another of my favorite speakers! Besides learning that he is from my home state, this session gave me a ton of info the sort through. It was almost a little too much, but it was all so good! Learning more about that JVM mess was great, as was his clearing up a misconception I had about indexing. I think one question that really struck home for me was asking if the app really has to be 100% real time or can it be cached for 5 minutes? 1 minute? .5 seconds? In many cases, the answer for our apps is yes, and we could save so much processing with just some basic caching!

Writing Secure CFML - Pete Freitag

The last session of my first day, and so so good! In our shop, we are beyond the basic security stuff (like using CFQUERYPARAM), but of course we're always looking for more ways to improve, so it was great to have a session that didn't focus just on SQL Injection, but on some other topics! Like session hijacking, something we hadn't really thought much about, doing more secure file uploads, and ways to defend against cross script hacking. I'll be looking up AntiSamy and combined with this session, we're already planning to start implementing ESAPI in our applications.

So for the first day, three great sessions, one eh one, and one I would have done better skipping all together. Not really so bad as far as conferences go. One complaint I did find myself having throughout the conference was the number of presentations that delivered as if you were already on CF10 or about to go to it. I get folks were excited about it, but it came out just a few days before the conference and not every organization has the budget or resources to upgrade immediately. So having so much CF 10 focus in this year's conference just annoyed me in general. Don't get me wrong, I know next year will be all CF10, which is appropriate, but for this year, focus on CF 9 and mention CF 10 when it's so new its barely even shipped yet!

The conference technically started May 16th with check-in followed by a reception. Check in was pretty quick - find your name on your table and then you get your "swag" bag. In this case a small blue canvas shopping bag and a sticky note pad. Yeah....the bag seemed woefully oversized for the handful of flyers and the conference book it contained. Now I do like a good canvas bag, I try to use them for most of my shopping, but this one is a bit too small to be really usable for my needs. Might give it to my sweetie for when he's on the bike though. For the reception, it was basically everyone in a room or milling around outside with an open bar. We kind of hung around on the wall a few minutes then left - I'm not social by nature (ironic with all the blogging and what not, I know), and since my partner didn't see anyone he remembered from last year I got to escape. Instead we went and got dinner then back to our respective rooms to rest up for the real start to he conference in the morning!

Side note: All three days, breakfast was provided for free and it sucked the first two days (we didn't bother checking on the third). Sorry, if you like sticky sweets and nuts, its great. For those who don't like that for breakfast or who don't eat nuts, it sucked. And the coffee was so freaking strong it could put hairs on your chest! Gag. How about just plain old muffins? Normal pastries? Cereal and milk? Ya can't go wrong with Froot Loops!

Anyway, day one started with the opening remarks and the keynote. This was apparently the seventh year cf.Objective has been held, and there were 325 attendees (a new record). They also announced that Adobe has announced that Adobe MAX is moving to May, which would basically put it in the same month as cf.Objective() is normally held. When they polled the audience, few people seemed to think it mattered, but I have to wonder. I know for us, we'd still choose cf.Objective() because our organization just can't afford to send one of us, much less both of us, to MAX. Insanely expensive. Many others might also feel that way, but what about the speakers and sponsors? And if cf.Objective() becomes a "competitor" will Adobe still sponsor and work with them? It will be interesting to see if they choose to move Objective or not.

Oh, and we had one more swag item - a cf.Objective() 2012 towel! I guess they arrived late, but after the keynote was done they were available in the sponsor area. Now I'll admit, it is a pretty nice towel. Soft and a pretty blue. It isn't so good for use after a shower as it isn't super absorbent, but would make a great pool towel :-)

Another side note: This year saw more first-time attendees than usual and more women. They held a women's breakfast and some photo thing, but I skipped all of it. I'm a woman, yes, but I'm not there because I'm a woman. I'm there because I'm a web developer. Or maybe I'm just anti-social and I really don't get the whole "women-centric" idea. Besides, I wasn't going to abandon my bud even if the women's breakfast mentioned actually having eggs and other real foods. Now the more first-timers bit is great, ColdFusion needs more open developers. In the last year I've seen so many sites running ColdFusion but where are their developers hiding? Come out of the closet guys and get your tushes to these conferences! It helps show we exist!

With the opening remarks out of the way, Rakshith Naresh (Product Manager for ColdFusion) took the stage, briefly joined by Hermant Khandelwal (Senior Engineering Manager for ColdFusion server and ColdFusion Builder), to talk about ColdFusion 10, which launched on the 15th. He discussed their methodology for building the release and the three "messaging pillars" they focused on: embracing futuristic technologies, deploying enterprise ready applications through an increased security focus, and improving developer productivity by continuing to make it easy to build applications quickly. All in all, he mentioned a lot of great things that ColdFusion 10 includes, such as the replacement of JRUN with Tomcat, support for MS Office 1020 files, greatly improved caching, the grown up scheduler system, all the HTML 5 integrations, etc.

He also talked about ColdFusion "on the cloud" at Amazon, the release of the ColdFusion 10 certification exams, and that ColdFusion 11 is already being worked on. One thing I was particularly excited about was they spent some time talking about Adobe's efforts to try to solve the issue of seeming developer scarcity, particularly by reaching out to the Java community, continued releases of white papers, spreading the message of the benefits of ColdFusion, and the positive new analyst briefings with the launch of CF 10. All in all it sounded very positive and, to me at least, it affirmed that Adobe is not trying to dump ColdFusion and that they are fully embracing and supporting it.

And no, ColdFusion is not dead!

Our trip to cf.Objective() 2012 started on Tuesday. We arrived in Minneapolis in the early evening, and after some minor issues with SuperShuttle (i.e. the counter girl falling asleep and not telling us the driver had arrived and was waiting), we arrived at our hotel around 8. The venue for the conference was the Hyatt Regency on Nicollet Mall. It is in the process of finishing a major renovation, and I've seen comments on other blogs and that Twitter thing that it is a great hotel to stay in. Alas, we didn't get to find out.

For state employees, such as myself, we will only a set per diem amount for a hotel stay, which for the Minneapolis area is $121 a night. So we were happy to see that the conference organizers had negotiated with the hotel to have some rooms available at that government rate, versus the $169/night regular attendees would pay (which was still WAY below the usual rates for that hotel). Alas, when our business coordinator called to book our rooms, she was told we didn't qualify for the government rate. Issues with the way the state of Texas can act sometimes, we are still a government entity, so yeah, we do. I contacted the folks at Best Meetings and they got it straighten out, so she tried again to book our rooms and then was told they had no more available at the government rate! Um....okay, so why didn't you just say that in the first place?

It was annoying and we ended up switching to the Millennium Hotel, which is directly across the street. They gave us the government rate even though they had no room block for the conference or the like, which was a primary criteria in choosing a hotel. The location, of course, was as ideal as we could get to without being in the venue hotel (they were even connected by a skywalk - which seems to be a common feature in the downtown area). The Millennium was a comfortable place. The bed was large and plush, the seating chair was comfortable, and the view was great (we were on the 12th floor). The hotel is clearly showing signs of age, with some peeling wall paper and rust in a few spots, but it was clean and met our needs. The staff was also super friendly throughout the hotel which is a big bonus IMHO.

My only big complaint is that they charged for Internet access in the room. $9.95 a night to have slow, broken wifi in my room. Seriously?? In this day in age when I can go stay at a $50/night place and get free wifi that works, I get cruddy wifi that I pay a small fortune for in a place costing 3-4 times that?? I guess I should consider myself lucky in some regards, 1 - I am getting reimbursed for the costs and 2 - apparently the Hyatt was charging $20/night. @_@ Once the conference got under way, there was completely free wifi in the session rooms, except for one room which was a complete dead zone (wifi was "connecting" but never giving an IP). No idea what was up with that one room - both rooms beside it and the hotel's restaurant had strong signals and I could connect to the wifi no problem. In either case, except for the dead room, the cf.Objective() free wifi was way better than our hotel's paid one. At the Millennium, I was unable to FTP nor access the SVN on our servers, even though I successfully connected with the VPN and could FTP to my personal sites. So dealing with work issues back home had to wait until I was between conference sessions (or sometimes in them) on the better wifi that actually worked.

Regardless of whether you were in the Hyatt or the Millennium, the location was awesome for getting around without having a car. Nestled in the heart of downtown Minneapolis, there were tons of dining and shopping options within walking distance, as well as a seriously well interlaced bus system (yay electric hybrid buses!) and a light rail system that had a stop nearby and went a variety of places. We rode it twice out to the Mall of America - which has a freaking mini-amusement park in it and an aquarium! And Hello Kitty fans, two words: Sanrio Store!! There is also an awesome Lego store with huge Lego models and a wall where you can buy any color lego in any of the regular shapes. Too fun!

One of the perks of travelling is trying new foods, so we made it a rule that we would not eat at any restaurant twice, which were easily able to keep. In fact we had some places on our "to try" list we just couldn't fit in - not enough meals LOL For future travellers/attendees, my quickly recommendations on food within walking distance the area (or light rail):

• Hell's Kitchen - seriously yummy breakfast, the scrambled eggs were perfectly velvety and the cornmeal pancakes were so good! - $10-20/person for breakfast
• Tucci Bennuch - Italian place in the Mall of America, uses local sourced ingredients, all fresh made, and OMG that baked spaghetti is so good!! - $20-30 for dinner (can do reservations online)
• Ichiban Japanese Steakhouse - teppanyaki grill where you can enjoy seeing very friendly, attentive waitresses in adorable kimonos, a fun cooking show, and they have some tasty fruit drinks (with or without spirits) that come in cute porcelain mug (I got the Neko) - $30-50/person (can do reservations online)
• Fogo de Chao - Brazilian Steakhouse where you sit down, and folks just keep offering you delicious meats prepared the "gaucho" way, caramelized bananas, pão de queijo (a tasty cheese bread), mashed potatoes, and fried polenta. When you have enough, flip a card to take a break, then flip it back to get more coming in. It's expensive, no lie, but an experience worth trying at least once! - $60/person
• Ping's Szechuan - it may not look like much from the outside, but OMG so good! Warning, the egg rolls are insanely huge - try the hot pot, it is delicious! Bring a big appetite, they feed you big here - $10-20/person

The Minneapolis-St. Paul airport is rather nice, IMHO. It is nicely designed, with pretty floors and lots of eating options. Security was a breeze - no big, raise your hands, full-body scan. Certainly nicer than Houston, anyway, and was less stressful to get around in versus Dulles. They have some cool touch-screen helpers through out the airport listing all the dining places, shopping, etc with a "how do I get there" feature that draws you a map from your current location there. Very helpful! In Houston, the only map of the airport seems to be in the back of those airport magazines you have to get from the plane or going to their website - not helpful at all if you are flying out!

Anyway, in the next post, I'll actually start getting into the conference content. :)